Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

Elisa has no condition, please understand that once and for all, she muttered. She never had and will not have a condition. Condition, ha. And there can be no change in her condition either. Besides, she’s the last person who gives me trouble or any reason to worry.

I don’t understand how an innocent question can be so misunderstood.

Unless it’s done intentionally.

Only you two give me anything to worry about. Or the simple fact that I haven’t moved out of this rotten apartment. Why can’t I get free. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand this infernal noise.

Why am I still here.

Rotten would have been a valid and justified word to describe other parts of Budapest, but not the clean, well-landscaped, and relatively well maintained Újlipótváros. And the adjective was inappropriate even if one hadn’t forgotten the terrible things that happened in Szent István Park and on the Újpest docks in the winter of 1944. Or how they unloaded frozen bodies from the bed of a truck at the same place in November 1956, yes, at the very same place. And it wasn’t the noise , not by a long shot. And moved out means out of the country, and the apartment means, perhaps, this miserable world. And her anger is her way of asking where would she go.

At this moment, Margit Huber finally understood that Mária was tormented by a compassion that had grown to gigantic proportions. As soon as she understood this, she knew instantly how to respond. Although first she once again had to overcome her stifling jealousy of Irma and, mainly, Elisa. She was always having to overcome it. Mária hadn’t had two children who were murdered. This burden she does not bear. She wasn’t taken away, but only watched helplessly when others were. The burden had been not intended for her. She hadn’t had a cerebral hemorrhage in her youth, needed no medical care, and therefore she cannot count on anybody’s compassion.

Of course, what she said out loud was not what she was thinking. If only because her jealousy was the least important element in the situation.

For eight years she had worked as a vocal coach at the Berlin Opera and then for twenty at the Budapest Opera House. She had firm notions about the inner logic of hysterical outbursts of temper; about how, with the help of her own smile, she might guide the singers in her charge along the path of first taming and eventually controlling their emotions. Only with maniacal repetition can they uncover the dark depths of their fears, and when there is no way back from a repetition, one must pounce. They explicitly expect, wish, and demand that she go with them; they want to pull her in, entangle her nerves in their own, and with the strength of their frenzy pull her down to the depths with them. She’d smile, though she felt no sympathy for them. In this, she was helped by the fact that people instinctively want to be free of the little pains that others cause, and she helped herself with the unbroken armor of her smile. She rarely came close to succeeding, but when she did, she was able to explode her hysteria, which filled her with bursts of satisfaction and gave her smile added meaning.

But the professional, technical means of arresting and utilizing hysteria were for her almost more important. The connections between dramatic strength and breathing, their effects, credibility, proportions, expressive techniques — these means that were exclusively her and the singers’ domain.

Later, these studied components could be consulted as a professionally developed collection of paradigms.

When she stopped, lowered and condensed the column of air inside her, it changed the posture of her impressive body.

Among themselves, her friends referred to her as Brünhilde or Krimhilde, expressing their adverse admiration for her, their yearning fear. They had become inseparable friends on Veres Pálné Street, at the most venerable girls’ school in Budapest, famed for its liberalism; and they also knew Erna Demén from this school. Where in classes of fifty, poor girls and rich, middle-class and aristocrat, German and Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish, all studied together; already then they admired Margit, in whom lurked a strange, large-bodied woman blessed with an enormous smile. In summer, her blondness turned literally to whiteness, but the sun did not harm her skin, and the girls had much to delight in when looking at her.

Starting in the late 1920s, when women began to sunbathe freely, she shed her clothes and pranced about wildly in the joy of absorbing the sunshine, tanning her bare body to dark brown. Men had very little to do with this, just as earlier she had not been charmed by the shy stares of boys. Today, the crown of snow-white hair that radiated above her shiny brown forehead had of course lost some of its firmness. Her eyes glittered brightly when she — carefully, from a lower register, hitting her warmest timbre, with deep resonance and increasing power — made her column of air sing out.

You know, don’t you, Mária, that you’re talking nonsense. How could you move out of here, and where could you move to with Elisa, for God’s sake. But all that aside, why on earth do you have to move from here anyway. You can’t be moving all the time just because your house fills up with dirty dishes. Just wash them, damn it.

After the last phrase, which hung in the air between them, and there was no stronger swearword than this among these friends, Margit allowed a short pause. In her next sentence she meant to raise the volume considerably and give the timbre another twist. The sentence would be long, complicated, the loudness making the articulation harder. In such cases, tongue and lips must shape each and every syllable most precisely.

The only reason you may have pangs of conscience, and there’s no other reason, is that you don’t talk decently to your servants.

To this dramatically enunciated declaration, Mária responded with a laugh. How do you know that. She was giggling.

How do I know, I’ve heard you enough. If you learned how to talk to them, they wouldn’t be leaving you all the time. Damn it, why can’t you make the effort. That’s the only thing you should have qualms about.

She wanted to take the burden off her shoulders.

Though she became ridiculous with these voice-coach techniques.

And indeed she did remove it.

The way she meted out, artificially increased, and then reduced the volume of her voice, the way she puckered her lips vertically to give shape to the words, and the way she never ran out of air, all this held Mária’s attention. Margit flooded Mária with her anxiety, carefully formed in her loins and belly, and the loud, even, slightly rasping throb of her voice involuntarily played counterpoint to the tugboat’s increasing and insidious beats, which reverberated on cobblestones, along subterranean walls, and in dull cellar cavities. As if she were demonstrating the means by which drama can be both intensified and extinguished.

Even when she unashamedly put her substantial, deeply tanned and wrinkled breasts on display as she lifted them and pressed them together, in her bearing there was something profoundly ascetic and humble. Her moral attitude, her appearance, and her work had anointed her as the priestess of her profession, and she elicited devout reverence from her students. Though they couldn’t understand why she smoked so much. When she dispensed those precise portions of air, her feverish flesh undulated and trembled in the frame of her richly embroidered, lace-trimmed, and pleated blouse. To Mária’s critical eyes the more sensual, steamy image proved stronger, even though her resisting body, unnoticed, relaxed and grew peaceful in the currents of that intimately deep voice.

The red, eyelike coral beads danced on the finely trembling necklace.