Parallel Stories: A Novel (213 page)

It was getting dark.

A terrible stench hit them unexpectedly, assailing their noses with warmth, but they comprehended only much later with their minds what they felt and saw then. Which was accompanied by many terrible independent little sounds. Rattling in the throat, frenzied laments that sounded not like crying but like some sort of lullaby, a persistent whimpering farther off and shouting at the border of consciousness.

In this long split second, they became truly defenseless; anyone could have killed them.

They were standing in the buzzing beehive of a singing traumatic fever.

They did not go in, but they could see that these wrecks were Germans. A single glance was enough. On the bare brick floor lay the most seriously wounded evacuees of a field hospital, left to their fate. Some lay on stretchers among the dead, just where their escaping carriers had freed themselves of their burdens.

The water in the well tasted of carrion.

He personally would shoot anyone who dared to drink of it, the sergeant whispered menacingly, planting himself by the bucket of bad water.

They didn’t have much time for discussion because they discovered that behind the building and not very far off was a road. And on it now appeared enemy tanks; the road could not have been more than five hundred meters away. So the building could serve them only as a temporary hiding place; under cover of night they might be able to move on. While they stood by the well talking about this, at the same time keeping an eye on the moving enemy tanks, through the oak door left wide open slid a human clump, blackened by mud and excrement. Both his legs had been amputated at the knees and the bandages were soaked bloody or black. He kept turning on his stomach and then on his back, the only way he could inch forward, like a caterpillar.

They stood there, with thirst and unfinished sentences in their mouths, watching him. When his trunk flipped onto its back, it remained motionless. As if he wanted to sit up; he was alive.

Beyond the distant artillery fire twilight was reddening the sky darkened by clouds, but the muzzle fire of the guns no longer sounded. Seagulls were screeching above. Anticipating the eating of live human flesh. The men wanted to turn away but didn’t know where to look. The sergeant gave a resounding order; they must dredge the well.

The sense of this not even the passively distant sky could see. Ever since they had set out in search of an escape route, starving, thirsty, drenched, and weeping, the sergeant had let not one minute pass without issuing a command.

Then with long strides he started toward the wounded man and, while somebody finally, reluctantly, began to carry out that last command which made so little sense, he reached under the German’s shoulders and dragged him back to the wall of the building. The wounded man kept shouting in pain; his head flopped back; his blind features stared into the sergeant’s face. Still, Fervega saw that the man expected something from him that no one else did. Maybe he wanted water, maybe he was begging for death in the foreign language that could still struggle up from his dried throat to his sore-ridden lips.

They were all from the Alföld, they did not understand a single word in any foreign language.

Someone near Bizsók growled, then mumbled, if you’re not going to do it, I’ll shoot him, Fervega.

But Fervega did not reply; with his eyes on the tanks on the road, he said, those can’t be anybody but either the British or the Americans.

Give the order, said the former hoarsely.

This made those soldiers stop who until now had been checking the well with a long rod for a possible corpse or carrion.

The well was not very deep, and they told Fervega they weren’t finding anything with this kind of search.

The wounded man leaning against the wall was silent but alive.

By the time it was dark, one of the men could be lowered into the well to dig out the muddy bottom with his combat shovel under the beam of a flashlight. Nobody asked how long it would be before fresh water would bubble up.

By the time it was dark, another three soldiers and the sergeant had carried the dead bodies out from among the dying in the building.

The sergeant spared Bizsók this job. Before the darkness became too deep he sent Bizsók with two men on a scouting mission. These men had not parted company in the last few days; they slept in the warmth of one another’s bodies.

In the reflected light of the distant heavy guns, the barren terrain appeared to them in quick successive flashes. Which filled the darkness with the illusion of a mute landscape.

Now this one, now another one tripped on solitary clumps of grass.

Bizsók was in front. He was bothered by the thought that they might never find their way back to the others. And if they did, what possible news would they have but that they hadn’t seen anything in the dark. The wind hurled sharp grains of sand and fine mist in their faces. Pauses in the squalls were filled with the booming of distant armies on the move. But no matter how close they came, the moving troops were not visible. Fighting units have to move slowly, with dim lights; tanks were rumbling. Panting, the three men groped their way forward in the noise but could not reach those dimmed lights.

Then Bizsók realized he would never see a road or any dimmed lights because what lay ahead was the sea.

In the dim flash of the muzzle fire he could see only another infinite stretch of barren terrain, no matter how fiercely he stared ahead. Or was it fog. By now the wind was whipping at them from all directions, and as it blew through their clothes, water dripped down their faces. He bent low because he felt a change under his feet; water was seeping from the wet sand in his hand. It threw froth on his face and body. What they could not see was raging right before them.

He smeared wet sand over his face. His mates could not see his weakness.

Small noises could be heard from the other trailer that morning, followed by muffled words, hitherto unheard-of thumping sounds, stamping of feet and the din of hurried activity.

A tension-filled silence ensued.

He did not eavesdrop but simply listened to the quality of the silence. He put the chamois back in the drawer and with ceremonious fussiness placed his glasses on his nose.

