Parallel Stories: A Novel (110 page)

Thus was Gottlieb riddled by the excruciatingly painful absence of God, about whose rapid withdrawal he would not talk to anyone, not for the world.

Gottlieb was not a stupid man.

To no one.

He should not be seen while crossing Halpiac Square, where at this hour the fish market was being cleaned and scrubbed by municipal sanitation workers, followed everywhere by cats, dogs, screeching seagulls, and beggars hoping to retrieve some scraps. He waited a little while and then managed, without having to greet anyone, to make his way across among the upended washbasins and tables glittering with water and leftover fish scales; hurrying under the spherical crowns of the elms, he fled from the familiarly functioning world along Szent János Street and the narrow, snaky Kígyó Street, and after he had crossed the wide and tranquil Szentháromság Road, lined on both sides with the severe-looking houses of the more prestigious Catholic families, their blinds rolled down and shutters closed, looking for all the world like two rows of citadels, he at last reached, at the corner of Zsidó Street, the old Israelite graveyard packed with uniformly pink tombstones.

Here he definitely had something to worry about without his hat.

The goyim could not know the meaning of the Almighty’s wrath and judgment; but there was no Jew who didn’t. The terrible promise filled him with the sense of a painful safety. He stopped in the shade by the tumbledown wooden fence to protect his bare head from the burning sun, and he regarded the street with the eyes of a stranger abandoned by God, his breathing heavy.

Between two breaths, he was still praying.

The bustle and shouting was great, somebody in front of him was pushing a handcart piled high with assorted junk. In the cacophony, it seemed improbable that he could reach his house unnoticed. Two unfamiliar rag-and-bone men were shouting at the top of their voices, their free hands spinning rattlers to attract attention. They both wore yarmulkes. We buy everything, they shouted into the noise they were making with their rattlers, everything you can find in your kitchen, your pantry, anywhere in your house. A few meters away, on the bank of the roadside ditch covered with wild spinach, a Christian kitchen maid was cleaning a chicken and singing loudly. In the dust, children were having a hoop-rolling competition; a farm wagon loaded with last year’s grapevines was just arriving, its wheels creaking and squeaking. Dishwater was hurled out of a window. From deep entranceways and echoing yards, the sounds of arguing voices, hammering, and grating were heard, which died suddenly at the unexpected slamming of a door. Then, along with the kitchen noises, the wound was opened again, and while a man’s voice begged and beseeched, two desperate and frantic female voices were shouting at each other.

A few weeks earlier, by mail, the Gottliebs had received the voucher from their son Jakab, according to which they were to board ship in Rotterdam for their overseas journey.

They already had their railway tickets to Rotterdam, and their son wrote to tell them to spend the night in a small old hotel near the dock, which frightened Gottlieb more than the long journey across the sea. What if there were no vacant rooms in that hotel. What would I do with your mother then. In response, Jakab wrote that there were many hotels, like mushrooms, near the piers. They didn’t have to worry about that. Robbers and drunkards are found in hotels at every port, Gottlieb knew that already; he already saw the corpse of his wife, frozen in its own blood, among the slashed eiderdowns in a ransacked little room. No amount of prayer could keep him from looking into the future, in which he too would be killed. One night he looked out the window because he thought someone was prowling, he heard voices. He could not get his head above the flesh of the murdered ones. The blood stuck to the feathers, no one bothered to bury their blood, and later no one could find out what jewelry had been stolen from them. And he could not write to Jakab about this either—that we are taking such and such pieces of jewelry with us—he could not put it in writing because he did not trust the letter, which might wind up in anybody’s hands. He did not reveal what pieces they were taking to Marika either; it had to remain a secret, otherwise a war of jealousy would break out between brother and sister, which never stopped smoldering anyway. That is how their terrible lives ended, for which he expressed his thanks in advance, bowing before the eternal throne.

The glory of Merciful God never ends; His rule is our beacon.

Actually, he couldn’t imagine that his own son would rob him, the son for whom he had made allowances, out of necessity, and to whom he had given more, after all.

He listened to ascertain where his wife was, who in a short while would be murdered mercilessly for her jewelry.

