Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

What intemperance.

Countess Imola, in contrast to Baroness Karla, could not do without at least one expensive piece of jewelry; in summer she saw to it that there would never be more than one.

With magical lightness and no less extravagance, she had pinned on the severely cut English lapel of her peach silk suit a brooch decorated with a real pearl. The pearl was exceptionally large, of a color somewhere between white and gray and including — in certain lights even reflecting — all the hues of the rainbow; it was set on a severe-looking platinum rosette. It came from Le Maître’s Paris workshop. She had a matching platinum ring, also decorated with a similarly expensive pearl, which the gloves concealed, but anyway she did not consider the ring as jewelry.

The baroness could not work at her table in the dissecting room or in the laboratory with all sorts of jewelry on. But she used this argument only as an excuse. In reality, it was physical stinginess that kept her from wearing jewelry.

The Boîte Rouge was the only place where she readily revealed and displayed her splendid anonymity to strangers.

Nothing else, ever.

She was extremely ungenerous with herself.

When she spoke in German, Countess Auenberg thought in German, yet things that might be considered improper occurred to her in Hungarian.

I’d rather marry my dear Mihály quickly, she now thought to herself as she sized up Karla and excused herself. Whatever happens. In the depth of her soul, she feared she might dry up as this other woman had. If she does not act soon. Even if I go crazy because he so resembles those other men. And she laughed in her anticipated great happiness because, regardless of how much she feared Mihály’s brutality and however much she doubted herself, the promise of their future stormy physical encounters proved stronger in her.

An eager and unsuspecting Karla took over part of this feeling along with the laughter or, rather, she received a portion of it, not undeservedly, and laughed along with Imola.

Even though Imola was by this time laughing at the thought that she’d never let herself become such a scientific nun.

Ever since she had seen Karla in the lake, she has been following her involuntarily; because of her, she studied biology as a private student at the university in Prague. Now she will stop following her. She will be happy and she will bloom. She too had attended Professor Nussbaum’s anatomy lectures and his lab sessions about dissection, which were hard to take but necessary since she did not want to know less than Karla did. It’s been sheer madness what I’ve been ready to do because of her. Still, she could not decide to enroll as a regular student, take exams, and go from degree to degree as other students did. Before Prague, she had never attended public schools. She would have felt it profoundly improper to have to account for her knowledge to men, to complete strangers, or to have them put questions to her. What’s all this unbridled laughter, the baroness asked, while laughing herself, trying to navigate to a plane somewhere between goodwill and suspicion, as if she knew that in linking up with the younger woman’s thoughts she was in fact laughing at herself, finding her own fate unworthy and frivolous.

So many foolish things pop into one’s mind, it’s nothing, really, not worth talking about. I don’t want to bother you with it.

I see.

Goodness, I did not mean to offend you.

But this time you really did, said the baroness, both pleasure and pain sounding in her voice, for she had sensed that Imola’s laughter had been at her expense, and now she had to exploit this alibi to the full by acting offended.

But she could not have known that the younger woman was in the process of parting with her for good.

And at that moment they laughed again on each other’s account, skittishly and happily, like two immature schoolgirls.

They put their arms around each other’s waist as they walked. Their hip bones bumped a number of times before their steps found a harmonious rhythm. They took care with their arms not to rumple their clothes. Soon they reached Ihne Street and proceeded in the shade of not yet too tall or too ramified plane trees.

There was no time left for the baroness to show the countess the world-famous scientific compound’s professional or special buildings, the great lecture hall, the large dining hall, and the halls designed for social gatherings, but they passed by Harnack House, with its guest apartments maintained in a charming rustic style. Here, as if in passing, Baroness Karla remarked that Margarethe von Bellardi managed the institute with great expertise and elegance; she had been her classmate at Prague and for years has been her most trusted confidante even though at the university they hadn’t even noticed each other.

Should there be a chance for it, she would introduce her to Imola.

She said most trusted confidante in order to hurt Imola.

They reached the building, with its dignified and modest exterior; its narrow wings were articulated by tall windows.

To make things simple we’ll now simply march through the institute, though that means I won’t be able to show you my rooms or the laboratories.

We don’t want to be late.

You’re right, not for any reason.

Along with their words their movements became light and airy, almost breezy, as they hurried noisily through the revolving doors.

The doorman’s booth was wide open.

They met no one in the well-lit vestibule.

The back section of the building, more spacious than promised by the facade, seemed with its big windows to spill into the garden. Their laughter, their hasty words, and their strong steps echoed loudly in the empty corridors. Baroness Thum moved with ease; with the vivacity of her movements she was also trying to demonstrate how much she felt at home. In the capacious stairwell, permeated with the smell of formaldehyde, she stopped for a moment to indicate with a gloved hand that they’d be leaving the building through the rear exit, that her office was upstairs and her great collection downstairs.

About this great genetic collection, kept in wax-sealed glass vessels of sometimes enormous dimensions, inside strictly locked closets, she had meant to talk in great detail to the countess, even the evening before, when she’d just arrived in Berlin. So that when, on a calm afternoon of a day in the future, she moved the sliding doors and showed her the contents of the closets, the countess would be prepared. Part of the collection consisted of material for her special research: dissected eyeballs and preserved eyeball segments, always one eyeball and then various segments of its mate. Most of the items in the collection showed hereditary organic anomalies and abnormalities, classified according to different human races, and every display model was human-size. But she did not have a chance to make a detailed report because of Imola’s indifference and lack of interest, for which she was unprepared. Nothing interests her but her fiancé. And it just so happened that only days before Imola’s arrival, Karla had successfully completed a project containing seminal scientific discoveries that would put a significant tool in the hands of physicians involved in defining racial affinity. Karla was not interested in anything outside her own work, and she couldn’t share her incredible joy with the silly goose.

I have been probing the secrets of Creation, and she prattles about her trousseau.

In reaction to the insulting lack of interest, she quickly decided not to show Imola the collection, which colleagues from all over the globe came to admire.

Demonstrating abnormalities and anomalies was no easy task; organs, limbs, and other body parts, occasionally entire human heads or trunks and lower bodies, had to be dissected and displayed according to size in the different glass vessels, and in such a way that physicians arriving for extension courses in genetics would focus their attention not on the mutilations but on the subject of the scientific demonstration.