Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

In the end he shat in his pants for us, said one of the older prisoners, though he remained alone with his laughter.

In an instant, the smell rose to their nostrils.

All the more reason for them quickly to abandon the pinioned, stinky human remains.

They hurried, did not even close the door behind them. They immediately found hunting outfits, ammunition, work clothes, warm socks, boots, striped and checkered flannel shirts. Not everything was freshly laundered, and so along with the clothes they put on the cooled-off scent of strange German male bodies.

They would have liked to move on before darkness.

They found nothing of value. As to money, only five imperial marks in a wine-red purse in a windbreaker pocket, even though they looked everywhere, turned everything over, while they kept eating and searching, eating and searching.

It’s a lot of hooey, the whole text, every bit of it, said the man standing stark naked in the door of his cabin.

He had been leisurely drying himself for minutes.

Now he would wipe his neck, now his ears, while turning his head to the rhythm of the words, and often he would reach between his legs with the thick towel.

It’s of no interest at all, I don’t understand why you bother with it, came the second man’s irritable reply.

Who’s interested in a text like that today, added the third man quietly.

I see that, of course I do, how wouldn’t I, but it’s impossible not to notice what they’re doing, continued the first speaker, who might have been the most restless of the three. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on these comrades.

He gently and quickly wiped off his testicles, then rubbed his luxuriant pubic hair, maybe a bit too vigorously, and when he was done with that, he returned to his shoulders and neck even though there was nothing left to dry there.

Oh, André, my dear, the second one started again, a large, blue-eyed man with pale gray hair, who was irritated not so much by the affected lecturing tone as by the nature of the prevarication. It doesn’t interest anyone, believe me, not anyone. Not even you.

You mean you know better than I do what interests me, called out the naked man from the cabin; his body was thin as a blade.

A long silence followed.

You’ll be surprised, but it happens that I really do, growled the gray-haired one benevolently.

He spoke with a slight foreign accent, as did the man continuously drying himself — who sounded sort of English and stammered nervously like a little boy — but the voice of the gray-haired man was more German, powerful and reliably manly. According to his birth certificate, he bore the high-sounding name of a well-established family from Erzgebirge, without the title of baron, and not only because in Erzgebirge titles and ranks had been done away with, but because he had been born out of wedlock. Hans von Thum zu Wolkenstein would have been his honorific, and this became the object of much jesting, especially since, according to his official documents, he had the simplest possible Hungarian name, János Kovách. They called him Hansi, or Hansi Wolkenstein, a name that had a good dose of childlike kindness, about the same amount of loud contempt for Germans, and a portion of truth, since in his childhood the name on his documents had been simply Hans von Wolkenstein. His mother, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, had tried to soothe the indignation of the Thum family by leaving Thum off the birth certificate.

Since the Middle Ages the Wolkenstein family had lived mostly on its name; they had not in fact been in possession of their magnificent fortified castle since the sixteenth century.

His close-cropped hair was indeed, for his age, surprisingly grayish white, his eyes offensively blue. Opposite his friend’s cabin, wrapped in his light blue bathrobe, his large white terry-cloth towel wound around his neck, he was stretched out to his full length on a wide bench, leaning his head against the hairless thigh of the third man.

He looked like a large wild animal, a kind of lazy cat, and occasionally he could not hold back caustic remarks. His friends thought him cynical because of his biting remarks, and perhaps he was.

Or he may have chosen this allegedly manly pose, sometime in the past, as a permanent defense.

The intimacy with which he rested his head on the third man’s hairless thigh obviously meant more than a chance physical contact.

This third man, with his friend’s prematurely graying head on his thigh, sat at the very end of the whitewashed bench, a bit squashed against the backrest, and was looking impassively out the window giving on to the pool, which meant he had to twist his entire upper body uncomfortably. He had no bathrobe on, and one could see from his skin that he was a bit chilly. Maybe he should have put something on, but that would have meant tearing himself away from this minor bodily contact.

Every mid-September, here in the Lukács Baths, large glass panels were put back between the columns supporting the upper floors, and in May they would be taken out again. In the open courtyards, the two swimming pools were surrounded by rows of wooden cabins on several floors, just as arcaded corridors surround a cloister courtyard. In summer it seemed that what one saw and heard was a cloister of bees: bathers swarming in great clusters around the sunlit multitiered beehives. As the nights grew cooler, the stairs leading to the cabins on the upper floors were closed off; in winter, snow settled on the corridor railings. But the sight was no less fascinating now. From the springs of Saint Luke, medicinal waters of various temperatures keep bubbling up, the warmest close to sixty-five degrees centigrade, the coldest seventeen degrees on the average, and the bath attendants mix them so that the water flowing into the so-called men’s pool is no more than twenty-one degrees. Those unable to swim can splash around in the warmer water of the women’s pool. But the moment the outside temperature drops, the open pools begin to fog up, steam, nearly smoke; on overcast winter days, such a thick fog settles on the enclosed space that swimmers are always apologizing for bumping into each other.

The vapors were fairly strong now too; a gusting wind picked up small clouds of steam and carried them along, or simply whisked the vapor off the surface of the water, which at once became blistery and ruffled. While the storm raged like this over the pool, the long hands of the clock on the opposite wall of the yard were making their indifferent rounds. But one could see the passing seconds only until another gust slapped the next burst of a shower against the clock’s convex glass cover; then the clock grew hazy for a while.

It was getting to be half past nine in the morning.

This third man was interested neither in the exact time nor in the spectacular display of the spring storm, and even less interested in what his friends were going on about. He made no effort to be polite, did not pretend to be interested. With other people, he was usually rather indifferent or at least very reserved, but this time he took strong offense, which he did not bother to hide; this may have been one explanation for why he chose to turn away from them, however uncomfortable it made him. The previous evening, when they had had supper at the Fészek Club, they had taken him aside and told him that today, as soon as the pools opened, Viola would be there with her husband; he should be at the Lukács by six.

He must catch her, they explained, before she went in the water or, they suggested, when her old husband disappeared in the showers.

He had overslept, had had to run, but he’d gotten there in time.

It wasn’t that his friends had played a trick on him — it wouldn’t have been the first time, and he understood why they would — but in this instance he could not forgive them. Something, he could not exactly tell just what, had become too much for him. They simply wanted to lure him away from the Sports Baths so that he’d be with them and not alone, and mainly not with that silly goose he had been living with for a while. Viola did not come at six, or later, only the elderly dentist arrived; Viola was nowhere to be seen, which did not put him in a bad humor but, on the contrary, relieved him. And that is how he surrendered to hopelessness, which had been waiting for him with open arms. All three agreed that Viola, although a little loud, was an entrancing woman. His friend swore up and down that she had promised to come, they weren’t lying, he must believe them, but of course she was unpredictable. And he despised this place where every morning the crème de la crème of Budapest came together. He did not believe them. Viola was anything but an entrancing woman.