Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

He goes down to the river to bathe every night, he said as he buttoned up, and looked again at the pastor, withdrawn behind his indulgent, shy smile.

If you don’t think it impertinent, frankly I’d like to go with you.

The suggestion hit Balter like another real blow. He looked at the pastor; was he mocking him. Gentlemen say things like that to ladies, I’d like to go with you. With a certain leisureliness and sluggishness, he weighed whether to hit the man.

Above the sizzling landscape the cloudless evening sky was flaming red.

You know, at this hour in the evening, the pastor explained, when it’s not so hot anymore, frankly I usually go for a walk anyway.

They started out under the flaming sky, walking side by side for a while on the footpath.

So, did they find the tramp they were looking for so hard.

It’s better that they didn’t. You see, cried the pastor bluntly, one has to admit, frankly, that the good Lord has once again made things turn out more wisely.

The way he saw it, the authorities would have fixed the scoundrel’s wagon for sure if they had found him.

The two men’s voices sounded identical in the flaming air. No voice should rise above the silence of the landscape, neither of them should hurt the other.

By the grace of Jesus Christ they steered clear of the sin of hitting anyone, the pastor told Balter warmly, as if he were initiating him into jealously guarded secrets of Creation. Because he realized they both had much base feeling in them, he didn’t deny it, and wouldn’t care to lie. Frankly, they had wanted to retrieve his grandson’s pants and the miserable creature had stolen bread from the store too. Whether one likes it or not, there’s a murderous instinct in man.

Many damned scoundrels roam all over the world, answered Balter in his own way, very courteously. I should know, you can believe me. I’ve got experience in things like this.

The pastor really didn’t want to upset their fresh understanding, but it was hard to relinquish his missionary intentions.

Without Providence, we are all ignorant children, little children. In our great ignorance we are all sinners.

With cautious glances they measured the effect of their words on each other.

Balter had put up with party seminars and propaganda meetings more easily than with such missionary texts; at political rallies he had listened repeatedly to the theory that only a few more years of hard work were needed to lay the final foundations of socialism. With patience, perseverance, and mainly great vigilance, because the enemy, both without and within, lurked everywhere. He did not believe a word of it, and he knew what the game was really all about. If they put a communist and a fascist in the same cell, and they did, what the hell did they talk about. But the pastor’s words filled him with some primeval passion.

A dead furrow led them across the abandoned orchard where Balter had not had time to fix the devastation.

He did not believe in any kind of providence, and if it was spoken about in such unctuous tones, he preferred to take revenge by swearing. At the mention of communism or fascism he shrugged his shoulders, but the orchard interested him more than providence. What he thought was, a plague and a pox on your comrades, not me, but if things stay as they are and the old lords can’t come back, that’s all right with me too.

Everyone has a mother, that’s what I say, a baron also shits.

When they reached the boundary of Balter’s fertile land near the shore, clearly marked by stakes, they had to continue in single file through a thicket, its soil soft with silt, until they reached the willows by the river.

Balter went in front, the pastor walked behind him.

The pungent vapors of decaying plants pervaded the air.

The water level had dropped to the deep part of the riverbed during these dry months.

The shore was steep.

As if showing off the splendors of his property, Balter led the pastor to a lovely glade in the willows where, standing side by side, they could watch the landscape reveal the powerful sweep of the river and the bare line of the far shore in the reddish vapor of twilight.

So that’s where you used to work, I heard in the village, the pastor said after a long time.

There it lay, at the northern edge of the small cathedral town of many churches, a shape alien to the landscape and to the water, the old block of the baroque penal institution, with its pointed watchtowers and thick brick walls.

No matter where one looked, one couldn’t help seeing those walls; to live close to them and twice a week to preach the word of God there and give testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ — there was no greater ordeal in the pastor’s life.

For thirty years I served there, that’s right, Balter replied quietly, almost bashfully, as if he had heard the dread in the pastor’s voice. He laughed a little. I began under the rule of His Excellency the regent, if you know who I mean, your reverence, then I served our father Rákosi and I swore allegiance to Kádár too.*

I have been doing my service for thirty years also, said the pastor. His tone was more resigned than it had been before.

The other man mustn’t sense too much of the immeasurable difference between the two. Maybe a little. But the pastor thought it wouldn’t be right to miss a chance to testify to his own long service, if only in a modest way. As things were, the distance between them had grown too wide. Because of the testimony he had to give to Christ, the desire for merciless revenge only deepened in the pastor.

And so as not to emphasize the various enormous distances between them while they stood so closely together, he didn’t look at the other man for a long time.

No matter how true it was that he had devoted his vocation to following Christ, he had to take his bloody revenge on someone. He could not avoid the feeling and the compulsion stemming from it.

It was January when I got married, Balter related with charming innocence, I took my oath of service in February, and in February of this year I completed my service. Believe me, it was enough.

We moved here in the month of July from the Tisza, which is where I had my first position — ten years at Tiszavésztő, if you know where that is. That’s how I’ve been spending my service, said the pastor indulgently.

Despite his good intentions the different nature of their services could not be equalized. Or perhaps it could have been if he had eked out of himself a little more goodwill, but then what would he have done about the fate of his only son and his own dark hatred. At best they were equal in age and in the unstoppable rhythm of mortality, which they both had to face.

Still, their long silence did not become unpleasant, since they both were interested more in the intention of what they said than in its literal meaning.

Whatever happened to them before now, they were both on the way out of their lives.

And now I am free, Balter said cautiously.

Which had roughly the effect it would have had if he were a small child who for the first time said something dreadfully indecent out loud. But coming from an old man, the statement had a certain irony. And in the ensuing silence the pastor heard well the sigh escaping from the other man’s heavy body, and then the silence that led to the next sentence.

They were hard years, to be sure, who had it easy. Thus did the pastor go around the problematical subject. Frankly, we shall all make our accounting before the just Lord.

How many things one has to live through during one’s service, replied Balter, equally indulgent. One could go on talking about it until tomorrow morning, but he fell silent quickly, as if he had given himself away with his own unguarded words.