Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Ágost either knew nothing of any of this or wanted to take his revenge by not letting on that he did. He put on his poker face, which neither of his two friends could see through. All three of them had special sources of information they jealously guarded and concealed from one another.

At boarding school too there had been such ritual behaviors.

They could give thanks for their confidential jobs to the exceptional ability with which they wrote and spoke better in foreign languages than in their mother tongue. Though Hans von Wolkenstein’s father was Hungarian, his mother tongue was German: his mother to this day lived and worked as a district doctor on the Czech border, not far from the family estate in a small town named Annaberg, in Erzegebirge. The three men were in close contact with military reconnaissance, military defense, and the civilian secret service operating abroad. All three of them had high military rank and had received decorations for their activities, about which, of course, very few people knew. André had been considered one of the most successful agents in the British secret service until a few months after the war, when he changed horses and went over to the Russians, for whom he worked no less successfully. He was given just a half hour to leave his last workstation, in Eindhoven, Holland, and allowed to take with him only a briefcase. Hans was first sent to the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to visit his mother and settle in Dresden, then completely destroyed; after a while, to his great relief he was transferred to the Hague, then to Prague, and finally to Budapest. But after a few months, with no reasons given, they handed him over to the Hungarians; he received a new name, since then he had been called János Kovách, and in the same hysterical way they removed him from the intelligence service. In the same year, Ágost was called home for consultation from Bern, where he had been the cultural attaché in the Hungarian embassy but in fact in charge of the South European section of Hungarian military intelligence; not only could he not return to his former post, but he was not allowed to travel abroad again.

In their peculiar exile in Budapest, they met for the first time in the autumn of 1955.

For completely different reasons, they were being kept out of circulation. They had no idea how long this enforced rest would last, and none of them considered the possibility of a lifetime of uncertainty as a piece of good luck. All three of them were waiting, in silent anxiety, and this too was one of the delicate matters they would not discuss with one another or with other people.

Nothing, not with anyone.

Their common past restrained them, because they hoped it had not yet ended. Its strong inner dynamic spared them the need for thoughtless chatter. They were not ordinary people, their temperaments and their fates were not ordinary. Far from one another, at distant points of Europe, left to themselves, they had spent their childhoods in various boarding schools, their youth in various colleges. They had learned about solitude long before they met, André in wartime England, Ágost in neutral Switzerland, and Hans, in truly exceptional circumstances, in Nazi Germany, from where, through illegal routes, he had been taken to Moscow. The reason why among themselves they were compelled to use that secret and supranational sign language which can be acquired perfectly only in boys’ boarding schools was that to this day each dreamed, counted, and thought in his own separate language. They were also alike in not understanding Hungarians, whom they disdained, and this profound disdain had become one of their favorite topics. The tension between their thinking and their behavior, between their own linguistic needs and the Hungarian they used for communication was so great, so full of deviations and misunderstandings to be clarified, of uncharted areas and breakdowns, that without the guidance of this mute sign language, which seemed very stable to all three of them, finding their bearings would have been nearly impossible. But by using it, they involuntarily steered their attention back to a time, and placed their sensitivities in a position, about which they could hardly talk, or rather, which could not be reconciled with their stations in adult life.

Their lives had run aground on the treacherous shoals and sandbanks of the double consciousness of childhood timelessness and preadolescent solitude, from which they could not escape even when the waters came in abundance and the tide raised their boats. This is why they probably chose and enjoyed the dangerous life. Although they managed to make themselves and others believe they were responsible and thinking people, André’s stammering, Hans’s eternal jests relating to the lower body, and Ágost’s destructive apathy directed constantly at himself gave them away.

However, they did not have to make one another believe anything.

And anyway they couldn’t have done so, because they had no protection against one another. Left to themselves, and no less to their individual introspection, in their secret and common language they continued to play the game of their painfully missed families. The game had much more to do with children’s imagination than with adult lives. They did not have to step out of the fantastic world in which every gesture turns into a question of life and death and yet everything must be handled playfully. They sometimes altered and exchanged roles just as they had in school.

Although Hans was the biggest and strongest of them, not to mention that he spoke more languages, the role of the father was kept firmly in the hands of the oldest, André, who otherwise tended to be more sentimental and brutal. Without exception, in every boarding school the leading role is always that of the missing father. And because tenderness was one trait of the physically better constituted Hans, he could aspire only to the role of the mother. In their secret language, casting acquired a double meaning. Hans was much stronger and more important than a father, since he was taking care of the family in place of a real mother, yet he was only a deputy of the father, who needed care so he could guide the others unimpeded. This meant everybody. In the spirit of this duality, they struggled with each other for first place. Which also meant the clarification of the eternal question of who should have a bigger say in interfering with Ágost’s life.

They attached neither doubts nor hopes to the outcome of this ritual battle; since André was maintained in his autocratic role by the most secret fighting signal, he had no reason to fear he would lose his paternal authority. That, however, did not keep the other two, aside from short periods of cease-fire, from continuously trying to topple him, if necessary by underhanded means. Kronos must be blinded.

They appreciated one another strictly from the viewpoint of this struggle of mythic proportions. André was considered clever, though in dangerous situations a bit hesitant, Hans decidedly irresponsible, cynical, and dull, though in delicate situations inventive and reliable. With their basic constitutional traits these two confirmed their own casting but also placed Ágost in the role of the child to be taken care of, who meant more to Hans than his own children, for example, from whom he lived very far geographically and with whom he was not allowed to maintain contact. Ágost needed care, guidance, at times protection as well, and he was phlegmatic enough to endure this. In public he did what Hans considered proper, and to keep things simple he matched his opinions to André’s way of thinking. He wound himself around them, a tactic that matched the one he had followed as a child when from one day to the next he found himself at the Villeneuve boarding school, where they beat him on the very first night. He already spoke French quite fluently when his father took him to Switzerland, but the other children could not forgive his not having it as his mother tongue. He infuriated them with his mistakes. They wanted to expel the intruder. They counted his mistakes and then he had to endure silently the same number of slaps on his face in the bluish glitter of the night-light. Try as he might to be heroic, after the third or fourth slap he could not take it anymore — broke down. Then they gagged him, wrestled him to the ground, and wrapped him in a blanket; that’s what they’d been waiting for. All day long they waited for him to yell in Hungarian, cry and call out for his mother in Hungarian so they wouldn’t understand. For which he would earn extra punishment.