Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Repeat after me, Glück.

Glück.

Gyöngyvér, please, shorter, shorter. You are happy, you understand, happy.

Glück.

Because of the tempo, you may double a vowel, but be careful, no strange sound between the two vowels. Please don’t get in the habit of that embarrassing spl-ee-ee-ee-ting of words. You’re singing about happiness, not cooing to a baby.

Of course others do that, but we don’t understand them. All you’re doing is imitating the weak points of others.

You’ve got enough of your own.

Glück, say it after me, one more time, and shine, make your voice glisten.

Not with your little mug, Gyöngyvér, with your eyes! Glitter and glow with your eyes, shine them out of your pretty little face.

You can indicate by miming what you’ll do in your great happiness, for all I care, the dramatic situation allows for it. But you, my dear, are doing it the other way around: you are demonstrating retroactively what you failed to deliver with your voice. You make faces, but I want to hear something about happiness.

As it is, it’s worthless, nothing, zero, nada. It’s as if you mixed up cause and effect.

We can’t mix apples and oranges either.

You can’t give me the visual instead of the acoustic.

And now I’d like to hear at last that you’ve put the notes in their proper place.

Glück, I want to hear this shorter, Gyöngyvér, shorter, and let your voice glisten.

Gyöngyvér Mózes, filled with doubts, kept hitting the F sharp while outside it was fast becoming light, and at the very same moment the tormented and humiliated Kristóf Demén, not so far from her, made good on his promise to himself.

He was trudging toward the Pest shore, not on the Margit Bridge but on the Árpád Bridge.

He did not pick this bridge just because it was closer and seemed to be the safest way to escape the raiding police.

The others, who did not manage to escape, were soon beaten with nightsticks, the blows falling wherever their bodies could be reached on their backs, heads, and arms raised in defense. He wasn’t sure that other police units might not be combing the interior of the island; he couldn’t flee that way. And if he had good luck, the incredible luck to slip through the dragnet, he still thought that on this bridge he had the best chance of not falling into a trap again.

It wasn’t advisable to meet other human beings in his condition.

The chances of this happening were greater on the Margit Bridge or Lipót Boulevard.

In another twenty minutes city traffic would slowly wind down, but given his condition he couldn’t have gotten on a streetcar in any case.

He picked this escape route because the surest way of throwing himself successfully into the depths would be from the Árpád Bridge. Before meeting anyone. He only had to hurdle the railing.

As if his entire life until now had been nothing but preparation for this lovely nightmare that, lo and behold, came to him while he was still awake.

Under the blows of nightsticks, several men fell or collapsed into the tarry pissoir; they screamed, but the police went on beating them, they cried and begged for mercy while the police yelled.

Headlights of a police assault van provided light through the open door.

Will he have the fortitude.

Now he can realize it; all his great hopes lay in this last, long-gestating plan whose every little detail had been worked out.

In the glimmer of dawn, which had not yet obliterated the deep grayness of the world, he was running headlong, all alone, on the bridge. His bodily contentment was panting along with him, deriding his sense of morality and disgracing his conscience. He carried his joy with him. He was fleeing from policemen who were not pursuing him. They probably hadn’t even noticed that someone had escaped or, if they had, they were glad to have one less faggot at the station.

He stopped for the first time on the bridge, and thought of those who had perished here before him in the icy current, but he suspected this sort of thinking was an infamy to be avoided; then he looked back at the island, but the thick foliage hid everything.

It was summer now, with all its living, powerful fragrance. The grove of young chestnut trees swallowed up the cries for help, or there never were any. The summer dawn was lovely and serene. The gas lamp shone passively through the branches. As if nothing had occurred in the night just passing, the first birds sang loftily. He was dragging himself, he could not actually run in his fine, pointed black shoes, which had gotten so wet in the puddles, and his socks made sucking sounds.

No cars, no streetcars, no one, no movement at all on the gray asphalt of the bridge.

Dawn’s first blush appeared in the sky over Angyalföld, at the edge of the clouds mixing with factory smoke. It became improbable, it turned into an improbability, that he had succeeded in escaping, that he had really managed to escape from the screams, the dull thuds of blows, the shouts and implorations, across the blinding light, and that he had not been taken away. That they had not reached him with their swishing nightsticks. Although the arc lights up here on the bridge were still on, the great sky with the birds was becoming lighter. Gulls were screeching lazily at one another, and swallows on the shore sent their brief shrill messages as they swiftly flew about. Yet he kept hearing the plopping and thumping of bodies being piled on top of each other, the falling of rapid blows; his conscience registered and properly sorted everything, he brought with him visual illustrations of arms poised to strike or raised in defense, melodies of futile begging, swearing, someone’s screaming entreaty, please, don’t hurt me, you shouldn’t hurt only me, comrade policeman, the sound of tearing clothes, the curses, the cracking of bones in upheld arms; in his own brain cells he salvaged and brought to light of day the sounds and sights of horror and reprisal, which couldn’t have been more contrary to reason or comprehension.

You just wait, you filthy fags, you’ll get it now.

In the unusual silence, he could hear the streaming, helpless plashing of water around the base of the bridge’s piers.

You wanted cock, all right then, you’ll get cock.

It was summer, an ordinary early-summer dawn with its cool mist.

He was dragging his injured leg.

The tight pants chafed the oozing wound; the shin smashed on the iron railing was burning and painful.

He feared that the rounded-up men would be taken away across this bridge and then they’d catch him too; he’d have no place to hide or chance to escape.

His black shirt and black pants, wet with other men’s urine and filthy with their sperm, stuck to his back, chest, bottom, and thighs; they clung to him, adhered to him like skin, white-hot with shame.

Only a few seconds before the police raid he had struggled to his feet from the stone floor, wet with water dripping from the cracked sink and the streams of urine that had missed their target, where, earlier, the men standing above him and intimately busy with one another had reached their satisfaction or had hastily abandoned him because of others’ stiff cocks; his body had been lying there, motionless, for a long time after its own gratification. He figured he would do it when he reached the geometrical center of the bridge’s span between the island and the Pest shore, where he’d have the least chance of getting stuck on part of the bridge while falling or of knocking against a pillar below.

That was his big plan.

He could see himself falling, but he didn’t want to see himself shattered or mangled, not that.

Before the police raid, his personal fate had given him time to stagger to the sink, which in the darkness he had guessed was behind the wide-open steel door of the pitch-black public urinal.