Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

For a twenty-forint bill, they took care of everything very quickly. They were grateful to providence that they could be done with everything so fast and with such a fine gentleman to boot.

If he wanted a higher-quality woman, which happened rarely, a more artful and more sophisticated one, someone in theory more suitable to his social standing, then he continued along the former Queen Vilma Road, under the chestnut trees, to the Moszkva Bar, where once Hedda Hiller used to sing her bittersweet chansons. Love again, always that damned love, again and again. And if he wished to sink as deep as possible into filth, then he could just walk on the boulevard to the Ilkovics. Here he could find whores riddled with nicotine and alcohol, looking worse than ghosts; this was the pits, rock bottom. They never gave hints concerning their origin or condition; at most, they complained or cursed. He could thank these creatures sunk in the swamps of the city for his strongest erections and most elaborate orgasms. Around the railway stations, things were neither clean nor danger-free. Here he could be mugged or knocked out, and he might also run into unemployed, dissolute former colleagues who came to this part of town to warm themselves or have a helping of boiled kale without meat for one forint and forty fillérs.

Out of mercy, the servers would splash some onion sauce on the kale.

Bellardi’s son, who also frequented this place to have kale and watch the whores, had a special ability to remain unseen.

Only Gyöngyvér noticed him.

Every time they ran into each other in the spacious hallway of the Lehrs’ apartment on Teréz Boulevard, by chance, as it were, they caught each other’s eyes and found it hard to let go. While they exchanged a few noncommittal words, they openly and shamelessly gauged each other’s mental and erotic abilities. Bellardi looked deceptively like a little boy, but his gaze and scrutiny made the woman, older than he, gasp for breath and shudder. One of them would be coming, the other going; sometimes Ilona was also there, standing between them to let one of them out and the other one in. This did not keep them from continuing their shameless game.

And one could not claim that between their meetings Gyöngyvér did not daydream about the young man in the personal service of the professor. Who continued to come to the house to correct proofs of the professor’s latest articles and arrange books and papers, even weeks after the professor had gone to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road.

Gyöngyvér was taken by the suppleness and energy of the frail small body; in her imagination, she contemplated the weight of a feather and the manliness of a reed. I could blow this little boy away like blowing out a candle, like a feather, my voice would make him fly away. I’ll swallow him whole, I’ll suck him like candy, she wanted to say to herself, and she felt the boy, soaked sopping wet with her saliva, along with his innards melting all over her tongue; but his severe look pierced her brain and stopped her imaginings.

Jesus, he can see right into me.

A lunatic, a madman; I shouldn’t start with him, she said to herself, ordering herself to be cautious.

She was afraid of him, yet she longed for the fears and risks of meeting him again. She could not give up wishing this. The boy’s slender childlike body stood at a generous distance from Ágost’s physical attributes. And she began to weave plans to free herself from the monster with as little pain as possible. The monster whom she couldn’t live without. But he was too heavy for her, at least two sizes too big for her, destroying and crushing everything. She would prefer a sweet little child like this, whom she could play with and on whom everything looks sweet and nice.

The young males orbiting around Professor Lehr were in close contact with Ilona. Most of the time it was she who answered the telephone and went to the door when they rang the bell; in her simple way, she judged correctly when she should take the telephone to the professor’s bed, when to deny some calls, and whose messages to put on ice. Although she had never heard of the scientific questions his work was concerned with, she could judge what service or professional connection the famous professor needed, and whose service might further increase the professor’s prestige.

From the time his illness kept the professor in bed and his mental state kept him from appearing in public, Ilona acted as his private secretary. Everyone tried to keep away his actual secretary, a very ambitious and exceedingly nervous woman named Kati Geyer, who had come from the Communist Youth Movement and everyone knew worked for the state security services.

There was no reason to fear her, because for her the weakened professor’s case was closed. Kati Geyer was interested only in people who were in some way important to her career. She came to the apartment to help with the professor’s correspondence and to have the necessary allocations and departmental orders signed.

Ilona learned her role well, and she got along better than Lady Erna did with this impossible sniggering female, who was always shaking her dyed mane, if only because they were both from the country.

And Ilona was particularly keen on ensuring that signs of the professor’s occasional loss or lapses of memory were noticed as little as possible. She arranged visits for the days and hours during which the professor could still show something of his immense knowledge, far-reaching interests, and engaging affability. Lapses of memory have their own strict regularities, of course, but like the feeling of helpless falling in a dream, they are incomprehensible and interminable. Periods of slow improvement would occur in which medical practice could intervene to stabilize the faculty of speech for a few hours or, in favorable weather conditions, a few days before the next regression, the speech being more damaged each time it returned. Whenever she arranged a visit, Ilona had to coordinate the urgent wishes of feared and powerful men, the limited allowances the professor’s physician made, and the professor’s anticipated condition.

Lady Erna was the only one who saw through the little freckled woman’s scheme.

Once she innocently opened the door on them, or who knows, maybe she suspected something; the sight waiting for her in the professor’s book-lined room was so delicate and heartwarming that she silently closed the door.

She never found out whether Ilona had been aware of the silent intrusion.

It was in Erna’s interest not to disturb Ilona in the performance of this service.

Ilona also arranged the little Bellardi’s visits.

He came as he had used to in his student days, though for some weeks, thanks to the professor, he had been working as a researcher at a scientific institute. But he came to read foreign-language works to the professor, who tried to keep his mind off his deadly illness by keeping his mind alert. The professor’s students had to know Latin, had to be fluent above all in German but also in French, so they could read without hindrance and speak flawlessly when it was time to emphasize something; acquiring further languages he left to the personal interest of each student.

On his visits, Bellardi would receive a glass of tap water, sit in the winged easy chair by the window, and not interrupt his reading even when the professor dozed off.

He would politely go back and read the same text again when the patient awoke of his own accord.

They were just passing the Franciscans’ building, which for decades had been wrapped in scaffolding.

Lady Erna again addressed Bellardi very quietly.

Please forgive my inconsiderateness, she said, embarrassed, a remark that only deepened her clumsiness of the moment before. Now the pretense of her embarrassment was important. It was how she wanted to help herself get through this delicate situation and why, relying on the sheer sense of rhythm, she then stopped talking.