Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

And why shouldn’t she have done it; it was logical that she did.

She’d never experienced this among women, women are very different from one another and like to be different; they make a point of it. In contrast to women, men are interchangeable. You may choose any one of them, this other voice whispered, you have to pick one; for them it’s all the same whom they impregnate. In her feet, growing tense in her comfortable shoes, and in the roots of her hair she felt the excitement of the thought; she could not let go of it. She was pursued by the thought that she must choose not the copy, obviously, but the original; the thought made her brain ache, yes, not the forgery but the original. There’s no denying that she also felt this torturing thought in her breasts, becoming sensitive where the silk blouse touched them, and in the depths of her womb. She continued to chat rapidly and with inspiration about the many-faceted indecency that this truly great artist allowed himself to commit against the wife of the famous architect, let’s admit it, very boldly. If he were not an artist, one could not forgive him such immoderation.

He had told the visiting ladies about the emotional admiration and devotion he had felt for Margret’s husband from the first moment of their first encounter, and with this admission he no doubt embarrassed them all — the ass kisser, she thought in Hungarian, every artist is a born ass kisser — but Margret’s husband was also the man whom he could thank for his wonderful commissions, she added aloud in German, laughing.

Still laughing, she asked Baron Schuer, deep in his own monologue, whether he had the good fortune to be familiar with the amazing story of the two great artists’ encounter.

She could easily call it a meeting of giants.

Her overheated, shrill little voice sweetly cut through the other voices.

Frankly, she was happy because she was no longer thinking about the oddity that she would have to leave the proximity of this man and return to the Auenbergs’ city palace in Tárnok Street in Buda.

The sun-drenched riparian city sank back into its dim and chaotic past.

The umbilical cord snapped.

Although she received no answer, she probably did not expect one, just as she had not responded to every aspect of the hubbub Schuer had made when he volunteered, unasked, those details about his youthful experiences in the Thuringian campaign.

For the time being they could both be satisfied with what they had found in each other’s eyes and quickly made their own.

She bewitched Schuer with her shrill little voice, and the scientist’s warm, lecture-trained deep bass had a similarly profound effect on her. Because, you know, Countess, it so happened, and with your permission I’ll tell you this one last story, before moving out of the area we should have stopped in Friedrichroda to put things in order there too. The two of them made each other’s body resonate like a sound box; with vibrations coursing through each other’s corporeal matter, neither of them had to pay attention to what was actually being said. They could look at each other’s hands, lips, neck, or forehead, whatever their clothes left exposed to the eye. While the three children and the three other women, their pupils dilated, marveled to see them being gradually and improbably transformed. Spooning their soup with painful precision, the hostess and the two other women tried to engage in conversation on so-called neutral topics. They ostentatiously pretended to be sharing lighthearted banter and paid no heed to its content, hoping that the other two would awaken from their scandalous shamelessness and return to earth.

The two continued to converse politely, spoons in hand, hoping to distract everyone’s attention including their own from all that was happening publicly between them.

People in Schuer’s house never sat down to lunch before two o’clock, and they always ate very simply, never to excess. Which was as much part of the strictly followed family tradition as was the obligatory tastelessness of the food. Occasionally cooks would quit the job out of conviction, when they reached the point where they could not endure banishing all taste and character from the food. No surprise that in this house the preparation of sauerbraten was a hotly debated issue. At the Schuers, the cooks had to be sure that the food was never composed of ill-smelling or odorous raw ingredients, for the smell of raw meat revolted Schuer, and though he never went near the pantry or kitchen, the very thought of being under the same roof with uncooked meat also revolted him. Yet a good sauerbraten must, before being cooked, marinate in its vinegary, spicy sauce for at least ten days or even three weeks.

They all found it unbearable to sit there as if nailed to the stiff, high-backed, barely upholstered chairs along with other people with whom they had nothing in common. Baroness Karla did not understand what might possibly have tied her only a few hours earlier to this shocking female, who with perfidious naïveté was concealing her intelligence and about whom, despite her unpleasantly shrill, hysterical little voice, there had never been anything little-girlish even in her girlish years. Still, she couldn’t get enough of the younger woman’s premature beauty. Suddenly she felt compelled to accuse Imola not only of being ignorant of degenerate art — the reason for her idolizing these particular modern works — but also of having lost her innocence.

Though she’s engaged, she’s not ashamed to behave like this with the first man she meets.

Baroness Erika disdained but also felt a little sorry for the showy young lady.

She’s crazy, she said to herself, excusing her guest, yet it was in these painful moments that her mind clearly formulated the haunting yet always repellent realization that the father of her children was not a human being; she’d always known he was an animal. Who obviously would have preferred to get up from the table in his home, grasp the hand of the ever-twittering crazy woman, and with no consideration run off with her, leaving behind his beautiful, happy family life.

They didn’t know what to do with their destructive emotions; they couldn’t shed their self-discipline so suddenly.

Though Baroness Erika nervously repeated to herself several times the helpful bourgeois commonplaces reserved for just such occurrences — I’m dreaming, this cannot be true, I must be dreaming — that is to say, though she tried to diffuse her anger by saying one should not acknowledge painful reality, she could rise above it by talking over it, and clichés often help one navigate seemingly hopeless situations, she herself was behaving compulsively. In a loud voice, she combatively matched every sentence spoken by someone else with one of her own, saying something about the soup they had been served, that the Schuers cannot bear cinnamon or clove in fruit soup, which in the first years struck her as very strange, it’s not always easy for a young wife to cope with the odd eating habits or peculiar demands of a husband’s family; something about the rose garden where blooms continued so abundantly until November, about pervasive smells emanating from the institute, from the entire research area, from her husband’s clothes, from the clothes of their guests, frankly, she can’t stand the smells; something about the children’s progress — she uttered proper and improper bits and shards of sentences with no apparent logical relation to one another, but with which she stepped over the boundary between inner monologue and public conversation; in fact, she didn’t know what she was saying.

She asked if the others were aware of the smells, because she was, even as she spoke.

But the others paid no attention to her. What she was feeling now, what was guiding her, was a terrible dream she was having about her husband. She could not have imagined he would be so starved for this common kind of love or that he could tenderly love anyone. She had no tender feelings for him. They respected each other and had no reason to be dissatisfied with that. And yet she now had to witness his meltdown, his disgusting hankering for this hysterical Hungarian woman, virtually devouring her with his eyes. Baroness Erika was convinced that neither of them needed intemperance like this breaching their obligatory mutual respect. Life was ruled by a strict agenda, and she had never thought there was a nobler or morally more satisfying task than to carry out that agenda, a task that required a complete human being.