Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

At least the air moved in the stifling cars.

The heat was unbearable.

Everyone had long since devoured the food they’d brought from home; hours had gone by since we’d had anything to drink. My thighs and back stuck to the seat and I couldn’t move much because a little girl who had been entrusted to me was, in her sadness, alternately nibbling on my thigh and crying herself to sleep in my lap. Another little girl slept with her head on my shoulder. They were hungry and thirsty, as were we all, and I thought it better not to wake them. At age sixteen, I was the oldest one in the car and the rest of the children expected everything from me. The youngest ones were asleep, exhausted, or staring blankly out the windows.

Boarding the trains had ended around noon. We were given lemonade in green, buckle-lidded bottles. Everybody was still hanging out of the windows then, shouting and hoping to elbow their way to a good place for the trip. After the German conductresses closed and locked every door on the three trains, making a terrific racket, we thought we’d be on our way shortly.

The impassive, almost bored female voice coming from the loudspeakers kept repeating for long minutes that in compliance with the orders of the station inspectors, for security reasons the departure hall would be closed before the trains’ departure, therefore parents and relatives, tives, were asked immediately to vacate, cate, the railway station.

Tation. Tion.

But the crowd would not move.

Children hanging out the train windows were waving, yelling, and the long complicated sentence kept echoing, maddening and incomprehensible. The throng of excited parents and relatives was now packed into the open space between the entrance of the glass-covered departure hall and the end of the platforms; they stretched, waved, and screamed from there, though it made no sense to wait until we’d leave.

The loud bubbling of a dark mass.

Outside, Baross Square was sizzling in the sunshine.

Bullet marks on the facade of the glass-covered hall had been repaired in the first months after the fighting, but the station’s domed roof was still gaping with holes, and the hot sunshine pouring through them in enormous beams created a veritable curtain between us.

It was dazzling.

The little girl whose cardboard suitcase someone had thrust into my hands, I should take it for her, would not leave my side. She was whining that she couldn’t see outside, I should lift her up. If I gave up my place for even a second to satisfy her wish, the other children would have squeezed me out of my seat, for sure. There was her head, stuck between my stomach and the window, and from there she was screeching that I should lift her up.

Lift me up.

She was from the country and she used the formal address.

But I was not so much worried about losing my place as disgusted by the little girl’s smell. The unknown smell was emanating from her little dress, her skin, and her two heavy braids.

And then something happened that created a moment of frozen stillness in the station. The loudspeakers fell silent and we could hear loud commands being given, long reverberating and very aggressive.

As if someone would be hit immediately.

Only a few months had passed since the end of the fighting; what else could I have had as a first thought than that shooting would start soon.

But the policemen simply grabbed one another’s arms and formed a human chain that tautened against the fearful crowd. It all happened in a wink. The silence thinned, became ever thinner, and then snapped.

All hell broke loose, because as the chain of policemen began to move, the helpless crowd’s indignation soared, and the echoes reverberating in the hall sounded not like a mass protest but like an expression of dread and horror.

And then something else happened that I could not quite understand. The police officers were desperately shouting something that sounded like a ritual supplication, and the crowd responded with shouts of indignation, but there was no strength left in the indignation, the crowd’s resistance had no force at all.

Over the next few seconds, people squeezed through the two open gates and away from the glass-ceilinged hall like filling out of a sausage. The giant glass doors flapped, creaked, and then slammed closed; the mute hall echoed eerily and now the revolution was finally over.

Next morning the landscape was dazzling.

For that time of the year, the sun was blazing very strongly above the small riverside town where houses were painted blinding white, gaudy blue, or burning yellow.

The silence was broken only occasionally by fish jumping in the river. The sky exhaled a fragrance of the water.

Every willow by the river was in bloom; horse chestnut trees lining the streets and round, deep-green ash trees all over were leafing out; and spilling out of closed yards, over fences, stone walls, and pickets, myriad purple and white lilac blossoms were about to open. Nobody was in the streets, no cart in sight anywhere.

The previous night, he’d fallen asleep very late in the cold room facing the street in the house of his birth.

He had drunk a lot of water.

He told himself that the water he had to drink after the roe salad was causing his insomnia.

He could not slake his thirst; he kept going into the kitchen and ladling more water out of the bucket that stood on a bench under the window facing the large moonlit yard. He drank, but the well water did not slake his thirst. In the midst of this ceaseless thirsting, waking and dozing, tossing and turning in bed, he saw his life as fruitless and empty. He dreamed of a dry riverbed; yes, his life was one big thirst, the scaly, odd-shaped segments of the dried silt made no noise under his feet, and there was nothing anywhere but barrenness, an infinite gray wilderness. Perhaps the fish eggs hadn’t been quite fresh.

The water became heavy in his stomach.

Yet his thirst remained unquenchable. Maybe he had gastric poisoning.

His stomach swelled, became hard as a drum. He walked outside and stood on the veranda steps, sweating in fear, worrying that he might not be able to cope with the pain. From the steps he urinated into the night, but took care not to let his stream reach the delicate leaves of the fledgling rosebush. He had on his dead father’s white nightshirt, and when he pulled it up with one hand the cold night touched and pleasantly cooled his lower body. Feverishly, his brain kept grinding away at his anxieties. I’ll drop dead like a poisoned dog. He enjoyed the damp coldness of the night on his thighs, spread legs, and testicles, and he was glad that in the last moments of his life he could still hold his penis, somewhat stiffened between dreams and wakefulness.

I’m going to die, he said to himself. I’ll die and leave this miserable existence without having found the person I’ve longed for all my life.

This is how they will discover me.

From the steps of the veranda he plunged into the bed of roses.

He appreciated his prick most when it was in this state, when it no longer lay shriveled on his testicles but, completely alienated from his own bodily reality, had not yet stiffened to the point of showing tense blood vessels. People will say he died among the roses with his cock in his hand.

Maybe I am a lost man; I haven’t found the one I’ve always longed for.

If only I could get back to America.

Dogs were barking, howling, and yowling nearby and far away; the moon was out, not too high yet, just over the roofs of neighboring houses, among the tips of the poplars; and with the air pulsating with barking he felt sure he was no different from the dogs. He envied the dogs their existence. If he were an honest man, if he didn’t keep deceiving himself, this is how he would howl into the night, every night.