Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Luckily they were stubborn and determined enough to hold their peace, though each felt strongly the silent wrath and hatred of the other.

And when he finally discharged the two women in front of the hospital and they, tugging on their gloves and holding their hats against the wind, slowly made their way up the steps, which remained blindingly white even under the overcast sky, Bellardi could hardly comprehend that in his unfolding life this might have been the happiness which until now had not proved worthy of even being mentioned.

A completely different, strange life that might have been his if it had found its substance in him, not only resistance and toleration. His happiness could not escape him, though it did not possess him; until this very moment, he had not even acknowledged that it was precisely with this pain and this lack that happiness did not escape him. There was no continuation, and the beginning had vanished in obscurity. Once, a long time ago, his alien life with all its futility and unexpected pleasure had snatched him up from the bottom of unhappiness to take him to itself, body and soul, as an empty object, into its iron fist, and then, just as unexpectedly it had dropped him and left nothing behind except the deadly bleakness of boredom and fatigue, war, humiliations, jail, and privations.

He had to get across it.

Now it was wringing his heart.

He did not know why he should have to get across it or whether that bleakness would even have a far side.

At any rate, he had no strength left to turn the key in the ignition.

And there was the realization that with Lojzi Madzar and Elisa he had indeed tasted and enjoyed the happiness of being privileged, however their story ended or had not even started.

That is the sum of what was; everything else would begin only now.

Leaning across the rim of his consciousness, he managed to comprehend the strangeness of his condition; I wouldn’t have this much strength left, I shouldn’t have even this much strength, but actually, I’m not surprised.

I was still young then, a young man. I could swim across the Danube at Mohács with my young friend, a number of times too, and now I can’t turn the damn key in the ignition.

Back then I also knew I was swimming across my death, which I enjoyed immensely. What I enjoyed was that despite all my misfortunes my muscles and nerves functioned flawlessly in face of the elements.

In the hospital lobby, decorated with tropical plants, palm trees, and giant ficuses, inspired by the fascist spirit of wondrous sterilization and furnished in the style of imperial modernity, whose coffered ceiling was supported by smooth marble columns, and in which at this hour not a soul was to be found, the porter showed Gyöngyvér where the telephone booth was.

This hospital was perhaps the last edifice left in the city that had once dreamed of a Hungarian empire, before everything collapsed.

Follow me as soon as you can, Lady Erna motioned to her from the elevator that was to take her up to the psychiatric ward on the top floor where the professor was being treated for brain softening.*

Looking out of the spacious glass phone booth while she waited, dialed, and then talked, Gyöngyvér noticed that the pike-gray Pobeda was still parked in front of the hospital.

She spoke to the secretary; none of the boys was in, but she managed to arouse the secretary’s curiosity as well as her willingness to help since they were talking about a matter of life and death, and Ágost Lippay’s father literally had only a few hours left to live. She saw the pike-gray Pobeda make a sharp turn in front of the building, its wheels screeching; it barely missed slamming against the sidewalk across the street. Gyöngyvér almost cried out. And then the cab pulled into the hospital parking lot but stopped as if there were no marked parking spaces or as if the engine had been suddenly throttled.

They hadn’t told him to wait; it was very suspicious, what this Bellardi was doing in the parking lot.

She could not give him her full attention because the secretary on the phone was promising that she’d try to track down the boys right away.

And as if she were saying.

Where.

What are you saying.

Track down the boys where, Gyöngyvér shouted, because there was much noise around her now.

She thinks all three of them are there, the secretary said, involuntarily raising her voice at the other end of the line. They can’t be anywhere else, she shouted. No doubt about it, today they seem to be staying a little longer than usual.

The poor things, sometimes they work at night too.

A bus passed by on Kútvölgyi Street, going uphill, its engine loud, and Gyöngyvér could not hear where the secretary thought Ágost and the boys might now be. She was relieved that he was not with another woman who might take him away from her, so she wouldn’t have to break with him tonight.

You can count on me, shouted the otherwise lazily indifferent woman, I’ll do it right away.

But where are they, for God’s sake, Gyöngyvér insisted, what did you say, I didn’t get it.

That’s the part I didn’t get.

I’ll get to them, Gyöngyvér, leave it to me, don’t worry, I will.

You must have other things to do now.

You don’t have to worry about this.

But despite all her promises, the secretary did not manage to find them. Gyöngyvér put down the receiver, calmed herself, and, with a last glimpse at the cab, headed for the elevator.

As if being able to drive his cab into the lot had been a great accomplishment. Bellardi took off his worn leather cap and did not understand why he was perspiring. In the oppressive dimness he leaned on the steering wheel for a while to rest a little. He was ashamed that one of the wheels had hit the sidewalk, as if his greatest concern now were damage done to the cab, property of the state-owned taxi service. However, not only his forehead was covered with perspiration. As soon as his head touched the steering wheel, he felt that his bare neck was soaking wet, which made him feel cold.

But why am I cold if I’m so hot, which I can’t feel.

I don’t feel anything, I’m becoming numb.

This is the reason that in the darkness descending about his shoulders he had to recall the particular summer night that most likely had accepted his life and absorbed it. How curious, how his shoulders throbbed and how weighty the past proved to be.

When his entire naked body trembled.

As if, at the sight of the unknown future, he were trembling for life, fearful of what was ahead because of his abandoned life. The life he would have gladly given, all his life, to Elisa, and had feared — he now at last realized — giving to Madzar. He saw how helplessly Madzar’s naked body was trembling only an arm’s length away; Madzar could not control his either. And perhaps it had been in his power to stop or relieve the trembling.

But his armpits and chest became drenched under the ice-cold shirt, his loins and, oddly, the crook of his knees too; he could feel sweat dripping down his calves.

The secretary could not reach the boys because at the end of the glass-covered corridor of the Lukács Baths, nobody bothered with the telephone ringing in the cabin attendant’s booth. It rang insistently and long and then it ceased for a short while only to begin anew a little farther away in the public phone booth.

The bench, on which a little while ago and under the indignant gaze of the new attendant the three friends had been lying in one another’s laps and arms, was now empty; those attractive men, with their choice rudeness and equally choice gentleness, had been trying to keep Ágost from another attack of despondency. The realization had never reached Gyöngyvér’s awareness that the man she loved, whom she would have to leave during the approaching evening, was a seriously afflicted and endangered melancholic. The thought would have paralyzed her or would have ruined her amorous enthusiasm, which she considered a gift more precious than anything else in the world.