Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

A while later, when the remembered movements led his muscles back to the forgotten times, for brief moments his childhood summers flickered up and glowed. An unknown bird would screech. He would look out from behind a grapevine as if peering out from behind the shaded leaves of the erstwhile bower into the wild blue, and he seemed to hear the voice of his long-dead mother calling him. He did not know to what place she was calling him. The blue of the enamel bucket, its familiar clinking, the water, some of which always splashed on his dusty feet — that’s what he remembered, such cloudless summers, the blue enamel bucket.

And the sweetly hovering dust, the sound of cowbells coming closer, together with the approaching twilight, his feet stamping in the dirt.

Now too, time went by, day after day, week after week, without the tiniest cloud in the sky, and it seemed as if all those long-ago summers had also been cruelly and eternally blue. Had he not felt free, had not the river, misty in the cool nights, produced a little dew on the blades of grass each dawn, he would have found these signs threatening, ominous, terrifying.

And they were indeed ominous.

It made a difference how much each planted thing yielded, because he wanted to be sure that what he raised would last through the winter. The threat of a protracted drought hovered over the incandescent landscape. He was free at last. But he could not but remember the long, oppressive, and dizzying spells of privation from his childhood.

When it made a big difference how many of them sat down at the table.

For all he knew, doomsday might be near.

He did not expect rain either.

He rarely saw anyone, did not long for anyone’s company.

Did not think about whether he was cheerful or sad; he was now in the process of forgetting thoughts that were indispensable for the awareness of happiness, just as earlier he had forgotten his youth and childhood. Still, he did sense something of his happiness; after all, he kept telling himself he was free at last. As a person who has reached his destination; his calling was answered by his being free. At last, he kept telling himself, he was free. As if he had served out a long sentence. Perhaps he kept repeating this because he was coming close to a state in which he would neither long for nor insist on anything.

Being bitten by horseflies was the only thing that upset him during these weeks.

And a horsefly bite is indeed very unpleasant.

A horsefly always appears out of the blinding blueness, it circles unnoticed above the deliciously sweating skin, slyly picks its spot, lands gently, and even if you shoo it away, it finds another unprotected spot where it will bite you, ejecting its saliva into the living tissue. If the attack occurred in the middle of the day, there were at least two, sometimes three horseflies coming at him in formation, one to divert his attention while the other two bit him elsewhere. The bite is painful; a hard lump swells under the skin, turns tight and itchy, burns and tingles in the flesh. And if at times like this he turned and bent over his nicely thriving plants more obstinately and restlessly than usual, as though denying that something might be bothering him so much, it was because in his own way he was trying to find an infallible method for outfoxing the horseflies, so to speak.

But he should have realized that horseflies are infallible.

He remembered the horses and the silky-hair-covered bony knot on the tails of cattle, the swishing and slapping sound of their swatting at pests.

After all, he reasoned, a horsefly was not as lighthearted and cunning a creature as the common housefly, but in comparison rather sluggish and clumsy. In the instant it bites you it’s easy to whack it, and it’s no small satisfaction when its dust-gray body cracks under your palm.

But by then it’s too late; its secretion is already spreading and working under the skin.

Whenever the horseflies’ hour arrived, his entire body became covered with gooseflesh because of the awful unrest; he was annoyed, he fumed and grumbled; why wasn’t man more resourceful than a horsefly, being so much smarter. He should be more inventive in that crucial fraction of a second. Why wait for the moment of the bite, why not act beforehand, why does his skin signal him only afterward, he complained. As if with only a little adjustment of Creation everything would be perfect.

Anyway, I’ll kill it, he kept repeating to himself, although in his new life he found these repeated little murders rather disturbing. But his attentiveness, practicality, and circumspection must have had a predetermined sequence, an order with its own definite conditions and boundaries. Despite his struggle and experimentation, despite his belief in the superiority of the human mind, he could not in his own animal state anticipate the moment of the horseflies. He would flail, slap, strike out, dodge, become annoyed, rack his brain, endure the bites, flee, at times rave — not so much at the ancient enemy as at his own human helplessness.

There is nothing more profound, more secretive, and more abominable than hatred conceived in solitude.

He was pensioned off on the last day of February, and after the party given in his honor he did not return to his home in Budapest, the family house on the shore of the Rákos creek he had built with his own hands over ten long years. By then the little wooden house on the other side of the river was ready, fully furnished. He had prepared well in advance for a quiet retirement. He had put away enough money for it too, which no one knew anything about. They had a good time at the Kőkapu, the famous little inn in Vác by the triumphal arch built to honor a visit from Empress Maria Theresa. A traditional haunt of lawyers, prison guards, and released prisoners. He sat at the place of honor, smiling benevolently; no one could have noticed anything exceptional about him. He waited patiently until dawn, though from midnight on he made sure he was gradually sobering up. He knew this was his last drinking binge with the boys. He liked their company; he belonged to them and to no one else in the entire world.

As he sobered up he felt his heart would break when he left them.

He took the first ferry across the icy river.

The ferrymen knew him well; he had been coming and going, spending his days off here for the last two years.

His mates, still tipsy, whooped and shouted farewell from the receding shore of Vác. By then he felt nothing for them.

Only later, in a coldly composed letter, did he inform his family of his final decision. He could hardly write; his emotions, more than anything else, drew the letters from his fingers. Let them wait for him, have the police look for him. But the family would be glad he’d disappeared. They might squander his pension just as they had squandered his salary, but he was going to live here alone and did not want them to visit. He wanted to keep at least his remaining years clean. He had had enough of his wife and son, he no longer needed to know about their deeds or misdeeds — enough of the loud words, fights, and treacherous family intrigues that had filled his life. This is what he wrote, brutally, with his awkward words and ugly penmanship, but there was nothing false in what he put down on paper. Spring was cold that year, windy, overcast, and stormy; he kept warm by the fire in the iron stove. The change did not displease his wife; in fact she was a little sorry the man had turned up at all. She waited a long time before answering his letter. She would have felt happier if he had disappeared without a trace. In a few lines she let him know that his crippled younger brother was dying in the urology ward of Szent János Hospital and in the meantime his irresponsible daughters had been slowly selling everything of any value from the nicely furnished super’s apartment on Teréz Boulevard. They couldn’t wait for their miserable father’s death. And since that apartment was a service apartment, what else would it be, they’d probably have to move out of it, and she worried that they might, being relatives, after all, want to move in with her.