Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Using both hands at once, he disturbed the peace of the water’s surface.

He found the most reliable trace, yet he did not get to what he was looking for. Once the surface was smooth again, he repeated the movement; water and the palms of his hands splashed noisily.

He stared stiffly at his strongly arched hands and with tilted head listened to the sounds. His excited nerves were searching for a comparison, but there is no comparison without memory. As when one feels that something is about to pop into one’s mind, except that with this feeling one cannot comprehend one’s mind because the direct connection between feelings and mind has been severed.

Movement and the sound of movement became the comparison of his inability to remember.

He had discovered in the other human being something that he could not otherwise have realized in himself.

Excitedly he was looking for it between the good and the bad; the unceasing slaps of his palms on the water, speeded by impatience, threw him back to where he would have hastened if he could have remembered. He repeated the movement until the urge to urinate deflected his attention. Although the fly of his pants was open, like a wedge-shaped hole, he did not reach into it until he stopped urinating and the stain on the pants touched the water. Perhaps his hand was led by aggressive angels. He watched the urine stain on his thighs reach the water and then he took out his weenie, shrunk to the size of a child’s. Those angels, like humans, were pushing and pulling the foreskin on it, which made the member’s little hollows fill with blood. It kept growing. They flashed across his mind the lights of another world to make him not worry about what he had lost or could not find. They took away from the dimness of this world as much as they gave from the light of the other world.

Thus did they take away from him what Dávid had left in him of the secret madness of his countenance. For the sake of total forgetting, they even returned a little bit of his memories.

He caught sight of himself crawling along the edge of a deep ditch. At the bottom of the ditch lay a kitchen alarm clock, still ticking, but while with his ten fingers he scraped decaying fallen leaves to cover it up, it slowly stopped.

Nobody should see what he had done to the alarm clock, nobody should hear of his sin.

I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to, he shouted as his foster father beat him with his belt, beating him bloody. His foster mother followed with screams, but not because she wanted to protect him. His foster father’s belt buckle hit his thighs, waist, and back; the man hit anything he could reach.

And he kept scraping the decaying leaves, unto his sin, until it grew dark with the lunatic brightness.

An ambulance took him away in the middle of the night while, his lips turned blue, he was still thrashing about and shouting, frothy saliva flying, I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to do it.

Mighty was the struggle the angels put up for him and with him, and it tired him so much he could barely drag his dripping limbs to the shore.

They were lurching, staggering with him, tugging at him; their eyes were frightened by the indifferent sunshine. They tottered into the thicket, helplessly going around in circles with him, until they found a comfortable place under a bush where they would put him to sleep.

That is why his pursuer could find his abandoned sandals on the empty shore.

While they were shouting back and forth, hunting for footprints, finding fresh ones, he slept sweetly in his hiding place.

This is how it happened; all of this did happen. While the pastor found that no matter how much he had thought about all this, Creation’s logic would remain hidden from him. An uncomfortable time had gone by since Dávid went outside without a word. The pastor sat in the dark for hours, praying, and now it felt good to rest his thoughts on Dávid’s disobedience.

If they find the tramp, they might kill him.

His prayers led him nowhere.

What a mean, useless child, he thought. Didn’t I tell him to urinate inside the house. Now I must go looking for him.

What he could be grateful for to his God was that they found only some footprints and could not kill him.

When he had returned home the evening before, greatly agitated by his defeat and having found no prayer with which to calm his primitive hatred, he decided that, citing illnesses, he would ask his bishop to let him retire. Why in the world does that good-for-nothing kid want to piss outside all the time. There will be no problem, the bishop never thought much of the pastor’s temperament or service. Varró was a man of great learning, the bishop admitted, but he preferred to use brawn rather than brain; that was the sum of his opinion. But he mentioned this only to his secretary. He did this on purpose because the secretary worked for the state security services and the bishop knew it.

If he carefully conveyed information to them through the secretary, in time he received a correct and practical response.

Varró kept his mouth shut, the bishop could be pleased about that, but he bluntly refused to cooperate with state officials, behavior that the bishop had both approved privately and several times taken exception to publicly. Because of the pastor’s executed son, the bishop had had to face the music at the ministry of religion.

A week later, in the presence of the bishop, the secretary was ruminating over the abstract doctrinal question whether a Christian, having to choose between ecclesiastical solidarity and national interest, shouldn’t give preference to the latter.

The bishop replied without batting an eye that for a man belonging to any of the reformed churches, the two interests could not be in conflict.

This silent battle had been going on for years.

Finally state officials tried stealthily to have the village presbyters turn against the pastor and send him away on some pretext.

The physician’s wife and the secretary of the local party council were called in several times for so-called conversations, which is to say the two were taken, in a car with government license plates, to a secret-service apartment in Szentendre. The physician’s wife had a nervous breakdown, she did not stop crying and kept asking why, but why. The bishop would not stand for such strong-arm tactics in his diocese. He was also a member of the secret society then trying, under the guise of willing cooperation and tactical accommodation, to alleviate some of the damage caused by the Russian regime.

Thus he had to make some very sensitive concessions in order to gain some indulgence from government authorities in Varró’s case.

Varró knew very little of this, except that from then on his bishop was even more annoyed with him. He took it amiss when in 1957 the pastor’s son was hanged and not even given a proper grave. Because of his attitude, Varró assumed that the bishop sided with the government officials after all or perhaps worked directly for them, that that was the true state of affairs.

And he could not deny that he revived the idea of his own retirement after hearing the lamentable life story of the retired prison guard. But what tranquillity would he find in retirement, having failed to find any in his life. The only correct deed of his life would be to give up his calling, because then he’d cease deluding himself or others about being able to serve them honorably.

Just as his bishop wanted to be rid of him, it was good for him too to be free of himself.

Yet the way he thought about these matters differed greatly from the bishop’s thinking. Because the bishop kept the church’s interest, which is to say its principle of utility, in the forefront of his mind, for him the borders between tactical accommodation and forced cooperation were blurred. Varró, however, did not believe that what was useful or unavoidable was necessarily moral, and this pagan thought positively tortured him. The only deed that might please God, he imagined, would be if once, just once, he could convey to one other soul his own true feelings. And by this he meant the sheer human readiness for faith, which had appeared in him on an overcast day under the mighty sky when he was a small child and had accompanied him ever since. Faith justified truth; faith was also the test of true feelings, not the other way around. Until he could conjure up at least the necessity of faith for another human being, he could not retire; without that he would find no rest.