Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Let me teach you, then, you old bitch.

Cunt.

Say after me.

Sopranos, of course, can throw hysterical fits for you, making their fine town houses resonate.

Oh, she understood the old bitch, she did indeed, very well.

As a contralto, Gyöngyvér, one should know one’s place in the hierarchy of the art of singing.

If only the old idiot would make an exception with someone, with me, for example, with me. She should make me her general heir. Anyway, she hasn’t got anyone. Mrs. Szemző doesn’t either; these women have no one and still I won’t be inheriting anything from them. Why doesn’t Médike understand her: that she loves her so much for her knowledge; that she wants her.

In my pain and embarrassment I’ll say to you out loud, I want you.

Why doesn’t she love me, what would it take for her to make an exception just once; after all, her drawers are full of jewelry and her apartment’s got nothing but expensive paintings and carpets; what more does she want, why isn’t she more tender with me.

She would like to be a male dog; then Médike would let her climb on top of her.

She couldn’t have many students who respect her this much.

At most, she could call her Médike, and the wicked witch couldn’t object to that. Those pampered ladies, those posh women friends of hers, they called her Médike.

Well, I’ll give you plenty of Médike, to have your fill.

Out of pride, Médike had to pretend not to have grasped how much Gyöngyvér adored and disdained her whenever she called her Médike.

I’d kill myself if I had huge, wrinkled, freckled breasts like hers. Médike was one mean-spirited bitch and because of her Gyöngyvér had to suffer so much. I shouldn’t have breasts larger than a boy’s. She had paid a lot to be able to suffer from Médike, true, but she also hadn’t learned so much from anyone as she had from this dear woman. A slut of a Swabian woman like this could be so damn stingy and with her an hour was only fifty minutes. And even after the lesson one couldn’t chat with her for free, oh no. For five minutes of yakking she charged a whole hour, and on top of that she pretended not to understand your indignation.

Gyöngyvér would have liked to sink a good long knife into her for such pettiness.

Or, good Lord, to fall on the harridan with her bare hands.

Good Lord, imagine that once upon a time a man must have loved this ugly woman.

And properly strangle her.

When she could no longer listen to her remarks, neutralized by her smile, that this was not to be sung like that, nor that like this.

In full voice, Gyöngyvér, not loud.

Watch the descent.

As if you were squeezing it.

It was intolerable that everything was supposed to be done differently from the way she was doing it or hearing it. That her feelings should be discounted. And if she had a shot of something to help her get through an hour’s worth of anxiety, even smile back at her teacher and feel just a little better about things, Médike had the nerve to tell her she could smell it on her breath.

If you’ve had a drink, Gyöngyvér, don’t come to the lesson. Please, do not let this turn into an inveteracy.

Inveteracy. That’s the sort of thing she says. Neither her colleague at the kindergarten nor Ilona Bondor knows this word.

She chewed some coffee beans after her drink, that’s how she tricked Médike.

It can’t be that in one person everything works the wrong way.

At least a good cognac before the lesson, she should have at least that. All right, maybe two.

How could she remember so many things at once. The old crone bleats so much because she wants me to take more lessons. The old hag could fill all her waking hours with lessons. How could a person satisfy so many demands. You don’t have to tell me. Yet she couldn’t even find an extra free hour for you to make up a missed lesson.

I can’t learn three foreign languages simultaneously. She can’t shove every stupidity down my throat.

It did not seem reasonable to put up with so much shame and humiliation and to pay so much for it.

But she did not give up, she kept hitting that fucking F sharp on Mrs. Szemző’s piano, following its sound with her voice.

In the meantime, she was locked up in the chicken coop.

When did anyone lock up Médike in a chicken coop, or Irmuska and the famous Mária Szapáry and the rest of the grand ladies, when. Never. They gave her nothing to eat, she drank out of the trough, she had to drink out of the cattle trough.

Out of what else.

When had these women ever suffered as much as she had, and she couldn’t have known that this was mental suffering because she hadn’t learned the appropriate words from them. In the morning they gave her a turnip to chew on. She’d never tell anyone that she had picked a live worm out of one and eaten it. How could she have known there would be punishment for that too.

She did not understand what sins a little girl like that could have committed, or what sin was. And she did not know what a little girl or little boy was because they kept her as if she’d been a dumb animal, and also punished her for being one.

She drank the chickens’ water.

She was capable of doing it, that useless thing.

She looked for her uselessness everywhere, tried secretly to feel it on herself, where it might have entered her, and to figure out what made other children so useful.

And they always shoved her back here, hungry and thirsty, and she felt that anybody could put her to shame, degrade and humiliate her.

She could never be free of this. The only reason she could endure the long hours, the whole nights, in the chicken coop was that she didn’t know she might die or that she had been born; how could she have known. How could she have known any of the things other children knew. The bolt clicked again, they locked the chicken-coop door from the outside, and this was her punishment for drinking from the trough again.

Ain’t yah a disgustin’ li’l animal drinkin’ the water o’ them cows. What am I wastin’ time teachin’ yah what to do, an’ aks fur water when yah thirst. Didn’ I gi’ yah turnip. I’ll leave yah here all night, but if yah budge, the ugly fox come take yah away an’ bite clear across yer throat.

From the depth of that night, there glimmered in Gyöngyvér’s brain a realization about her first foster mother. She could not remember her face, only her meaty arms tanned dark by the sun, her approaching heavy steps, and that strange large man and what he had done, in the midst of intimate and ominous sounds, to this larger-than-life woman who now seemed to have been the Médike of her old life.

That is why she is so terrified of her, or of Médike, and of men in general.

These figures metamorphosed into one another; she could not be rid of them.

That is why she can’t learn from Médike what she should, not because of the cognac.

Paying her in vain.

She will kill her.

She’d like to take my entire salary.

These two very different things, her unconsciously committed sins and her sheer existence, were inauspiciously coming together. This was not something she thought; she actually witnessed it. She saw the fox from very close up; in her life, not in a fairy tale, the fox and the rat came in the night and kept chewing and pushing at the coop’s boards until they got to a hen or rooster and they took away the little girl too. That was actually good, taking her away, because then there’d be quiet at last; or maybe it was inside her that something was forever rent asunder, something that could not be mended in her lifetime and it is only her that God punishes like this so cruelly.

The fox did come.

To pick at the bolt from inside wasn’t easy, but she kept at it for a long time and finally got it to move and managed to escape. She threw the bolt into the nettles. So they couldn’t lock the coop door on her again. But they did, they also beat her around the head and locked her up using something other than the bolt, seeing how incorrigible and useless she was.