Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Even though she saw mud on the heels of his shoes in dry weather.

Occasionally, Lehr wound up at the City Park lake, where human traffic was intense under the plane trees. That is where he met the greatest inherent love of his life, to whom his memory continued to return with an unquenchable thirst. As they cautiously approached each other in the alternately stronger and dimmer lights from the gas lamps on the promenade, uncertainty gripped him. Perhaps the figure coming nearer was not a shapely woman but an effeminate man. He had to be careful about that in the darkness; it could turn dangerous. There were places in the city where the boundaries of areas favored by different sexual preferences were uncertain or simply overlapped and merged. But uncertainty did not halt the steps of either of them. Professor Lehr carefully avoided places that had lost their borders. Anyway, the figure brought with it the sound of swishing feminine clothes and was dangling something in its hands. He saw that she was barefoot, which made his heart beat in his throat, a sign at once of joy and dread; obviously, she’d taken off her high-heeled sandals on the mowed lawn. Above their heads the leaves of the plane trees rustled quietly in the silent night.

They both behaved erratically in the dark.

Farther off, other human shadows could be seen approaching and then receding. First the two of them would observe each other, retreat a little to observe again and gauge the other’s interest from a distance — that was the accepted safe thing to do at places like this — and then, estimating the degree of danger, approach each other again.

But that is not what happened.

They both stopped and the young woman unhesitatingly dropped her shoes. The shoes landed silently. On the morning of the day this happened, he had given his first talk as an appointed expert at the People’s Tribunal. That is why he behaved so bravely at night. This was the phase of the attack— la petite troupe fut attaquée par surprises , as he described it to his most trusted students — which allowed him to consider that his work as an expert in the courtroom was not a tactical betrayal. There was no doubt that the figure was a young woman wearing waterproofed silk overalls, which might for a few seconds have made her seem like a man; and it was beyond doubt that she was insane.

He had never seen such innate, inherent agitation, the strength of which his mind could not follow.

Mechanics in the American air force wear overalls like this.

During the one moment when he could not possibly know what was or might be happening to them, what her hands were or might be doing, the young woman with one decisive gesture unzipped the zipper that ran diagonally down the overalls. He heard the metallic susurration. Stark naked from her neck to her pubic hair, she whimpered with expectation. An insane nymph, a pagan priestess. Never had he a more convincing body in his hands. Never had all accompanying thoughts so completely melted away.

Only much later did he manage to recall everything that happened between them, because right afterward he was too busy trying to sober up from the experience as he staggered home.

For months he kept going back, until in the late autumn a verdict was reached in court, but he never found the insane nymph again.

He should have been pleased, because although accused number 1 and number 2 were condemned to death, he managed to yank accused number 3 from under the gallows.

He could never make up the enormous loss, which also made a sensitive dent in his theory of copulation, though he remembered her face, the texture of her skin, her eyes, and the incredibly rich pubic hair. He was compelled to remember every personal thing that he now missed, and missing them was not possible without lasting pain.

Libido is inseparable from a person, and therefore the Jew rightly holds it to be the cornerstone of individuality, he pronounced at the end to his students. To realize his aspirations for world domination, he must not only destroy the nation but also break down human society into its individual parts. As opposed to this, in inherent copulation each individual experiences the communality that characterizes us all — even the Jew, strangely enough. In inherent copulation the communal overrides the individual, as it were.

He did not understand why he could not find the insane young priestess anymore.

It did not matter that he found others.

Lady Erna discovered the smeared green of grass on the elbows of his jackets and the knees of his pants. She also noticed sticky filth clinging to his fine wool overcoats and to the velour or rabbit fur of his hats.

In the years after the war, the city at night was full of great dangers.

She always found some kind of grayish fuzz that reminded her of cobwebs. She did not understand this, because in her great jealousy she thought about the things she and her husband did together, which weren’t to be sneezed at, and embellished and colored them a bit in her imagination, to make it hurt. Let it hurt, and may her jealousy perish in the pain. But she could never have imagined that the famous professor, object of both general esteem and public obloquy, was driven by a passion of an entirely different nature, which lured him to danger, to abandoned promenades and strange attics, which pulled him into dark doorways where it would happen amid filled garbage cans, while he trembled with the insane urgency and risk, and that this was the only way it could happen, in a state of impersonal excitement brought on by a childlike fear of punishment and a sinful desire for union.

Not to mention wafts of smells and odors that one simply could not have in a well-cared-for apartment.

She dismissed the scandalous odors by thinking she’d gone mad, but she couldn’t go mad. And she couldn’t go around smelling her husband’s underclothes. But she did, and frequently too, for the smells always caught her unprepared. And then she would acknowledge with considerable relief that her husband had stepped in dog shit or human shit.

It could not be that his own shit was smeared on his underpants.

It’s not possible, István, that you went in your pants.

That would surprise me too.

There was no scientific career that could exist without secret, rather dubious human relationships; also, generally speaking, there was no such science.

Still, with her imagination bordering on hysteria, Erna sometimes so upset herself that she would have preferred screaming to having knowledge and understanding.

I can’t bear it.

The things I keep imagining.

But what if I can’t endure this very hour.

I can’t endure an entire life like this. What hell hasn’t this accursed man thrown me into.

She was unable not to love him and want him; the thought made her loins ache. She had piercing pains in her ovaries and she could not understand her longing after so many years. Soon I’ll be an old lady, so why is my body doing this to me. I’d rather perish. Why are you punishing me like this, Almighty God, why are you humiliating me. Even though she did not believe in any divinity; humbug, she could not believe in anything or anybody. We are born, we suffer, and then we perish. C’est tout . Therefore, all her life she thought that a body, her own, had to be given its satisfaction occasionally, and that should take care of this whole frivolous business.

She saw it on her son, she saw it on the two good-for-nothing friends of her son, what her husband had been doing behind her back, and what these good-looking filthy men were doing to poor women. There is not one among them, not one, she could call a human being; there are no exceptions, they are all animals. It was the exceptions that repelled her most because they were the loudest — the murderers, the possessed, the Arrow Cross men, the priests, the psychologists, and the party chiefs.