Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

And horses are not always patient; let there be enough space in the courtyard for them and their carriages to turn around comfortably. Demén extended the depth of the courtyard, but then brought the second-floor gallery a bit forward, thus optically recapturing the near perfect square.

True, the second-floor gallery blocked the sun from the concierge’s apartment on the mezzanine, yet the apartment was neither dark nor unfriendly. The light reflecting on the courtyard’s bright yellow ceramic tiles filled its kitchen and two other rooms. Although direct sunshine never reached it, the apartment had both strong illumination and pleasant colors. The insanely yellow hues alternately glittered and dimmed even when, as now, clouds were moving across the sky. But one could not see the sky from down here, even if pressing right up against the window. The concierge was doing exactly that now in his kitchen, where he had the best view of the roof, whence tiles were falling as if the wind were picking them up and hurling them down. What probably happened was that an already loosened tile slid down the roof’s incline, the next one followed it, and after that the job of each subsequent gust became ever easier: it simply reached under and lifted up the defective row and at the weak points heaved the tiles into the air. The concierge, whose name was Imre Balter, looked up again but could delay no longer; he grabbed his visored cap, the keys to the attic, and was on his way.

The tiles were sliding ominously, with long grating sounds, banging against the eaves, only to explode within seconds on the courtyard floor.

At another time, perhaps Balter would have made his decision faster.

A pox on it, he grumbled.

It was not likely he could stanch the ruination by himself.

And the elevator hadn’t been working for weeks. It took him a long time to drag himself down the wooden steps from the mezzanine, him with his dislocated hip. The dangerous courtyard and the three flights up were still ahead of him. The technician at the housing authority claimed that this elevator could no longer be repaired; it had done what it could and that was that. Everybody knew this wasn’t true. A pox on them. By the time he reached the courtyard, the tiles had stopped falling off the roof, but because the pouring rain continued, he hobbled on in the protective shadow of the second-floor gallery. As he passed over the entrance to the cellar, he looked down and even made his customary puss-puss call because today none of his cats had come outside, as if they were not hungry.

He had been able to keep cats from the time he realized that there was no longer any landlord. Ten years had to go by after the general nationalizations* for that to happen, partly because the heirs were still living on the third floor and kept the concierge in line with their looks, glances, or stares, although they never said a word; whenever he took things into his own hands or violated one of the building’s regulations, they nearly skewered him with their eyes. At least that’s how he felt. Besides, you never know what will happen. In 1956, those heirs might have gotten their building back if the mayhem had lasted a little longer.

His limping shuffle echoed in the entranceway. He carefully pulled the windbreak shut behind him, passed by the officially dead elevator, from whose dark maroon depths the edges of the beveled mirror, like a rainbow, always glittered into his eyes, and then, firmly grasping the bannister, he began his climb upward.

After the death of Samu Demén, his two heirs did make alterations in this building that was so extravagant with its spaces; they made them in moderation and good taste, but in the definite hope of increasing their income; they proletarianized it somewhat. They supposed that the kitchens, pantries, and maid’s rooms could be a good bit smaller, and from the spaces retrieved from them they built two new apartments on each floor. They also redid and partially modernized the continuous front of the second floor, which Demén had designed for a small, short-lived national-conservative political party, after whose demise he’d rented it to the party’s surviving weekly paper. Destruction would better describe what the heirs did here. They had the fine wainscoting ripped from the walls and the marble fireplaces in every room thrown out. Originally, neither of the heirs intended to occupy any of the new apartments, the building not being in tune with their taste or their concept of modernity, but in the end Demén’s favorite grandchild, Erna, moved into the apartment her grandfather had left on the third floor, and Miklós, the other grandchild, who was already working for the illegal Communist Party, moved into a house on Aréna Road also built by their grandfather. All this happened in the 1930s, and after that, aside from Teréz Boulevard being renamed Lenin Boulevard and, in honor of the Russian Revolution, Oktogon Square becoming November 7 Square, not much happened to this house on Grand Boulevard.

There was very little turnover among the tenants. The stairwell was not painted, and no door or window saw a new coat of paint either.

Aside from its proportions, the stairwell had no ornaments. The unusually wide and unusually shallow steps, on which the concierge was now climbing upward, were buffed to a marble smoothness; a few months after nationalizing the house, by order of the Party the red coir carpet had been removed along with the brass stair-rods. The intermediate landings between floors were the stairwell’s true ornaments, along with the turning spaces at each floor, where well-proportioned wall sections were framed by Ionic profiles similar to those on the building’s facade and in the entranceway. These framed surfaces did not completely darken; or rather, one could see that originally the profiles had been painted white and the framed areas presumably yellow; and they had been careful to preserve something of the sun’s heat by mixing a bit of red and black into the paint, thereby throwing into relief the dazzling white of the apartment doors and highlighting the discreet but dazzling surfaces, the brass casings, knockers, nameplates, doorknobs, finely chiseled latticework of peepholes and doorbells’ oval ivory bearings.

The concierge kept taking small breaks, his deep-set eyes darting fiercely and rapidly in all directions, and he tried not to pant as hard as he needed to.

At times like this, the two poles of his self-deception touched each other.

He pretended that his eternal step-climbing was not tiring, even though on some days, even without the garbage cans, he could barely drag his lame lower body along. He also obstinately pretended to assign his tasks an order of priority, though he couldn’t have cared less about them and found any number of reasons why they could not be done.

He reached the third floor when the telephone stopped ringing.

Since the very first time he set foot in this building, the only change to this door had occurred when another nameplate was added to the original one. One said DEMÉN, in large roman letters. The other said DR. LIPPAY LEHR. He eavesdropped for a little while. Not out of curiosity; rather, it was the sweet instinct of natural laziness at work. If he had gotten here when the phone stopped ringing, why not stay a while, find out who called, from where, and who picked up the phone. He had a hiding place in his kitchen from which he saw everything while remaining unseen; he knew everything about everybody. He always knew who was at home, who had gone out, and he could guess who would be coming back when. For weeks, he hasn’t seen Professor Lippay, who is being treated at Kútvölgyi Hospital; from there they’ll take him to the cemetery, that’s all. And the younger Lippay simply dashed out of the house pretty early in the morning. He did not remember anything like this ever happening before. He knew that in the morning all the connecting doors of all the rooms were wide open; still, no sound reached him on the landing. A pox on it.