They decided that one of them would stay at the spot where they reached the sea. If he sensed no danger, every few minutes he would give two dim signals with his flashlight. They called the flashlight cat’s-eyes because it had no batteries; it worked with a hand-pressure-operated dynamo until its fine little carbon brushes wore out. That is how the other two reassured themselves that they could find their way back to their comrade. And they proceeded northward along the shore in the direction of where they assumed the town of Husum to be. The wind was blowing in their eyes from that quarter. Bizsók learned much later, in the Hamburg POW camp, that they should have gone in the opposite direction.

When they turned around the first time they could still see it; when they turned around the second time they could no longer make out the pale blinking of the cat’s-eyes in the darkness filled with the sound of roaring waves.

Every morning his story ended differently, and the next morning it continued in yet another way. Once he had the spectacles on his nose, the sharpened sight of his surroundings made the feelings guarded by his dreams vanish. Before going to make his bed in strict military fashion, he lingered for a few seconds by the small table. He did not clasp his hands and his lips did not move, but he was praying. Always the same thing, the Lord’s Prayer. He prayed that he might see Fervega again. The Lord’s Prayer suited him because he didn’t have to pay attention to the sequence of words; while reciting them he could think of things he was forbidden to think about. At times the prayer carried him across great distances; the words were free to meditate on themselves.

Now he would turn to the Father as a faithful son, now he himself would be the Father who had to take care of the son. His feeling had nothing to do with gratitude. With his prayer he neither asked nor expressed gratitude for anything; perhaps, rather, he gave something. That is how he offered himself up to whatever was yet to come.

But never again could he fill the space that had been emptied. There was no fairness or equality in the name of which he could drag another man’s bed in there.

When they finally fell into captivity, the British first took them to a small town called Pfeilen. There was a tall Hungarian among the British, one András Rott, a dark-haired young man who was able to talk to them.

He consoled them; boys, relax, everything will be all right.

He saw a sign of his aging in what he missed so terribly. On that summer morning, guaranteed to turn into a scorcher, he forgot the Lord’s Prayer. The cloudless clear sky had not promised relief for weeks. Heaven, where the Father was supposed to dwell, had no outer form, and it did not have the color of the sky either. It could not be blue, and dark clouds could not move across it with the wind. When he uttered that word,
heaven
, he saw the kind of sky Catholics paint on the ceilings of their churches. At other times he saw nothing, but the lack did not bother him, because he had no doubt the word spoke of an invisible beauty. But now the word in his mouth turned into something he had to spit out immediately. It reminded him most of the sand with the smell of algae and shells he had just wiped off his lips. As if some unequivocal whispering in his ear were saying that, contrary to what he had thought until now, there is more than one heaven and the number of Fathers is countless.

But he could not contemplate things like this, could not even imagine them.

The tension-filled silence in the other trailer that alerted Bizsók also awakened Tuba. He lay on his stomach, his head sunk on a pillow. He was not a man who scared easily, yet a spasm coursed through his softly resting body, first making his skin realize that something extraordinary was happening, and only then making him open his eyes, alarmed. He saw what he saw, which made his entire body become covered in goose bumps, but his muscles were still asleep in the warmth under his blanket.

There was more light in this trailer than in the other one, its small window gave on the water, the mirror of the river water hurled up on the ceiling the light it received from the sun rising in the vaporous mist.

Dark spots trembled in the light, the ethereal shadows of poplars.

ALSO BY PÉTER NÁDAS

A Book of Memories

The End of a Family Story

A Lovely Tale of Photography

Love

Own Death

Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2005 by Péter Nádas

Translation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2005 by Jelenkor, Hungary, as
Párhuzamos történetek

English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2011

An excerpt from
Parallel Stories
was originally published, in slightly different form, in
The Paris Review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Nádas, Péter, 1942–

[Párhuzamos történetek. English]

Parallel stories / Péter Nádas ; translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. — 1st ed.

    p.    cm.

ISBN: 978-0-374-22976-4 (alk. paper)

1.  Middle class families—Fiction.   2.  Budapest (Hungary)—Fiction.   I.  Goldstein, Imre, 1938–   II.  Title.

PH3291.N297P37513 2010

894'.511334—dc22

2010039688

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 978-1-4299-6357-2

*
March 15, Hungary’s National Day, memorializes the revolution of 1848, which in Hungary began on March 15 with insurrections in Budapest.

*
On October 23, 1956, many thousands of unarmed civilians and a few thousand lightly armed revolutionaries rose up in Budapest to protest against Hungary’s tyrannical Communist regime. As the demonstrations continued, four divisions of Soviet troops went to the capital at the request of the threatened regime and took up positions guarding government buildings and important intersections. They were met with vehement resistance, which continued until October 28, when a cease-fire was arranged. Political prisoners were freed, radio stations and newspapers liberated, and a newly installed multiparty government under Imre Nagy announced on November 1 that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance led by the USSR. Thirteen more divisions of Soviet troops and armored columns then arrived to put a stop to these revolutionary actions, which ended on November 4, though civilian resistance continued for some time. More than 2,500 Hungarians died in the uprising.

*
When the Communist Party gained full control of the postwar Hungarian government in 1949 it nationalized many enterprises.