Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

I beg your pardon, no one was screaming.

Besides, no one asked permission to scream.

Is it impossible for you to grasp that I can’t stand this noise, she asked, hissing. And you’ll do as I tell you to, she yelled, I hope that’s clear.

She turned on her heel and took off at a run in her huge apartment, the footfalls of her yellow-soled steps resounding. If the doors had not been open, she might have bashed into one or cracked her head on another. And sheepishly the two others followed. This made Margit Huber really angry. Ahead of her went the frightened woman in the silk dress, whom Mária Szapáry liked to call either my sweet or Belluka when she wanted to convey criticism of the slender woman’s mental abilities; the woman’s actual name was Izabella Dobrovan. Hungarians, full of their own language, were often nonplussed when hearing this decidedly un-Hungarian name, and Izabella was used to this response, which she’d observed even as a child. Slovak was her mother tongue, and she still had an accent, though only people who knew she wasn’t Hungarian would notice how she made her vowels a bit too large; to forestall questions or jests about her name, when being introduced she would often remark, my family is from the Felvidék*; sometimes she’d give this explanation even before saying her name.

But then at least tell us what on earth you want, she kept exclaiming irritably, loud enough to be heard over the pounding footsteps and creaking parquet floors, how on earth should we know what you want.

Making such a senseless scene for no good reason, Margit Huber shouted after them, but she could not stop them and did not want to. If she had no explanation for what they’d gone through in the past decades, if there was no explanation for even a single day, how could there be a sensible reason for this angry outburst. Still, they followed each other across all sorts of emotional swamps because they understood each other better than they did others. To the extent, of course, that one can follow another person or see into her soul. From which it did not follow, given her upbringing, that she would accept everything. She should have resisted, perhaps even with her body, the offended yet forgiving effusion with which Dobrovan had taken off after their friend. She felt they were both repugnant, as was the entire scene, including the role she had cast herself in. One of them was too impetuous and aggressive, the other unbearably emotional.

First, they hurried across a large room that Mária Szapáry used as a workshop, then across the foyer that led to a rather narrow, long connecting corridor where, in the trapped warm air of summer evening, they could smell a dense stale odor of food coming from the kitchen. Wherever they went the lights were on, which particularly irritated Margit Huber. But she usually didn’t let herself turn off the lights to appease her penchant for frugality, and the opportunities for doing so were rare, because every evening Mária Szapáry herded them into her living room with broad and inviting movements and clearly did not take kindly to anyone leaving it for any reason.

She was very strange about this. They laughed at her, saying she suffered from a persecution complex.

She always left all the doors open, the lights on everywhere, and though she never told anyone what to do or where not to go, she kept the other well-seen, well-lit, bare rooms strictly off-limits. If someone showed some independence or had to go to the toilet, she’d get nervous and follow the delinquent with her eyes through the empty rooms; worse, she’d keep calling after her.

No matter how good friends they were, they only laughed or teased each other about such peculiarities, and they never dug down deep, never asked questions. Not only did they refrain from kissing or hugging each other, ever, but they also weren’t keen on telling other people that they were good friends.

Perhaps they didn’t think they were.

Their noses were assailed not only by the odor of stale food but also by that of a brimming garbage can left uncovered and dirty dishes unwashed for days, perhaps weeks, which took up every horizontal surface in the kitchen; they towered on top of the stove, filled the sink, and were piled in wobbly pyramids on the kitchen stools and the huge, hewn kitchen table, which must have come from a liquidated country estate.

Excuse me, but this is outrageous. What is going on here, asked Margit Huber, greatly surprised, as she stood in the doorway.

The tugboat noise reached this far into the apartment with its rapid little throbs.

You don’t have a cleaning woman again, I presume, said Izabella, as if to express indignation.

Not only that, but the beast with her smelly flesh left me without a word of good-bye, grumbled Mária, and, finding no appropriate glasses in the cabinets, she began rummaging in the sink, full of dirty dishes. So don’t aggravate me with this too, now.

A good two weeks have gone by since then, if I’m not mistaken.

It’s rather dangerous in such heat.

She hadn’t before, but now she knew where to look for the glasses. Still, because of her anger, the task was beyond her strength. Though evidently she had worked herself artificially into this state, there appeared no way out of it, and she did not quite understand this. She was playing a role for the others’ benefit, which helped a bit to protect her from them. At such times, one appears to oneself as a stranger within oneself.

She must break through herself.

They’re here, of course they’re here, rotten little things, on the bottom, she kept exclaiming, to help control herself, where else would they be, but she could restrain her outburst only with another one. Why in the name of heaven and hell haven’t I moved out of this damn apartment.

I don’t myself understand it.

The two women still in the doorway said nothing; this new turn of events silenced them. Because they both knew there was someone else besides them in the apartment, a woman much younger than they. She either lay in bed or, wrapped in a blanket, sat on the terrace, living an unchanging vegetative existence. The door of her room was closed most of the time, and if there was a reason why after the war Mária Szapáry could not move from the apartment, it was this sick woman or, as others referred to her, her sick girlfriend.

They came here every evening so Mária wouldn’t have to leave the young woman alone.

The dirty dishes in the sink clattered and slid about under her hands. Bella started to make a move to help her but then changed her mind.

Maybe because of Elisa, Margit Huber started to say, cautiously yet emphatically, in a different voice; she knew she was going too far with this tentative comment.

Perhaps it would cause a change in her condition. I mean a negative change, if I may say.

She had barely spoken when Mária Szapáry was ready with a withering look. But that couldn’t stop her, so Margit Huber quieted down only gradually. Two such rotten women. Daring to stick their noses into her most jealously guarded secrets.

In fact, she had no guarded secrets from them. At most there were certain things they never talked about, and their mutual silence had its own strict logic and a well-founded moral base.

I’m going to burst.

The meaning of so many things in this world is simply incomprehensible, and very little can be comprehended with the help of knowledge.

She was raving, but not without method, which dictated the clatter and clinking of dishes under her hands, enamel knocking against metal, glass against china. She continued to carry on in a small, almost shrunken voice, which of course could be construed as a seal of their friendship, and she finally found two tall glasses. She could never have let herself do anything like this in front of other people. She knew she was being unjust, but with whom else might she be unjust. The glasses had dried shreds of lemon on their opaque sides, lemon pits embedded in ossified sugar on the bottoms. She had to permit this injustice in order to feel the pain of what hurt so much and of what she could never really share with anyone ever. In her lucid moments, she was very grateful. That they were here, around her, these increasingly vulnerable women, still like little girls in their pain. One after the other, she fished out the two glasses with one hand and, remembering exactly where the third one was in the pile, supported the raised dishes with her other hand.