Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

He did not have much time to think about the Jew because the ship’s bell was sounded, and shortly the captain sent for him with an invitation to dinner.

Look at that, Mayer, he called to the cabin boy who had come to fetch him, and leaning out over the rail pointed to the surfacing and disappearing object in the water, part yellow from the clayey silt and part gray with mud churned up by the wheels.

It was like a drowned woman in a short red coat.

The water kept spinning it; when it turned from its back to its stomach it became a tree trunk again.

From the moment he boarded the ship at the Franz Joseph dock, he crossed over into a former world, with different humidity and different air pressure; he stepped back into his earlier life from where he could look back to historical times, even to the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary.

He breathed differently here and everyone was someone’s acquaintance.

The river would rise, the river would fall; the water flowed through everything and threatened everything.

Everything was becoming familiar — the smells, the immense gray sky with its sultry southern winds and harsh western breezes, the silver-gray shoreline, and, behind the calm shores, the tidelands that had given him the gifts of mystical experiences and charged silences. He had not forgotten them, which is why he did not believe they’d been mystical. Visions pervading his body and soul that to this day secretly directed his life. The whirling water along the body of the ship; the murky water with its two-tone surface, bubbling up from different layers of the riverbed, and the river’s unpredictable, wild currents.

He went home at least once every two weeks. He wanted to make use of his time before going to America.

The abandoned workshop and his mother were the ostensible reasons for his visits home, but he wanted to be near the water, the fog at dawn, the smell of fish, and to let their reality fill his life. Of all the ships on this route, he preferred the Carolina with its classically severe aesthetic, its reliability and comfort, for it brought something with it from the early nineteenth century that Madzar greatly appreciated: a sobriety and modesty in its proportions, as well as mechanical perfection.

This boy Mayer was from Paks, but the captain came from Mohács, and he was one of the most peculiar people Madzar had ever met; they had sat side by side as schoolboys at the school on Koronaherceg Street.

Mayer did not want to be impolite but he hardly looked at the object floating past them in the water.

That’s not a woman, sir, he yelled over the sound of the engine and against the wind.

No, but it wouldn’t hurt to drown women in water, the architect said, and smiled at the boy.

I’ll manage without them for my whole life, believe me, replied Mayer, yelling into the wind.

Madzar, taken aback, looked into the boy’s immobile, somber, dark eyes, at his thin lips and strongly protruding chin with its taut, stubbly skin.

He scrutinized him, hoping to see whether he was yelling the truth or even knew what he was saying.

But you can’t tell what that red thing is, can you, he yelled back in a friendly tone.

No, I can’t, sir, you’re right, replied the boy readily, but what he thought was, I don’t really care; his demeanor suggested that he was ready to butt and gore the whole world.

To charge anything or anybody.

They remained at the railing for another moment. Madzar wondered who could have hurt or insulted this Mayer boy so much, with what and why. They went on watching the object spinning in the water churned up by the paddle wheels, both of them perplexed and silent.

The red they saw was not a woman’s robe but a loincloth on the naked body of Jesus Christ. For a fraction of a second their eyes caught the crudely carved crucified figure on the surface of the water before it was submerged again.

Without a word, surprised by the red painted loincloth on the clumsily carved body, Madzar followed the young man, who in the tension of his body was proclaiming that it was irredeemable, the entire Creation was irredeemable. The end was near.

He knew Mayer’s father, mother, and grandfather; everyone knew they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and believed that earthly hell would soon be over: the Last Judgment would descend on the human world, possessed by Satan, and Armageddon was imminent. Their manners were harsh and unpleasant, like the boy’s, but he did not know what to make of the boy’s response. There were years when Madzar’s grandfather had built several rowboats and more than two flatboats for them; the Mayers of Paks did their fishing with many different people. This boy must have been the youngest son in a long line of children whom they sent, who knows why, to be a cabin boy. While making their way down the narrow steps to the lower deck, Madzar watched the close-cropped nape of the boy’s neck, his bony, tense shoulders, as if expecting that the body’s structure would explain things. Suddenly, on the lower deck, it was hot. The wide windblown corridor, whose white walls were vibrating with bright spots of light reflected from the water, was filled with the aroma of food cooking, perfumes, and tobacco.

The kitchen was sizzling, sputtering, almost bubbling over; each time its swinging doors opened and closed, waves of noise were released from clattering dishes and yelling cooks, waiters, and scullery maids. Light from sconces glittered on the highly polished cherry-red wainscoting in the commodious salon and somberly furnished dining room, while on the low-coffered ceiling the bright, reflected lights of the river swam in the opposite direction. It was as if he almost understood something, as if to a certain degree he comprehended something of the connection between the nature of reflexes and his own attraction to them.

Mrs. Szemző did not appeal to him. He could not even imagine her as somebody’s type. Yet he could not deny being attracted to her. When he had had the chance, he had searched Dr. Szemző’s face to learn whether he could harbor the same sort of feeling for her as the doctor felt for his spouse. This woman surely had a lot of money. An enormous inheritance. Perhaps the husband married her for her money. Which in his case must have been as persuasive as the light was in convincing Madzar to take on the job, those multiple reflections on the ceiling of the empty seventh-floor apartment created by the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, the surface of the Danube, and Eliel Saarinen’s tin domes, reminiscent of conical caps. And he did not even want to think about the apartment’s interior. Well, one needs money. And the only thing the tin domes, or indeed the entire group of buildings, had to do with Saarinen was that Emil Vidor had followed Saarinen’s ideas for a few years.

One could say that Vidor stole his ideas from Saarinen.

Madzar also remembered the strange words with which Mrs. Szemző characterized the neuroses of her Jewish patients.

The tin dome cast a shadow on them in this brand-new quarter of the city, as did the memory of the Judenhut, the stigmatizing hat Jews had to wear in the Middle Ages. Nothing like that would have occurred to him, and he was surprised by what Mrs. Szemző was saying and how she said it.

The spray over the water often rose up to and swept across the wide low windows on the lower deck; occasionally, rebounding waves splashed the panes. Here one could hear the even seething and churning of the gigantic wheels, the axle’s empty, unexpected creaks. Below this lower deck carpeted in wine red, in the enormous engine room, the engine with its carefully oiled wheels and gears, valves and pistons, siphoned and pushed, squelched and clicked and snapped repeatedly. From the engine room spiral stairs led even farther below, all the way to the ship’s bottom, where two half-naked stokers, blackened by coal dust, worked in the red glow of the boiler and the noise of the puffing engine.