Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

As the Sunshine, it was one of the rare places in Budapest that managed to retain not only its interior furnishings but also its style and something of its erstwhile milieu. Its highly polished wainscoting had not been removed, even right after the siege, when the wood could have been used for heating; the long-legged easy chairs with their handsome little footrests and the long-legged small tables also remained. During the day it was annoyingly bright, and that along with the dubious public buying and selling made a most peculiar impression; but at night it was different, when the sconces with their wax-paper shades frugally emitted faint glows.

The sunken dance floor had room for only a few clinging couples, moving in the light of a pale-red spot hanging from the mirrored ceiling. Wrapped in smoke, the dancers swayed and hovered at the same level with the heads of guests seated at the bar and tables, and thus a feeling of improbability came over anyone coming down the stairs from the street-level entrance; the place looked crazy, with its warm lights and distorting mirrors. Kristóf and Klára found a place near the piano but not at a table, so they had to rest an elbow on the open instrument.

The piano was the only object in the entire place that received harsh white lighting.

They were not talking.

The older, bored-looking waitress amiably advised them — her voice drawing out the vowels — not to drink vodka today but gin fizzes.

Her typical Pest accent, slightly singsong, lent a sarcastic flavor to everything she said.

On account of today being a national holiday, they were handing out lemons at the central office.

All three of them had a good laugh at this — that the central office handed out anything, let alone lemons.

They had their own share of the piano’s white light, which exposed them to the other guests, exposed their shared giggles.

Where do you know her from, Kristóf asked after the waitress with her dyed blond hair left them.

I don’t really know, Klára replied, but maybe from somewhere.

Obviously she wasn’t telling the truth, and didn’t make anything of it.

Quietly they rebuked themselves for spoiling everything with every word — silence or even transparent prevarication was better. Every word acquired an offensive edge. Even though they were thinking of two different things and not blaming each other. And they could not talk about it, if only to keep from spoiling things even more. They kept looking at each other. No trace of fondness or love remained on their faces. Mirrorlike surface of motionless water. They both felt they’d behaved shockingly over the previous hours, their frivolity had been shocking, and there was no point in adding further shocks to the situation. They could not account for their behavior.

No wonder they had frightened each other senselessly and unforgivably. And mainly they had prattled and argued too much. They had made themselves vulnerable and had betrayed the one they loved.

Why had they become so common and shameless.

The people drinking and dancing around them had the impression that the couple in the piano’s spotlight were in the midst of a final breakup, trying to examine what their relationship had been in the past and getting a taste of how shocking it had been.

As they looked at each other impassively, accompanied by drums and piano, their emotional life was changing. In the windy outdoors they had experienced something of their freedom’s devastating power, but in here, under each other’s gaze, they were no longer people existing separately.

Their self-control was working perfectly well, no problem there, and nothing escaped their attention, yet they offered to each other, and to each other alone, some flavors and signs of their existence beyond their neutralized expressions and impassive features. No one could say Klára Vay wasn’t conspicuous — with her big hair, huge eyes, round and heavily painted lips, her mink coat now nonchalantly thrown off her shoulders and revealing a plunging neckline and blindingly white skin, her clinging, frighteningly short dress, immoderately high-heeled and pointed shoes, her shapely calves, little-girlish figure, strong hips and powerful thighs — her body’s anatomical contradictions or disharmony. As they came in, Kristóf had been very anxious about the challenge created by Klára’s appearance, and about people seeing him in the company of such a conspicuous phenomenon. He saw clearly and he felt on his skin that Klára’s beauty and unpardonable elegance made him look ridiculous.

Which turned him into a little prick.

Which in some laughable way he had to be proud of.

That such a dumb little prick’s been dealt such a woman. As if he had been her page, escort, and secret lover for years. Or might nurse realistic hopes of becoming her true lover one day.

At their very first appearance together in public Klára shouldn’t be allowed to see how moved and awed he was. That is why he looked about with a neutral, noncommittal gaze, so as not to reveal his desperate situation to these other people, the total fiasco and catastrophe that until now he had managed successfully to circumvent.

They both hit on the right expression.

They did not look shocking enough to hold curious eyes for very long; after a while inquiring eyes were duly averted. The two of them remained shocking and unbearable at most only to themselves. No one bothered to weigh the obvious age difference between them as a factor in the possible breakup. What people might have considered awful for the couple was that from now on they wouldn’t be able to get along without each other, and wouldn’t be able to account for this either. They weren’t holding hands, as if the glasses they each carried in one hand made this impossible; their coats hung off the backs of the high chairs. Their bodily stillness, or the complete absence of verbal communication, separated them from the dense human crowd around them. There might have been a chance to rescind or cancel some of the preceding events, but not in this present reality.

The ever-present moment was more powerful, and under its weight the significance of the stories they’d told each other was generously reduced.

As though the stories could be forgotten, had become ephemeral sound effects, tiny noises of history, nothing more.

As to the glasses, they really had no place to put them down. They stared at the innards of the piano, the hammers working on the wires and their own reflections in the black lacquer of the propped-up lid.

To look at anything but each other.

The first thing they noticed was Kristóf’s knee touching Klára’s, though he had neither moved nor wanted this to happen. He said, pardon me, and he was truly mortified by his rudeness. If only this was happening between them for the first time, but it was not the first time. The vacuum created between their knees when he quickly withdrew his sucked in their bodily sensations and consumed their physical reality — flesh, clothes, and all.

Their pitiful isolation ended. Or they were only following on each other’s bodily surfaces what had already occurred in their souls but what in good conscience they could not yet accept; but they could not have known that.

It seems probable that the soul is first, followed by physical sensation, and only then comes the decision.

After some time — how long they could not say, though this was not the first time that time had passed like this for them — Klára’s knee touched Kristóf’s knee, for which she hastily apologized. It was more as if her upbringing was speaking for her. Actually they could have laughed about this, but they didn’t. Sunk into a serious mutual muteness, they continued the assessing and weighing processes they had begun, on and in each other, occurring way beyond the realm of common sense. As if they were weighing the proportions of something that could not be seen with the naked eye or deflected with bare hands. It was not possible to get to the bottom of it, it was full of little surprises; pupils dilating, they were amazed.