Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

He was nearly choking with tears.

Which surprised Karakas. It was as if he had caught himself out.

At this moment, tiny cracks opened up on their faces among their various pretenses. They looked into the depths of their mutual source of joy. Another drop dripped from the dark, cold medieval cupola.

I betrayed him, Rott rejoiced to himself. And he rejoiced exuberantly, as if this had happened for the first time, as if in the past he had not worked a long time as a mole for the British secret service.

But that was an institution and this was a bosom buddy.

He had to utter the magic word to himself, because otherwise he could not have comprehended that betrayal becomes not a moral weight but a physical relief. And he can thank this physically rather repulsive male person for it, for lifting the oppressive burden of procrastination off his shoulders. There was no way back, he too no longer had any secrets; they had let him know that they knew everything about him that had been or could be known, he had no place to hide.

Like a crevice in a rock that remains open to the destructive light.

Karakas raised his eyebrows almost involuntarily, a sign of his wonder and amazement, and, to keep Rott from seeing this, made the most telling possible move: he ducked his head again in the hot water.

Oh, he did not wish to conceal himself; he wanted to spare Rott from his own shame.

At the moment of betrayal Rott was finding pleasure in himself, however, exactly as he had during his darkest inner struggles and amorous confusions, from which he had fled to secret drinking and solitary binges. Once again he broke free of terrible fears and trembling and of lovely childish delusions. In his childhood they had warned him that betraying someone was to throw oneself into a kind of moral abyss, caught in morality’s whirlpool, from which there was no way back. And once again it was proved that this was not so. I am the abyss; I am the whirlpool. He could be glad of this, because it was something he had known for a long time. A living person had become free of the burden of a friend once lovingly bound to him. Whom until then he had tied to himself, to whom else, and whom now he nevertheless set free, hoping for the liberation of them both. He could be thankful to providence. Let him go. The feeling, the knowledge offered a stronger pleasure than lovemaking because, finally, another human life was no longer tied to human organs, skin, smells, or gestures, and had no perishable juices.

He had to feel himself light, airy.

Now anything could happen.

He had nothing to do with him, and this suddenly rolled back and liquidated their common past. As if he no longer had any need for breathing, for anything, for eating, shitting, anything that earthly existence demands of a human being.

I killed him; and the sober phrase, the clear accounting, felt especially good because it was as if he were the sole possessor of this knowledge, even if meant that he had killed part of himself as well.

When after a brief yet substantial moment Karakas surfaced again, he said that Lippay’s mission of course had a rock-hard condition.

He laughed hideously as he said this.

He has to get married within a week so that he can travel in the company of his little wife.

As two tourists.

They will hardly need luggage.

It will be done. André nodded to this coarse man while keeping his expression, excited by joy, dutifully somber.

He was not happy to see the powerful man go so far.

But you, comrade Rott, will also have to create more orderly conditions in your private life.

And he sounded the same hideous laugh. Rott joined him, laughing at his own nonexistent private life, which the bathing hall echoed several times.

Even though Karakas would have preferred to sob and shout.

By now, he could see nothing on Rott’s face. Which did not fool him in the least. No stranger to betrayal, he knew from his own experience that Rott’s jubilation and fear were increasing as a spiral of self-gratification and self-admiration carried him away, with a phase delay.

Rott understood this to mean, however, that there would be appropriate blood money; he would get his promotion and that would be it. He’d have to get married and start behaving like a conscientious clerk, and to all appearances that is how things should be.

So that this perverted little asshole, this lousy turd with his pencil-thin prick, can have his revenge.

As if Rott understood that Karakas grasped all his ulterior motives.

And to snuff out the elemental joy of becoming pals and also to show who was boss, Karakas, with true manly affability, gripped Rott’s thigh under the water.

Comrade Rott will forgive me, I’ve had a tough day, I must excuse myself.

Contemptuously he let go of the strange thigh, motioned that he would take a dip in the cold-water pool, and their audience ended.

And Rott was free to go on his way unhindered, with his breathing regained in fear and trembling. He regretted that he would no longer find his friends behind the little green door. He felt especially sorry about the anticipated loss for Hansi. And he could not imagine how life would be reorganized between the two of them once the third member of their group disappeared for good. He was afraid that the two of them might not be able to bear the solitude, which he could well endure on his own. Karakas did not lie, he very rarely did, and he was indeed having a difficult day. He needed the cold-water pool, and he repeatedly immersed himself in it. The movements pleasantly numbed the skin covering his warmed-up muscles. Above the pool they were waiting for him with his bathrobe and various towels. He dried his head as he walked. The masseur stayed close behind him and continued to massage him with the rich material of the robe, kneading his back and shoulders while buzzing in his ear that comrade Karakas should really stay for a few more minutes today, take time out to see to his health because he could feel how knotty his muscles were through the robe.

They opened the cabin door for him and handed him his clothes item by item. A few minutes later, curled up on the deep seat of the large Russian limousine, the Zim, they sped him back across the Margit Bridge to the prime minister’s office. When they reached the ramp to the island, where the arc of the bridge rises to its highest point, he looked among the flat roofs of Újlipótváros for the roof terrace of Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment. Behind the high solid parapet, he quickly found the pale little light of the salon’s always-open glass screen. In time, on their way out, the policemen most likely had to close the door they had found open.

The reason he loved Mária Szapáry was not because in November 1944 she had saved his life.

It probably happened the other way around.

The woman must have hidden him in the big wall closet because she could not otherwise reciprocate his silent and persistent love for her. By then other people were hiding there too: Jupi, who had given him only his name used in the movement, a field officer from a very good family, and a Jewish engineer from the neighborhood. Later, Mária Szapáry spoke to her women friends about Karakas as she would about a loyal canine, very kindly. Which he also knew, because with her customary noble simplicity she called him dog straight to his face. Listen to me, dog, I want to come up to your office, when will you have time for me, you could do me a number of favors. I’ll go see dog about it, he’ll take care of it, he’ll smooth things over. I’ll talk to dog about it, I won’t go to see him, but sooner or later at some upcoming reception. Even if she had any interest in men left in her, what could she have done with such a shop assistant with his slicked-down hair.