He most feared that their bodies would be mutilated and their blood left unburied. Their fingers would be cut off along with the rings. And as he suddenly opened the door, he saw the miscreants approaching in the silent night with their sacks open. By then he wouldn’t be able to get up, out of his cut-up flesh, to do the most necessary things for the soul. In the meantime, as if nothing had happened, all his hats were there, in a row, on the coat-and-hat rack in the dim hallway. The shiny wide-brimmed black hat he wore on high holy days, his richly embroidered kippa, the everyday black hat he wore in the city, and the oddly frayed, lusterless, greasy hat too, which he wore to work and which, after exchanging it for the yarmulke he wore at night, he should have put on this morning.

Like a thief, he lifted his own weekday kippa off the hat rack in his own hallway and hurried deep into his house.

At least a dozen times a day he made himself believe that just this once he could avoid the madness of his wife.

He opened doors carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible by tiptoeing on the softwood floor, turned gray and splintery after many autumn cleanings. There were a few spots that creaked badly no matter how careful he was, because the joists underneath had rotted away. As he made his way through the rooms and corridors, moving ever deeper into the unpredictable labyrinth of the commodious house, the emptiness became darker within the whitewashed walls, which echoed the tiniest sound.

The dark-brown folding shutters were closed everywhere, and only through cracks in the aged wood did some light come into the house.

Gottlieb put his yarmulke on his head and relaxed a little in the familiar dimness, in which white slipcovers on the furniture glimmered faintly and his transgressions reassumed their customary places. He also seemed to hear his ancestors, who opined that at least in our homes and synagogues we should remain free human beings in the sight of the Lord of Mercy. When on waking you cover your head, no matter what the day will bring you have spread the holy firmament over it. They have always lived in this spacious home, with its rooms opening one into another, hoping to please the Lord and to avoid eliciting His terrible wrath with their transgressions. There were only the most necessary pieces of furniture, beds, tables, chairs, that should suffice, and these were also made of the least expensive painted or wood-grained pine. Although there were more expensive carpets, they lay on the floor, carefully rolled up in wrapping paper, along the undecorated and empty walls. If, at the time of general cleaning or during high holy days, the folding shutters were opened, the covers removed from the cheap chandeliers and modestly dark furniture, the carpets rolled out, smoothed along the floor in preparation for receiving friends and relatives, then Ármin Gottlieb’s house positively flaunted its merciless cleanliness and cheerlessness.

Here lives a Jew, and Gottlieb was fond of this awareness, a Jew who displays nothing ostentatious, does not tempt fate, because he has not forgotten for a moment what he owes his Creator.

He would burst into loud sobs at the painful joy when, after the holidays, he was suddenly left alone in the sunny, bleak emptiness. But soon he would exchange his embroidered kippa for a plain one and, obeying the ancient duty of resignation, go from room to room carefully closing all the brown shutters again.

His house had one bright space: the wooden veranda framed in glass that faced the small, walled-in yard.

At the edge of the yard, where grass could barely survive at the base of the walls, stood a tall sumac tree, its widespread branches towering above the roofs, its trunk partially grown into an abutment of the brick wall; it was a
Rhus hirta
, the undemanding plant of Mediterranean and subtropical regions whose leaves, unlike those of the indigenous trees of Mohács, did not open completely until late June and whose acrid, velvety flowers emerged very slowly.

When he could be alone, Gottlieb liked to sit here, on a painted kitchen stool, and between two ritual devotions he either prayed or read one of his beautiful half-leather-bound books, either the six-volume
Prayers for the High Holy Days
or the eight-volume
Weekday Prayers.
This time, however, he had barely sat down and opened a randomly selected prayer book from which hundreds of small slips and bookmarks stuck out, both from the Hebrew text and from the pages printed and footnoted in Hungarian, and he had barely placed his elbow on the windowsill to create a reasonably comfortable position for reading, when his wife appeared in the dark frame of the doorway.

She appeared like a shadow slipping silently toward the light.

You think I don’t know, you really believe I don’t know why you’ve come home so early from your famous lumberyard, his wife said angrily, contemptuously, reproachfully, and then she almost broke down, barely able to suppress the tears of her bitterness.

