Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

What else can we possibly do with our mother, they would say.

He must not die while the woman lives.

He, the stranger, must take care of this strange woman.

He did not understand Creation, why it assigned strangers to live together.

But how could he comprehend His powers. And he no longer wanted to.

In the midst of his prayer he really had to laugh out loud at the Lord Almighty for his wild thoughts, and that made him shudder. Into the minds of people given to alienation, the Lord put thoughts of estrangement. He enjoyed immensely the sly tricks of the Lord, how He managed to reach into his thoughts.

He says, think of shallow things, and the shallowness turns out to be deep enough to be painful.

You’ve got me again, my Lord, I thank you, Thy will be done, as Thou had willed it once, now, and forever.

He understood how the Lord’s mercilessness could possibly remedy his joyless life.

Don’t reply, don’t even look up, whispered the sober thought, but with the prayer drive out the sparks and restless incitements of reason.

Actually, he could endure everything except for one thing.

When Margit screamed, can’t you see that I’ve raised three beautiful children for you.

Not that, not that third one.

Our third child, Margit, deformed and crippled, you can call it what you want, but not beautiful.

Hold your mouth. Give no cause for quarreling.

If they started to quarrel, because Gottlieb did not respond or because he did but could not reasonably control himself, which made their quarrel deteriorate, because he said out loud that they had buried their third child, we buried him, Margit, make a note of that finally, even then there was no room for reflection. Except that on those occasions it was not his goodness but his wickedness he had to relish to the last drop, and with it he had to part with his reason — no small physical and mental ordeal. His wife would repeatedly shout the name of the dead child, exactly as she had done when she was first told; she kept calling him to come home, where was he, just a minute ago he was still out on the street playing with the other children.

He was not, how could he be, we sent him away to the Strickers, Margit, for the whole summer, to the island.

I don’t send my child to anyone, to no kind of island. You gave him away. You did it. You. To the goyim. Only you.

She collapsed, writhing on the ground as if in her pain she would have to give birth again.

But Gottlieb’s silence might provoke her; at times, whether he behaved well or inadvertently did something incautious, it was impossible to keep on an even keel or escape without fits and outbursts; his wife’s monologues accompanied him in his waking hours and even in his restless sleep, sometimes inexplicably.

If she yelled out into the great big world, Józsika, Józsika, the whole neighborhood came running to the house and the doctor had to be called so that with the help of injections and tranquilizers she would calm down.

I’m glad, Margit, he said now, in the voice of a man who has tired of even the semblance of indifference and, in addition to his physical reality, is searching for emotional reserves with which to mold something into something else.

You know how glad I am about the liver.

This did not sound very convincing.

Why wouldn’t you be glad, you wretch, it was fresh when they brought it, I was standing by the counter for a whole day so it would be fresh for you, and on top of that I’ll fry it again for you. I can spend more time at the stove standing on my bad legs.

She did not always fry it a second time; this was unpredictable too — just as he didn’t know whether she’d address him in formal or familiar terms — and that made Gottlieb dread the possibility of blood spurting under the knife onto his plate; he always tried to hide it under the rice or potatoes. At least he should not see the abomination when, to ensure the mental calm of his wife, he silently ate the blood.

Because of his insane wife, once a week he eats raw blood.

Just fry the liver again the way you usually do.

For a change, today I’m making nice white rice to go with it, because I could eat a few grains too, the wife said pensively. For two days now I haven’t had more than a few morsels. With my stomach, I can’t cope with liver anymore, no matter how much I like it and would like to eat some. But I’ll peck at a few grains of rice with you.

I don’t like watching you eat the liver all by yourself all the time.

Only no blood should be left in it, Margit. You know that’s the most important thing.

He did not look up from his prayer book, signaling obsessively that he was calling out from his book between two sanctified thoughts and had neither time nor energy to waste on this liver story even if he was frightened of blood.

You know, Margit, how much I love to have the fried liver well done, you know very well.

And it doesn’t matter if it burns a little and becomes a bit crunchy.

Deathly silence followed; perhaps this was already too much, too many instructions and explanations for the woman.

For her, his words could mean that according to her husband she burned the liver and ruined his food. She paid no attention to anything; she could not be expected to fry liver properly, and, according to these facts, Gottlieb married a woman from Munkács who spoils the creations of the Creator.

Now something was again about to happen between them. Should she tolerate such nasty slander from this wretch from Mohács.

In the tense emotion-filled space, Gottlieb completely forgot he had come home because of his missing hat, and that Madzar must be waiting in vain for the three sleepers to be sent to his home.

He had developed a special ability in himself.

Within a split second, he was able to withdraw attention from his wife. Accompanied by the singsong high falsetto, he fell back into the sought-after text. In the prayer books, he liked checking those prayer fragments that involuntarily cropped up in his mind during the day, while waves of the senseless singsong words broke pleasantly above his head.

Even after several decades, he still did not think he knew the prayers by heart. How could he, when throughout his entire bitter childhood he had been beaten so much. His father of blessed memory beat him, his teacher lifted him out of his seat by his side locks, and her gentle mother shrieked as she pummeled him, because the raw matter in his brain instinctively protested against receiving verses whose sense, despite all his well-intentioned efforts, remained vague and elusive.

He knew nothing, though he should have been able to rattle off all the prayers by heart. There were constant complaints about him — that he was not paying attention, that he was always busy with some nonsense under the bench, his mind wandering elsewhere.

He fell asleep on the bench so he wouldn’t have to hear things of which he understood not a word.

They beat him.

Yet it seemed more pleasant to put up with the beatings than to absorb the Hebrew passages, because no matter how he had tried to follow them with his ears he could not catch them, let alone memorize or recite them by heart as the other boys did. When he was about to catch one verse, another was already pouncing on him. He did not understand how the brains of other boys coped with this speed. But he learned quickly enough that it was no use complaining about headaches. Even though the dreaded effort to somehow fit in the words of the hurrying Hebrew verses among the sounds of Hungarian and Yiddish words, and to fix them with their own meaning, had his head throbbing. The throbbing produced white circles through whose center he saw into a space of unfamiliar color. If he succeeded, if among the illuminated circles he managed to reach the inviting darkness, if past the dazzling of his own pupils he managed to glance into the red and green, then inevitably he awakened to being doused in water and beaten at the same time; and he knew that he would be beaten again at home, yanked and shoved around for a good long while.