Parallel Stories: A Novel (102 page)

The sight of our excitement and enthusiasm when we returned from one of our shopping sprees, flushed and talking loudly, throwing the packages down in the spacious hallway of the apartment on the boulevard, must have seemed to Nínó as a frontal attack on her personal convictions.

Her carefully, lovingly maintained apartment was flooded by a wave of confusing irresponsibility.

She’d say she couldn’t for the world understand why all this was necessary.

Shamming surprise, Irén responded, come, come, Erna, forgive me, but I couldn’t bear watching our favorite nephew walking around in outgrown rags any longer.

She was the only one who did not address Erna as Nínó.

Nínó was indignant, turned red, pardon me, what rags are you talking about.

His wrists are hanging out of his jacket sleeves and his ankles do the same from his pants. Maybe Erna hasn’t noticed how the boy has grown, and wasn’t she glad that suddenly he has turned into such a handsome lad.

I had been given Ágost’s best clothes, and my wrists and ankles could not have been showing or hanging out of the jackets and pants, for he was taller than I by at least by six centimeters. Unless I had suddenly grown since the previous Saturday morning.

Irén had a tendency to grow pale; she would never raise her voice, not for the world.

She said she had no intention of arguing but, sticking to the facts, she had noticed that my socks were wet. She had been noticing it for two weeks by then.

I slept in their house on Saturdays.

Which means you’ve let him walk around with holes in his shoes for two whole weeks. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, no one would see the holes, but it’s autumn and it’s wet. On Sunday we couldn’t even go to City Park because of those shoes. And I don’t think there’s any point in hoping for a completely dry winter, either.

Then I have a suggestion.

Go ahead. I’m eager to hear it.

I see that you are dissatisfied with me.

I won’t deny it, sweet Erna.

I am ready to entrust the child’s care to you without further ado. If you take him to yourself, I’ll have no objection.

I assume you are willing to give me, along with him, the appropriate portion of the inheritance.

Frankly, I don’t know what you’re referring to with this sly insinuation. I am a sick woman, I’ve lived though a lot, and I don’t suffer baseless reproaches easily. Take it back. Please take back your last sentence.

I won’t take it back, but if you wish, we can discuss it in more detail.

Absolutely, but it would probably be better to pick another time for that.

The child has a right to know what we think and why, about what belongs to him.

Within a certain framework, absolutely.

Why can’t we talk about what your poor mother wanted to have happen.

Your aunt Irén is a very charming woman, Kristóf, but please, don’t be fooled. What is the meaning of this open accusation, she shouted. You slander me in front of the child, she shouted. I cannot imagine where this misleading information might be coming from, but if you insist on going on with it, I know what I must do.

Irén must have felt that she had gone too far.

I don’t insist on anything. I’m simply telling you.

Nínó, however, did not want to be told.

She must have feared that I was the source of the information, and that scared me too.

I’m not interested, she shouted. And if you have any doubt about my honesty, I’m sure the guardianship authority will be glad to be at your service. Nothing and no one will stop you if you wish to file a complaint, I can assure you. In a court of law, I’d be happy to account for everything down to the last penny, but not here in the hallway. And quite apart from any future decision of the courts, I’m ready to turn over to you the right to guardianship this minute.

Sometimes they carried on over the telephone, and that made me even more nervous because I could only guess what was being said at the other end of the line.

Irén saw she was losing, and she looked at me for help.

I’m afraid my principles of child raising and education would not be to your liking.

It was strange to hear these arguments taking place over my head. It was like a dream in which I could not see every detail and did not exist at all. Sometimes, in my excitement and nervousness, I’d get an erection, as a stray dog would when with different kinds of people among whom it hopes to find a master.

I did not help Irén; rather, I betrayed her. I kept standing there in my new clothes, saying nothing. I realized they were both lying while pretending to be telling the truth; if that was telling the truth, then that was what I was doing too.

We can find our way in the labyrinth of one another’s lies, and that’s what makes us one big family.

But we’re not talking about your principles of education, my dear Irén, you have accused me in front of the child that I made his inheritance disappear. In any case I want you to know that I have no child-raising or educational principles.

Well, dear Erna, that’s the difference between the two of us.

I beg you, Irén, let’s leave it at that.

As if they had said that nobody wanted me. And a few minutes later, as if nothing had happened, they were quietly having their tea, gingerly munching on Irén’s inimitable cream puffs.

They were talking of the rare cameos that during the past week Nínó had finally managed to acquire at a low price from someone’s estate and add to her large collection.

In fact, they were talking not about me but about themselves.

I was a burden to everybody.

I didn’t have to be a genius to realize that I wouldn’t have it any better with Aunt Irén. Word had it in the family that in addition to her husband she had plenty of passionate affairs, and what I saw was that except for discussing their clothes and dressing preferences, her attachment to her daughters was not very strong. She silently loathed her hairy, cross-eyed husband, who, to all appearances, idolized her. Irén not only accepted and enjoyed this but also knew that none of it was true. This short, bald, and very strong man who so enjoyed cutting up leather and fur with his big scissors that he had to stick out his tongue while doing it, and who had once told me I could not move in with them because with me there he’d be afraid for his daughters, was also playing a role, like Gézuka. He was certainly colder and more calculating than my aunt Erna, who was always flitting between emotional extremes but whom, when all was said and done, I loved more than anyone in the family. In the company of Irén’s husband, I froze. He believed the girls and I would have a mutually very bad influence. He gave me long penetrating looks as if he were seeing and silently enumerating all my secret sins. As if he knew what sort of person I would turn out to be.

You’ll never be a real man like me, he said, fixing me with his piercing cross-eyed look.

He glared at me as if expecting a full, penitent confession.

You will not spoil my two sweet little girls. I will keep you from that.

