Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

He uses one to deliver merchandise. In the other he takes his family on outings.

How many times have I asked you not to interfere with my life.

But try as he might, no matter how much he felt he was behaving very properly, exercising the correct measure of self-discipline, with his mother he was unable to use a different tone.

Please be quiet.

Don’t you tell me to be quiet.

I know what I’m doing.

In a few days, he could see how thoroughgoing her secret preparations had been. And he also failed to banish Mrs. Szemző from his mind, because whenever he finished his daily work — before twilight, for he did not feel like working by lamplight on this sensitive wood with its delicate color and proportions so easily distorted by electric light — then suddenly he felt very lonely. There was nothing to be done about it, and he was disturbed by the thought that he had no way of knowing what he was doing.

He sensed, like a heavy premonition, how utterly alone he would be in America if he ever got there.

On top of it all, the day was approaching when he would have to interrupt his work here and go back to Budapest for the work on Dobsinai Road. And he worried that the apartment would not turn out as he had hoped. That it wouldn’t satisfy his demands for architectural purity. Don’t let the telegram come just yet. If Bellardi arrives at night, he’ll be getting off at Mohács on his way from Vienna. Or else he might come five days later on the ship arriving from Belgrade at four in the afternoon.

But he did not come at either time, and Madzar again had to wait three more days, and he could be glad that no telegram came either. In his great expectation, he went so far as to leave his work quietly at the relevant hour and take a leisurely stroll down to the boat station. He went as is, in his father’s work clothes, to see with his own eyes whether Bellardi would disembark or not.

But he did not see him on the bridge.

He could have sent him a message, because he saw the Mayer boy.

But, outwitting himself, he had to pretend that only by coincidence was he observing from the willow trees along the shore the Carolina ’s spectacular and noisy arrival and then its painful departure. When the Carolina was receding from Mohács, with its streaming, clattering wheels turning against the current, the wailing of its horn lingered for a long time. At such times, Madzar usually stopped either behind the customhouse or at the silk factory’s stone wall, but from there he did not see Bellardi either when the ship came or when it left.

Sometimes he would run out of the house at the doleful sound of the horn, just as he had in his childhood, hurry down to the dock and from the old fishing-boat landing watch the slow passing of the Carolina .

Once he saw Chief Counselor Elemér Vay get off, on his way back from Belgrade; the Mayer boy lugged his suitcases behind him. The smartly dressed, severe-looking gentleman was conveyed from Fish Market Square in the Hotel Korona’s black, crest-adorned carriage, while simultaneously, amid much blowing of its horn, the ship set out upstream, taking its passengers leaning on the railing. And this not only pained Madzar but also made him dread the pain of longing to be off.

Which should not have touched him. He did not want to admit that his life had various mysterious processes and phenomena that he could not clearly see even in retrospect and that no sober reasoning helped him anticipate. He feared them the same way he did bodily contacts he considered improper. And when once again Bellardi did not show up in the afternoon, and Madzar was left with only the Danube’s enormous currents and muddy, layered whirlpools, he took off on a longer stroll to work off his anger with Bellardi.

He should pick up at least two bottles of good wine; that way he wouldn’t be going home alone.

At least they’d have good wine when Bellardi came.

North of the city lay ridges and series of hills, covered with loess and divided naturally by vales that seasonal streams had created, where even in Roman times grapes were grown and where, thanks to Levantine wine merchants, the very demanding viticulture survived the century and a half of Turkish occupation. At some places, the ancient wine cellars had long since caved in. Above the buried, walled-up medieval labyrinths sat small windowless grape-crushing sheds and proud, richly decorated houses belonging to rich Swabian smallholders, with wooden porches and tripartite wooden facades overlooking the river. He made his way up here on banked, carriage-wide roads between vertical loess walls. He was recalling in more depth and detail what once had happened to him and Bellardi. It felt good to go for a long walk after a full day’s work. As if he were thinking that with these pieces of furniture he might be able to make a present of his childhood to Mrs. Szemző. Recollection itself was not surprising to him; he has had ample practice in it. While working, one concentrates on the details of details, and parallel with them all sorts of other things come to mind, details and images from his life completely unrelated to his work. Except that now this was happening in the city of his birth as he walked along fences and stone walls, among raging dogs, or clambering upward in the grave silence and green dimness of the banked roads. Preoccupied with a technical detail, such as that something needed oiling, he would recall the giant willow that arched over the swelling river, in one of whose branches they had spotted the little cripple, look, there he is, reading, because he was always reading, taking his books everywhere with him, and in the next instant he would suddenly realize that the V-shape belt of the electric saw was loose, and so on; thus his thoughts kept chasing one another.

Or in the midst of having to deal with some quintessentially technical detail, he might think, we are the culprits, and he would brood on this if he could not suppress his memories.

Bellardi did not come.

He wanted to give up on him, but anxiety, aversion to the other man’s capriciousness, elemental wonder at the sight of this strange man’s behavior, and existential fear about the future remained much too strong in him. He won’t even have one car in America, let alone two. I’m a dreamer who doesn’t do anything. And why in hell did Gottlieb have to go to America of all places.

Why couldn’t the Gottliebs let him have that pleasure for himself.

He decided to wait for him anyway, to be prepared, and not to let Bellardi surprise him. And the telegram still hadn’t come from the head mason or the cabinetmaker telling him to come to Buda. He and his mother ate up, or gave to friends and relatives, the plum-jam tarts, morello strudels, and cherry pies; his mother kept bringing fresh fruit from the island. At night he drank the light white wines he had brought from the Süssloch or from the valley of the Csele river, from the Stricker relatives’ vineyard, sitting by himself on the veranda, in the dark. He wouldn’t turn on the light. But why should Bellardi come to see him. Bellardi’s life was nothing but a series of promises he couldn’t keep, not even for himself. What cause could they have in common, no cause at all. Yet Bellardi must have felt bad about having been so firmly rejected. But Madzar couldn’t imagine not rejecting him, how he could have been less rejecting, what he might have done so as not to reject Bellardi’s proposal. What part of the proposal should he accept. Still, the following day he walked out of the city again to get wine, taking with him an empty demijohn, sat around again with the old men he knew, sipped wine with them until it grew dark above the cellars.

If Bellardi comes now, he won’t find him at home.

Sometimes it rained for long spells and he could not go out for days.