Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Even in a jungle, you can’t put down two stakes and declare that the area from here belongs to this one, from there to that one, because after the next rain new growth will cover everything.

Of course, you’re not alone with this mistaken notion.

And don’t forget, either, that it’s not in the negative but in the positive sense that no border exists between illness and well-being.

I can only guess what you mean.

I just want to reassure you that you don’t have to be either defensive or offensive when you think that way; after all, the absence of illness is health.

Now I really don’t understand you.

If I remember correctly you’ve already read Tonio Kröger .*

I can’t say it was easy.

Then you must know exactly what I mean.

They both had a hearty laugh at this.

For Gyöngyvér at this strange moment the physical mission of her naked, shuddering body became evident.

She does not have to escape via the bathroom, not yet, because this is not yet Mrs. Szemző, this is not the elevator. She hears shouting, but in reality there is dead silence on the street, in the stairwell, everywhere. The sounds she hears are unfamiliar; therefore they do not exist. I am so tired I’m hallucinating. And she reassures herself with this word, though it’s the very one that should alarm her, given what it describes. She did not understand where Mrs. Szemző tarried so late. At the crack of dawn, what could she be doing with her friends. Somebody should report her to the police, that would put an end to her staying out so late, and Gyöngyvér’s apartment problem would be instantly solved. But no matter how frightened she was or how many accusations and hateful statements she was making, she thought she should tempt again that miserable little F sharp. Now she knows where to put it. During the singing lesson it had happened by chance, rotten little Médike was right again, because she knows everything ahead of time, but this time, in the hallway, Gyöngyvér deliberately raised it to its proper place.

She had lifted it out of her violent hatred.

I am a sounding board, she thought triumphantly, and adored her taut, naked body in its shuddering skin. I bring the sounds of hatred with me, she thought triumphantly.

And the living souls of destroyed objects found their voice in her.

As if she were saying, I am not a person, not a mere structure, I wait in vain for live people to address me or make me speak first.

Her entire miserable childhood had been spent in not being able to speak. At the sight of people, fear and astonishment kept words stuck inside her. I must be the one to address this depressing space.

Madzar regarded furniture, especially chairs, as being like statues. He followed Rietveld,* who said that when a person is about to lower himself into a chair, the dramatic connection between his corporeal sensations and the place he takes up in space becomes clear. Because Madzar had thought a lot about this, Mrs. Szemző’s explanations and objections excited him. Indeed, a chair must grasp the dramatic relationship positively. This is why he was revolted by Tonio Kröger ’s cataclysmic decadence, though he saw that Mrs. Szemző positively enjoyed his revulsion, which is why she had insisted he read it. He must first accept that he found decadence repellent before he could see it objectively, and only then would he understand it. Yet she always provoked a smile, no matter how many interesting things she told him about decadence, because she remained a woman he was attracted to, or could not be not attracted to, which raised them to the level at which visceral forces are at work.

As if they should have a fuck simply to understand something much more essential and basic.

In Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he must represent something strong, headstrong, and primeval compared to the timid, probably impotent Tonio Kröger. In her imagination he was the embodiment of archaic man — he tried to follow Mrs. Szemző’s thinking — which I’m not, he thought, and never was. She needs a weakling like Tonio Kröger, but she lives with a brutal character like Szemző. He was flattered that in Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he differed so greatly from whining Tonio Kröger and perhaps from her husband too. It would have been better to resemble brutal Mr. Szemző than Tonio Kröger. A chair cannot give in to nostalgia, to a catastrophe or to the small tragedies of personal life, not even to pleasant sorrow, like Tonio Kröger, whose physical fits of madness never ruffled him because he did not give in to them; a chair can’t put on airs. Madzar knew almost everything there was to know about what a chair should have; he was sensitive to objectification. And in the perspective of this utopian knowledge, he considered it imperative to be repelled by German decadence. And, no less, by Mrs. Szemző’s Jewish decadence. And not only did he read Thomas Mann with great aversion but it was also very difficult for him to listen to compositions by Wagner, Mahler, or Richard Strauss all the way through to the end; they nauseated him.

Years earlier, when studying in Weimar, the chair had become Madzar’s specialty, and if he ever was dissatisfied with his work, he never doubted his ability to deal with matter, any material, or his perfect sense of space. He had problems with his constitutional love of comfort and his archaic slowness, though, which is why he well understood what the Jewess from Budapest was talking about or had in mind. He could not free himself from the rhythm of the surroundings he came from. He acknowledged this, but dreaded awareness of it as he would a court sentence.

He was always lugging Mohács around with him.

At best he should try to find the key to his slowness and lagging; he realized that being a slow laggard might have advantages in a foreign setting, but to benefit he had to enjoy the perennial loser in himself. To learn to love Mohács’s destructive decadence. But he felt mainly indifference toward himself, and the same toward the abandoned city. He could not learn to love a place within himself where his last panic-stricken compatriot had been lost centuries before. He could not love the river’s wild maelstroms and great floods, which swallowed and carried away any person just as they would a helpless object. Although, on this last, perhaps very last summer in Mohács, despite the mental anguish and irritating technical dissatisfaction he had managed to deal very economically with historical and personal time, as well as with asceticism and decadence.

He had to create fifteen pieces of furniture during a few stolen weeks.

He stole the time from himself, who else. He shouldn’t be frittering it away; he could have followed Mies van der Rohe to America.*

But with the saturated sleepers he was very lucky, inexplicably lucky. The mysterious saturant had an unpleasant odor reminiscent of valerian, but it left no visible trace or stain and lent a deep-purple tone and a most exceptionally silky surface to the wood. While masons and roofers were busy inside and out with the Buda building on Dobsinai Road, he could make good progress in Mohács, working on the deep-purple silky-surfaced furniture for Mrs. Szemző’s clinic. Of course, they had barely delivered the sleepers from Gottlieb’s about-to-be-liberated lumberyard when Madzar discovered that it was going to be harder to take possession of his father’s abandoned workshop than he had thought. During the long years when the workshop was closed, woodbine had crawled into the roof space between the tiles and the gaps in the roof timbers and cracks in the corbels, across the splits in the adobe, looking for openings in the roof beams and planks, and it descended from the ceiling like a curtain. It was lovely, striking, and not hard to remove, but its tendrils had dangerously invaded the walls, the tool shelves, parts of the machines, and with its adhesive pads was grasping objects from all sides. He couldn’t just go at it, yanking it off, with impunity; tools, boxes, and shelves then went flying and crashing in all directions, screws and nails scattered everywhere.