Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

At first glance one would take them to be of a dark tropical wood, he thought. If these really have stayed like this for you for five years, he said aloud, then they won’t change, and again he shuddered at the idea of permanence and the thought that he had found the material for it.

You can rest assured of this, no need to lose sleep over it, he added gruffly. Bet your life on it.

I must be an idiot to praise his merchandise for him, Madzar grumbled to himself, overcome by a strange, gentlemanly emotion.

He hadn’t touched the wood, hadn’t properly assessed its qualities, and didn’t know for sure whether the unknown saturant had penetrated it fully.

This is what I’ve been looking for, he thought, remaining calm. And what might the preservative have done to the medullary rays, had it reached the wood’s medulla, he asked himself seriously. By then he had told himself that this was it, yes, this is what I had in mind. If he cut it into mirrors, and removed the medulla, which he might have to do, would it be the required size. As if from a secret source, he knew the answer, yes, yes, and was ready to decide immediately that this would be better than taking wood from demolished buildings or long-seasoned plum or cherrywood. He liked this wood precisely because of its perfect saturation of unknown origin and its purity; he only now realized that he couldn’t have done anything with the dry hollowness of wood taken from demolished buildings.

He kept calming himself, saying, take your time, take a closer look, don’t get excited for no reason. In his mind, question was chasing question: would the unknown material leave stains, will it have an unpleasant odor.

I’ve found it.

Don’t rush your decision; don’t rejoice in vain.

In his helpless joy he would have burst into tears if the stranger hadn’t been standing next to him.

It was as though he instantly felt the wood as part of his flesh and was living through the wood’s peculiar fate.

This was saturated right after they felled it, he said aloud, which leaves the question, saturated with what.

Gottlieb joined him in making little rhythmic sounds punctuating the logic of the thought.

And Madzar could not tell how the magic moment occurred, a moment not entirely the product of either chance or necessity but containing elements of both. Something like condensed precipitates. He must look into this, cannot jump blindly into the unknown. Destiny appeared before him as a convergence of old dirt roads coming from various directions under the open summer sky.

Sometimes the old dirt roads crossed, other times only touched one another; they were familiar or completely unfamiliar.

Events arriving from different points of the compass met on these abandoned dirt roads, and once the encounters were over they moved on, indifferent to one another. Perhaps Gottlieb was also luxuriating in the grandeur of the moment; he wasn’t chattering anymore, he grew silent alongside Madzar.

There’s no doubt these oak sleepers were used on secondary rail lines.

In size or material they did not differ from standard ones.

To prevent any possible disappointment due to the usual stickiness one feels when touching saturated sleepers, he hesitated to step closer and did not dare touch them right away.

Even though he could see plainly that he was not in for much of a disappointment. In his mind, he had already gone too far, figuring and calculating things; the disappointment would be unbearable. Two fifty, and he wouldn’t need longer ones than that, not even by a centimeter. But mainly he was shocked by their color. Although they had darkened considerably, the substance of the wood, as far as one could see, had not changed at all. Or perhaps they had steamed it too, and after the first saturation sort of washed out the tar oil with some kind of additive, dried it, and put it in the pneumatic boiler under high pressure, then saturated it again with, say, creosote and some other refined preservative. Not impossible. It might have been a vegetable oil. After that, the density and quality of its flesh could not change. It would not get moldy, it would resist fungal decay.

It has to be looked at in a radial section.

It could have been linseed oil.

Once, on behalf of Mies van der Rohe, Madzar had gone to order some material from the famous plant in Semmering where the modus operandi was true handicraft and nothing was mass-produced. He spoke to the ancient Stipiczka himself, and now, thinking back, he had the impression that he’d never gotten any information about the details of his work. With his drawn-out, reluctant emphases, his bulging, expressionless eyes, and in the blue work apron tight across his abnormally protruding belly, Stipiczka was for him like a peculiar idol one should not dare address. He either spoke so fast it was impossible to follow, as if he did not want to be understood, or he kept quiet. He must have been frightened of people his whole life, frightened of everybody and everything except perhaps wood. Because he feared that everything would be taken away from him. But to the wood, in contrast, he gave everything the wood had to have or could possibly wish for.

I won’t be able to get the information I need from him, if he’s still alive.

He tried to imagine the pleasant surprise that would greet him when with a power saw he opened the heavy, dark blocks of wood. Or painfully unpleasant surprises, one after the other. He drew his finger across the surface of one sleeper, lifted the finger to his nose, smelled, and very quietly asked Gottlieb if he knew the sleepers’ measurements.

Of course he did, Gottlieb replied in a similarly quiet tone, and quickly enumerated them, they wouldn’t have to measure, revealing to Madzar that his rough calculation had been way off the mark. The sleepers were a full ten centimeters shorter than he had guessed by his eyesight. In his embarrassment, Madzar leaned closer and now had the impression that his nose was registering something familiar that one usually smells several times a day, the odor of a common chemical.

The sleepers’ cross-section he found ideal, however.

He was making small approving sounds too.

It deviates from the standard, or I may not be remembering the standard measurements right.

He thought, pondered, mused, tried to recall and fix in his mind the smell of the familiar chemical, but from where. Another excitement on top of the others he’d been coping with. He tried to lift this smell away, as it were, from the smells of other compounds. Perhaps it is from an organic not inorganic compound.

Probably some formaldehyde derivative.

With this idea in mind, he started to go around the pile, but he moved away more to be alone with his sense of smell and freedom to touch, and also to keep telling himself, to be allowed to keep telling himself, how damn lucky he was.

Gottlieb did not follow; he did not wish to disturb the strange gentleman, whom he could not place by either his attire or his behavior.

He thought of belladonna, which ladies suffering from headaches drip on lump sugar in the depths of their darkened rooms, and of atropine, but he didn’t stay with either because of that sharp edge to the odor, so characteristic of organic compounds.

I never heard of Stipiczka manufacturing sleepers of any kind, he said irritably to the merchant when he came back around the woodpile.

If material of such quality lay around here for years, the question pricked him like a thorn, why did no one take it.

As if to say, you can’t put anything over on me, my friend, you’ve got to get up a lot earlier for that.

Stipiczka doesn’t make sleepers, why should he, answered the merchant, yielding, but my man told me these here were specially ordered from Stipiczka by the Hungarian State Railways. They could have had them done in Dombóvár, but extra demands cropped up, you see.