Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

No, I said, it can’t be, she must be mixing him up with somebody else, because my older cousin has never in his life set foot in a store. Unless he was with my aunt.

She laughed and said I was wrong about that too, because he does come to the shop on Wednesdays and Fridays, always between four and five, and he always buys the most expensive dessert.

Dessert, I said. You mean to tell me my cousin buys dessert, I said. He had never bought a box of matches, let alone dessert.

But there must be something to this story.

And I kept staring steadfastly through the swaying, yellowish sphere of the lights from the streetlamps as if I had not the slightest wish to see this unknown woman’s face and was willing to hear her voice only from a distance. This lively, little-girlish, distant voice I didn’t know what to do with. She was talking to me from another world, and the image that Ágost bought desserts at that shop so he could court her was simply unbearable.

There was no woman who would want to avoid his gaze.

And the street was now commanding my gaze. As if I were slightly forgetting what we had been talking about, I too was becoming a bit lost. Or I longed to be lost, I don’t know. I began to long to be out of the car, to lean into the wind and to go home to Stefánia. To return to the country that no longer existed for me. To see at the far end of the garden the six high arched windows all lit up and, until Róza came to open the gate, to lean my forehead against the cool, lance-shaped pickets of the fence.

She asked what I was thinking about, or looking at so hard, or why did I become so quiet.

I said I was remembering something from my childhood.

I should tell it to her.

That’s it, I said, laughing, and went on staring out into nothing in the tunnel of the lights on Dembinszky Street. That’s exactly the problem, I don’t know what I should tell her about, because suddenly so many things were on my mind at once.

I had to look back at her; I asked whether she came from the country.

Wherever did I get that idea.

I didn’t get it from anywhere. I’m just asking.

But she is asking why does that interest me.

Because if she was from the country, then maybe I couldn’t explain anything to her. This is an idée fixe of mine that I had even as a child: that there was a border on Aréna Road and life on the far side of it was completely different from our life on Stefánia Boulevard. I asked her if she wanted me to show it to her. But suddenly I remembered that we hadn’t brought down those drink bottles from the third floor.

It was clear he was at the right place, and it was equally clear that he was in the grip of a peculiar feeling.

Perhaps happiness in love is what makes such a wonderful promise in the air made fragrant by vegetation.

It would have been foolish to be taken in by such a spiritual promise, but it would have been no less foolish to deny himself the exceptional and groundless feeling of lightness.

Dr. Kienast saw a solitary, one-story house in the forest, standing in the middle of a long, rather narrow clearing, all its windows lit up, and he had to goad himself to look so he could see, instead of being preoccupied with what he was thinking and feeling. It was as if he had strayed back into the same winter twilight. But where in the devil else could he be walking if not at the place where he happened to be.

Everything might have occurred once before.

In light moments or frightening ones when, who knows why, one is gripped by irresponsibility and suffused with happiness, one can easily have the impression that one knows the world by heart. And it wasn’t the first time he had experienced this particular hallucination. A little farther on in the clearing, he saw a smartly built wood-framed shed and, facing it, a handsome little structure whose use he could not guess. This was the fruit-drying shed in which, in Döhring’s dream, Isolde had found the hidden gold, and perhaps the oldest of the three buildings.

The beams and wide trusses of the wood-framed main building must have been repainted recently.

Kienast was laughing at himself a little; one tends, when nudged by an illusory feeling, to make daring discoveries regarding the inner nature or structure of the world that only a moment later may prove useless. In the silence of the foggy woods the noise of fine dripping could be heard. The air was still. And he could be truly content with what had happened in the previous two days. He had escaped, run ahead of himself, and everything was coming together very nicely. He reveled in the joy of discovery, though nothing was exactly new for him. As if he were someone arriving on this miserable muddy globe not for the first time and in all probability not the last either. It’s love again, that damned love, he sang the old song to himself.

Always and again, love, he had sung to himself — and whistled the tune too, to escape the stupid lyrics while traipsing along, going about his dark little criminal cases among unsuspecting people in the city, which was preparing for the holiday and already decorated with electric garlands.

And now he was standing before the unknown house, still whistling the same song, always the same song, and he will sing the same song tomorrow too. Although most of the things he was thinking about now he had not thought about before. Words like providence and muddy globe usually escaped his attention or failed to settle permanently in his consciousness. He had no penchant for rapture, no inclination toward mysticism, he found esotericism laughable, Nazi drivel, and he felt no special joy in secret correlations or in having exceptional thoughts. Neither his uplifting sentiments nor the volatile upheaval in his love life could make him smile happily. One really must not let signs of such things show. Still, he well remembered that just before his trip, when discussing the first test results in the lab and after he had handed over a few very promising pieces of new material to the lab technician, he had felt like heartily slapping the back of that gaunt, bespectacled man.

Listen, pal, let me tell you what happened last night. Felt like doing it especially because something like that had obviously never happened to the other man. But in the end he didn’t; the man was not his pal. Even so, the lab technician gave him a certain look. What had got into him anyway; he knew it wasn’t quite proper to entrust the technician with the examination of materials that he, the detective, could not have obtained by legitimate means.

When the first sketch of an investigation quickly comes together with almost no missing pieces, one must be especially careful. In the universe a strict logical net holds up not only great truths but also great errors, so it may often happen that one believes one is on the trail of a great truth when in fact one has only been taken in by a rather weak idea of one’s own.

He did not continue under the neatly pruned fruit trees — mainly apple and pear trees, and plum trees farther off — and he did not step out onto the grass of the clearing.

What petty things I investigate, what shitty little things I let myself brood on, and I make myself a laughingstock even with the little stuff; as if he needed bigger and bloodier cases, and much less diligence, for his well-being. He destroys everything with his ambition, as if he were doing the opposite in his life from what common sense required. Which meant that he stood on no firmer moral ground than criminals did.

From behind the shed door he heard the dull thumps of wood being chopped, the banging and the splitting.

A few moments earlier he had stopped his overheated car where on the map the paved road ended. He had hardly eaten or drunk all day, hence the feeling reminiscent of dizziness and a surprise about the twilight, which perhaps wasn’t real. Or he was driving not in today’s twilight but yesterday’s. To stuff something quickly into his belly, he had shouted to the sausage man through his lowered window. The man wasn’t surprised; for almost ten years he had been stationed at the edge of the city in his tin hut smelling of burned oil; he was accustomed to madmen locked in their cars; he made his living from them.