Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

At this point laughter helped him deflect the conversation. Out of caution, he did not tell the visitor that his son, with the same family name, was carrying on the firm’s work on Coney Island. He had two vehicles, two beautiful Fords, to deliver merchandise with.

After all, he doesn’t know who this stranger is, why would he tell him everything.

Madzar didn’t need much time to see he would find nothing useful here.

Under the rain roofs he saw mainly abandoned pallets and broken support beams, a bit farther away under the open sky a small pile of firewood or rough softwood timber. But one couldn’t stop the Jew; he was going on, hurrying, taking with him the aroma of the morning’s onion, limping a little, his weight shifting more to one leg than the other. Madzar felt like going instead to the Serb merchant who always had a rich assortment of material taken from demolished buildings.

At the railroad, they stack a hundred sleepers to a pile.

He paid no attention to what the Jew was saying.

As the gentleman can see from here, only two are missing to make it a full pile, Gottlieb said, and he smiled at him as if to say, I don’t care to go too far in our conversation, but let’s go as far as the pile.

I must keep the gentleman busy with my chatter until we get there.

But Madzar would have preferred to know what the Jew had done with the komondors, and immediately consoled himself that these could not be the same komondors. He did not want to ask, for that would reveal his identity and then it would be impossible to avoid a conversation burdened with their memories. He shuddered at the thought that he might wind up in intimate proximity to a Jew who didn’t brush his teeth in the morning.

Bellardi, with his theories, had surely made him sick to his stomach.

It even occurred to him that what he was doing now also justified Bellardi. Wherever he looks, he cannot free himself of Bellardi.

Perhaps the reason he had gone so far away was to be free of him. What’s the point of pushing back the Jewish element if the German one will push into its place. If a Gottlieb throws in the towel, there is always a Roheim to take over his business. It’s impossible to shake off the foreign element.

His men were very lucky, the merchant went on enthusiastically, they managed to fish out all but two of them, and sleepers of this quality the gentleman will never find anywhere.

He didn’t know whom he found more repugnant, Gottlieb or Bellardi — everybody, which could mean himself.

He might have killed his own dogs, he thought angrily, giving himself the impression that the Jew was repugnant and that thinking so proved his loyalty to Bellardi.

They’re from Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering, the merchant explained, hesitating slightly at the sight of the gentleman’s expression.

If that name means anything to the gentleman.

It does, of course it does.

But entrusted to this smooth-mannered Jew he felt his situation as even more lamentable in this damned provincial district where he saw the justification of thoughts he vehemently opposed. Away with all this. What was the point of hoping. Why had he come here anyway. He couldn’t go to Roheim because Roheim didn’t deal in this sort of material. How could this Jew be familiar with Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering. He couldn’t get free of — and in his thoughts he almost said of this louse. And the old man could have at least remembered him.

He tried to interject that he did not object to looking at Stipiczka’s sleepers but frankly did not need ninety-eight of them, in fact didn’t need a single one.

The Jew pretended not to hear this; he kept talking just to work his jaws.

Even though Madzar emphasized that he was not interested in waterlogged wood, which he could not use in his work.

Gottlieb did not give in; he enjoyed his own artful jabbering. He understands, of course he does; with a raised voice, he spoke a word to every one of Madzar’s, clear as day, unless he had misunderstood the gentleman. Because if we figure three hundred river kilometers, and we can’t figure less, then this wood had to have been sent downriver from Verőce, which took at least a week.

Well, now, how can you say such a thing, Madzar interjected angrily, as if he were in the mood to argue about this with a Jew. He did not understand why the Jew was exaggerating so shamelessly when the exaggeration was against his business interest. Even from Győr it’s not three hundred, how could it be more than two hundred from Verőce.

I wouldn’t want to argue with the gentleman, I’d probably wind up at the short end of the stick, but please take a good look, he said, and with his finger he pointed at the place they were approaching. Whether it’s two hundred or five hundred, on that wood the gentleman will see no trace of any damage or any alteration. Right next to the red stamp of the railway, the gentleman can see Stipiczka’s burn marks. He, Gottlieb, has a good man with the railroad who follows up and takes care of everything for him. In the end they agreed, he doesn’t mind telling the gentleman, that he’d pay the railroad a symbolic sum, they set it at ten pengös, which he paid properly, because according to railroad regulations the wood had been exposed to a natural disaster, and they’d have to chalk it up as a loss anyway.

And that the gentleman needs just this kind of wood borders on the miraculous. This is what happened. One of the piles, listen to this, dear sir, they didn’t unload it on the right side from the direction opposite to the train’s travel, as the engineer in charge had told them to do. Boggles the mind that such coincidences exist in this world, this is a miracle, a real miracle, this is; I don’t want to exaggerate, but the truth is they unloaded the pile on the left side. This is how this one pile wound up on tideland, but the water didn’t carry it away all at once, it nicely divvied up the labor, and Gottlieb laughed again, his mouth wide open, as if he were praising the water’s elemental force and the treachery of the current. Ten sleepers a day, it regularly lifted off the topmost row, at least that’s how my men caught them. But the last two never showed up, doggone it, he exclaimed unexpectedly, and then quickly offered an explanation. It’s possible that those two rows simply drifted right by their noses without their noticing them.

And they had not yet reached the woodpile, protected by a wide shingle roof on stilts from rain, spray splashes, and strong sunshine, when the sight emerging from the shade stopped Madzar in his tracks.

From that point on he dared to approach the wood only very cautiously, as if not meaning to go ahead at all.

He had never seen such sleepers. He could not believe his eyes.

He did not even know that such sleepers existed. He could not comprehend how sleepers could be so perfectly processed and finished.

Could he be lucky again, he asked himself, and he knew immediately that he was damn lucky.

How long has this pile been here, he asked gruffly.

For years, five years, let me see, I don’t want to lie to the gentleman. I know we repiled it twice and very carefully too, if that reassures you at all. But the mystery, my dear sir, is what these sleepers had been saturated with, go ahead, feel them, come on, closer. I don’t know who will take the secret with him to the grave, but they saturated these with something, that’s for sure. I mentioned that we repacked the pile because I myself became very curious to see whether this material was changing or not.

Madzar was now close enough to study the sleepers’ rougher, darker cut surfaces. He would have preferred to smell them then and there before deciding what the method of preservation had been. But he was bothered by the other man’s physical closeness and the suddenly created professional mutuality.