Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

On the upper decks the passengers had to raise their voices a little.

The passengers were already seated at their tables and the din of the dining hall had increased, though on this late April day there were few people in first class — a number of German officers, egging each other on to louder and louder exchanges, and a little farther off, a couple of very constrained honeymooners from Pest, reminiscent of drenched birds. Obviously ill at ease, they held their aperitifs distrustfully in their hands. Perhaps a rich relative had paid for their tickets and they were unsure how to handle themselves. Beyond the couple and isolated from everyone else, at a table set for one, sat a very well-dressed man in his fifties, Elemér Vay by name, the government’s chief counselor, who, at the personal instruction of His Excellency the regent of Hungary, in the following weeks and without drawing attention was to inspect every port along the lower Danube. At the fourth and largest table, Serb hardware merchants sat in poorly tailored frock coats, Gebrocks, greasy and stretched by overweight bodies, badly in need of pressing, along with their massive, colossal, bejeweled, and painted wives in completely inappropriate evening dresses with plunging necklines.

Madzar had the impression, and not for the first time since his return from Holland, that here in the land of his birth, at some point in the past time had lazily come to a halt and now with its last ounce of strength was moaning softly, saying something like, why should I bother to go on ticking. He observed these people with a profound horror as if seeing different variations of himself in his own staid future.

No, not like this.

With the exception of the well-dressed lone gentleman, they were all extremely ridiculous and pitiful.

If Madzar were to stay, his fate would be no different; there was no ingenuity that could enable him to avoid the inevitable.

He would marry somebody, an attractive woman, probably, who would bear children and gradually, imperceptibly become like this, ever thicker, more obtuse, and louder.

Madzar was not dressed for the occasion; he wore simple traveling clothes, a so-called knickerbocker outfit — a six-buttoned, high-necked jacket decorated with a permanently stitched belt, facing pleats, and sewn-on pockets; a vest with buttons one could see above those of the jacket; loosely fitting, baggy knee pants. To match this outfit, he had picked thick, pale-green fishbone-patterned knee socks and thick-soled shoes; out of season such a minor violation of social etiquette was permissible.

Though he was a bit anxious about it.

Supper was served earlier than was customary in the regular season on a luxury ship like this.

It would have made no sense to rent a cabin for such a short trip. He traveled without luggage.

His coat and hat were taken from him by the old Viennese waiter who continually mumbled to himself in different languages; accompanied by the waiter’s purposeless words, he was escorted to Captain László Bellardi, who in addition to being a baron was also a Vitéz — a title given to valiant, heroic veterans of the Great War. Seeing them approach, the captain took his leave of the noisy Serbs.

Behind the protection of his charming smile, for long minutes now the captain had been waiting for Madzar, patient yet almost angry; where was he, he should come and relieve him of his burdensome duty, where is he tarrying.

Not that he needed anyone to relieve him, but he could not forgo an obligatory act without giving an excuse or having a pretext to dodge it. True to his upbringing, he held nothing higher than duty. Now he wanted to chat with his sometime friend rather than with Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, with whom he had a distant familial connection.

God, religion, homeland, the good fortune of every subject of the realm — these were among his duties. He could do nothing publicly unless in the eyes of the world the act had a conventional reason or at least a conventional explanation. All manner of social demands were made on him that were incompatible with his temperament, which, fickle and intuitive at its core, leaned toward arbitrariness and improvisation. He suffered from temper tantrums because he could not consider as his duty everything he could not help performing. And ever since his wife had left him, his body and soul had been held captive by sheer horror and dread. None of this could be seen on him, of course, not in his bearing and not on his face, though he grew somber as he approached Madzar.

As someone who, in the transition between playing two different roles, retains only the physical shell of his own body.

Under the heavy weight of the secret mental burden, his attractive lean visage caved in; bitterness sat on his lips.

But behind the appearance he could show only another appearance.

Moving from event to event, he systematically cobbled together a narrative of appearances that did not conform much with his inner life or most personal intentions, yet this external tale became his biography. When he completed something in accord with appearances, he would tell himself with a measure of self-satisfaction, well, we got away with it. He acted as if the supreme value of individual personal life was the survival of the impersonal life of the group.

As if his sense of I was ruled by the sense of we. He was coming toward Madzar as if he were being pulled by the weight of his head.

Until, between two swaying dancelike steps, he switched to another preprepared smile of his. With this smile he ceremoniously raised his head high, because it was not he who was smiling from behind the woeful mask or who made his feet move as if dancing, but the role he was playing. Right now, he is demonstrating his true attentiveness and genuine kindheartedness to those who eagerly watch the meeting of two friends.

This meant at best only the honeymooners, who followed the two men with their eyes; in their apprehension, they paid close attention to everything.

The strangers’ regard made Captain Bellardi grow taller, he needed the added stature as he needed air, it helped him give meaning to himself, to every one of his gestures. Thanks to the attention his mortal shell filled out with flesh and blood, with hunger and thirst for life.

Madzar felt uneasy at this revelatory spectacle, though he saw no more than what he had already known about the man.

Bellardi was playing a solitary game with himself. If he hadn’t been brought up halfway between small-town gentry and a sophisticated aristocracy, he could have easily spurned or cordially disregarded ordinary fellow human beings. But the duality of his upbringing did not allow him to use either approach, so he regularly disappointed himself. Thanks to his mother, his behavior was designed for a much larger stage than he could ever perform on or even have a chance to see. Yet he was not allowed to complain about the narrow-mindedness and unworthy conditions of the locales he moved in, as everyone else did in the great Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was positively forbidden to blame others for anything. This was the traditional bon ton : to accept every situation without comment. He could not scheme, as everyone else did in the larger milieu of his life; he could not prattle, bear a grudge, or hate to his heart’s content. And he did not realize that in his obedience he relinquished vital mental functions, over and over again.

He believed he was exercising Christian humility, a very decent thing to do, a duty required by his rank as much as a patronly duty toward his church.

Or at least he offered the appearance of this virtue, deployed against the maladies of self-contempt and misanthropy that tortured his soul and irritated his mind, and that also sometimes led him to be carried away and gravely insult others. In their childhood, Madzar had enjoyed these excesses of Bellardi’s playful instincts, even though he shuddered in fear of them. Now he was rather shocked at what he had enjoyed years earlier. Though he joined Bellardi’s games up to a point, he enjoyed the extremes of Bellardi’s dangerous overrefinement and decadence as much as his hypocrisy and imaginative cruelty. Or the ominous size of his fury and his always brief temper tantrums.