Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

She wouldn’t let them, not the girls and not their unreliable mother.

This was followed by a single sentence, red-hot with anger.

She prays to the Lord Jesus and Mary every night that Balter should not regret his decision.

The woman wrote with nice round letters, like a schoolgirl, being proud to this day that in elementary school her teacher had always held up her handwriting as the example to be followed.

Far from regretting his decision, Balter was surprised to feel that every day spent in freedom made his life more meaningful. A life perfect in all its aspects, in a way he could hitherto not have imagined. Then slowly, gradually, he shed every piece of clothing as regularly as day followed day, as the land slowly grew warmer and later very hot. First he put aside the green quilted jacket, then the shirt, later the wide blue work pants, on a particularly hot afternoon the white undershirt, and finally he kicked off his blue twill shorts that were the same color as his bucket.

He was fifty-seven years old, slept without clothes, and naked stepped out of the house into the blue mornings. His nudity was no more surprising than that of a gracefully aging wild animal.

Just as his body had become indifferent to him, others had to become indifferent to it too.

Strangers’ eyes could see him only from a great distance, anyway.

He could thank fate for his hulking, indolently muscular body.

First the gendarmes kept an eye on him, but then everything turned out differently. His tread was slow and heavy, which might have been the reason no one thought of becoming familiar with him or calling him by his first name.

A man of long strides and slow wits.

His name was Balter. More precisely, that is how people referred to him, Balter did this or Balter did that. His relatives did the same; even his wife had called him Balter for thirty years, as if they enjoyed having the family name be so corporeal and weighty. His only son, who took after him in both build and features and who, to Balter’s great sorrow, also bore his first name, Gyula, got mixed up in very bad company when he was still a child, no matter how much and how often Balter had beaten him. The son led a life that Balter could not follow, neither with his common sense nor with his imagination; he only guessed at what was happening around him, even though his job made him familiar with the inner lives of men.

They had no secrets from him; he knew what they were capable of doing.

Horseflies appear in the middle of July, when the apricots begin to ripen. No matter how many mean things he had committed in his life, how much he had cheated or stolen to supplement his salary and put some money aside secretly for himself, he had never been cruel or tyrannical. Because of the damned horseflies, he first put his wide work pants back on and then his shirt; the flies robbed him of his hard-earned freedom. Frankly he had quite a few things to regret and, strictly speaking, many men would have good reason to beat him up. No matter how much he blustered and flailed about. Several men had indeed threatened him when they got out. To preserve the freedom of his days, putting on his pants and shirt was an inadequate precaution; his neck and profusely perspiring face, so tasty for horseflies, remained bare.

Again, he had to give up more of his freshly gained freedom, again to comply silently with his circumstances and to bargain with them.

When the sun reached its zenith, he put his tools aside and retreated into the shade, where horseflies were reluctant to follow. Still, after several days of senseless battle against the pests, his retreat did not regain for him the peace and quiet he had so joyfully enjoyed before the arrival of the horseflies. To endure again, to wait, to tolerate. This made him wonder whether his miserable younger brother was still alive, but it did not occur to him to take the train on the other side of the river, from the station built in honor of the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph. If his brother was no longer alive, well, so be it.

He did not think so highly of human life that he wished it on anyone.

He kept sitting in the breezy shade of the apricot tree, his head hanging between his drawn-up knees, and he felt a prisoner in his clothes.

That was his greatest worry.

But at least new bites were not irritating his flesh, nothing burned or itched, his skin was no longer tight over the subsiding berry-size lumps.

He could never evaluate what he thought or what he did not know, and he never attributed importance to things he didn’t think about. He tried not to think about his dying kid brother; true, he had never given him much thought. And he definitely did not think about how he had beaten his son and his wife, about the sound of a nose breaking, about flesh being pummeled, about how much hair remained in his hands. This did not mean that he was unable to think about things as flexibly as anyone else, or that in other cases he had not suffered in the absence of certain thoughts. He was not a talkative man, though rather taciturn, not wanting to seem more stupid than he was. But whatever kind of man he was, he could not have had practice in following thoughts woven in solitude and or in finding his way in the thicket of missing thoughts. He no longer thought about the released prisoners’ four-word magic sentence, for he was anything but free, though he did not notice this, since the objects of freedom were still with him: his bucket, his house, his work-induced heavy breathing, the sky’s cloudless blue, his tools, summer’s warmth, his money in the bank, a few pieces of jewelry in a small box hidden under the floor, and his footprint in the dust.

Actually, he began to suffer from the absence of the disappeared words, the four words that had given meaning and rhythm to the passing days, nothing else.

Suffering became quiet and persistent, like the touch of a blunt blade, for it would have been senseless to say the situation was as it was because of horseflies, because of his miserable kid brother, or because the thought of death hovered so close by. The memory of prisoners in his charge kept coming back to him. Sometimes when they went berserk he hit them with his cudgel wherever he could, true, yet he had been one of the friendlier guards, one of those who maintained secret little business connections with the prisoners. He had all sorts of confused desires, though his long-term plans were reasonable enough. For example, he longed for cold beer. He envisioned a very young girl approaching, though he saw very well that the path was as empty as ever.

He dreamed of the hairless lips of a young girl’s vagina.

There was a woman in the village who offered to cook for him so that he, being a man, could have warm meals, but he rejected this indecent offer.

By summer’s end he wanted to reach the stage where he could grow strawberries and raspberries to sell on his small property, as nearly everyone else in the nearby villages did with their household acreage.

For this he first had to dig a well.

A pox on it, maybe he’d get dressed properly and go to the capital to visit his crippled kid brother and especially his brother’s big sluttish daughters who, though they don’t know it, are probably his, their uncle’s, by-blows.

If words won’t do the job, he’ll beat the shit out of them.

Four stakes marked the borders of his garden, but he owned the entire abandoned landscape with his gaze. He stood at the center of an enormous flat plate strewn with lowland groves, willow plantations, uncultivated or barely cultivated fruit orchards and vineyards; beyond the gigantic branches of the invisible river, mountains bulged on the rim of the plate. As if the big wide world started beyond that point, where so many baffling things happened, though none of them had anything to do with him except the expected selling price of strawberries and raspberries. He tried to force all his pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and feelings to the rim of this plate. He did not drink beer. He turned on the radio only on Sunday morning when Gypsies played sweetly plaintive Hungarian melodies.