Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

And this was no small gratification.

When at dusk he went to wash up in the river and while he stood in the water up to his ankles, soaping his body, his eyes gazed longer and longer at the towering prison walls on the far shore.

It happened on one of these quiet summer days that another human being appeared in the landscape, congenial even in its isolation.

This man had very vague notions about where he was coming from and no notion whatsoever about where he was going.

Where he had come from must have been a bad place, since moving in itself, being on the move, was good for him. He possessed abstract and refined notions such as those whose lack Balter was beginning to realize in himself but did not know what to do with because he had no experience in abstraction. The further this other man moved from the palpably bad, the more he showered himself, in his heart and mind, with inexplicable good — until everything turned out to be good for him and none of the bad remained. He had crossed over on the other branch of the river, on the Visegrád side, so the ferrymen had not brought him here.

A few people saw him walk slowly across the bridge at Tótfalu.

He did not have to engage anyone in conversation. He couldn’t have, anyway, because he thought exclusively according to the most ethical standards.

If someone had stopped him and told him to turn on his heels and go back where he came from and be quick about it or else he’d be in big trouble, at most the threatening tone might have frightened him. This is how he interpreted for himself what he did not understand in this world, putting things into his own language after some delay. There was nothing wrong with his organs of hearing or speech; as a child, he was just like all the other children. He became the victim of an adolescent shock and since then had neither heard nor spoken, and instead of seeing people’s faces he saw only vague spots. He did not look anyone in the eye. Ever since that incident, the condensed sense of any one moment of his life, good or bad, could almost completely replace the condensed sense of any other moment, good or bad; in one respect, then, he was occupying himself with the same kind of ethical issue that philosophers — always touchy about their concepts — have worried about ever since Aristotle.

Chaos could set in, however, when he happened to linger in the murky waters of the bad or in the very mud of the worst, because to remind him then of the good with nice words was futile. While in the thicket of good he could still almost remember the bad, but if he did not behave himself and was administered additional doses of bad, even with the kindest medical intentions he disappeared completely.

This is how he thought about things.

In his exterior, by the way, there was nothing conspicuous.

His slight build, acquired before the adolescent shock, a hesitant good-natured smile on his lips, large, badly scratched, and infected pimples on his forehead, scabs on top of scabs ready to bleed at any time, and the shirt of his brand-new dark-blue workman’s clothes buttoned to his neck made him seem much younger than his years. Heavy black stubble covered his face; still, he could be taken for a pale apprentice sent to the store for a couple of rolls and half a liter of milk.

He had been on the road for three days.

He’d escaped from an asylum in the Buda area and had been peacefully making his way across the mountains. He first stole something to eat in Pilisszenkereszt and then in Pilisszentlászló. At Leányfalu there was an ice-cream vendor, and he came off the mountain to the highway that ran like a ribbon along the foot of the mountain, but he couldn’t get his hands on any ice cream.

The vendor was hawking his merchandise on the steep, badly paved streets. His wagon bounced on the cobblestones as he worked to keep it steady, and he never left it unguarded, not even for a second.

Now the road was leading him through this miserable little village, stifled in the midday heat, where neither trees nor bushes could grow tall, not around the houses and not in the gardens. There wasn’t any shade anywhere. Only in the churchyards or on the priest’s and parson’s quiet properties could one see some old linden trees. Dogs lying in the shade of whitewashed walls or gates did not bark at him, because his feet made little sound. He wore loosely laced much-too-large ankle boots that flapped a bit, and no socks.

He had filched the boots and the new workman’s clothes the day before in Leányfalu from an open and unattended trailer for workers while the road-building Gypsies were having a beer in the nearby roadside kitchen with Bizsók, their older, Hungarian work manager. In exchange he left behind the clothes he had on, just as he pulled them off his body; he had stolen those the day before from a weekend mountain lodge he had broken into, where later the astonished owners found his old pair of pants, ripped at the seat and around the knees, a pair of bad-smelling white sneakers, and a striped pajama jacket with the oval emblem, reminiscent of a bloodstain, of the health institution from which he had escaped.

Hens were pecking in the open ditch running in front of the houses, and when he stopped at a roadside morello tree to eat some of the overripe fruit, a rooster began to crow in the bare yard.

He probably would not have moved on until he had eaten all the fruit he could reach or until some indignant person ran out from behind the picket fence, under repair, to protest his stealing the sour cherries. But people in the general store across the street noticed him and, somewhat puzzled, acknowledged that in the midday heat a stranger had appeared in their village. And then, before they could make any comment, a medium-size truck whizzed by at breakneck speed, tarps flapping wildly, a cloud of dust in its wake exuding the smell of freshly baked bread.

The bread’s here, Mariska, shouted an older man toward the darkened house behind the picket fence, and the women in the store were saying the same thing.

It did come, after all.

Didn’t I tell you it would. You see.

Every day, the arrival of the bread was regarded as exceptional since on some days no bread came at all or the amount delivered was much less than was needed. The villagers had to be on the lookout. Ever since they had handed over their land and animals to the cooperative farm, they hadn’t baked at home. They received grain from the cooperative according to work units performed, but for miles around not a single mill remained where they might have ground their meager stores of grain into flour; eventually they dismantled the brick ovens in their homes too.

The truck slowed down and then in a wide arc backed up to the store’s open door.

Without a word the stranger followed the scent of the bread.

That day there was no midday ringing of bells.

No wonder then that Balter, who had been cooling himself under his fecund apricot tree while waiting for the midday bell, felt an unjustified restlessness in the silence.

This day remained in the village’s history as the day on which it should have been midday at any moment but midday never arrived.

Ever since horseflies had forced him to retreat, he had no need for a watch, because this hour was the culmination of Balter’s day.

The horseflies signaled that the sun was at its zenith.

He took cover from them in the shade, taking his time, carefully removing his perspiration-soaked shirt and hanging it on a sunny branch. Sat down on the bare sand and let mild shady breezes slowly evaporate the moisture from his skin. It felt good to stretch his limbs, tired from the morning’s work, and give them a little longer to rest. His eyes closed from time to time, he could easily doze off. His eyes emerged again from under his heavy eyelids only when he saw or felt something that ultimately he could not have seen or felt.