Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

No.

And in that case one is permitted to do anything.

Yes.

But how can a person coexist with this knowledge, he asked, and then suddenly he let the question dwindle. Is it even possible.

Exactly the way you coexist with it, not any other way. Only people who are soft in the head can believe that freedom is a good thing that one should strive for. I’d say, instead, that freedom is necessary, you can’t get around it.

You can’t be serious, or else you are cynical to the marrow of your bones. Even if it was so, how can it be acceptable to strive consciously for evil and do premeditated harm.

Nobody accepts that, even when a person has done it. This is something everyone fears.

Then maybe I wasn’t wrong after all, maybe murder is better.

They would have liked to continue this, sitting in the dark; it would have been nice. To continue thinking about how they should mutually avoid the subject of murder, if for no other reason than that it didn’t get them anywhere. At best it would confirm their feeling of complete futility. But the detective, preferring to leave the question undecided, was willing to relinquish even the beauty of asking questions or engaging in a dialogue. As Humphrey Bogart would have, he stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, turned on the ignition, and backed up, making the wheels screech as he turned his old car around and, pulverizing their intimacy with immense gusto, took off at great speed.

He would have been annoyed at, and for practical reasons could not have approved of, their surrender to the sentimental spirit of theological contemplation.

He wanted to talk about simpler things and did not want to stray from them. It was not so much hunger or thirst that urged him on; after all, he had had something to eat and drink and did not really care about the other man’s hunger or thirst, but now he simply had to find a restaurant that was open, since he had promised he’d find one. He thought a neutral location would be more appropriate for their conversation, which he had more or less planned out while driving to Döhring’s place, mapping out various possibilities, but until now he hadn’t even come close to sounding his themes in their natural tones. He had to get closer to the young man, to get even closer, to be dangerously close, and to obtain the most intimate pieces of information, and he could not afford to be taken in by the other’s playacting.

He was wise to that, though. He saw through Döhring’s role playing. He didn’t grade the young man’s insanity as more than average; however, unlike others with this kind of insanity, Döhring played not a normal person but, oddly enough, an insane one. This is how he defended his real insanity, the points of his outburst. Everything he had committed until now was a mere taste of what he might commit in the future. And it made no difference whether all this was unintentional, unpremeditated, whether he played his role not consciously, for he performed what his real schizophrenia made him perform.

His suffering could not absolve him. He might go completely berserk, this is what Kienast thought, but until that happened he could not legally be declared mentally unaccountable.

Kienast already knew what brand of cologne Döhring used, and that cologne in all probability matched the one smeared on the dead man’s belly and pubic hair. He knew that the brands of the two men’s special-quality underpants also matched, and he also knew that both these matches could be mere coincidence. He was grateful to Döhring for this information and would probably have called himself not only cynical but also perverse if he had admitted to himself that he had come here to express his gratitude. He felt the most humble gratitude toward criminals, because when he finally discovered something, when he managed to penetrate the details of details, he could not help enjoying his profession; he always drank the cup of poison to the last drop. There was a moment when his moral superiority and professional expertise met in the joy of crime. He had been to the special store where those tight underpants had been sold to both men; he had been to the bar adjacent to the store and in the infamous cellars under the bar where, with choice and expensive instruments of torture, men surrendered themselves to other men.

It was only a question of hours before he would obtain photographs of both men and then it would be possible to determine whether they had been seen together at this notorious place.

Had it not been for this case, if chance or his fate had been slightly different, if the young man had not behaved so peculiarly, then Kienast would not have met his sweetheart. This was now unimaginable, though he feared that his gratitude toward the young man might just as unexpectedly turn into profound hatred. He had dived into the pool of love too many times, for episodes that were all too brief, and he was therefore wary of sobering disappointments. Not to mention false trails. Or the painful realization that she might not be the one, again not the right one, and perhaps there was no such being. He already dreaded the moment when he’d have to move out of an apartment once again. Or start on a different trail because he had gone astray on this one. Or that somebody once again would leave the key on his table, throw it in the mailbox after having locked the door, and another one of his crazy hopes would go up in smoke.

Better not to start a relationship at all, but then it is very difficult to maintain human contact with anyone.

If it hadn’t occurred to him that the cologne he’d smelled on the corpse’s stomach and pubic hair might not be the dead man’s own; that on other parts, on the limbs and in the crooks of the body, he detected another very different cologne, and yet a third one, the banally intrusive fragrance of some aftershave on the shirt and underpants — he would not have remembered Annick van Bruck and her enormous collection piled up in her much-larger-than-average bathroom.

And that she could tell which one was which.

He had to forget this absurd idea quickly.

The moment he closed the file on the unknown corpse, he’d gone about his business.

But about ten minutes later he stopped absentmindedly in front of the decorated and illuminated window of a perfume store.

For good business reasons, the door of the establishment was left open not only to let fragrances emanate outward, but also because now and again an assistant, hair plastered down, would saunter out to arrange and rearrange the quality merchandise in the two baskets on either side of the door now being offered for sale at rock-bottom prices, and at the same time to spray a frightfully expensive fragrance into the air from an old-fashioned atomizer. For this purpose there were large bottles of Chanel and Guerlain lined up in a row. Strange as it may sound, vaporized perfume tends to intermingle with particles of steam and soot already in the air whose relatively greater weight means that the perfume rides on them, as it were, is carried into the currents of air that passersby produce.

With a made-up story that he had not bought any Christmas presents for his sister and mother, he entered the store.

He was looking for a fragrance that was familiar to him from somewhere.

It took only a glance at the shelves for him to realize he had undertaken an impossible task. The salesgirls, faces made up to the smoothness of porcelain, followed him as he moved among the other shoppers. He hesitated a long time about whether to search among the fragrances meant for women or for men. What the salesgirls were interested in was whether he was a sneak thief.

Döhring spoke after a while, to remind Kienast that soon they’d be at the border.

A salesgirl asked Kienast if he needed any help.