But I know, I do. I could have known that you’d deceive me again and come home earlier.

If only once you came home on time, then I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Almighty God, I keep saying all day, the poor man really thinks he can hide his forgetfulness from me. Of course, he still has to wait for his lunch. I know very well what he forgot and left at home, but I shall never tell anyone what I know about you. How would I know, I don’t know what time it is, the kitchen alarm clock is broken again, and he hasn’t taken it to the watchmaker; but this time he had bad luck with his forgetfulness, didn’t he, leaving his hat home again—unheard of. He’s come home, let’s not talk about why, but his lunch is not ready. He said, I’ll be coming back late, Margit, didn’t he. And indeed, now it will be late for you, even though you hurried home early. Wretched. You’re a wretched man. You couldn’t possibly get done with your papers in such a short time. You can thank only yourself for all your troubles, because all your life you’ve been fumbling. Your famous lumberyard has always been more important to you, sawn planks are more important than your beautiful family.

You’re not a Jew.

You should be ashamed of yourself, you and all your papers.

She continued to talk very quietly like this, rather impassively, actually, using a barely changing falsetto, chanting a text that seemed alien to her, her head tilted a little mischievously and little-girlishly, her countenance suffused with hatred and contempt, her eyes narrowed and swollen with too much sleep. She was observing this despicable stranger who had wandered into her home, yet whom, according to the prescribed rituals, she should receive with a hot lunch, someone with whom, allegedly, she had lived in the happiest of marriages for more than forty years, giving him three beautiful children and raising them very well, yet her secret opinion about this man remained that although she knew him by sight, she wouldn’t marry him if she listened to her heart, because he was not a Jew. A Jew does not behave like this, and she hasn’t the slightest intention, there is not enough money in the world to convince her to marry him. She will dissuade her mother of blessed memory from insisting on this marriage, and she truly hopes that at least her adored father will reconsider his plans, because this wretched man will do nothing but deceive her, throughout an entire life will do nothing but mislead and deceive her.

They should look for somebody else.

I am the only one who can see through him.

Like through a sieve, that’s how I see through you.

You wretched man, you.

But if you dare do it anyway, and it’s obvious that you will, you shameless, vile man, and my dear beloved father will not want to keep me by his side, what can I do, that’s how it is, then you will go tell it to everybody on our street, you won’t spare yourself and go into every single house and tell them. What you’ve done to me, what you have done. And every Jew in Munkács will know what a wretched man he is.

What he did.

Such a wretch and yet what he dared to do.

He violated an innocent Jewish girl.

It was as if the empty dark house were the only house she had ever known, or as if she had recalled a long-abandoned snail shell, yet the street outside would not be a street in Mohács and the lapsed time had no meaning.

Keeping her dead alive.

It was not surprising.

However, the snail shell might have crushed under anyone’s careless step. All he had to tell her was that we’ve raised only two of your beautiful children, Margit, because the third one is long dead. Gottlieb wondered more than once how he or anyone else could remove themselves from this vast present, in which we eternally mourn, only mourn, while every event relevant to our person is still ahead of us.

We are still before the death of our loved ones.

One’s unlucky little son should not have died before one’s own death.

For a second he looked up at her, ascertaining the time in which, separate from everything and everyone else, he too lived in the eternal present time of his wife.

Margit was pressing a deep china bowl against her large, heavy, drooping breasts in a peculiar defensive posture, as if to protect both herself and the bowl, and with a wooden spoon she occasionally lifted and then disgustedly slammed back the dumpling dough, bright yellow from its many eggs, or with obvious boredom she simply stirred it. Over her pink, not quite clean nightshirt she wore a dark-blue apron patterned with tiny white flowers and, on top of that, a sweater filthy from work in the kitchen and from making fires in the large stove. When she spoke, one could see she was missing many teeth, which made her lips sink into the hollow of her mouth. Unruly clumps of thin, unkempt gray hair leaned stiffly in all directions; for more than a decade now she had refused to have her hair shaved as religious propriety would have required.