Which made me realize that my status would be even lower than that of the Jews, unless I restrained and disciplined myself.

Even they would have reason to scorn me.

As opposed to her husband and the others, however, my aunt Irén had an irrepressible curiosity, a kind of esthetic exultation, and because of that I could not deny her my affection. More precisely, my enchantment with her referred back to my mother’s icy silence. I sensed what might be blazing behind it. When Aunt Irén dressed me, she enjoyed finding connections between a person’s physical attributes and latent possibilities with which she might open up the essence. She enjoyed making somebody out of me whom I didn’t know. She told me it was always women, she had always dressed women, her little girls or her women friends and their little girls, yet the world, after all, was made not only of women, and this was now very different for her—a boy, she had now managed to get her hands on one, this was a novelty, a pleasurable break. The older I get, the greater the pleasure will be. Of course, with a boy she should be more levelheaded.

She was flattering me with her openness. I was attached to her.

Irén was beautiful, and I abhorred beautiful people. Her personality was considered colorful, and she never ran out of ideas, even if these ideas were very wicked.

As if her beauty were shackles from which she hoped to free herself and therefore every morning she hurled herself into the boring, gray multitude of ordinary people. This must have been the very opposite of how Ágost felt about people; he could derive no pleasure from observing that such-and-such a person was boring this way, another boring that way. As if people’s mere commonness and insignificance offended his good taste; or as if he were jealous of everyone and of everything anyone had; as if he would even have been glad to possess the ugliness of other people.

Perhaps this attitude too was the result of their obsession with frugality. It was hard for me to understand why these two people felt this way, while I felt nothing at all.

The two of them walked about in the world with an expression that suggested someone had just insulted them in some way but they were too genteel to acknowledge it. There’s no denying that their noses were pretty high in the air, always showing the world that they would not show what they felt. And if in accordance with their upper-class will and taste they picked something out of Ágost’s hand-me-downs and, having no choice in the matter, I wore it, Nínó was very happy, not because the clothes found a new wearer or because the clothes looked good on me, but because it pleased her that once again she could save some of the money she received as my orphan’s allowance. I was given favorable treatment because of my father’s disappearance; since his comrades could not account for his body, the sum, officially called a civil servant’s pension, which the government regularly transferred to my guardian for my support, was quite substantial. But the price of success was high; something had to be given in exchange, and Nínó considered this another offense she had to suffer in the world. The shadow of loss darkened the joy of the gain. At least Erna made herself believe that the gain was greater. But Ágost could not even give a farewell look to his used clothes. I saw that he had to control himself so as not to take them back right away.

He suffered a terrible loss; gift giving pained him.

No one but his mother understood the terrible pain he had about objects he might lose. And to reduce the pain, he treated the items given to me as gifts, as if they were still his.

Whenever he felt like wearing them again, he’d simply take them out of my closet, without a word. When I lived with them, I never knew exactly what belonged to me, what had been taken back; had they eaten my food before I had a chance to taste it, did they really use things they had already given me.

I barely remembered the years when I had lived with my mother and father. Thereafter, I had to learn quickly what my new caretakers wanted of me, with their strange intentions.

Sometimes I couldn’t find an item of mine that Ágost had no personal connection to. They just laughed. They also had a lot of fun when in their greed Ágost or Nínó gobbled up the lunch or supper that had been put aside for me.

Don’t tell me you’re going to whine about a lousy lunch. Ilona will scrape something together for you.

I watched and I observed this strange and beautiful man, this Gézuka, and I could not understand how he could be my cousin. He treated me as a lord of the manor would treat his servant; take this translation to such and such a place; bring me such and such a book from this other place. Sometimes he hurt me to the quick, sometimes he amused me, and I couldn’t figure out what sort of effect, and when, his tyranny might have on me. That’s why I was terrified of him.

Unknown emotions toward him arose in me. Sometimes I thought to myself, I will kill this man.

Ours was an unambiguous relationship.

I could stay with them so long as I behaved perfectly. With this premise, of course, they let themselves not only make all sorts of judgments about my good or bad behavior but also laid down for me, very strictly, exactly how and within what framework I might protest or rebel against them, what I might request or demand of them. In most cases, nothing. There was no humiliation I didn’t have to endure. And if I hadn’t been raised by my grandparents, this would have been much harder to bear.

Ágost could not relinquish anything of his, not with his eyes and not with his fingers. Let’s say he walked by me and, as if accidentally, pinched my shirt with his fingers. With an embarrassed little laugh, he’d remark that he’d probably never again have another shirt made of such excellent oxford cloth.

I felt I was burning up; my face was red; I was ashamed for him. And if I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting, for example, that perhaps I should return the shirt, he’d say innocently what a great idea, he could then wear it for a while longer. Actually, he liked these passed-on items. One does not like to wear brand-new things.

I wanted to tear off my skin—here, take it.

And now I didn’t care about him or his expensive pen, I didn’t care whether he stayed or went. I cared only about the boy I knew, I was sure, but still hadn’t figured out from where.

I felt that if I took my eyes off him, I’d miss something. I could still see his checkered shirt and yellow suitcase, but the crowd was swallowing him up. I wanted to stay with him; I wanted to run after him. But the thought embarrassed me. Ágost was proffering his stupid pen and shouting at the same time. That he was indeed going now, leaving me on my own, he really didn’t have any more time, and there was no point in waiting. Nobody had thought this departure would turn into such a disorderly mess. And I should use his pen in good health. Pleasant journey. When I arrive, I mustn’t forget to let him know my address. I should write him with his pen. He handed it to me ceremoniously, with both hands. I couldn’t tell what was more refined, his pen or his fingers, his gift or his gesture. He kept shouting that I should write, write, otherwise Nínó would be very anxious and I should know how dangerous that could be.