Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Whatever laughing László did, crackbrained Imre did as well; he couldn’t help it. But if Imre, head and arms flying in all directions, began to pour out all those superfluous words, László would accompany the many sentences with the lazy nod of an experienced man. The truth of the younger brother was reinforced by the prestige of the older. Bizsók also noticed that the older brother never questioned the younger one’s word when they were around Hungarians; at most he’d busy himself with something else.

Perhaps it was only that eternally valid difference in the depths of their souls that made their furrowed faces slightly different.

In a state of constant readiness, his eyes wide, Imre concentrated on what the right thing was to say, while the older Téglás brother knew what they should do.

They ran as they pushed the wheelbarrows heavy with the hot molten material, and then they emptied them with a single quick lift, neatly tipping them over; sizzling and sputtering, the tar oozing out in front of Tuba, who with wide leisurely strokes of his very heavy leveling blade smoothed out any lumps in the hot mass, kneeling then squatting then kneeling again. He worked with incredible elegance and absolute inner discipline. The fifth man on the team, Bizsók, was both their mechanic and their supervisor. Sometimes he would check with his level and other instruments on a half-finished job when it was still possible to make corrections if need be, but the judgment of Tuba’s eyes seldom disappointed him. This Bizsók was the oldest and, by the nature of things, most consequential member of the team. The Gypsies idolized him for his fairness, though they had his weak points pegged as well. Sometimes among themselves they would contemptuously call him dumb peasant. Because it was not his work, not even his nice family, but his apple orchard that meant everything to him. He’d hardly have gotten home from work after a long train ride when he’d head straight for his orchard; he never stopped working. The Gypsies considered him a wastrel, a man who’d wasted his life for the sake of unpredictable profits. If the road construction company, which covered half the country, hadn’t urgently needed every skilled hand it could get, and if Bizsók hadn’t had the sense of duty he had, he could have retired, but as an old-fashioned man he considered the world’s anonymous needs as a law governing his personal life.

He kept at both his job and his apple orchard for the same reason, though he couldn’t have expressed in words what his compulsion was.

And the Gypsies certainly couldn’t have told him what to do differently.

Since both his grown sons had built their own houses, many different jobs awaited him, and him alone, in his enormous bountiful orchard. Occasionally he even helped his foster daughter, though because of her foreign blood he was a little afraid of her. Bizsók was rational and somewhat reserved, a man whose circumstances had taught him sensible husbandry, so he created order for himself out of whatever was at his disposal. He came from one of the most deprived areas of the Alföld, but he’d never thought of himself as poor among the truly poor. He couldn’t, in any case, because a man in a Tiszahát-region village with two threshing machines to his name was considered a rich man in those days. He had inherited one machine from his father before the war, the other he received when he came home from a POW camp, from the bequest of a Jewish thresher who had perished in the war. It did not take long before both machines were taken away from him, and thereafter he had lived away from his family.

He left because he couldn’t swallow the insult of being ordered about at the collective farm’s machine and tractor station by his former day laborers, the very men who’d been responsible for taking his expensive threshing machines away from him.

Sitting in the high saddle of the steamroller, his arms resting on the steering wheel, he watched his men from behind his thick glasses. These round spectacles were surely a peculiar old item. The ravages of time had turned the translucent frame yellow, and it seemed to have become organically fused with the dark, sunburned cushions of his fleshy face. A battery may run down, an axle may wear out, the cohesive tension in the molecules of artificial materials may diminish, but he had a hard time giving up his longing for eternity even when it concerned only a pair of glasses. Not for himself, not for his family, but on the roads and in his apple orchard he worked for eternity, or at least against mortality.

For years this reasonable and experienced man had been conducting a quiet battle against the natural fate of his glasses. He could not have cherished his own life more; as a soldier and a prisoner of war he’d learned not to value life too much, but he treated his glasses with a circumspect caution bordering on madness that he never accorded himself or others.

The best place for his glasses was on the wide bridge of his slightly flattened nose, where he could nourish its material, in the perishing cold of winter and in the heat of summer, with the warmth of his skin and the fine grease of his perspiring pores. He never removed his glasses unnecessarily. Not even when walking from the cold air into a warm place, which fogged up the lenses. He owned something he could protect only by touching it as rarely as possible. He was content with his fate too, as long as he didn’t think about it.

István Bizsók was the full name of the man with the glasses.

The road builders hauled two gray trailers with them to their jobs; they never built a new road, only repaired existing ones, doing their share to keep the old highways in working order. Among themselves they called one trailer the office because under the barred window was a small table covered with wrapping paper on which Bizsók kept drawings of road sections to be repaired, plans and accounts relating to the expected materials to be used, warehouse receipt-books, work logs, workers’ time sheets, a ruler, a few pencils, and an eraser, but nothing else. Empty pay envelopes were kept in the drawer, which had a working lock. Next to the door stood the stove on which they cooked supper in the fall and early spring months or on rainy summer days.

In the dim far end of the trailer Bizsók had his bed, which was considered comfortable. The second trailer served as quarters for the four Gypsies.

Sometimes they set up the two trailers perpendicularly to each other, creating a small courtyard, and sometimes they had the trailers parallel and facing, making a small street for their communal life.

They picked carefully the locations where they settled. What sorts of folk lived in the area, were their dogs wild, what was close to them, what was farther away. Gypsies from the Alföld traditionally did not consider peasants as human and they feared them as they did wild animals. But Tuba came from Transdanubia, from the boundary region on the shores of the Mura river, and things were different with him; he also behaved differently with Hungarians. He knew ethnic Croatians, Serbs, and Slavs, and he claimed they were even wilder and crueler than Hungarians. Because a Hungarian, when he’s alone, is a coward, but these others are wild even when they have no help from anywhere. Bizsók had to be on guard to see that the locals did not blame the Gypsies when something went missing. They had to know the directions the wind blew, where there was water, where the nearest well was. For some time now he had been relying on Tuba’s judgment to answer these questions. János Tuba was the first Gypsy to be hired on this work team; other Gypsies then joined up as Hungarian workers slowly left the company. Later, Bizsók brought in the Téglás brothers and in turn they brought their hapless sister’s son, poor little Jakab, who had been with them for only a few weeks.