Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Maybe I should be a little apologetic, the apple wine is our own and frankly not of very high quality, he said with the same unpleasant laugh as before, but there’s not a single additive in it, I can assure you of that. Which by the way gives everyone headaches.

I have the feeling I’m dizzy from dehydration, so I’d be glad to have some apple wine or water, anything.

That’s the kind of thing people around here drink.

Since I left Berlin I’ve had nothing to drink.

He lied now to make the image he had given of his thirst sound spectacular. He wanted to draw the other man’s attention to himself, but this quickly became a fiasco.

Drink apple wine, make children, grow asparagus, and dry plums, that’s what people do in this region. The asparagus, which they also eat, they poison carefully and with due forethought.

Forgive me for burdening you with my request, said Kienast, who was not quite certain whether the young man was listening to him.

Mothers’ milk is poisoned with heavy metals. Other people’s apple wine is either stronger than ours, in which case they’ve mixed in a separate cancer-causing apple aroma, or weaker than ours, in which case it keeps its natural aroma, fortunately. These people’s obsession is that they must constantly choose between two bad things, and don’t forget these are my relatives, this is my extended family.

You’re probably expecting guests, perhaps your sister, and here I am bothering you with a weak spell.

Wholesale or retail, everyone deals in asparagus here — growing it, storing it, or selling it. My parents — which is to say our father and stepmother, because this woman is not our real mother, I’m telling you this so you understand everything — grow asparagus.

Perhaps I’m not being too forward, after all, by asking for a glass of water.

Or maybe I’ve already mentioned this.

No, you haven’t. I don’t remember your mentioning it.

I’m saying it because it doesn’t go in any other way except with effective plant-protective sprays. Don’t ever eat asparagus.

It’s very awkward if I’ve disturbed you with my visit.

Who said you’ve disturbed me in anything. I’m not doing anything, how could you have disturbed me.

I didn’t know that asparagus was so dangerous.

They’ve got this weak apple wine, they don’t really have anything else. They have money, though, but not under their pillows, they keep it under their skin. If you take just two steps over to Holland, you’ll see how much more modestly people live there. Yet we were the people who lost the last war. In the spring the trees get a little rinsing spray, nothing more.

Both of them stared wearily into the fire when they reached the end of what they had to say.

The detective had no response to Döhring’s last remark, the young man’s rigid isolation and deaf attitude having truly nonplussed him. Whether from the reflection of the flames or his sudden loquaciousness, his face seemed to be all heated up. The sight of his sick face and sick body strengthened Kienast’s aversion, touched with disgust; it gained shape. Which he himself could not accept. Their profession often exposes detectives to experiences they would prefer not to see or live through. He saw the young man in an agitated state that theoretically he should not have seen, even though it was the young man who had called him and even though he now had no way of avoiding the effect the young man’s agitation had on him. Which meant that this young man had another face, one that he himself may not have known, and if the detective wanted to extract his secrets he had to witness the bodily manifestations that went with that other face.

The voice the police had recorded on magnetic tape, with its diffuse, dark tone and deep vibrations, indicated something of the young man’s secret life.

Kienast could not tell whether, given the agitated face and dark tone of voice, the young man was attractive or insane, whether he was attracted to his insanity or whether all these impressions in fact repelled him.

Anyone poking around in the drawers of a schizophrenic’s brain is likely to feel close to the person’s whims and perverse ideas. At any rate Kienast’s peculiar feeling, which he’d been struggling with independently of the young man, was growing stronger.

Everything in the world that surrounds one and might influence one is, in reality, only a copy, and everything on earth is condemned to permanent repetition. Once, ten times, a hundred times, infinite times, even the feeling of love is but a copy of an earlier feeling. The act of love is surely more important for everyone than the object of love, more important than the other person is, though without an object of love one cannot perform the act of love. Perhaps his exertion had made him overly sensitive and he had grown so weak because of his barely two-day-old focus on love, or perhaps he had become both weaker and more sensitive because what really interested him, certainly more than what has been happening here, was the person he’d left behind. Something was definitely not right. The phenomenon of love is probably preceded by the idea of love, but that truth greatly irritates and humiliates the person in love, no matter how hard Socrates tried to convince Alcibiades of the opposite.

It would be pointless trying to understand something, get to the bottom of something, find something tangible in the other human being, or any proof of anything, or a handle on something, if everything is constantly being repeated a hundred or infinite times, and therefore happening within a person but not to him.

On some future night it might seem to him a delusion that he had actually discovered something the night before, or was discovering something now, but at the moment he was assailed by memories of nights alive with the sounds of amorous grappling and helpless pounding of flesh accompanied by shouts and squelches coming from the lubricating secretions of two different sexual organs.

In reality he had not become dizzy, of course — more precisely, his sensations did not have much to do with dizziness — but he could not have said whether they were copies or the original. There was a humming, like that of the wind in telegraph wires or an idling engine. Was his body simulating thirst because he was supposed to test the young man and possibly jolt him out of his schizoid fit.

Who had been waiting for his help, who knows why, but then pretended he hadn’t even heard the stupid request for water, or maybe he really didn’t hear it.

Which meant, again, that neither of them was an original specimen, only two copies working on each other. But a copy cannot satisfy a personal request.

The two of them had stepped into a world in which cues intended for the roles they were playing could not impede their mutual, laborious legerdemain.

Illusion, everything is only illusion.

The thought made him thirsty, or at least compelled him to get up defiantly and get a glass of water for himself in this peculiar house.

He had to pull himself out of his own illusion.

The short corridor opening from the far end of the room had three doors, which he had noted earlier. The first door was to a broom closet full of cleaning tools and miscellaneous items. He had no more time to waste. Like an electric shock it occurred to him that what he felt was neither thirst nor its illusion but the prelude to an epileptic fit, which would be his first; just when love was supposed to free him, his father’s fate was catching up with him.

That is how the final judgment arrives, ridiculously repeating itself. Then he went into a very clean toilet, and as in alarm he kept opening and closing doors, Döhring said not a word behind him.

Perhaps he would have made a move if Kienast had gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He must have been preoccupied with his own madness, because he sensed nothing of Kienast’s dread, which was ready to erupt; oddly, it was already enough to strengthen the embarrassing mutuality between them.