Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

No greater devotion or loyalty is possible in a person’s life. How many months, how many hours had passed, and he was still clinging loyally and cheerfully to him. The clinging between them was not one-sided. Their mutuality had turned their lives into pure kitsch. Without it he’d never have known about lovers’ harmony. This clearly meant, however, that other people, if they could see into him, would consider him completely mad, because in reality he lived in the giant’s imagination as the giant did in his, and they would never find each other or their place among people, only the mere illusion of that place.

And knowing this for certain made him totally happy.

He should not have made the woman’s acquaintance. He thought of himself using the giant’s head. But using his own head, he had to think that the giant probably would not want to be betrayed.

Sometimes he did not know which one of them was doing the thinking for him.

Except for him, nobody could have known about this cheerful coexistence encompassing all the senses, but the giant did — and how.

What would he accomplish with a primitive and boring rebellion against his family such as the woman had suggested.

He knew of a different rebellion, perhaps the only heroic tale that might impress the woman.

Their imagination, or their mutual loneliness in the realm of imagination, the continually gained sensual knowledge about each other and their parallel lives, than which there was no stronger bond — this he had discovered on his own. Not the law of free fall, not the Demén-style coke basket — those he did not discover — but this he did. With the giant they did not look at the water to see its currents. It was very clear that Klára belonged in the realm of ordinary people, and it was to that realm that she wanted to entice him. She weighs the offenses and figures out the retaliations, but no thanks, he doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to accept her suggestion. And the giant’s mustached assistant believed they’d managed to get rid of this little prick for good, and since he needed the giant just as much, he said, let’s go, we don’t have to worry about this little jism anymore, but boy, was he mistaken, and he also couldn’t have known that the pictures mutually nurtured in their imaginations never faded, that Kristóf and the giant had made a gift to each other of the sensation of these pictures.

Ordinary people don’t consider such things.

Ilona could not help noticing the big stains on the sheet, some on the silk quilt cover too, where it must have fallen back after the semen had shot up in a double-beat rhythm as if breaking through an obstacle, soaring high and then falling down heavily. They did it every night, how could she not notice it; torn with jealousy, Ilona followed the events as she changed the bedding on Lady Erna’s instructions. Not to mention his handkerchiefs flung into the hamper, which Ilona sniffed fearfully; how could she not have sensed what was happening during the night without her. Sometimes he saw on her face that she not only had discovered their secret but was also afraid or afraid of herself for him. They did not talk about this either. Something happened between them early that morning when, after he’d failed to kill himself, he staggered back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard, his clothes torn, his body filthy and, standing in the kitchen just as he was, bloody and unwashed, wolfed down the leftover rice chicken straight out of the pot; neither of them could mention this to anyone, ever.

To catch it at least with a handkerchief.

Even after the inevitable moment, he didn’t have the self-control to tear himself away from the giant. All he could do was follow him with the handkerchief. He was no longer in his right mind, and given the nature of the thing, this should not be understood metaphorically. And the reason he and Ilona could not talk about anything was not that their sense of decency forbade it, but because everything was right as it had happened. Which he also attributed to the giant’s strength. This made him feel so strong and powerful that he expected he’d be the one who at the right moment would block the giant’s way in his frightening and cheerful urge to run amok.

For that he would have to find him first, to go back to him from his imagination, as it were.

That is how the heroic tale might have been realized, their terrible happiness.

It did not occur to him that the giant might have another life, small children who were his spitting image, but that the giant daydreamed about him he felt on his skin, in his aching frontal lobe or in his unavoidably erect penis, in the temperature of his body and the rhythmic tempo of his breathing. Or that the giant might be making love to someone else in his stead, doing it very seriously and, along with this stranger, might be looking for him, Kristóf, in the universe. He saw how they filled him with themselves, with their parts, but he was not envious of them, he had no reason to be jealous. In his imagination the giant had to remain as free as an outlaw. This was the basic condition in the functioning of his imagination, and it would have been senseless to cancel it with jealousy. Neither his body nor his soul was tied to anyone but the giant; that was the big truth; he had become the giant’s prisoner, his slave. Impartial curiosity and imagination had set him loose from everyone else; there was no one left to whom he’d earlier been bound or belonged; put another way, impartiality would not let him get close to anyone. He observed impartially even those to whom he was close. He had to distract Klára’s attention from all this so they could more thoroughly observe each other. And while flitting among his various stories about the city and its architectural styles, explaining things loudly and pragmatically as they drove along, he felt how immoderate a man he was, what an evader, a rambler who made himself laughable with his awkward, pitiful life, and no matter how hard he tried, his story was never nice and round, and there was no way back.

Only forward, deeper into the thick of things.

When it comes to sharing one’s story with someone else, the storyteller tries to retailor the story to fit the measurements of the listener, as it were. Then many things come to mind that cannot be told or shared with anyone, which slows down the telling; and with the constant jabbering the storyteller never gets to the end of anything or never returns to the beginning. Either another story joins the storyteller’s own censored tale, or the storyteller trails some silly fairy tale behind the original story.

It’s not necessarily modesty that keeps him from the story of the other person; of course, that too.

But he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Which makes him think he should strictly separate the stories so that they won’t ever again make contact so dangerously and unguardedly. To separate the secret story from the acceptable one; they mustn’t dribble into each other. But how could things have turned out differently from the way they did. The mere question tortured him. Or what might have happened if he’d managed to make them turn out differently. After all, when telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself. He keeps telling the legend until he too is taken in by the credible presentation, according to which his life has a nicely rounded conclusion, a brief clever punch line, an epilogue, and a lesson to give some meaning to it even beyond death. And it occurred to him again how many things he and the giant should have done differently to arrive at a different fate, one that might have led him not only to the shuddering happiness of presentiment, intuition, and imagination, but also to the other man’s ordinary, boring, everyday life story.