Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

He had much to be silent about. Before he left his job, he had had to reconfirm both his verbal and written oaths to keep his silence.

People say you are alone, is your dear wife no longer alive, if I may ask frankly, said the pastor deliberately but cautiously, as if at the moment when the other opened up he wanted to reach even further into the darkness. But in fact he was thinking about his own fate.

If you only knew how much my old lady is still alive and living her own life, if I may put it that way, Balter replied. It’s not the kind of life you’d understand, he said, and his voice reverberated with a hatred for educated people that he’d accumulated over many decades and which felt at this moment just like the hatred he felt for his wife and son.

Though my wife wasn’t a regular whore, no worry about that.

It was probably his surprise at opening up like this that made his reply come out so coarsely.

I must say, though, to be frank with you, she wasn’t much better. So why shouldn’t she live her own life, he added with an unpleasantly grating laugh. I couldn’t care less.

That is how, at that moment, the ignominy of the two men’s fate became entwined.

They glanced at each other in their mutual shame, as if they had no way to avoid this common ignominy. They could not have been more different; nothing bound them together but their age; and they saw nothing in each other’s eyes but that they were both men.

The first word was lacking.

In the pastor, the lack of a daily dose of good had become so acute that he could make no room for more evil. He asked no more questions, didn’t want to turn more of the man’s evil on himself. When he heard Balter’s indecent laugh, apathy settled into his heart, the most dangerous kind of apathy.

Balter suspected rigid rejection and hard moral judgment behind the spectacles. What more could he expect from such a powerful man. His superiority shrank, now consisting only of the fact that his wife was indeed alive. He could have done nothing with the other man except, in anger about his own fate, knock him out.

Yet the other man’s mute sorrow pierced his self-esteem as a pin would a balloon.

He almost cried out in the evening silence.

My wife waited for me, sir, ambushed me with a sack, and my only son beat me until I was bloody. If you want to know how they did it, I’ll be happy to tell you. With the poker. They broke four of my ribs, he cried, and seeing the effect of his words on the pastor’s face, he added something that sounded truly strange.

If I don’t get killed, I’ll have to kill my potential killer.

The water carried his voice on its whirling surface, and from the reddish shore of Vác an echo returned it.

It could not be determined whether he was referring to his wife or his son. They went on trying to gauge in each other’s eyes what might happen next.

Not for anything in the world would he tell the pastor more serious things about his son, though he had much to tell.

The water was lapping the sand gently in front of them, and if the two men did not go at each other it was because of the heart-numbing apathy that had somewhat tamed the pastor’s murderous impulse. Bats flew over their heads and the screeching of nocturnal birds was heard from among the willows. When the pastor finally spoke again, only the Creator might have known what nonsense he was going to come up with.

It’s been four full years since my poor dear wife, my sweet little Emmi, my one and only died. This was his dulled, pained response, and he almost broke down in the middle of it; while he struggled for words and for air with his trembling lips, he had the feeling that with every word he should bow to the ground.

He wanted to throw light on the other man’s fate with his own.

The disgrace of the uttered words instantly disgraced his dead.

His dull cry of pain had no echo.

Even after so many decades, he could not predict what a man locked hermetically in his will and physical strength might do with his feelings. Neither of them failed to notice that in the interval of their struggle with these blind emotions, the searchlights on the prison watchtowers had been turned on. The beams bore through the twilight; the harsh light spread and stretched out over the water.

Reflected light fell on Balter’s eyes and on the pastor’s glasses.

My dear son, my only one, like a common criminal, like a dog, he continued, crying out in his pain even more dully, they threw him into an unmarked grave, you must know who they were, I don’t know anything, nothing, they shot him or hanged him.

Without tearing himself away from Balter’s shining face, he jerked his head toward the other shore.

It’s true. Not where you worked but in the terrible prison on Kozma Street,* at least that’s what one supposes. This much I had to tell you.

He managed to unload this portion of his rage and then retrieve some of it with his explanation.

Balter had to take his eyes off the tormented man, though his professional curiosity was immediately aroused to know during which political wave the death sentence might have been issued. He had little doubt it had to do with 1956. To place the case correctly in the chronology, all he had to do was to look at the pastor and gauge the quality of his agitation with his sense organs. He could endure his own defeat only if he unilaterally relinquished their fellowship, which until a moment ago he had strongly expected the pastor would do. War criminals and relatives of Arrow Cross men behaved humbly; they could not afford such outbursts. And the debased and humiliated relatives of communists lacked anger and hatred, and they never gave up their rebellious, haughty conviction in the rectitude of their cause. Balter yanked his shirt and towel off his shoulder and slapped them down on the cracked silt; before the other man could try to stop him he undid his belt and shed his pants in a single vehement movement.

As if denying his decency, he stepped out of his pants and started for the thin stream at the center of the riverbed. As if with this majestic gesture he was telling the pastor that their audience had ended.

Before he could comprehend the other man’s nakedness, offered up as prey, the pastor quickly turned aside and without a word began to walk away. Not to see the other man’s genitals again; he did not wish himself so great a humiliation. And when he was certain he could see nothing of the man but his shadow in the light hovering on the water, he stopped and very loudly called back.

May God bless you, then.

Hearing his words echo from the other shore, from the episcopal see and from the heavy reddish brick walls of the prison, he knew his request for a blessing was in fact a curse.

By then Balter was in the water up to his knees, slapping some on his chest and shoulder before dipping his whole body in.

Driven once more by the zeal of correction, the pastor began.

May the Lord watch over you, guide your every step. That is what I shall ask him to do.

Again his voice came back to him as a threat; his apology to the other man was in vain, and in vain would he pray for the immense mercy of forgiveness.

There is no forgiveness.

The first ripe apricot fell off the tree in the middle of Balter’s garden just after midnight. It fell from somewhere near the top of the tree, hitting and grazing branches in its fall, and the first thud, which awakened Balter, was quickly followed by others.

Dávid slept peacefully that night, though he usually tossed, talked, and shouted in his sleep, or even walked around the dark rooms of the parsonage as if he were awake. His older sister and grandfather had to be on the lookout, though in the one-story house he could not harm himself as he might in the apartment in Budapest, where he also sleepwalked.