Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But if something deemed incriminating were revealed about her father, Simon would leave her; this too was very clear to her. Although among some quietly accumulating counterarguments was the fact that recently Simon had come very close to being offered a job in the diplomatic service; since it was hard to imagine a screening process that would not uncover her family background, perhaps it had already been done and did not conclude with a negative result.

For his intemperate hatred, Klára loved Simon even more, though she could imagine a hatred so intemperate that it might make him break up with her. In fact she could not go past a certain point with him, despite the hatred she harbored for her own family. The chief counselor’s old sports car, in which they were now headed toward Stefánia Boulevard, had weathered the Hungarian Nazi regime — and, after its collapse, the requisitioning of goods to pay reparations to Russia — in a garage in Börzsönyliget, hidden among bales of straw. Only after 1956 did they free it from the straw, using pitchforks. For years afterward, the car seats smelled of hot Hungarian summers, of larks and hayed fields. Before starting out in it for Vienna with their two grown daughters that year, wearing army boots and awful-looking trench coats, so that the girls could finally dance with their peers at the opera ball, they had to obtain a new license plate and papers for it. Were the girls to be stuck in Budapest, neither of them would get into any Hungarian university, and without that, their future would have been very bleak. In those days there were no special problems in obtaining the right papers, and nobody raised objections. After a few years of enforced silence, the old network was functioning again. On the last Tuesday of October, the ready-to-fight core members met for the first time in Lehr’s apartment. While the hoi polloi on Köztársaság Square were busy hanging people, shooting, storming the Communist Party headquarters looking for underground torture chambers and, with their own ears, hearing freedom fighters banging inside the fortified secret-police cells, the men in the Teréz Boulevard apartment, bright in the languid sunshine, were reactivating their secret society.

It took only a few days.

By the time they had the false papers and the phony license plate, the Russians, together with the city police of Győr, had sealed off the borders again. Now, sitting in the car together, Klára and Kristóf could not have known that when Kristóf fled home from the devastated square that very Tuesday to tell the speechless and incredulous elderly gentlemen what he had seen, virtually breaking in on them in his agitation, he had chosen Klára’s father’s face to focus on. As if this oldest pair of eyes having been the most skeptical were the safest, as if it was this gentleman especially whom Kristóf had to convince that he was not exaggerating or distorting anything, that charred stumps of bodies really were lying out among the burning books and documents, that people really were being hanged in the street.

It would please Klára to take a secret small revenge on her worshipped father by getting together with a Jew and thereby also inflict a nice wound on the young man. This too belonged to her rebellion; Kristóf himself had nothing to do with the passion with which she would touch him. Then she would really succeed in touching the Jew in him. No one should remain untouched by her universal pain and universal anxiety; this would be Klára’s only satisfaction.

Simon was the one; love was meant exclusively for Simon, not for Kristóf.

To see how much she could torment Kristóf and watch his torment — that is what Klára wanted, not his love.

And she saw clearly that he could be tormented.

Which Kristóf himself did not consider wholly unjustified, since his own father, killed by his comrades, had been a die-hard Stalinist; he did not forget that for a moment. It wasn’t enough for either an excuse or an explanation.

Kristóf and Klára turned their raw self-hatred, their historical perturbation and exasperation, on each other.

Oddly, the mutuality of this somewhat satisfied them.

If Kristóf did not want to lose moral credibility in his own eyes, and why would he want to, he could not object to Klára’s taking her revenge on him for the family insults she had suffered because of her father. Klára listened to Kristóf’s lamentable story with a certain empathy derived from her feelings about her father and from a vaguely delineated historical remorse. Nevertheless, she couldn’t deny that her concern for him was overshadowed by her gloating, raw and unforgiving.

Which, because of Simon, she had to deal with cautiously. She would protest whenever Simon tried to wipe off the alleged sins of his class on her, which she found extremely unfair, and would become sharply indignant.

Where does he get off.

At the top of her voice she would yell, you’re talking to me, not to my mother, not to my father.

But this was not their biggest problem.

In the darkness rhythmically illumined by streetlights, Kristóf could not get used to the woman’s freshly applied perfume. He liked the earlier one better; it had been fuller and more subdued. Also, he was unusually cold and could barely keep from shivering, which was humiliating, not very manly. And this was not only because the soles of his shoes were so thin, but also because their closeness had grown too intimate, hugely increasing his anxiety about the abandoned giant, who, although he was physically far from Budapest, surely was aware of what was going on. He had to be feeling what Kristóf felt and didn’t want to feel toward the woman. A sense of his presence made Kristóf breathe as if he were taking small samples of air into his lungs and then expelling them when he uttered his sudden, unexpected phrases. This behavior had nothing to do with his response to the giant’s unmistakable animal smell. As though he were saying to himself, Well, I’ll be, I can’t get to the bottom of this. The giant initially had no idea what to make of this attitude. Slowly he realized it, jostling among alien sensations, and only then comprehended it.

Indeed, they could not get to the bottom of anything; Klára, Kristóf, and Simon, coming together as they had from three contradictory social environments, either misinterpreted or plain misunderstood one another’s gestures. No two of the three of them could be together, on their own, without the third. This was hard for all of them to grasp. Yet the attitudes that Klára and Kristóf had each absorbed in their strict upbringing were alike in that neither of them felt free to understand certain things that it was more pleasant to misconstrue politely. Kristóf’s bottomless sexual subversion and Klára’s anarchic rebellion actively required them to find each other — now, however way they could, heedlessly.

Klára was on guard, though. She had read every work by Bakunin available in Hungarian and in Russian; she unashamedly used a dictionary when she needed one to understand what she was reading, and understand it well, and she did not hurry. She definitely wanted to be part of the conspiracy.*

And in the darkness Kristóf kept his nose alert and trained on her, inclined as he was to a more sensual and sensory conspiracy, excitedly working his nostrils to absorb everything more and more deeply whenever he pensively fell silent while telling his life story. And what made him pensive was the woman’s insane selfishness — probably the result of having been spoiled as a child — and her aristocratic narcissism, her intellectual affectations, which she balanced and interspersed with obscenities and vulgarities. Kristóf was more at home with sexual pornography; transpositions of anarchistic political pornography were alien to him. The perfume was sweet and heavy, as multicolored as the segments of an open fan, not at all anarchic, and his abdominal wall and his testicles hurt because of the relentless tension of the last few days. Klára could not have known that he was uncircumcised, which in this or similar cases is a disadvantage for the man, how could she know. Her being so spoiled, her directness and proximity, this was all very unusual, unfamiliar, and alarming, and she seemed to be attracted to him. At the same time he had to sense the pervasive proximity of something in her from which he was excluded and in which he could never be involved.