Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

A surprise.

Most likely.

And now we’re going to play twenty questions.

No, I don’t think so.

Because she wasn’t in the mood to play dumb games. She sees that I like to take life easy. I could do anything I want with my own life, but I’d have to do it without her, not with her.

I said it would be better if we stopped talking for a while because I was afraid we were only hurting each other for no good reason.

Then at last we once again agree on something, she said.

What I don’t understand, I said, is why she has to quarrel with everyone in this kind of tone.

First, she isn’t quarreling. Second, what do I mean everyone.

I don’t mean to interfere with her life, but I do have ears and eyes, I can hear and see that she talks to her husband the same way, and she doesn’t speak differently to the men in the shop either.

How touching it would be if I was going to protect her husband or the men in the shop from her.

I said I was protecting myself, not your husband, I asked whether she could hear her own voice. And how does she know, how could she know, the suppressed shout burst out of me, how I like to take life, easy or otherwise. I can tell you, I am not taking life in any way. And how would she know what kind of life I used to have or what kind I’m having now.

She didn’t know, she answered quietly, almost frightened. But I could no longer restrain my anger.

And why do you insist he’s your husband when he isn’t. Why this lie, why this game of hide-and-seek. In the list of tenants in the lobby and on their apartment door, I saw her maiden name. Anyway, if she had a husband or if he were her husband, she wouldn’t behave like this with me. Couldn’t she see how common she was. She wants to use me to make that miserable man jealous when he’s about to explode with jealousy as it is.

No, that’s not so at all, she said patiently.

I wasn’t listening, I just kept saying what I wanted to say, that she’d lied, telling me he was her husband, so I wouldn’t have high hopes.

No, that’s not so, she kept repeating more and more quietly. One cannot tell everything all at once, it’s impossible, she said, fiddling absentmindedly with something on the dark dashboard.

But it would be much better to tell somebody something instead of constantly evading things or, excuse me for using such strong words, lying.

I am making a mistake, I am wrong. It’s not like that, not like that at all, I am wrong.

Well, how and about what, that’s what I’d like to know, what am I wrong about. And why is it impossible to tell everything at once. If she wanted to, I would tell her everything, all at once. Or twice.

I shouldn’t shout and mainly I shouldn’t mock her.

But I am shouting, why shouldn’t I be shouting in my own voice.

She leaned on the steering wheel with both arms and ran her fingers over the dark dashboard. I didn’t dare look at her straight on, and she wasn’t looking at me. Or maybe she had already forgotten I was there. That wouldn’t surprise me, because I myself had no idea where we were or what was happening.

What one managed to say aloud gained enormous weight, but the things one could not possibly utter became even weightier and more threatening. I felt that now I could tell her, all at once and in a single sentence, my entire life and everything I had ever thought or was thinking now. There was this terrible, insurmountable entirety. There was no place where one could begin and no proper weight for it.

Still, somehow, each of us should have entrusted it to the other. Everything that could not be told.

She moaned that I was torturing her.

It was as though there existed one gigantic emotion and a tiny piece of it had chipped or broken off and I shouted that I wasn’t torturing her, with what would I be torturing her.

At the same time, my conscience was gnawing at me. I wanted to understand her, see her clearly; I was shouting and throwing accusations around because I didn’t have the strength to fight my way out of my miserable lie. What’s more, it felt good that I couldn’t, and instead I kept on with my insistent, domineering huffing and puffing, even though I was deeply ashamed of it all.

Why is it a crime, I shouted, that I want to see things clearly.

Oh, come on, those are nothing but big words, she responded morosely. Who’s talking about crimes here, and what do you mean clearly. She doesn’t know words like that. Anyway, how dare I use such words. She can see very well that what I want to do is get away with something. I want to avoid her. I had taken a deep breath and run after her, but what I really thought was that it would be better if she didn’t exist, that’s what I thought. And why would I think she can’t see through all my little tricks.

Why would she think I don’t see them myself.

That’s why she’d said before that I’d like to take life easy. That’s all she had in mind. I think that one can solve everything with words. And for my information she did not mean to hurt me. She really didn’t know much about my life, though she had heard a thing or two.

Then you could at least tell me how you know my name.

From Terike.

What Terike, I asked, surprised, I don’t know any Terike. And I noticed that we were staring at each other again.

And that again I saw she was phenomenal.

And that I had never seen anything so beautiful.

Terike, her boss.

And her eyes were roaming over my face, she was letting her gaze glide all over it without stopping anywhere.

And how could her boss know my life’s story when I don’t know her.

How could she know, well, from your own dear aunt, that’s how.

This I hadn’t expected, though I could have, because Nínó, always looking for her little girl, asked every woman she met who had a number on her arm.

Her face became a strange object in the dim light. A single patch of yellowish light fell on her nose and lips. Her innocent statement opened up a secret world in which people discussed one another’s lives behind one another’s backs. For her, this world was probably neither secret nor strange nor repulsive but familiar and natural. She appeared little-girlish or awkward in this world, and this must have been one of her transformations, which I had not understood until then. She could change her age even between two sentences. Now she was older than I, now she was like a child. I couldn’t easily imagine a world in which my aunt would talk about me to a stranger while another stranger eavesdropped. Although I knew that such a world existed, just as I knew that in the real world every sentence was an assassination and betrayal; but in the world that existed only for me, in no circumstance could a thing like that possibly occur. And with the help of these feelings, or thoughts, within a fraction of a second I had finally understood something about this woman, yet somehow I still didn’t know what it was I had understood.

I asked when and in what way my aunt had talked about me, how had I gotten into the conversation, and from where could her boss have known my aunt. But I didn’t wait for an answer; as though I dreaded her answer I turned away and stared out at the street.

The street was more familiar than her face was.

No, she did not think the two women knew each other from someplace. They like to talk to each other because they are about the same age. Her boss had a child very late in life. Sometimes they talk about this, sometimes about other things, about this and that, anything.

And I didn’t even know, I said, that my aunt frequented your shop.

Not only my aunt, she said in her lively, enthusiastic, little-girlish voice, but my older cousin too.

Meanwhile I was looking at the street, because for some reason I had to.