Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

They were also thinking about something far from what they observed in each other’s face, figure, or motionless limbs.

For a good long time observation and thinking proceeded on parallel tracks.

Perhaps twenty minutes went by before their arms, resting on the sharp rim of the piano, began to move and their fingers found their way back to where they could hook into one another. Which did not come close to making them happy. They had bestowed on each other their leaden fatigue and sadness, had given up their sense of independence, the kind of independence that until then Klára had not relinquished to anyone, not even to Simon.

Kristóf had given up his once before, but only for ten minutes, with Ilona. Those ten minutes stuck out in his life like a bone from a bad wound. The child had awakened on the bed in the maid’s room that summer morning, and they had triumphantly completed their act, the child’s countenance open and lively, since at the moment they had no choice, there could be no way back.

As if each of their fingers, separate from the other fingers, had several issues to deal with. So many restrained emotions and so many hitherto suppressed thoughts had found their way into what they now were feeling that they almost shouted with excitement and clapped each other’s palm. At this thoughtless juncture they noticed that the dancing couples had returned to their tables. And the two of them were no longer exposed at the edge of the blinding white light, because the musicians were taking a break and the spot had been turned off. And only now did the two fools notice that in the benevolent darkness, which they accepted as an unexpected gift, they had for some time come close together and were holding each other’s knee, their recently rejected knees; they noticed all this only in retrospect, as it were. Now they acknowledged that unaccountable things could occur in a split second, in the blink of an eye. Although they would have liked to inch their way up, higher on the thigh, toward the groin, these areas having a stronger attraction, and especially to feel knees clasping thighs mutually, but they weren’t appropriately determined about this. As reasonable, adult, and responsible persons equipped with prepared movements, they faced each other as if short-circuited somewhere between rough action and inner compulsion. Unaccountable inhibitions stood in their way. Not because strangers might see and curb their actions, but because their mutually gained new freedom and their lost independence were at stake.

And it could not evolve in small increments, secretly, in unguarded moments. Because they did not know what was supposed to happen since what was happening now was very different from many of their rational experiences.

And if the waitress had not very politely taken away their empty glasses, opaque with lemon and sugar, laughing rather too intimately and maternally, they would have continued for at least another forty minutes, sitting stiffly in front of other people, frozen at each other’s melting point, constrained and expectant.

That is when they realized that they each had another hand, and had had it all along, holding a long-empty glass.

This was not vacant time but time full of event, each moment filled to the brim.

Finally they grasped each other’s free hand. Only then did they notice how attentive the waitress had been, not only addressing Klára in the familiar form but also calling her by her rarely used nickname.

They could stay no longer; suddenly they had to leave as quickly as possible; out on the street they ran straight into the winds coming from two different directions, then found each other again, this time not only in great haste but also clinging to each other along the entire length of their bodies, shyly and sweetly.

And then, with their coats open, they ran again in different directions into the big, darkly blinding void.

By the time they drove into the deserted downtown area, their excited breathing had subsided.

They got out in front of a small mansion on Újvilág Street and stood under trees swaying in the wind, but even there they said nothing to each other. At moments their mutual silence seemed hostile and at other moments just the opposite, soaring and moving with the power of their mutual discoveries. In any case they seemed to be coddling each other in temporal terms, both of them wanting to prolong their time together.

Klára lifted out the wine and vodka bottles from behind the backseat, four in all, and handed them to Kristóf, but then she took back two of them for herself. By sharing the work in this way they seemed to go on fondling each other. That is how they went up to the second floor, carrying real bottles, immersed in the loveliness of their first mutual undertaking.

She walked ahead of Kristóf as if she knew her way around, but Kristóf watched only her calves and ankles and how she stepped up the worn-out stairs, one by one.

It wouldn’t have occurred to them to talk about anything in the dimly lit staircase.

Already on the first landing they could hear bits of music, thumping, the din and humming of people crammed into the apartment.

By the clock on the nearby Town Hall it was almost eleven. The clock would strike on the hour, and the old mechanism was preparing with loud clatters for the four strikes that would fill the narrow street, but here there was no day or night because the party had been in full swing for two days running and no one could tell how long it would go on.

People did not know where they were going, to whose party, they had only heard about their hosts. But that was the interesting and wonderful part of it — the anarchy. There were no rules anymore, and no rules meant no rules. When there are no units of measurement, there is no time either, and we can’t tell when the reckoning of time stopped. All they knew was that the ancient tailor whose trade sign had adorned the facade of the handsome little mansion since the late nineteenth century, who made splendid evening jackets, tailcoats, smoking jackets, and formal suits, and whose shop was now run, theoretically, by his grandson while he, darkly tanned and wrinkled, was shooting the breeze on the terraces and in the corridors of the Lukács Baths with old people who were in every way younger than he, that this tailor had a few days ago emptied his second-floor apartment and third-floor workshop, which — in return for his long and faithful service — his family had been allowed to retain as leased property, though they could not own them, since the Land Registry records showed that they’d been taken away from him. No one any longer needed the magnificent garments whose specialist he was, not even in the highest circles. He had made tailcoats and jackets for Mátyás Rákosi that required all his professional experience, but János Kádár, with his quite good build and carriage, bought his suits from the Red October Clothing Factory’s tailoring workshop, and other high-ranking functionaries followed the leader’s austere, plain example.* The old tailor could not imagine a world in which nobody was interested in shirtfronts, dickeys, cufflinks, silk vests, and the cut of lapels. And regarding the modern lines and fashionable new patterns, his family slowly lost their courage. The new tailors and assistants simply didn’t have a feeling for true tailoring. With the family’s exceptional connections, they managed to obtain emigrant visas to go at least as far as Vienna. Once there, they would see, perhaps there they could still make it, maybe their skills were still needed. Most of their objets d’art had been declared national property and been turned over to the state. They were allowed to take hardly anything with them; fortunately their money, kept in foreign currencies, along with the best of their jewelry, had been smuggled out of the country before the war.