Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Like a thief, he lifted his own weekday kippa off the hat rack in his own hallway and hurried deep into his house.

At least a dozen times a day he made himself believe that just this once he could avoid the madness of his wife.

He opened doors carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible by tiptoeing on the softwood floor, turned gray and splintery after many autumn cleanings. There were a few spots that creaked badly no matter how careful he was, because the joists underneath had rotted away. As he made his way through the rooms and corridors, moving ever deeper into the unpredictable labyrinth of the commodious house, the emptiness became darker within the whitewashed walls, which echoed the tiniest sound.

The dark-brown folding shutters were closed everywhere, and only through cracks in the aged wood did some light come into the house.

Gottlieb put his yarmulke on his head and relaxed a little in the familiar dimness, in which white slipcovers on the furniture glimmered faintly and his transgressions reassumed their customary places. He also seemed to hear his ancestors, who opined that at least in our homes and synagogues we should remain free human beings in the sight of the Lord of Mercy. When on waking you cover your head, no matter what the day will bring you have spread the holy firmament over it. They have always lived in this spacious home, with its rooms opening one into another, hoping to please the Lord and to avoid eliciting His terrible wrath with their transgressions. There were only the most necessary pieces of furniture, beds, tables, chairs, that should suffice, and these were also made of the least expensive painted or wood-grained pine. Although there were more expensive carpets, they lay on the floor, carefully rolled up in wrapping paper, along the undecorated and empty walls. If, at the time of general cleaning or during high holy days, the folding shutters were opened, the covers removed from the cheap chandeliers and modestly dark furniture, the carpets rolled out, smoothed along the floor in preparation for receiving friends and relatives, then Ármin Gottlieb’s house positively flaunted its merciless cleanliness and cheerlessness.

Here lives a Jew, and Gottlieb was fond of this awareness, a Jew who displays nothing ostentatious, does not tempt fate, because he has not forgotten for a moment what he owes his Creator.

He would burst into loud sobs at the painful joy when, after the holidays, he was suddenly left alone in the sunny, bleak emptiness. But soon he would exchange his embroidered kippa for a plain one and, obeying the ancient duty of resignation, go from room to room carefully closing all the brown shutters again.

His house had one bright space: the wooden veranda framed in glass that faced the small, walled-in yard.

At the edge of the yard, where grass could barely survive at the base of the walls, stood a tall sumac tree, its widespread branches towering above the roofs, its trunk partially grown into an abutment of the brick wall; it was a Rhus hirta , the undemanding plant of Mediterranean and subtropical regions whose leaves, unlike those of the indigenous trees of Mohács, did not open completely until late June and whose acrid, velvety flowers emerged very slowly.

When he could be alone, Gottlieb liked to sit here, on a painted kitchen stool, and between two ritual devotions he either prayed or read one of his beautiful half-leather-bound books, either the six-volume Prayers for the High Holy Days or the eight-volume Weekday Prayers. This time, however, he had barely sat down and opened a randomly selected prayer book from which hundreds of small slips and bookmarks stuck out, both from the Hebrew text and from the pages printed and footnoted in Hungarian, and he had barely placed his elbow on the windowsill to create a reasonably comfortable position for reading, when his wife appeared in the dark frame of the doorway.

She appeared like a shadow slipping silently toward the light.

You think I don’t know, you really believe I don’t know why you’ve come home so early from your famous lumberyard, his wife said angrily, contemptuously, reproachfully, and then she almost broke down, barely able to suppress the tears of her bitterness.

But I know, I do. I could have known that you’d deceive me again and come home earlier.

If only once you came home on time, then I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Almighty God, I keep saying all day, the poor man really thinks he can hide his forgetfulness from me. Of course, he still has to wait for his lunch. I know very well what he forgot and left at home, but I shall never tell anyone what I know about you. How would I know, I don’t know what time it is, the kitchen alarm clock is broken again, and he hasn’t taken it to the watchmaker; but this time he had bad luck with his forgetfulness, didn’t he, leaving his hat home again — unheard of. He’s come home, let’s not talk about why, but his lunch is not ready. He said, I’ll be coming back late, Margit, didn’t he. And indeed, now it will be late for you, even though you hurried home early. Wretched. You’re a wretched man. You couldn’t possibly get done with your papers in such a short time. You can thank only yourself for all your troubles, because all your life you’ve been fumbling. Your famous lumberyard has always been more important to you, sawn planks are more important than your beautiful family.

You’re not a Jew.

You should be ashamed of yourself, you and all your papers.

She continued to talk very quietly like this, rather impassively, actually, using a barely changing falsetto, chanting a text that seemed alien to her, her head tilted a little mischievously and little-girlishly, her countenance suffused with hatred and contempt, her eyes narrowed and swollen with too much sleep. She was observing this despicable stranger who had wandered into her home, yet whom, according to the prescribed rituals, she should receive with a hot lunch, someone with whom, allegedly, she had lived in the happiest of marriages for more than forty years, giving him three beautiful children and raising them very well, yet her secret opinion about this man remained that although she knew him by sight, she wouldn’t marry him if she listened to her heart, because he was not a Jew. A Jew does not behave like this, and she hasn’t the slightest intention, there is not enough money in the world to convince her to marry him. She will dissuade her mother of blessed memory from insisting on this marriage, and she truly hopes that at least her adored father will reconsider his plans, because this wretched man will do nothing but deceive her, throughout an entire life will do nothing but mislead and deceive her.

They should look for somebody else.

I am the only one who can see through him.

Like through a sieve, that’s how I see through you.

You wretched man, you.

But if you dare do it anyway, and it’s obvious that you will, you shameless, vile man, and my dear beloved father will not want to keep me by his side, what can I do, that’s how it is, then you will go tell it to everybody on our street, you won’t spare yourself and go into every single house and tell them. What you’ve done to me, what you have done. And every Jew in Munkács will know what a wretched man he is.

What he did.

Such a wretch and yet what he dared to do.

He violated an innocent Jewish girl.

It was as if the empty dark house were the only house she had ever known, or as if she had recalled a long-abandoned snail shell, yet the street outside would not be a street in Mohács and the lapsed time had no meaning.

Keeping her dead alive.

It was not surprising.

However, the snail shell might have crushed under anyone’s careless step. All he had to tell her was that we’ve raised only two of your beautiful children, Margit, because the third one is long dead. Gottlieb wondered more than once how he or anyone else could remove themselves from this vast present, in which we eternally mourn, only mourn, while every event relevant to our person is still ahead of us.