Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

We are still before the death of our loved ones.

One’s unlucky little son should not have died before one’s own death.

For a second he looked up at her, ascertaining the time in which, separate from everything and everyone else, he too lived in the eternal present time of his wife.

Margit was pressing a deep china bowl against her large, heavy, drooping breasts in a peculiar defensive posture, as if to protect both herself and the bowl, and with a wooden spoon she occasionally lifted and then disgustedly slammed back the dumpling dough, bright yellow from its many eggs, or with obvious boredom she simply stirred it. Over her pink, not quite clean nightshirt she wore a dark-blue apron patterned with tiny white flowers and, on top of that, a sweater filthy from work in the kitchen and from making fires in the large stove. When she spoke, one could see she was missing many teeth, which made her lips sink into the hollow of her mouth. Unruly clumps of thin, unkempt gray hair leaned stiffly in all directions; for more than a decade now she had refused to have her hair shaved as religious propriety would have required.

Threats, implorations, or explanations notwithstanding, no and no.

Until given away in marriage she would not sacrifice her beautiful hair.

She was even prepared to play the madwoman.

Her daughter tried once, but the moment she cut a large tuft the mother grabbed the scissors from her. They tussled vigorously for a while, until it became clear it was more than playacting; she first stabbed her own breast and then, with shouts of murderess, murderess, I’ve been murdered, she was ready to throw herself at her daughter, Marika.

She suffered a kerchief on her head only when she went out on the street.

The street was perhaps the only worldly authority before which she was willing to bow, or before which at least she forced her madness into different forms. On the street she played the kind of role that others could accept but that also suited her own adolescent daydreams. She transformed herself into a lady who, with exaggerated gestures, indicated how disgusted she was by the vulgarity of the world but who also knew at any given moment what this world owed her.

At home she wore no shoes, not even slippers. If in the winter she spent time in one place or just stood on the kitchen’s freezing floor, she’d keep shifting from one foot to the other and under the long nightshirt rub her cold soles on her calves.

She suffered from the cold.

Although she wore thick underpants, she struggled constantly with inflammation of the bladder and chills. Before going anywhere, she’d spend a long time picking her shoes and bags. Sometimes the careful preparations took days or even weeks. Because of her fine skin, her legs were sensitive, she explained to everybody, and with her fingers she’d point to and gently touch the fine skin on her cheeks and forehead, everything chafes and irritates it. If she went only so far as the marketplace, that would be the end of it, her feet turned into one big sore, sometimes her shoes filled with blood, and every shoe hurt, cut into her flesh, she has nothing to wear anymore because of your disgusting stinginess. I will not shove my feet into bloody shoes, yet she has to because this helpless man, whom even his children have left because of his terrible miserliness, they hate him, won’t talk to him, have nothing but contempt for him because he is mean, mean, and everybody always cheats him at the market too, sells him rotten fruit, he gets all the bruised ones and the ones full of worms, and no matter whether he looks at them or not, if the merchandise is cheap he doesn’t notice.

The meat already has a smell. Still, he buys it.

Shoemakers can’t help her anymore either. Once she had a decent cobbler, but who knows where he is now.

May his memory be blessed.

These cobblers can’t or don’t want to widen her shoes properly, if only they widened one pair, the one made of fine calfskin that’s flexible enough, because all her shoes are custom-made so they won’t chafe her instep or heels. She swears on the memory of her beloved father that she never suffered any pain comparable to this, and every week, when she goes to the market, that is her burden, that is what she has to endure. And not only is the cobbler wicked, treacherous, mean, and I don’t even know his name, but he’s worse than the goy cobblers, only the butcher is worse than this cobbler. The butcher is so mean, he’s a common criminal.

Mean.

Listen to me, man, that’s how I call him, who can remember the names of these cobblers, I’ll give you any money for a pair of proper shoes. God is my witness, when I try them on they fit, see how nicely you could fix them, you see, but by the time I get home, my feet are nothing but blisters.

And already yesterday I told you, she says now, that you’d have liver today.

But of course you forget everything. To you I’m air. I already told you yesterday what nice liver I bought for you, you wretch, was I talking to the air. I don’t eat any of it, not a bite, but once again I swore, I swore on everything dear to me that I’ll never go to that shoyhet again. I don’t care what you say, he is not a human being. Mean. You protect him only because you want me to go to him for your liver, but his stinking mouth is always dripping with hazeer ,* she said all this in a uniformly high, almost bored falsetto, and then, as if obeying her body’s unknown passion, and with the passion of her sense of justice, she unexpectedly began to shout.

Can’t you see, she shouted, yanking the elastic dough out of the bowl with the wooden spoon, you don’t even have an eye for wickedness. Mean. You’re no less mean than all the rest of them. All right then, I’ll fry this liver for you, she added tenderly, stupid that I am, I always let you have your way, and the unexpected emotional turn was addressed not to her husband, this miserable man, but to the liver, because she liked to fry it and she liked to pronounce the word fry as many times as possible and always with the same gusto.

And to make her lips pronounce the word liver , while she envisioned the liver bursting with blood under the bluish-purple membrane, even though she would never have put it in her mouth.

I hope you’re happy to have liver for lunch.

Now I’ll fry it well again. And don’t worry about blood, not a drop will stay in it, don’t you worry.

All this time Gottlieb did not look up from his prayer book, not out of meanness but out of considered goodwill and self-defense. Ever since the woman’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, he let her have her way, he had to endure almost everything, while with carefully doled out indifference he protected himself, spared himself from emotional involvement to the extent that allowed him to remain by her side.

He did not love her, not even in their earlier lives, and the woman had not loved him, never; he had failed to love this woman for even a moment, and therefore it was incredibly hard for him to remain permanently indifferent to her. To find a solution for this problem throughout an entire, unpredictable lifetime, even though the solution consisted of unbearably long moments.

In the early years of their marriage, they had tried to accept each other’s bodily proximity, but they failed.

At most, he was fond of remembering her beauty. Of saying to himself, after each moment gained, see, you managed to bear it, and instead of rebelling, you steadfastly praised the Father of Mercy for all your tribulations; yet he knew that his perseverance had only its own value and no reward, and never would have, neither in this nor in the promised other world. To this day, it filled him with satisfaction that he had been granted a beautiful wife, though he had never succeeded in opening up this beauty, and had never been able to think about what might have happened between them in the sight of the Lord. He feared that if instead of praying as he should, he’d think long and hard about how unbearable it was to endure her indifference; then madness would seize him and hurl him into the depths. Once, during a prayer, he shuddered when he realized he should stay away from depths, should strive for heights, because this hapless woman had no one but him. Since then, consciously and guided by the greatest compassion, he forced himself to think only about shallow things. Thank God she had two healthy children, knock on wood; may the memory of our poor little dead one be blessed. But these children, her own blood, are not only indifferent about their mother but stranger than she is, because they take after her completely. He could see that they wanted to be free of their mother; they would unhesitatingly put her in the nursing home in Bonyhád, which the Transdanubian religious communities maintained for mentally deranged Jews.