Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

As if her surface were dry and rough, and her inside swelling with delicious juices; as if a subterranean secret vein nourished it with its fluids, a rich oasis in a windblown desert, a tiny lake hidden under drifting sand, a small secret body of water.

What first caught her attention was that the woman did not leave her things all over the apartment, as had all her hysterical, chaotic predecessors who’d stayed for a few weeks or sometimes only a few days. On the contrary, she barely leaves a trace. She eats exceptionally small amounts. She gives the impression of someone making choices from a huge wardrobe. And picks things correctly. Others, driven by greed or insecurity, keep piling up objects around them — the entire fragile, dark art trade is built on this emotional instability — but this one must be infallible when she makes her purchases. She takes the one piece that others would never choose in a lifetime. Lady Erna kept an eye on her to see whether she was a secret eater, stuffing herself at odd times and places, whether what she saw was only false asceticism or hypocrisy. It was not.

Everyone strives to be infallible. Lady Erna herself could not resist eating too much; she had a special weakness for sauces and spicy gravies, chewed every bone dry, sucked everything from chicken bones, dipped fresh bread into the fat gravy of roast meat or with a crust of bread spooned the golden cream off the top of curdled milk or the sweet icings from so many surfaces, gobbled up floating islands.

She had indulged her curiosity too. She wanted to solve the secret of this serious asceticism. She found all sorts of reasons to open the doors of the closet in which, right after moving in, Gyöngyvér had put all her little things. She told Ilona not to stop ironing; she herself would put everything back. Ilona kept silent, shrugged her shoulders and looked put out; she did not know what to make of Mrs. Lehr’s unexpected zeal. An unfamiliar scent that assailed Lady Erna from the closet bore witness to the same, almost painful parsimony that emanated from Gyöngyvér’s supple body. And because she had done this not once or twice but more or less regularly, as if to keep track of what was taking place among Gyöngyvér’s belongings, Ilona slowly began to figure out what the lady of the house was up to.

She used some inexpensive, insignificant perfume; still, Lady Erna had to admit, well, she had got it right. The scent was almost too sweet, yet overall it was rather dry and acrid; on her skin it was as if the sweetness came from summer hay and sun-dried spices. It matched her bodily endowments, as did the style with which she wore her clothes. This was her maddening quality, and this is what probably intoxicated her son.

When she opened the closet door, Lady Erna felt her heart thump in her jugular vein. This wasn’t completely unjustified, since her son kept his shirts there too. She imagined she was doing some harm to her heart with such powerful excitement and also felt that what she was doing was somewhat absurd, but she did it anyway. And if not in the clothes closet, then she rifled through Gyöngyvér’s shoes in the foyer.

Gyöngyvér’s feet, as is the case generally with dry beings, probably did not smell.

And she would tell Ilona, but more for her own benefit than anything else, that she couldn’t find this or that item.

Gyöngyvér did not wear down the heels of her shoes, either; the sight of her graceful feet filled Lady Erna with particular envy.

She removed the cambered silver lid of the ground-glass candy box in which Gyöngyvér kept her cheap costume jewelry and a few pitiful real pieces. She looked at the thin little trinkets, which Gyöngyvér must have received from previous admirers. She glanced at the sloughed-off skins of cast-off lives. The pretty candy box was among the objects Lady Erna had managed to save from her grandfather’s manor house in Jászhanta the night before the inventory was taken for the public auction. She reached in only with her fingers, to expose everything to her eyes, and chuckled, a little ashamed to think that her son, cheap and stingy as he was, would probably add nothing to this poor collection. But she did not take out a single piece, seeing none she cared to examine.

In the depth of her soul, she would have liked to have a daughter-in-law, even one like Gyöngyvér. But not one with such an empty head. Yet even resisting the idea filled her with a certain pleasure.

A kind of physical sensation, as if experiencing her son’s secret joy, or at least understanding it.

See how cleverly she covers her ugly forehead with that pretty little round hat.

Gyöngyvér’s forehead was indeed not attractive. Convex and decently proportioned, but her hair grew in close at the edges, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that; it was not the kind of forehead that could carry off bangs. Of course Lady Erna did not fail to notice that once or twice Gyöngyvér had had her hair styled with bangs cut square above the eyes. Her thick dark hair lent her appearance a kind of wildness, and, probably because she couldn’t abide this, she resorted to removing superfluous hair with the aid of resin wax; but the tiny bloody craters caused by the violence had barely healed when fresh bristles would crop out in their place.

Dark shadow on her forehead.

She longed for tenderness, sensitivity, and refinement; she simpered and grew touchy, and what the little goose could not obtain except perhaps accidentally she was trying to get to with outward show. Of course her pug nose told the world what a low mark the little waif earned in intelligence. And that filled Lady Erna with contentment, if for no other reason than that her persistent physical attraction to the young woman sometimes so confused her that she behaved more brusquely, meanly, or maliciously than she could afford even by her own standards.

All of this, however, had a less common, more delicate aspect, a more intimate map. She was still a little girl when she discovered this map; it was already drawn up.

The buggy was taking her somewhere from the house in Jászhanta, perhaps to the train station, when they turned onto a long plum-tree-lined allée. The trees had been planted when the handsome manor house was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since then they had grown enormous, some had lost branches, so there were gaps in their rich foliage, and she could see clear summer sky through parts of the towering crowns.

She put her gloved hand on Gyöngyvér’s gloved hand for a long moment, lightly. But as soon as they made contact, the light touch gained weight, as if the other hand had been waiting for hers. She felt as if they might lock.

Gyöngyvér, my little girl, she wanted to say. If she’d said it out loud, and the very thought of it made her choke, not only would it sound false, but it could be misunderstood in any number of ways, and then she would only act out a newer, more absurd scene from one of the usual dramas. But that was what she was thinking at that moment. Her awareness was permeated with a sense of her absent daughter, along with the guilt she felt about her. She had been a big girl when they carried her off; she was in her first year at the university when they took away my little girl, though she still wore her hair in thick braids. For two weeks they left no stone unturned trying to get her back from the Gestapo on Melinda Road. Maybe not every stone. The daughter’s appearance now clung to Gyöngyvér’s mature exterior, because the daughter had never become a woman.

She never experienced the things this silly woman enjoys so freely with Lady Erna’s son. Perhaps it’s for the best.

Still, she could not forgive herself, or anyone else.

Most of all she could not forgive the dying man. She had been his daughter in every sense of the word, yet he failed to save her.