Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

And this, no matter how noncompetitive he was, Schuer could not forgive.

Even though lately the baroness had been behaving quite humbly, or at least she meant to, knowing that the means she had deployed against Schuer had not been above board. She told herself to be more moderate. She relied on the strength of their lifelong scientific complicity when she refused to withdraw the publication of the pamphlet, and she never considered taking her name off it; the booklet was supposed to be published within a few weeks with a print run of 600,000 copies, which would bring her considerable income.

She felt no small satisfaction; her pettiness reveled within her.

Schuer was considered not only a much more eminent scientist than she but also an exceptionally talented stylist; still, not one of his lines would ever reach as many readers as any one of the sentences in her little booklet. Nonetheless she tried reading the text once more with his eyes, while with Imola’s head she thought about herself.

They were both deeply disturbed by each other’s presence.

She even felt sorry a little for Schuer because she had been so cruel to him.

That was why she looked at the text again.

In their respective rooms, at a good distance from each other, they both felt a little ashamed for having let their emotions become visible; they did not want to see each other again.

She did not open the writing cabinet to take the pretty little godemiché out of its silk-lined box for even just a few seconds. Occasionally, infrequently, as a self-consolation, as one who kept this dark story a secret from herself, she would smell it quickly, all over, and then thrust it into her mouth. But she was helpless, precisely because of her highly placed patrons in the Education Office on Lützow Street, whom she needed in her quiet war against Schuer, just as they needed her scientific prestige and well-established name. Those patrons now supported her professorial appointment on moral grounds, while Schuer had long opposed it on moral as well as pedagogical grounds. In this too Schuer suffered a defeat. Never again could he exploit her as a fallen woman or unmarried mother, though without her patrons she’d have been vulnerable to his machinations. Thanks to his assistant’s connections in Frankfurt, Schuer had access to Himmler, who had received him several times, but this connection had not made the state apparatus’s enormous power available to him, nor had it allowed him to ignore it.

When a little later they stood together in the sunny living room, ready to go, they were aware that for the next few hours they would have to restrain their sentiments and emotions. And now that did not seem so difficult. They admired each other’s dress with an intimate joy that made it seem as if there had been no tension between them earlier.

Come, turn around, let me see.

My, this is really something.

Even though in fact they each had reservations about the other’s clothes.

The lines of this suit of yours are completely charming.

Every one of your shoes and handbags is, if I may say so, a real masterpiece.

They were going to have to walk for about ten minutes in their medium-heel shoes.

Given the cool edge of the breeze, they didn’t worry about working up a sweat, so they minded their steps and did not hurry. And exchanged their words circumspectly too.

When they left behind them the last houses on the reserved, elegant Hüttenweg, they were greeted by the mellow summer smell that spreads all across the Mark-Brandenburg Plain with its open sky, wide meadows, low and dense forests, and shallow waters overgrown with cane and sedge.

Countess Imola found, speaking frankly, that Baroness Karla’s toilette was ridiculous, though she had nothing serious against the outfit per se. But she wouldn’t have worn that kind of shoe or carried that sort of handbag, though she appreciated the workmanship and the exceptional quality of the leather. Karla’s high-buttoned dress was of white synthetic silk striped horizontally in light blue, with a round collar; over the dress and made of the same material was a cape, striped vertically with lighter and darker blue, that fastened over the chest with a longish narrow tongue fitted with only five buttons. A sophisticated optical illusion and the buttoning arrangement well emphasized Karla’s breasts, which she had first seen when she was a little girl and would have given a great deal to see again and touch with her fingers. The illusion came from letting the cape fall so that it not only concealed Karla’s too-wide hips but elongated her waist.

The Auenberg girls must have been very proud of their waistlines, which they had inherited from their mother, and they did everything to make their clothes follow this advantageous physical trait. As if in great secrecy, and despite everything, they were building their fragile fate on their dangerous maternal inheritance.

Imola appreciated the fact that this clever little trick with the buttons gave Baroness Karla a fashionable silhouette; a tailor’s clever work, she had to admit; nevertheless, she looked like a dried-out country schoolmarm in it. Only her handbag and the almost mundane shoes testified to her social standing; well, all right, so did her wonderfully fine silk stockings. The shoes and handbag were made of the relatively smooth, not so knobby skin hanging like dewlaps from the lower jaws of alligators; this is the animal’s most vulnerable spot if it takes up a fighting stance when attacked by its mates.

Germans have no sense of how to make an appearance, of how to shine, no doubt about it, she thought, with no small satisfaction.

As for Baroness Karla’s own silent opinion, it was that while her eyes could not get enough of the rich sight of Countess Imola’s toilette, she thought her Hungarian friend was once again somewhat overdressed — not by much, but still.

Hungarians seem to lack moderation or a sense of austerity, she said to herself contentedly, which in us northerners comes strongly and naturally, and so she doesn’t notice how embarrassingly conspicuous she is here, in an essentially rural environment.

Like a bird of paradise, like a peacock.

She was cross with Imola for her tendency to exaggerate, but also proud and enthusiastic, almost like an adolescent girl, because Imola showed with her behavior that she was allowing herself the kind of rebellion that Karla had never permitted herself, notwithstanding her unrestrained inner life and secret adventures. Following the examples of women moving in the highest social circles, Imola wore classically designed clothes and carried accessories made of the finest materials. Severe, comfortable, medium-brown goatskin shoes with fairly stable heels on her narrow feet, a somber, rather dull handbag of the same goatskin along with the finest kid gloves, filigreed at the wrist. These items established the basis of her appearance, giving it weight and seriousness. In truth she was beyond the point of being either under- or overdressed, and Baroness Thum, who lived far from the high life, was mistaken on this score. Imola used airy, light, pale pastel colors to make as graceful and playful an impression as possible, and at the same time she deflected attention from her physical attributes, her bodily irregularities, not with conventional sartorial ideas but with extravagant ones.

To represent one’s family and social class continuously, a person should not display anything that makes her appearance exceptional or peculiar.

Her way of dressing found meaning in the absence of characterization, as it were, and in persistent individuality.

It was all right that she lived at a different level, thought the baroness, rather crossly, but sometimes she ought to tone down her style a bit. But here again the baroness was mistaken. As a lover would be who in the throes of passion demands that the beloved be ever more flawless at every moment, more perfect than perfect.