Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

It was getting late, but that wouldn’t do for an excuse.

I said, I’d like to stretch a little, but now I wasn’t thinking of anything else except getting away. I wasn’t going to wait for Klára to come back.

Of course, it also occurred to me that I should cut across dark Aréna Road. I seemed to feel in my limbs the elation of getting away, the liberating steps.

As if freedom were truly waiting for me on the other side under the storm-tossed trees.

I still called it Aréna Road, its old name, because there stood the house, facing City Park, where I was born, and which my grandfather had built. And behind the Műcsarnok art gallery, among the large plane trees, the underground public urinal yawned invitingly with its pale light; this was where men thirsty for one another always waited in droves.

He asked me if I had any cigarettes; he said he’d get out and stretch a little too, but he’d gotten very wet before, which made me glad. At least we clarified the distance between us. I said I was sorry but I did not smoke, which was not completely true, and we both got out of the car. For me it was harder because I had to climb around the front seat, tipped forward. And to lessen my humiliation, I said if my memory did not fail me, there was a bar nearby. While waiting for Klára, I’d be happy to buy him some cigarettes there. He burst out laughing as if to brag about his embarrassment. He said that would be very considerate of me, but he could hold out for another few minutes. But I was right about the bar, he said, there, and he motioned toward the farther stretch of the street.

They have pretty lousy cigarettes.

His leather coat was short, I could see now under the streetlamp, its leather rather worn, its surface scaly with time. Private chauffeurs and farm managers had worn coats like that before the war.

The bar was indeed there on the bleak and shabby part of the street. Who knows how long the shadows of men had been standing there with their beers and spritzers in front of its illuminated window. This bar was one of the most mysterious places of my childhood. Regardless of what kind of family one comes from, in the city where one grows up there are always some forbidden places. This was not a hostile world; if the drunks weren’t on a rampage it was a rather peaceful place, yet I knew I should not step inside it. Not because somebody had forbidden it; life simply presented no situation that would have required it. Lately, this was the starting point and terminus of the number 5 bus line. The bar was always dim with smoke; it buzzed like a beehive; there were always so many men that some of them had to stay on the sidewalk, even in winter. They put a bench outside, along the wall of the building. The streetcar on István Road was also discontinued. The bench was painted blue, like the buses, because it was meant for resting drivers and conductors, but most of the time this is where the drunks lay about.

From the dark City Park, the spring breeze with the fragrance of wet trees pounced on us freely.

Then something perplexing happened again, something I hadn’t counted on.

He was but a tiny spot in the landscape, the boy about whom they had spoken in Baron Schuer’s study. The one with blond hair streaked so noticeably with strands of dark brown.

An ant, a hard-shelled little bug, no more than a naked worm that anyone might absently crush underfoot.

A little boy with brilliant blue eyes and close-cropped hair, slightly sluggish movements and a slouchy walk, who had no extreme thoughts or unpleasant feelings about himself. He was not grinning now, but he wasn’t bothered by premonitions. Nothing indicated to him that something might be out of the ordinary in the universe or that any danger was lurking.

Although the other boys could not help worrying about the regular racial-biological measurements, he wasn’t even fazed when one of their mates jumped off the Ochsensprung at dawn and died instantly. He often irritated his counselors with his constant grins. Which the others enjoyed no end: that he had the courage to grin and, when the counselors cautioned him that now you really have nothing to grin about, my boy, that he responded by grinning even more foolishly. Perhaps he found their displeasure comical, perhaps he was glad to receive more than the usual share of attention, for which he was willing to do much, because he liked to playact and clown around. The others thought him daring. They admired and feared him. They wouldn’t have dared behave as he did or approve of behavior like his.

The counselors assumed that since the other boys laughed at him, the community’s severe judgment would affect him.

But that was not the case; on the contrary, the boys laughed in sheer enjoyment. Involuntarily and communally, the boys were also laughing at something they shouldn’t have laughed at. Progressing carefully, step by careful step, Hans led them to unruliness; he was unruly on their behalf, which gave him enormous pleasure, always to go further than the others would ever dare and thus to lead them to sedition. The counselors failed to notice that the laughter was a shared and organized display of insubordination, a veritable rebellion. Or rather, they noticed it only when it was too late. They should have recorded every occurrence in all its aspects and manifested forms.

From a genetic viewpoint, they regarded a proclivity to rebellion as an important telltale sign.

The baroness also thought it outrageous that a person should be grinning all the time, unable to look at anyone without grinning.

Hans, you are behaving preposterously, my boy, your behavior is simply impossible, that is how she chided him.

But her son listened to her less than to anyone else.

Every year several boys tried to throw away their lives; only the childish methods or the results differed. But Hans took nothing seriously — the baroness had reason to worry about him, for it didn’t matter what she told him; he did not care about her motherly pain and sorrow, did not listen to her chiding or warning; she might as well have talked to the wall.

He’d follow her with his wide-open, slightly wondering, incredulous eyes as if out of curiosity, so as to fix in his conscious mind her every gesture; emotionally he remained far removed from everything. In this the baroness recognized herself in him, and when that happened she fell silent, contented. Even though it was the boy’s father who looked back at her with those rebellious, challenging eyes. It was as if, relinquishing their ritual sentimentality, the three of them had suddenly become closer. And none of them could deny their shameless intimacy.

This was Hans’s fourth year in the boarding school. Had they not opened this school, his mother would have had a problem finding a place for him. Several times during those years, he had lived through a peculiar hour or day, such as today, but unlike the other boys he found nothing to object to in the leap to death, not even the first time. At most its finality surprised him rather benignly. Those boys had saved their integrity, which everyone else loses several times an hour until they’ve used up their last reserves. He appreciated the suicide boys’ perspicacity, their consistency. In the depths of his soul he approved of them, considered them superior to those, including himself, who were willing to endure their lives simply to stay alive. He put a good face on his life, since he didn’t want to make his own or anyone else’s life more difficult by whining or complaining; he became fate’s disgraced conspirator, and with his entire physical being he suffered from existence.

He constantly felt that the raw materials of his body, his organs and limbs, had been put into the wrong skin, and the soul that was added was inappropriate to such a skin or such flesh. He profoundly disdained those who spent their lives eagerly fulfilling their filial duties and paying naïve respect to their parents. No matter what. Anyone can deceive people like that and make them do anything. In his eyes, those boys were laughable creatures. Still, in his disdain he failed to overcome his deeply rooted religious presentiment that perhaps the devil had tempted the boys when they threw themselves into the depths.