Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Why do you say they humiliated you. How could they have humiliated you anyway.

She didn’t kiss him, to see more of how the lips spoke.

I didn’t say they humiliated me.

You did.

Why would I have said that, in connection to what. It’s not a word I like to use.

But why do you say you didn’t say it when I heard you say it, with my own ears. Their lips touched, just barely.

She could not resist the touch.

You did say it.

All right, you’re officially protecting the terrible parents, he laughed, les parents terribles. He enjoyed seeing the uneducated woman’s recurring embarrassment. I know what you’re thinking. But I’m talking just about myself. If you’re interested. Not about them. And I’m not going to go into their moral qualifications.

She hasn’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, he thought.

He had managed to revive his hatred and contempt for his parents, but this robbed him of strength, since it divided his attention, yet it made him more attentive and his moves more cautious.

They wanted to give you a good education, whispered the woman, making a final effort to think this through. A good one, she said more loudly, a very, very good one, she said against her will, her voice gibbering, the foolish sounds knocking apart what had been a sensible dialogue. If I had such a sweet little child like you, oh, your mouth, please, please give me your mouth, she said, breathing hard, and had lots of money too, she tried to continue more sensibly, I’d throw my child in an institution too. She was kissing him. And whispering the words: you’re unjust to them, very unfair, believe me. I’m sure they love you more than anything in the world.

The man’s body fell silent again.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense. Something else entirely was going on. Bringing us up well isn’t even close.

He barely returned the kisses, but endured hers.

They wanted to be free of us for a while — it’s as simple as that. Not only because something terrible had happened between them but because something had really ended. Maybe they didn’t believe it themselves, but we felt it. My older sister kept whispering to me that they wanted to get divorced and that I should believe her. She wanted to torture me because she was suffering too. We eavesdropped on them. They were looking for a perfect reason to send us away, and they found the perfect place. Actually I was lucky, because if I hadn’t gone away they would have destroyed me as they destroyed my sister.

That’s not true either. They weren’t the ones who destroyed her, that’s another gross exaggeration. They loved you. They did what they did because they loved you more than anything.

My sister understood a lot of things then, but how could I, a ten-year-old boy, protest. She didn’t want to leave either. Much later, I understood that the poor thing was in love for the first time in her life — how could she leave that boy. And they seemed to guess — no, not guess, they knew what was coming. One day at the table, my father said, well, you bore two Jewish kids for me and now I have to suffer the consequences. Our mother put down her fork and knife and said, what, you can imagine. We just sat there. She got up, smiled as if she had just heard the best joke ever, kicked the chair out from under herself, and before she turned to leave threw a glass of water in our father’s face.

Sober up.

I think they should have gone through with the divorce. My sister idolized our father. Even though she had to accept that he had more than one woman on the side, and that our hapless mother caught him with her own seamstress and had a nervous breakdown. They couldn’t hide this from us. But don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming anyone.

But I feel you do, I can feel it in your voice.

Because I’m telling it to you the way I lived through it. This is a wound, a trauma, no doubt about it, a big psychological trauma. My father doesn’t want me. They outlaw something that originated in my mother, which she’d passed on to me and which made Father’s life miserable. This was terrible because it was my fault. Even though he paid no attention to me, did not even notice me, was busy with incomprehensible things. In which I disturbed him. And our mother could not give up this monster. Two days later, they were lovey-dovey again. If you want to know, that’s what you feel in my voice. Every word of theirs made me blush for them. That’s what you’re feeling. And my sister wouldn’t come with me. She stubbornly resisted, fought me as hard as she could. For the first time in my life I was left all alone, and you can probably feel that too. Although I knew French a little bit better than she did, I didn’t get very far with it. It was like being in a strange house. There you are, alone, in the middle of the night, and you don’t know where the light switches are. These are ridiculously small trifles but enormously large at the same time, and you can feel that too.

He stopped, because next he should tell her how they recorded all his mistakes, how they beat him every night.

The trauma remained; it was stronger than anything else.

As he turned away so he would not have to see the face of this strange woman, he saw Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s blindingly white neck through the steam. Standing there with his lackeys under the noisy showers, looking at him provokingly. He knew he was going to be beaten.

For a mistake in pronunciation, he received one slap in the face, for grammatical errors, three slaps. His hand, with the soap in it, slowly stopped moving. He could redeem ten mistakes with some service. He sewed buttons, shined shoes, and scrubbed their backs. Erasing was the most humiliating task. They would whistle for him and he would have to bring his own well-cleaned eraser to erase other boys’ mistakes in their drawing and geometry papers. During the lessons, when they were free to move about in the huge hall on the first floor. Lecluse lent him to others, but erasing required Lecluse’s special permission, and he would watch from a distance. If Ágost smudged a drawing because his eraser wasn’t clean enough or if, in a hurry, he wrinkled the drawing paper or made a hole in it, the punishment was nail pecking: holding their fingertips close together, the boys would batter the top of his head as if they meant to break through his skull with their sharp nails. Or they would decide that the erasing mistake deserved punishment with another kind of erasing. They would drag his own eraser across his bare neck, pulling at the stubbles of hair. Lecluse most enjoyed the game when Ágost winced with pain or begged them to stop. That is when excitement made rosy blotches spread across Lecluse’s milk-white skin. Ágost couldn’t understand why he thought about the rosy blotches, the excitement, and the pain when he didn’t want to think about them, and why now.

He’d never speak of them to anyone.

When we were on vacation in Normandy or Anacapri, he continued, as if interrupting himself, the situation was very different, of course.

Actually, what Gyöngyvér should understand is what he is not saying and never will say.

Word got around that the Hungarian boy had a pecker bigger than anybody else’s.

He said, this wasn’t like a vacation abroad, when, though you jabber all day in a foreign language with other children, you’re still a Hungarian kid because the vacation will have an end, just as it had a beginning. At this place it didn’t matter whether you were Hungarian or not.

I am Hungarian, I would say. They didn’t understand why that should make anyone blush. Politely they nodded, all right, good, or maybe just shrugged their shoulders. It was of no importance. Or rather, the light switches were just in different places. There were all kinds of kids, but they felt at home in those two huge languages. This lends incredible self-confidence to even the stupidest of them. Believe me, we Hungarians don’t understand this, and this is also something you can feel in my voice. If a Congo native can speak a human language even though his nose is as flat as a gorilla’s, then what the hell am I boasting about with my Hungarian. Who cares. And with them, everything was nicer, neater, better groomed, and I liked that. Maybe that was the deepest humiliation. That everything was more beautiful. Most especially those wonderful mountains.