Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Would that God, that son of a bitch, might bring the heavens crashing down on this fucked-up world.

As he carefully lifted his neatly folded work clothes from the top of the hope chest, he had to leave off with the cursing.

He managed to cross the corridor silently and close every door of every room, always darkened during the midday hours, without a sound.

No door handle clicked in the stillness.

He lay motionless on the sofa for a long time.

The mute summer sizzled through the cracks of the drawn shutters.

He had spent his nights on this living-room sofa and maybe he slept on it now for a short time. Because suddenly he jumped up, startled, as if someone were about to kill him. He had to go to work, otherwise he would not finish on time, let others have a ball, and he quickly reached for his work clothes, as he did every morning. Both his feet were in the legs of his cotton pants when he remembered the previous night, Mrs. Szemző’s telegram, his own ridiculousness, and the arrival of all those people. With his pants pulled up only to his knees he sat back on the sofa, took the telegram out of his pocket where he had shoved it, blushing, the night before, and spread it out on his knees. In the dimness he had to lean close down to the paper, which made him look like a child. In his shame he then leaned farther forward, as if he had to vomit. In his shame he buried his face in his hands. He did not understand how he could have sunk so low. Because, although obscured by a convoluted style and labyrinthine phrases, everything was there, spelled out in the telegram.

How could he have misunderstood it so badly.

The previous evening he had seen not what was in the telegram, with the peculiar letters of the telegraph machine, but what he recognized from his ridiculous daydreams in those letters. How could he have made himself so vulnerable to this woman.

So, that’s how low I’ve fallen.

Of course, now he saw clearly how it had all happened. As if, locked in his body, he’d been forced to live simultaneously in several parallel worlds and, given the current tensions, had by accident mixed them up and replaced one with the other. And thus he had indecently revealed to Mrs. Szemző one of his hidden selves, which she, luckily, not being familiar with his other hidden world, couldn’t have understood.

When he recalled these events long decades later, he sadly acknowledged that despite everything he had never been happier than he was during the next few days which the Szemzős spent in the city of his birth, and that he had suffered untold agonies in wanting the woman’s body so much.

He could no longer tell himself he was not attracted to her.

On a single occasion, they embraced each other in the afternoon quiet of the workshop, among the pieces of furniture in progress; then they could feel it.

His happiness was brief, the kind one never comprehends except when unexpectedly one remembers it.

Or, if he was happy sometimes, he may have felt it even more deeply and free of dramatics, but never so darkly and so lightheartedly as back then.

Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of tearing you away from your dear Hungarian friend, how could I, replied Otmar Baron von der Schuer when he heard Baroness Thum’s feeble protestation, and amid the throng streaming from pretty St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem he stopped unexpectedly.

Please forgive my thoughtlessness, he added, speaking loudly in the sunny, cheerful cacophony that followed the somber service. He had it easy, since he towered over the crowd, but the two ladies had to make quite an effort to resist politely the thrust of the human current around them.

The late-August morning was redolent of resin; people who wanted to chat had to shout over the two bells ringing their farewell to the faithful.

Which made a peculiar impression on them.

Both of you are more than welcome at our table, nothing could be more obvious, of course, naturally, without a doubt. And he briefly bowed his handsome, smoothly chiseled soldierly head to Countess Auenberg, whom he had just met for the first time in his life. He sincerely hoped it was not for the last time; if she would be kind enough to oblige him by accepting such a hasty though heartfelt invitation, he said more quietly after the two bells fell silent, having sounded two small belated rings, please believe me, and above the human hubbub one could hear the singing of fieldfares, guarding their second batches of eggs.

Countess Auenberg had no idea what she should believe and why the baron was padding out his speech so much, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. Silent and bewitched, they looked into the depths of each other’s eyes, seeing through their cambered lights and reflections, which Baroness Thum did not fail to notice; indeed, their lack of restraint all but took her breath away.

The fieldfares singing on high, the wrens whistling at shoulder level, and the flocks of sparrows twittering at ground level amplified their sense of the space around them.

They gained a good insight into each other in a twinkling of the eye, as it were.

Yes, surely, with pleasure, replied the countess with some reserve and also some confusion about the depth of their mutual gaze and the capacious feeling of her inner space. Almost with reluctance. Which she must have heard in her own voice, because she tried to balance it with bubbly but not completely convincing freshets of enthusiasm. She lifted her voice above her own sentiments because she saw clearly that Schuer was not at all the decent fellow he wanted the world to see him as. The throng was carrying them along the meanwhile, and each of her sentences sounded like her last. She’d be separated from the one she had just come to know. She hadn’t counted on being the guest of such an important scientist, an unhoped-for honor.

But despite what she had seen in the depths of his eyes, she could not deny her attraction to him, and that made her edgy.

She owed him her gratitude in advance, she said, accompanying her words with a nervous little laugh, which made her face even prettier, because she wouldn’t be able to resist flooding him with questions. The baron might not believe her, but she was greatly interested in race biology and genetics research.

But Schuer found the countess’s enthusiasm neither amusing nor fawning; in fact, he did not believe she could be interested in anything, for in the depth of his soul he never seriously believed women would ever have a prolonged interest in any scientific topic or subject. For a moment he stared inexpressively at this shocking feminine phenomenon and then stopped listening to her altogether. Anyway, he had never heard of a family such as hers, which made him distrust the Hungarian woman with a German name. Regarding women, the most he was willing to concede was that they had patience for details or were good at collecting data. At any rate, he continued in an entirely different, rather soldierly manner as he turned to Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, I must exchange a few very personal and at the same time strictly official words with you.

You will understand, I’m sure, he added, but this too was more because of the presence of the foreign woman. The relationship between the baroness and him had been very tense, so he measured his words; they had to avoid arguing. Although it would not have occurred to the baroness that the unexpected invitation to lunch could be refused or that the baron might provide some explanation for his uncivil behavior. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the research workers were terrified of Schuer’s threatening countenance. There was actually nothing threatening in his appearance — on the contrary, everything about his mood, his manner, his attire was smooth, flawless, and poised — but with his perfection he reminded them of their own human imperfections, and almost all of them felt this.