Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

After all, I was not in control of myself at that point and I accepted the situation, against all reason, because of the woman. How else could the man look back at me if not with an awareness of rivalry. As if, with our rising animal repugnance, we were already searching for a hold on each other, figuring which of us was the readier for the struggle, was stronger and more flexible. Everything could be decided by the first glance. And decided it was. In this case, the body was more important, his body, mine, his strength, his adroitness, nothing else. He was nimbler than I, more cunning, tougher, more open and more direct, better prepared for repeated clashes. But not stronger in the psychological sense of the word. It was animal instinct that made me see that I would have to clash with a body that was hardly more than skin and bones, tense and taut with sinews and exasperation.

About which my civilized self, of course, kept quiet.

The feeling was physical, a shared physical feeling, mutual, since he looked back at me in the same way; he recognized me; he sized me up. I knew more about men than he did. And I’d also spent my early years in a boarding school; the bases of my experiences had been the struggle for food and, even more grimly, for the attention of the women taking care of us.

But it was impossible to determine which of us was more provocative. His lack of knowledge, or the insincerity of his knowledge, made him vulnerable. His physical attributes made him seem ready to attack, yet in our situation I was the attacker. On the surface his behavior was not hostile, of course, though at first I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t return my hello. But he had hastened to help me, tipping the front seat forward; go ahead and crawl in if that’s what his wife wants. He was sorry about my head bumping the door. And then, following my moans, he chided himself for letting me hurt my shin too. His countenance made it instantly clear why he wore that suspiciously threatening leather coat. He wanted to appear larger, stronger, and more severe than he was. Such leather coats were not sold in regular stores. Men in the secret service wore leather coats — not the lousy little secret agents, of course, but the bosses. And high-ranking cops. One had to be a privileged character to get one’s hands on stuff like that. Party bosses in the villages, nachalniks as they called themselves, also wore leather coats. At least twice a week they’d have themselves driven out in their huge black cars to the territory, as they disdainfully and arrogantly called the countryside, and when they emerged from their cars with a great hullabaloo they wanted to look like bailiffs of the old landowners, now hounded out, or like Bolshevik commissars in movies from faraway Soviet Russia. This man was more than ten years older than I, around thirty, but in his scrawny features he preserved the look of a vulnerable adolescent who always invites attacks, always smells enemies everywhere, and always wants to quash resistance.

I pretended to approach him in a friendly way, as if hoping to bridge the embarrassing situation with affable behavior. No one with decent bourgeois manners finds it hard to put on an amiable face no matter how embarrassing the situation or how rotten the mood. Which is not dissembling but a basic navigational rule guided by common sense. Once I was out of my apartment, I thought I ought never to be a burden to anyone, either with the miseries of physical existence or with encumbrances of the soul. I no longer look at myself in the mirror or arrange my clothes; I am decisive and satisfied with myself. So despite the awkward situation and the repeated rejections, I was happy to extend my hand for the obligatory how-do-you-do. To which he again responded only with a cool look. He did not want it, did not desire it, or simply would not waste time on it.

Obviously he hadn’t been brought up as I had. He seemed to be not from the country but from the outskirts of the city. In fact, this contributed to our clash, though he probably didn’t notice it, given the nature of the thing. He couldn’t have known what I saw as missing in his conduct. At most, he might have sensed that I did not acknowledge his signals of rejection, while I had to pretend even to myself that nothing was amiss and I didn’t take the rejection too seriously either, given that bourgeois etiquette rules were not applicable. Not only because officially they were no longer considered valid, but also because I myself liked to disregard them when in certain local situations I sometimes found them still being followed. But I thought his eyes were beautiful, deep and penetrating; he seemed to protect himself with their coldness.

In any case he too had no choice; he had to pretend everything was just as it should be.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world that without any prior notice his wife simply brought along her latest discovery, her heart’s chosen one, who knows who else.

To give this impossibility some plausible form, theoretically he should have gotten out of the car to give his wife a chance to introduce me.

Without this formality I couldn’t feel right. After all, one can’t stay together in such close quarters when one hasn’t been introduced.

I could not resolve this embarrassment; I didn’t have the means.

Not only had he failed to return the most public form of cordiality, my hello, but he did not return my prolonged smile either. Granted, my smile was simply dictated by rules of etiquette and in that sense was empty, what else could I have done. Yet it can’t be said that he rejected either the conventions or me personally with his look; it was his inner self, agitated by repressed anger and constant discontent, that strained against me. We had not even closed the car door and he was already snapping, crackling, fluttering. That’s how he demonstrated his anger with his wife, as if he enjoyed being boorishly irritated, enjoyed violating every rule of good manners. He believed he had the right to find his own vulgarity charming. He could afford to behave like this with a complete stranger, said his face. He was in the driver’s seat, literally and in every other way. Or perhaps he let himself behave like this so I could witness his strength and authority, so I’d have no illusions regarding his wife. There was something unpleasantly puffed-up, swaggering, peacockish in his behavior. In his anger he let his voice rise, as if he were not sitting in a small closed space and the presence of a stranger did not bother him. I was deeply ashamed for the woman and for me too, that she belonged to such a handsome monster and insisted on staying with such a peacock.

And not surprisingly, everything crashed into pieces within seconds.

His voice was deep, stentorian, filled with threatening reserves. He was complaining about some booze, which they were supposed to have brought along for the party, but which his wife had forgotten. He should have known. They had arranged that she would bring it from the store, but she’d never ever kept a promise to do what they had agreed she’d do. And then, changing his tone, he proceeded with ominous, fussy, and cold precision to re-create the dialogue they’d had that morning, what he had said and what she had answered. And he kept interrupting himself, yelling, that’s how it was, wasn’t it, roaring into the dimness of the car. He received no reply. But he went on and on, expansively and with uncontrolled gusto, as if these uninteresting and unimportant details, his tiniest actions, his every word, had enormous importance. He probably knew no limit in this display of self-complacency; or rather, he seemed to believe that merely remembering all these details justified him and proved his incontestable claims. As if he needed every little proof because other people were always questioning his credibility, as if he had to prove himself before the world against ever-recurring hidden accusations. His wife was probably the greatest monster, suspecting his every word. Or could not retain a simple thing in that birdbrain of hers, he bellowed in the dimness, and she should try at least to find an acceptable explanation for her thoughtlessness.