Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Neither here nor anywhere else did they have a home.

As he listened to the sound of thumping feet, various thuds and seemingly endless murmurs and rummaging about, Bizsók contentedly acknowledged that their place was too small for the Gypsies. His contentment had to do with his privileged position, and perhaps there is no just man who doesn’t find his enjoyable privileges flattering.

Somehow he had to consider himself to be a little above the others.

To do this, he sometimes considered himself better because he was their supervisor and mechanic, sometimes because he was older, sometimes because he was Hungarian, and sometimes because, to his great good luck, he was not a Catholic.

They were all lonely here, so much so that they couldn’t accustom themselves to other people anymore, couldn’t share their loneliness with others. But they were also used to the fact that in their loneliness they lived in close proximity to their fellow workers’ loneliness. Although he enjoyed his small rightful privileges very much, with passing years Bizsók began to miss, especially in the night hours, the special silent attention of another person. As he locked himself in his trailer every night, he’d sometimes think that tomorrow he’d take care of this too. To spell it out, what he meant was that he should make up for what he’d missed or neglected. First thing tomorrow morning he’d move this other man’s bed into his trailer. He was thinking not of Tuba, not of sharing his privileges, but of Tuba’s bed.

He had already picked out a place for the bed.

We’d be much more comfortable like this, he would say bashfully on that imagined tomorrow morning.

The Gypsies shouldn’t be so cramped.

When talking to himself, he addressed Tuba as if he were not a Gypsy. In the mornings the dangerous proposition would lurk in the back of his mind because, ever since Jakab had started working with them, the day began very rambunctiously in the other trailer. Luckily, by afternoon he’d forget what he had wanted and didn’t remember it until going to bed again. What he envied was not their rambunctiousness but something indefinable. Actually, he could have said it out loud, for now there was no other Hungarian on the team from whom he’d have to hide his generosity and love of humankind.

He imagined the festive moment; they would all be together. He imagined the deep silence that would follow his words. But it was precisely the image of this pampered silence that kept him from finding an appropriate occasion for the needed words.

They knew everything about each other, or almost everything.

Behind János Tuba stood his dead grandfather who had raised him until he was twelve. Everything he knew he knew from him — his concentration, the broad arcs of his movements; he learned his ease and dignity from him too. His grandfather had neither land nor house; there was nothing anyone could take from him. No one had given him anything for free, either, but he had a fine axe, a good gouging hoe, and a few homemade curved and straight-blade knives. From early spring until the first snowfall the two of them roamed the villages along the Mura. Tuba very seldom saw the inside of a school when his grandfather was alive. If gendarmes turned violent or county officials threatened his grandfather with fines, they stayed outside a little longer than their work required. When there was nothing left of a tree felled in autumn and his grandfather could make nothing further from the shavings, they had to move on. For a long time he had no idea what it was like to play; his childhood passed without a friend who might have initiated him into secrets or knowledge other than his grandfather’s.

At school he observed the Hungarian children with great concern, watching what sort of things they did among themselves, because he understood neither their enjoyments nor their meanness nor their little business deals.

Not only was he unfamiliar with their feelings but he didn’t understand the words Hungarians used to try to restrain their freely rambling desires and fickle attractions. He and his grandfather slept under the open sky. He didn’t know why his grandfather had been cast out by his own people or why the two of them had to live beyond the boundaries of their own tribe. They spent every winter on the mountain in Rátka, in a remote, well-concealed hut his grandfather had built. They could see from the house the great bend in the frozen-over Mura, with the willows. Border guards would interrogate his grandfather when they were looking for fugitives, and they’d shout and swear; once they took him away because they thought he was lying. But other people could not see the hut, not from any angle, unless they spotted smoke rising from its chimney. They came off the mountain only when it began to thaw, when at night the ice cracked and popped in the river.

They could be content because in every village people waited for them impatiently.

They could find lodging in any house.

Uncle Tuba this and Uncle Tuba that, you know how much we love you, an’ the little boy’ll feel better with our young ’uns; with words like these, the peasants would coax the grandfather.

You don’t have to worry about food, the woman is cooking for nine anyway.

It was most difficult in the autumn because that was when his grandfather had to bargain hard with the peasants.

When life had gone to sleep in the trees, old Tuba’s raw material, a peasant would go with them to pick out the right poplar, willow, chestnut, or linden in his woods or at the edge of his hayfield. Of course the obstinate peasant wanted to trick the Gypsy, which made him act foolishly, as if deliberately setting out to get the worst deal for himself. The peasant would never let old Tuba cut down a tree that he had singled out as a good one — and from which, when spring came, Tuba could carve for the peasant a scalding tub for plucking chickens, a washbasin, baking peels, a tray, and spoons for lard. Or the peasant would cut it down himself and by springtime would have used it all up for firewood, stupid peasant. They started with the larger pieces, the scalding tub and washbasin; from the interior of such bowl-like pieces they lifted, very smartly and economically, wood for the smaller items, so that in the end only shavings remained. The peasant needed everything that could be carved from his tree, just as the carvers could not have survived for more than two weeks without the grandfather’s labor. But a variety of profound irritations and annoyances lurked in this necessary and strict exchange.

You won’t cut down that tree of mine, you filthy Gypsy, damn your mother’s dear God Almighty.

And when after all the unnecessary jabber they finally came to terms, the stupid peasant always wanted to have more things carved from his tree than there was wood for. He’d roll his eyes and watch from a distance to see if the old man and boy were not cheating him. Or he’d ask for something that old Tuba would not carve from a tree for all the money in the world.

That’s a peasant for you, doesn’t even know the value or nature of his own tree.

Of course there was always more in a tree than what the peasant could imagine in that hard noggin of his. But they didn’t let him know that, let him be content thinking he’d managed to trick the Gypsy again. The Gypsy can’t help it if he has more brains than the cunning peasant, who always wants more and who always loses everything.

The extra objects disappeared for a while under ashes or shavings and turned up later in faraway markets and fairs.

They could have made even more money on each tree if they’d had a horse and wagon, so Grandpapa Tuba daydreamed; necessity made him more honest than he could reasonably be expected to be.

They were given food and shelter, this and that, some produce, some secondhand clothes, but to survive the winter they needed a little money as well. The old man did not want much — to carve out no more than a few extra spoons, well, maybe a bowl or washbasin. The peasant who could outwit him had not yet been born, and if he had been, old Tuba and his grandson would give his house a wide berth.