Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

They could not forget it.

Where the river current had washed out a high section of the shore, the surprisingly intact ends of human bones stuck out of the sandy wall in thick layers — skulls, shins, pelvises, and toes that along with the sand crumble into dust in one’s hand. They happened on this scene, forgotten for centuries, south of the city, about two kilometers from the tip of Gypsy Reef, even though they knew that according to historians the battle had taken place at an entirely different location, at the foot of the Majs hills. If the desperate swallows had not been protecting their nests on the collapsing chasm so fiercely, they might have tried to dig out what they thought was there, in hopes of sharing a great discovery. They encouraged each other; they were both terrified of touching human bones. This was Madzar’s third time on the Carolina going back to his parental home, and on the two earlier trips he and Bellardi had already come to understand that the more they used the memory of the bones to preserve their common past, the stronger their disappointment in each other.

There was no limit to what they could have done, but their youth was gone; they could do nothing anymore.

It was not that nothing remained of the old attraction with which they could bridge the almost historical distance between them.

They had discussed everything thoroughly; they had revived their more innocent memories almost to the verge of boredom. They left everything else untouched out of mutual consideration, and as a result they always found themselves surrounded by issues of which they did not speak.

In complete darkness, they bumped into familiar objects.

They smelled each other’s fragrance, and as the captain yanked the architect close, on the surface of each other’s hard body they both could definitely feel rejection being expressed. The two of them were shocked that despite their now obviously weaker attraction to each other the mutual rejection was still so powerful. As if they were being reminded of a former rejection, as if even prior to that mutuality they had had a common life that designated their places next to each other and condemned them to mutual impassiveness. Moreover, even as a child, Madzar had found Bellardi’s smell repulsive, though his repulsion was coupled with a fierce curiosity. He had felt it most strongly when they came out of the water together; perhaps it emanated from Bellardi’s hair or skin, which was given to shivering even in summer. He’d decided that this was something peculiar to the bodies of rulers and princes; he was smelling the odor of history.

And now he was assailed by it again, along with the repulsion and curiosity. Stale earwax, which one scrapes out of the outer ear with one’s nail when it itches, smells like this.

The captain meanwhile, despite his own embarrassment, kept patting and squeezing the architect, gleaning some joy from the strength of his rejection. Let him feel that it was his privilege. This caused an embarrassment for the architect at least as great as the joy he elicited from the captain by recognizing the aversion.

And because of their shared past, they both had a rightful claim on these genuine sensations of aversion and repulsion.

Madzar remained mostly naïve about his own feelings and therefore had barely reached the threshold of his sensual compulsions.

The captain’s behavior was comparatively unembarrassed, though with his every word and gesture he followed the gentleman’s code of etiquette, the very code he poked fun at and sometimes attacked with other words and gestures. He brought attention to something, which he had no intention of doing, and Madzar, although he perceived this, did not understand or have any feel for it.

Or rather, he knew that while superficially Bellardi always seemed to accede to every request, there was always something else he wanted. To get away from this upstream area of the great river, he was sure to keep an eye on the great exit at the delta.

He had once organized an expedition to the South Pole, but he did not include Madzar in that plan, only boys from the better families. The two of them had gone on shorter trips of discovery, though, and once on a longer one. Anyone growing up near a great river is familiar with the desire to entrust one’s light human body to the current’s immense strength.

As everyone learned later, Bellardi had run away one summer with some Serb and Italian tobacco smugglers. He had told them he was an orphan. Gendarmes brought him back to Mohács. At his father’s order, he was taken to the town hall and, exposed to the view of passersby, made to stand in the huge echoing lobby, flanked by two gendarmes with bayonets fixed on their rifles, until his father was ready to receive him.

Stop thy trembling, his father snarled as he rose from his enormous carved desk, I will not lay a finger on thee, but be sure I shall have thee flogged.

He wanted to know exactly what had happened; he asked hard questions in the interrogation, set traps, his eyes penetrating more and more deeply, lighting up every dangerous corner, and all along maintained the formal address.

Then he had his son taken to the empty city detention cell, and the gendarmes beat him with a flagpole because they couldn’t find a stick, but it was a largely symbolic beating.

He was locked up for three days and given only bread and water.

The family’s extravagant lifestyle and chaotic finances allowed for nothing else but that the son too would become a municipal or district civil servant like his father, who had been for many years magistrate of the Mohács district and very popular, given his dispassionate fairness. The son’s other choices were the armed forces or the church. Since he took God no more seriously than anything else, the young Bellardi opted for the navy, where his career ended before it began: shortly after he received his commission, he had to leave because of some matter of honor of whose details no one seemed to know anything.

He was alleged to have stolen money from a fellow officer, but this was impossible to imagine about him.

Madzar kept shaking his head at this news as if he had water in his ears, gesticulating to his mother and warning her not to dare repeat it.

In the end, Bellardi fetched up on the only luxury liner owned by the First Steamship Company of the Danube, which was struggling with serious financial difficulties. Part of the reason for this move was that his future father-in-law had a major interest in the company. In fact, Baron Koháry liked the good-looking young man more than he loved his own beautiful daughter, whom he later sent on her way with a single suitcase.

The baron was a man unhappy to the very depth of his soul who had never shown any of his unhappiness to another human being. He viewed the penniless young man with a certain pity for letting himself be ensnared so haplessly by his daughter’s beauty and dowry. Bellardi would raise his only male grandchild, which Koháry approved of with all his heart. Nor did he fail to notice that Bellardi preferred to follow his example of stern paternal advice rather than that of his own father, his flesh and blood.

The steamship company, for undisclosed personal reasons as well as others, did not easily give up the old ship. At sessions of the board of directors they gave as reason for their expensive persistence the hope that when Hungary regained the territories that so unjustly had been taken from her, she would again have an outlet to the sea and, as a result, Danube shipping would flourish anew. After Viscount Rothermere made his unsettling declarations favoring a revision of the borders of Hungary,* no one had any doubt about the matter. The situation of the merchant fleet would change, shipping would become profitable again, and therefore in the interest of the future the beautiful old liner should not be sold.