Shimmering Details, Volume II by Péter Nádas

Author:Péter Nádas [Nádas, Péter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374611644
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2023-11-21T06:00:00+00:00

For all I know, the night when they accused me, Rózsi Németh wasn’t preparing to write her usual letter at all but was packing. She moved out way before our own move, perhaps a year before. She moved into the nursery school teachers’ training school that bore Amália Bezerédj’s name. But this didn’t hurt either, because by then the prohibition on complaining had filled up my universe. Get it through your thick skull. You are not hungry. Complaining is the bad habit of others, not us, except I had no idea what they meant by us. There’s no one to complain to, unless the Good Lord via pneumatic mail, as my mother was fond of saying. This is why I struck my brother. Why is he crying, there’s no one to hear, it’s time he realized it. The little idiot was out to blackmail them. He didn’t realize that they couldn’t be blackmailed because they were too caught up in the problems of the nation.

In the next two years we visited Rózsi Németh several times in the stable, as they called it. Her companions, young women from the countryside like her, insisted that they could smell the horses in the dorm. We sniffed around, too, to see if it was true. But they weren’t complaining; if anything, they were proud, they loved sleeping in a count’s stable. Whether they felt it or just imagined it, the pungent smell of the count’s horses had settled in their nostrils. To be perfectly frank, Rózsi actually said that the smell of the aristocratic horse piss had settled in their nostrils.

Our mother and I had been to the horse stable earlier, when it was under construction. We took our mother’s official car, a field-gray Pobeda, an ordinary unprepossessing automobile. My mother inspected the construction work with the architects, except she neglected to mention that Rózsi Németh would be leaving us to study there and become a nursery school teacher so she wouldn’t have to serve strangers all her life. Later we also moved to a new place, but I didn’t ask anything. I wasn’t obstinate, and I wasn’t stubborn, I was not even indifferent, it’s just that I knew I’d find out eventually anyway. Some bit of news or some circumstance would provide the answer. It wasn’t a decision on my part, and I wasn’t offended or angry, though I didn’t want to spare them either, it’s just that there wasn’t one concrete reason for our move, nor a variety of reasons. Something had changed way before we moved, but what that something was I haven’t been able to find out to this day.

Now that I think back on it, the first conscious break in my life actually brought a sense of relief. Ask no questions. In the end, I started to occupy myself with the subject that would interest me for the rest of my life, the mighty overlap between appearance and reality, even though, despite my best efforts, I never managed to define what reality is in relationship to semblance, or appearance.

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