Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

His visions and images came and dwindled, to be replaced by new ones. The persistently quiet suffering drew myriad little grooves on the old feelings.

He did everything as he had done before and he forgot everything according to his sensibilities, but he began to fear his own emptiness, which he had not noticed before; he especially dreaded the unavoidable, dull suffering.

As if feelings were calling his attention only to things of which he had no definite memories.

Perhaps it was better that he didn’t.

Namely, he was scared that his son or one of the released prisoners might surprise him here.

His own son will kill him.

During the spring days when he was still going about naked, such a thing had not occurred to him; he would not have thought about his son or the prisoners or anyone. When in the afternoons he fastened to his bicycle his two flat plastic containers and went to the public well in the nearest village for drinking water, he carefully locked up the house and hid the key under a stone. The stone often reminded him of his crippled kid brother, whom he used to beat throughout their childhood, and he thought he could use this stone to beat his own son to death. It felt good to beat his brother, he’d longed to do it; after all, their mother wanted it that way. That he should not have to live his miserable life. He understood his mother’s wish that somehow, gradually, he should beat his brother to death.

Only their helpless grandmother tried to protect the cripple, slipping bread crusts to him on the sly, since the others gave him hardly anything to eat.

Every time he came back with the water, he had the impression that in his absence someone had been prowling around the house. And the woman spied on him at the well, showing up with her water cans the minute he arrived. Anger directed at someone specific drew another furrow in his face. And the same thing was repeated when at twilight, as was his custom, he walked to the river to wash up.

He looked for tracks in the silt but found none. Or staying among the willows he watched his property, expecting to notice someone lurking.

He took long twilight shadows for human figures.

These experiences ruined his mood; his quiet rejoicing died away completely because of his fear. His hearing and vision became keener, however. If, having grown weary in the heat of an early summer afternoon, he sensed a brief shadow flitting past above the landscape, he knew without raising his face that it was the golden oriole heading home. Still, he shuddered. All the other similar sounds, shadows, and stirrings repeated themselves with the same regularity; only snaps he could not anticipate made his heart skip a beat.

And he kept seeing over and over how he had thrown the cripple into the freshly forked pig manure.

Better drown in the manure, he can’t work, anyway.

Watch what you’re saying, Teréz, don’t tempt God like that.

You watch it, you shut your stinking mouth or else I’ll sit on it.

You put him out naked in the frost. The Virgin Mary watched over him and saved his miserable life.

Then let your Virgin Mary give him bread.

Once she was merciful to you too.

The ferry receded in the fortieth minute of every hour; in the twentieth minute it approached. With ceaseless buzzing the bees kept busy, with ceaseless jolts and creaks the tipcarts used in the distant stone quarry moved above Dunabogdány. Maybe he’s dead, he thought — he hoped — about his miserable brother, and can speak to me only from afar. At half past ten in the morning, two explosions shook the air, and this was repeated at four in the afternoon. All night long, dump trucks carried stones from the quarry, and when they hurled their load into the bottom of the empty barges, he thought of hell. If he felt some mysterious trembling approach from the bowels of the earth, within half an hour it would turn into the puffing of a tugboat, the loud rumble of its engine; its slow movement occasionally brought with it snatches of radio music in the air. There were also stray noises, a jingling from close by, say, unconnected to any movement; the faint rumbling of a cart, the squeaking of a wheel’s hub, or the noise of shouting, even though no one and nothing seemed to be moving anywhere. Nocturnal singing of some drunk or perhaps that of an approaching or receding ghost, which awakened the village dogs one after the other and they could no longer find rest, howling desperately behind the decaying fences. The steady chirping of crickets. The drawn-out mewling of cats, the persistent music of frogs, the grasshoppers scraping their long legs in the dry grass, the short pops of their takeoffs.

The wider branch of the Danube also brought sounds from the far shore.

So vividly that he seemed to hear, at the appropriate times, the opening of the cells or, in the evening, the reverberation of their closing.

He accompanied them all, from door to door, on the checkered floor of the long circular gallery.

Five months had gone by and he had no reason to regret his decision. He prepared the soil for growing strawberries and raspberries; he hired a well digger. Since he was beginning to learn for the first time in his life what it was like to feel, another furrow grew deep among his feelings. This meant, approximately, that his amorphous dead mother whispered to him, telling him what he should do. After close to thirty years of silence, his mother now spoke as a guardian spirit, from which he concluded that this guardian spirit had always been standing by him because it had no other place. Neither of them had any other place. Even if they had put away his miserable kid brother, they wouldn’t have done anything bad. As if he were saying, laughing hard, in that case I wouldn’t have been fucking around with his wife. In retrospect he regretted not having had that lecherous woman in his life. It seemed that his brother had to stay alive if only for this reason. He had a better time with her than with his own wife. Considering one’s entire life one deserves this much. This was the thought that strengthened him in his final verdict against his wife. Sometimes she tried, made an effort, and sometimes she didn’t, but what could be done if they had no understanding between them.

And that, after all, is painful for a man too.

At the same time another thought made him equally uncertain. Ever since his hearing had sharpened, this other thought also deepened the bluntly aching furrows in the place of silenced memories. As if he had not chosen the right place for himself. As if throughout a lifetime his wife had been doing with his son what his own mother had done with him. That is how his fate caught up with him. He did not regret his decision, he tried not to regret anything; the prices of strawberries and blueberries will be good, but now he heard sounds of the last thirty years coming too close. His fate had him in a double bind. The distance that had seemed, from the other side of the river, looking out from behind the high prison walls, infinitely far and unreachable seemed but a stone’s throw away when looked at under an open sky. From the other shore freedom had seemed different from what it seemed to be here. For ten years he had been preparing for retirement, he’d bought this abandoned fruit orchard in the Tótfalu area seven years ago, it took two years to build his house on his days off, and the more he insisted to himself that he hadn’t erred, that he couldn’t have made an enormous mistake, the stronger his doubts became. He now received what his kid brother and father had received from the mutual protective alliance forged between him and his mother. Still, the unpleasant feelings had a pleasant side. He could not help hearing those insinuating snatches of sound from which he at last had freed himself.