Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

What whimsy, what a weird idea, my dear, what a disgusting recklessness.

He could not move from his post.

That was his soul’s only command. Though he couldn’t have confessed even to himself what good it would do to stay put all day. No good at all. Something very important failed to reach his consciousness. He could not tell himself or say out loud I’m very sorry I cannot go with you to the deathbed of my uncle because I must stay here on account of a strange woman who actually I can’t see from here. If he said this, even if only to himself, he would make public the fact that his days had no meaning at all. His rationality had broken down, and that is why his aunt called him to account.

The only thing that stood between him and schizophrenia was that he had not uttered these sentences aloud, considered irrational by the world, though the inclination to do so was there.

He clung to an old, infantile feeling. As if the matter at hand had to do with things being unfriendly, and their indubitable reality offended his sense of justice. Or sense of morality. The two women could not have been aware of what his aunt had secretly prepared here. While your husband is dying, you are busy working on your son’s inheritance, but you want me to go along with you and you have the nerve to talk about disgusting recklessness. You can all go to hell, together with your inheritance. I’ve had enough of all of you, once and for all, I’m fed up with my family. This is what he would have liked to shout into his aunt’s wet face, but he couldn’t even do that. At that moment he thought it important — much more so than the justice of his childlike sentiments, that no matter what happened to anyone, he should not go anywhere from here. He could account for the reasoning of this desire not even to himself, but now it meant nothing less than the betrayal of his aunt and was therefore morally unacceptable. Following common sense, he should have been looking for some excuse for not going, some pretext or reason, however hollow, however baseless.

Yet he said something that frightened not only the others but mainly himself.

I’ve had enough of his death. Excuse me, Nínó, I beg your pardon. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want any more deaths.

But this is not about you now, Kristóf. I need you to come with me. So I won’t be alone in such a troubling hour, my boy.

In her confusion and agitation her mouth trembled uncontrollably, while Kristóf looked at her obtusely and apathetically, and obviously without having understood anything of her very real need.

His glance remained so innocent that Lady Erna thought with some justification that maybe it had been a slip of the tongue, that he would now change his mind, retract that insane earlier sentence of his, and everything would be back where it had been before. But Kristóf could no longer restrain himself; he simply turned his back to everybody and, as if nothing was more natural now, stared out the window again. But Lady Erna’s behavior was equally unpredictable. Her own weighty sense of justice had already taught her not to do anything that would needlessly further complicate an already difficult situation. Rising above senseless and confusing phenomena, she expediently cut to the chase and instantly ejected the confusion from her mind. As if saying that anything that might interfere with me simply never did and does not now exist.

Gyöngyvér, you are not working today.

That’s right, today I am not.

Then maybe you can come with me.

I was about to suggest it myself, Gyöngyvér replied, as someone gasping for air, though on her own she would never have dared to make such an offer. They had never gone together anywhere.

I’ll get dressed right away.

Ilona, please pull yourself together. It’s too early to start crying. Call a cab, I say, and get my gray suit. And put out my short Persian lamb coat too.

Outside, the wind and the rain subsided for a few seconds but everything grew dark as if it were dusk. In the meantime, the policemen disappeared; the empty assault car, as though on a leisurely patrol, slowly cruised around the large square, pulled into the Andrássy Road intersection, and stopped, exactly at the spot where in November 1956 the Russians had set up their cannons and blown away Café Abbázia. Since then the café had reopened. In the apartment a door slammed, maybe the bathroom door, closet doors creaked, the two women were running around excitedly.

In a few minutes, the taxi arrived at the front of the house, a gray Pobeda. It had to wait quite a long time.

Gyöngyvér had dressed quickly and, stamping her feet, waited in the hallway for Lady Erna, who also put on her clothes fairly fast, though she spent some time on her makeup.

The concierge still had half a flight to climb to reach the attic.

As if walking up three floors once wasn’t enough without the elevator, damn it, now I have to do it twice, and this half a floor too. A pox on the whole business.

He huffed a little and then shoved the key into the lock, and as he turned it, the gust of wind roaring through the damaged roof nearly tore off the attic’s heavy steel door. It opened with a loud creaking, and in a little while it slammed shut because the wind not only knocked it outward, but also immediately sucked it back in the other direction. He staggered, found no place to back up, the wind opened the door again, he grabbed the railing. An appalling sight came into his view. It was bad enough that so many tiles were missing, but they were missing at places he could not possibly reach without the right ladder or scaffolding. And where the tiles were missing, the sky had fallen through. In the dark attic loft, divided by the various incoming shafts of light, peculiar rags or skins were swaying in the insane air currents. Order ruled everywhere, no superfluous odds and ends, everything spic and span. He had more than enough roof tiles to replace the fallen ones. Neatly stacked between the two chimneys, the original tiles had been left here by the tile setters eighty years earlier, and had served as the reserve supply ever since. He had to get to work because not only light but also rain kept falling through the holes.

In vain he tried to close the steel door, the wind kept knocking it open. He looked around for something flat to use as a wedge, but he relented and locked the door from the inside as he had done many times before.

I should take these beasts down too, he grumbled to himself, and walked to the front of the attic facing the street. The long rags or skins hanging off the longest crossbeam, five of them to be exact, were packed tightly next to one another; they were almost exactly the same length. He had to walk around them.

These were not rags and not skins, but cats shriveled down to their skeletons. This hardly surprised Balter; after all, he was the one who had hung them there.

The rain threatened to fall on that early cold spring morning but did not, as for days it had not, and the weather remained as it had been all along.

By afternoon the steaming gray earth, unnoticed, reached up to touch the deep gray sky, and suddenly it all turned into mauve evening again. Under penalty of death, the blackout order was in effect. People holed up in their cellars, in their cold houses, among the ruins; the endless night was ahead of them.

On the flat lowlands extending to the horizon where the Maas, the Niers, and the Rhine flow toward one another, it is not rare to have such a late February day shortened by spring fogs.

From the windswept tower of the old brick church, two people were taking turns observing the darkening landscape. No planes came. The artillery was silent. As if they had been forgotten. The enemy’s advance guard had not arrived. They were expected to pop up suddenly from the direction of the meadows of Herongen, to emerge from the swamps that in this area are covered by low, bushy coniferous forests full of trees with twisted trunks. Or maybe they would enter with tanks on the Broekhuysen highway. In such foggy, vaporous weather, even to the most experienced eye familiar features of the terrain seemed to move, pitch and rock. One tends to see successive ranks appearing, advancing with weapons at the ready, but it’s nothing but the fluttering of eyelashes, the hovering of patches of fog or scattering smoke in the hazy dimness as it glides in and out of the fluffy mass of distant pines.