Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

I’ll die, she shouted, keeping her voice down, I’ll die if you don’t tell me.

Geerte, in surprise, held her breath.

How could she possibly know I wanted to tell her something.

And then, along with the next sentence, hoarse with pain and shame she spat the words out.

I wanted to say that I’m hungry, I wanted to say I’m starved, Erna.

I’m thirsty, and I absolutely don’t feel like bringing you your stupid pump from the next room.

That’s what I wanted to tell you.

Silently and perhaps involuntarily they both laughed, which had the effect of a sobering wink, indicating how well they understood each other.

Erna freed herself from the embrace and slowly sat up, but neither of them let go of the other’s eyes.

Geerte, not to be alone, not to be left desperately to herself, reached after her.

She has finally understood; and this filled Erna with great serenity.

She felt enormous, powerful; with her blue-veined, swollen breasts, she ruled over and could have fed all humanity, but she no longer had any weight. They made barely perceptible movements. Even if in their own minds they were addressing themselves to each other, from this moment on they spoke each to herself, and about strange things that had no connection to and very little to do with the situation. Erna said to herself, I must check the dates, the years. She had a great urge to grab her coat, go to the library and look up the years, and she felt it so naturally that Geerte sat up, startled, sensing something of Erna’s strangeness.

However, she was wrong in assuming she was being rudely rejected.

Simultaneously they let go of each other’s gaze and hands.

And as they came off the bridge onto muddy Margit Boulevard, the convex basalt cobblestones began to rattle and toss the heavy taxi, whose springs were too stiff to absorb the shocks. I’ll get it for you in a minute, madam doctor, patience, please, said the cabbie, raising his voice against the noise, almost shouting. Just let me get through this damn section here. Anyway, I’d like to ask you something, madam doctor, if I may.

She didn’t understand where the driver had come up with this stupid madam doctor phrase, and what did he want from her anyway. She did not like, she could not get used to the idea of the help becoming independent. How could he possibly know that she had earned a doctorate when she never used the title.

The road ahead was clear all the way to Török Street. Gas pipes were being replaced, but now no one was working in the long wet ditch.

Above Geerte’s huge, meaty, heavily ribbed lips, a sharp-edged vertical scar disappeared into the cavity of her wide-winged flat nose. She had come into the world with a cleft lip; labium leporinum is the Latin name of the deformity. At the time she was born, during the last years of the nineteenth century, this condition was far from harmless. A cleft-lipped baby cannot suckle, because the various tissue lobes of its face have failed to join. The upper lip normally gains its shape from the union of a middle and two side apophyses, the lower lip from the union of two side ones; a cleft lip is an abnormal or irregular union of apophyses. It appears mainly on the upper lip, when the union is imperfect; the flesh of the lip is completely rent breadthwise. Moreover, a baby with a cleft lip cannot be operated on immediately but must first gain strength. Feeding it artificially, not suckling it, was not a simple matter in those days; babies easily got infections from the utensils used to feed them. A vicious circle developed. Because of infection, the artificial feeding would be discontinued, which posed the danger of dehydration. Geerte was three weeks old when she was finally operated on, and nobody dared vouch for her surviving the critical phases of the healing. They carefully sliced away the edges of the severely inflamed and suppurating cleft and sewed it together with three stitches. Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip, the natural mark of a proper union of the facial-tissue lobes. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round-looking — at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body’s wholeness or hint of at any threat to it.

It seems, Lady Erna thought, fate always brings me together with these thick-mouthed ones.

The dying man also had huge lips.

Pardon me, she yelled to the cabbie because otherwise they wouldn’t hear each other as the taxi bounced along, what makes you think I’m any kind of doctor. I don’t understand why you would say that.

The man, without turning around, spoke in a loud voice.

I took the professor to the university many times, to the academy, to Party headquarters. You’ve ridden with me too, but you don’t remember because it was at night, in the dark. One evening last year, when you went to see Aida in the Erkel Theater and we had that big snowfall. And once before that, when the professor, you remember, got that award, Order of the Red Flag.

As you can see I remember everything exactly, believe me, I do.

That’s very good, very nice of you, answered Lady Erna impatiently, but I still don’t understand how this follows from my being some kind of doctor. What sort of joke is this.

Listen to me, said the cabbie, laughing, and for a second he even turned around jovially. It’s very simple. I heard what you and the professor talked about. Please permit me to say, such a conversation demands at least a diploma and a doctorate.

I never mention my doctorate.

And my job is such, you know, I mean, its basic nature is such that I don’t have to understand everything to know whom I’m driving from place to place.

She couldn’t imagine what they might have talked about back then; she did not remember. She was sure they hadn’t talked about anything confidential, they would never do that in a taxicab.

And while with her fingers she grasped and then raised a little the swollen nipple of her left breast, she saw that milk was indeed seeping from it, she would have liked to ask the cabbie to tell her anyway what they had talked about during that trip. But she did not want to be so intimate with him. With a secret policeman who might have also been an Arrow Cross man. But now she had the feeling that neither assumption was correct; this man was somehow deceiving her in some way.

Geerte at the same time lowered her eyes but not completely, and from then on the two memories ran side by side.

Sometimes it’s best to separate tactile sensations from visual ones.

Nevertheless, Geerte does peek out from under her eyelids to see the nipple’s nodular, purple areola at a time when Erna entrusts her senses to its power of attraction. It never even occurred to her that she might deny herself this pleasure or that there might be any moral reason why she should. She’ll find me; let her lead. And Erna was admiring Geerte’s heavy, lazy eyelids, her auburn lashes whose roots were a transparent blond. It seems that her face, like seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, has hidden features. This is a secret they have in common.

Perhaps no one has paid attention to this or analyzed it until now.

The Thirty Years’ War with all its horrors is concealed in her special sense of family and home, in her inimitable tenderness and all-embracing attention, and in her gentility. It is like a benevolent curtain, hiding those aspects of human nature that the uninitiated should never see again. Or like a wrinkle, she thought, a soot-covered groove, sign of a blazing, continuous pain.

Should look up those years, to see if this is really so.

She had been regarding Geerte’s face, her bony and prosaic figure, as if in this small, strange town she had found the living model not of a single painter but of an entire tradition of painting. Just as it sufficed to step up to the square-grid windows to see what magnificent scales of depth and height the substance of air had taught Dutch painters. Now the situation was completely the other way around. In the face of a living person she had found what had been hidden in the paintings of a magnificent era. And if the dates of the years corroborated her assumptions, all the emphases would shift.