Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

She had one of those silver-handled, black-lacquered canes, I explained; because of an accident or some illness, she limped heavily. Her hairdo and her cane made her look very refined. And the piano was in the same room where just a minute ago the light went on.

I received a short, dismissive, openly sarcastic laugh as a reply. Which meant that my refined manner, intended to smooth over all inequalities, had failed to convince him.

People who like to hide and be mysterious take every banal question as a frontal attack against them. But however I looked at them, my questions seemed harmless. People like that see a secret motivation behind every word or movement; their thinking is nothing but their own projections. Or perhaps he paid no heed to my questions so that he could ignore my presence altogether. I could not help thinking that this man might be involved in some sinister affair and I’d better keep clear of him.

Or jealousy had driven him crazy, in which case I should be more considerate.

I was angry.

I failed to understand how I could accept his surliness. Nothing should be the way I might like it, and certainly not the way his wife would. As if he were taking revenge and enjoying it immensely. Which was quite understandable, and I willingly reached out to him with my loquaciousness, to ease the tension between us, not to let the situation remain so raw; we needn’t be so vulnerable to each other. If we were already at this point and did not know how to wriggle free of each other, then at least we should give some acceptable form to the useless few minutes we were spending together. It’s really not such a big deal. But for him, it seemed, the very suggestion of a form was unacceptable and ridiculous; he judged contemptible the very method with which I meant to save what could be saved.

Every hypocrisy of the sunken bourgeois world crawled to the surface. He obviously was not familiar with what he so profoundly hated. He was a believer in openness and brute force, but at best, guided by such a belief, we could have a fistfight. I had to be the understanding party, after all, since I had elbowed my way into their life. And in that case, what was I doing trying to tone down my own surliness with this chattering tone of mine.

He could easily give himself over to any danger since he was not afraid of altercation. He saw no reason why he should let propriety restrain his emotions. He was not even afraid of running over someone with his car. I am always on guard, listen carefully, wait to see how things develop, and make myself believe that I might somehow blunt the sharp edge of existence; I continually talk beside the point. Go ahead and consider him surly, uncouth, or immoral, said the gaze, but his response was that despite my proposed method I was nothing but a wriggling worm.

I saw that he saw through me.

But that made me see him even better.

Now he is demonstratively silent, now he preaches shamelessly; he plays simultaneously with rejection and allurement, now he is talkative, now taciturn, because it’s important for him to remain unpredictable. He’s playing a calculated game with others as well as with himself, but his calculations are strictly confidential. I was even excited by the unpleasantness of the game, with him attacking me at my most vulnerable point. Because of my attempts at restoring predictability, he practically ran me down. As if saying to me he not only knew another world in which the rules of human contact were different in every imaginable way, which is to say unpredictable, but also knew me better than I could possibly know myself, and therefore, if I were brave enough, he’d offer to me this secret and unpredictable world.

He was afraid his wife would make thirty-eight minutes out of the eight she had promised, he said. She had a knack for it, for taking her time. She’s happy when she can make you wait for her. So now he’d leave me to myself and go upstairs, just to be sure she wouldn’t take even longer.

Every one of his words insulted me. I did not want to converse with him about his wife; I did not want to agree to it. Not in the tones he used, and not in any other tone. He was looking for a cheap way to squeal on his wife. To make her out as just a woman who always makes you wait. That made me even more ridiculously stubborn; I kept asking him insistently whether they lived in that second-floor apartment where my piano teacher had been.

And how long had they been living there.

But it was as if he hadn’t heard my questions.

Affably he said that he wouldn’t lock the car door. Should I change my mind and decide to leave — he saw I couldn’t make up my mind — would I first honk the horn briefly but nice and loud, to call him. The car shouldn’t be left unguarded for too long. And with that he let go of the car door and it slammed shut. He left me there; I was very confused.

I was cursing because I really couldn’t decide what to do. His words were like a coup de grace. He let me know that he had read everything on my face. If I left now, my defeat and humiliation would be complete. But it wasn’t going to be different if I stayed. His gait was beautiful, with long, smooth, and very decisive steps. He disappeared into the dim lobby, and then I heard his running steps echo in the stairs. Without thinking much about whether it was appropriate, I took off after him. As if I were claiming, completely unreasonably, that I was the one who was entitled to this building — but by building I did not mean the building.

And I certainly wasn’t going to guard his car.

Not even a bright summer day could chase away the terrible dimness from this lobby. I wanted to find out which floor he was going to, where he kept the woman captive. I already had seen how he did it, and with what. As if I could diminish the extent of humiliation I had inflicted on myself, I clung to this knowledge.

The moment I stepped into the lobby, stinking with cat urine and a musty exhalation from the basement, I froze. As if some vestige of bashfulness was stopping me.

I’ve no right to do this. Or perhaps the memory of an old fear.

With their claws sliding on the stone floor, grating and scratching, two cats disappeared down the steps leading to the basement, a dark and a lighter flash in the semidarkness. In the light of the single naked lightbulb, a black cat was chasing a red angora one.

I could hear that he did not stop on the second floor, but just then the number 5 bus rolled across the cambered cobblestones in front of the building and its noise blasting into the lobby overwhelmed the echoes of his receding footsteps. Over the racket, I could just make out a soft slamming of a door somewhere. It might have been on the third or even the fourth floor. Which again reminded me of the little girl from the fourth floor, Ilonka Weisz, and she in turn reminded me of a room in their apartment, facing the courtyard, its curtain drawn against the bright summer sunshine. Of my shame, which I haven’t been to tell anyone since then, and of the afternoon sunshine’s indifference to my shame. As I was looking at the familiar patterns of these walls in the pale light of the single bulb, I could be sure of one thing, that Uncle Pálóczky was no longer alive; only in his absence could everything become so filthy.

And then there was quiet, the light went out in the stairwell, but above the empty, yellow courtyard glittering in the wetness the wind was making great noises. There was another naked lightbulb in front of me; this one, above the list of tenants, was always lit; otherwise, darkness everywhere. Had old Pálóczky been alive, there would have been order and cleanliness, and a shade for the bulb. And the garbage cans wouldn’t have been standing like this next to the entrance either, uncovered and stuffed to overflowing. I felt as if they could not humiliate me because I wouldn’t fall into their trap. And as if the senselessness of this evening was not happening to me. Or, could I be in a different building, after all. As a child, I hadn’t noticed how seedy and run-down the place was. In the interim, the proportions changed, and the building seemed to resemble another one that was, who knows why, very familiar from a long way back.