Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But how can you know this so precisely.

Coffee, he added.

For me, this would be too many good things to choose from.

You can’t always tell who the murderer is, either.

Not always.

But sometimes you can.

In the spring storm, the city remained deserted at night; not a soul anywhere, but this did not dishearten either of them.

They were preoccupied with themselves, with their own little past and their own little future.

On Queen Vilma Road, Kristóf excitedly showed her the restaurant garden, which had been empty and closed for years, where a long time ago Hedda Hiller used to sing at the sunny afternoon teas. Their eyes searched through the bare, nervously swaying branches of the horse chestnut trees to find the terrace from which he had watched the heavenly chanteuse and fainted in his fright.

It was as if he were giving away a guarded family secret.

As Klára leaned forward the better to see the terrace, the smooth mink coat opened on her body.

Not that way, look over here, it’s the third one from the left.

Amid the busy pointing, their faces touched, perhaps accidentally, and there was her scent, her shoulders and her breasts. The contact was so light and accidental, their bodies taut as bows, that they both burst into laughter and then laughed in each other’s face. In which act there was enough death-defying courage to make them recoil. Their future became heavy and their past threatening; they said nothing.

Later, at a slow pace, they turned on to Aréna Road so Kristóf could show her the building facing City Park that his great-grandfather had built in defiance of the prevailing notions of his era. Klára was interested, curious about everything, or at least she gave the impression that she wanted to know everything about him and all at once. In the distance, somewhere around Heroes’ Square, they saw police assault cars again, parked with their searchlights aimed at each other above the darkly glittering pavement, but the two of them ignored the cars and searchlights since they were going in the opposite direction.

The squalls were strong, yet occasionally there was a sweet, spring lightness in the air.

The pigs set up a veritable light barrier on the streets, Kristóf said, but no one in those days would have said anything about it out loud or even thought it. Bright light from the assault cars came though the rear window of the car and turned their faces eerily pale. Even if one didn’t have a guilty conscience, this light made one feel that one’s unguarded thoughts might be exposed at any moment and one would be caught doing something unawares; one cannot deny all one’s unguarded thoughts. Kristóf preferred not to look at Klára. He wanted to show her the many abandoned locales of his life, and he also wanted to initiate the ignorant country girl into the stormy events of the city’s living history and into the stories of its compulsive destructions and compulsive reconstructions. To flaunt his knowledge, his familiarity with world affairs, which of course was mainly familiarity with styles and languages. He could only barely hold forth on matters concerning which Klára was presumably very curious. To share the city’s jealously guarded topographical secrets. He chose to head in this direction, lead her this way; this would be a less dangerous route. After all, this is where in glimmering darkness his mother had met the older communist woman for the first time, in the dark crowd thronging under the swaying lamps at a block party. At that time the streetcar line was still running here, and he told her what direction the number 11 streetcar came from and where it went to, how it rang its bell for the dancers to let it pass.

And Klára cried out that she had never seen a block party and would really like to.

How well he remembered that warm night, the noisy party on the street, the phenomenal auntie in her glittering dress who danced with his mother, how both women threw back their heads as they laughed and kept on laughing and how both women later disappeared, the auntie and his mother, leaving only the name of a city behind: Paris.

The revelers wouldn’t let the streetcar pass until all the passengers got off and danced with them.

It sounded improbable this evening, too sentimental, but it was from here, from the second floor of this blackened building with its peeling plaster, that they had taken away his father, where now, behind the curtains, a lamp was shining at the far end of the room.

They stopped here for a while, in front of the building, in the middle of the deserted, glimmering roadway. If he could have had his way, he would have taken back every sentence, every word he had uttered about his mother and father. But the question remained in the air, hovering between them, the real question: why a new love if everything ends like this, if everything is so brittle and every story is destruction and devastation.

Wonder if Kristóf has someone else.

They remained gravely distrustful of each other. The thought that perhaps he was in love with someone else began to take root in Klára, as if her jealousy was greater than her desire.

It’s not possible that such a handsome boy didn’t have anyone.

That’s how it is, though.

Then you must be hopelessly in love with someone, she cried in her teasing voice, a voice she deeply disliked. I can see it with my own eyes.

With you.

If Kristóf had had enough presence of mind, which he did not, that is what he would have answered and then drawn her close, taking his chances.

Why didn’t I hug her.

However, he was repelled by her teasing, by her tone — borrowed from the chatty dramas featured in boulevard theaters. If he had wanted to gain her for himself. He looked at her in the dark, and the shining surface of the woman’s large eyes did not reject him. But he did not reply, and he did not want to lie to her; like a little boy, he drew up his shoulders. He did not risk rejection, perhaps on behalf of their future. He did want to gain her for himself, of course he did. Yet he couldn’t think about this openly and unreservedly. And what an impossible notion it was anyway, to gain someone for oneself. And he dreaded the other person’s bodily presence, anticipating what that notion might mean in their lives. Their silent individual efforts to avert or evade their current feelings clashed head-on — and then met, as was vividly registered in their faces, animated by the lights filtering in from outside. This changed their lives. So rapidly that they couldn’t follow it, and the woman somehow had to yank the steering wheel back to its normal position.

It would have been better not to raise, comprehend, or hear these delicate inner questions.

And what’s this about him being a handsome boy.

Where does all this disdain for him come from.

It would have been hard to comply with conventional custom and start talking again in the dark as if nothing had happened between them. He moaned, or rather groaned, under the weight of the presentiment that one might possibly possess another person. The future tense kept marching ahead of them, and at every moment, they realized, belatedly, what they had just said or done. This frightened them, and so they tried to create the illusion that it wasn’t even worth talking about. They had to conquer themselves on their own. As if love’s fear of death had to avoid or overcome a much larger fear.

He thought of Aréna Road as crossing the city like some magical border or no-man’s-land that he could not get across alone — if you try it you become anyone’s prey — but he also wanted to show, right away, that he was completely at home in the two different zones on either side of the border: in the thick of the city, up the rear staircase, or in the precisely apportioned quiet streets by the boringly vast desert of City Park, in the once ransacked and then reconstructed grandiose villas of deceased wholesale merchants or banished industrialists.