Parallel Stories: A Novel (155 page)

I understood the essence of these things, no matter how much they tried to hide them from me; she had run away because of the woman and she lived in this communist woman’s house at the edge of the Forest of Vincennes.

From inadvertently dropped words which I sometimes misinterpreted, I formed a picture of her in which everything had to be classy.

She was a ruthless mother, not even worthy to be called a mother, but I never believed this, no matter who said it. In classiness and strictness, she resembled my piano teacher. People also said to me, little boy, don’t even think about her, it’s not worth it. She was living in austere grandeur with someone, somewhere in a distant and alluring strange land. They said this was a moral slough. Which made me think of a puddle with pigs wallowing in it, snorting with pleasure. At other times, I imagined classiness as something like the dignity with which my piano teacher endured her lameness; she never complained. Or as the threatening act of destiny that will reach me too with its fury and one fine day strike me down.

In connection with the two women, people repeated a very beautiful word, which I also failed to understand or to remember. It was exactly the sort of word that
mezzanine
was. Only much later did I realize that I’d known the word for some time; of course,
mezzanine
meant intermediate floor. If that other beautiful word could reach and touch me, I’d become as classy as my mother was or that certain woman, who was a physician. The women in the family giggled when they talked of this, a woman physician should know what she’s doing, they said, laughing. Whenever they used that word in connection with anyone, they could barely control their squeals and giggles. The word might have referred to a specific pathological condition that the woman physician could treat as she liked. Or that Mother might have contracted this condition because she had left us for that certain woman. I did not understand why this was morally reprehensible if she’d had to do it because of her illness.

And how could she have known that a few weeks later they were going to take away my father and I would be left all alone. She couldn’t have foreseen this when she left, and when she learned of it she could no longer come back, sick as she was, to fetch me.

No matter how beautiful this word sounded, contagion and disease clung to it so strongly that in my fear I was unable to memorize it. Nevertheless, I could not withdraw my dreaded longing for my vanished mother. I kept excusing her any way I could, because I craved a mother of any kind. Sometimes I tried to imagine what if things hadn’t happened as I’d been told; what if nothing had happened, as was the case in most families. My body shuddered at the thought, I cried at the sheer happy thought that I hadn’t lost either of them; I cried a lot, but only in secret. I wanted her to come back one fine day; I even wouldn’t have minded if they’d arrested her and taken her away for what she had done. And I always worked up a fever with my constant shuddering—as I did while searching the streets for my father, whom one day, unexpectedly, I did discover.

I took after strange men on Teréz Boulevard, I walked in front of them, showed myself, maybe they’d recognize me.

The only time that I truly felt I was with my mother, that I was truly hers and nobody could take me from her, was when, to punish me, Grandmother locked me in the winter garden, full of tropical plants, where the smell of wet soil made it hard to breathe. I could endure the punishment without crying, but then I’d develop a temperature. The crying had to do with missing my mother, and it had to remain my deepest secret. I had no greater secret than this longing for my mother—until in this building in Dembinszky Street, because of Ilonka Weisz, fate finally caught up with me.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

It was hard to remember how much time might have passed, and counting from what point.

My last reference point was the bell of the Terézváros church marking eight o’clock. I couldn’t say when I’d come up these six worn steps and how long I’d been standing here, not as a child, in front of the roster of tenants. Pálóczky was gone, but on the second floor I found the name of the piano teacher, or at least her name was still on the list. And on the fourth floor, I could see the Weiszes’ name, and that meant Ilonka Weisz could appear at any moment.

In those years, young men like me tried hard to figure out what they should do to give some meaning to their complete and absolute hopelessness. I, however, was busy with the question of whether my entire life was anything but a peculiar hallucination.

I seem to exist, though in reality I have never existed, nor do I exist now and will exist only if I kill myself.

As if I could decide more reliably, given the positions of the watch hands in relation to the numbers, whether what I judged to be about an hour since the last ringing of the church bell had really and truly elapsed. I could not decide how much of that hour I had spent here, I had no reference point for that. As a saving idea, I remembered that the bus that ran in front of this building had gone past twice. The mind fixes occurrences like this, and one’s ears seem to hear them at will. But I couldn’t be sure whether the bus had really passed twice or I was only thinking it to reassure myself or to figure out what it meant if the bus had indeed gone past two times.

My mind broke everything down into tiny pieces but then left me to myself with the unconnected details. Something was happening or had already happened in the world that, without knowing the connection between the pieces and details, I could not understand.

As if feelings and emotions were not followed by value judgments and I was leaving behind periods whose duration or contents my memory could not account for.

This did not happen because my memory was faulty. Or because I remembered things randomly. My memory worked well and I remembered things not randomly but simultaneously: everything occurred to me at once. Everything was together in my mind but with no internal connections. Whatever this was, I could neither survey it nor measure its extent. It was too much and too frightening to be in the midst of a past that is all in the present. No sooner did I begin to sense or have some inkling about how things were connected in my life, and which of them were inconsequential, than paralyzing waves of emotion rushed hotly to my face. Anger and hatred for the two of them. Fear for myself. Klára Vay. Their names were right there on the nameplate. József Simon Hetés. Now I know. They lived on the third floor, in the apartment overlooking the street, above the piano teacher. And now I also know that the woman lied. They aren’t married, I know that too. It was as if I rose to the surface for a brief moment, and then timelessness quickly reclaimed me. To restrain myself, I used the fear I felt for myself and also the anger I felt for them. I had lied to her, but she’d been lying too. A half hour must surely have passed since I’d been standing here halfway between their apartment and their car, maybe only twenty minutes.

I knew perfectly well why they weren’t coming back out, and that was more important.

What a raving idiot I am. And I didn’t want to see what they were doing, as if I could possibly shoo away the image. I saw the half-open door of their bathroom, just as if I were peeking; I saw them pressed against the sink in the bathroom. Klára’s body shining in a short black slip. Ultimately, one perceives many things that never, or perhaps only later, register in one’s mind. I understood the man’s shameless and provocative winks above the glittering car roof. The dry lines on his face running together because of the deeply concealed sarcasm.

He knew why he was going upstairs.

They made each other moan and howl, just like the men on Margit Island.

While, like a dog, I was supposed to guard his car for them.

I felt as if I were being butchered; imagination made my heart pound in my throat; I was suffocating. I have to leave even if it’s just jealousy playing tricks on me, and I have to leave even if I’m making empty accusations. My breathing grew fast and heavy. Impulse carried me across the dark lobby; I ran out of the building.

But I stopped with the wind hitting me in the face.

Because I could hear noises from within.

A slamming door, a man’s voice from the depth of the courtyard, the quick tapping of a woman’s shoes. In which case it was only my jealous imagination playing tricks on me; nothing had happened in the bathroom.

Then silence, and again a door slammed.

Minutes were ticking by but they were not coming out.

And against my better judgment, this compelled me, as if I were a sneak thief, an assassin, a lousy little peeping Tom, to step back into the dark lobby. To stand next to the stinking garbage cans, listening intently. Not to go away, not to leave after all. The stench and the cold were not improbable at that moment; they were sole proof of the existing world order. But it was completely incredible that I had once again sunk so low, and the sinking wasn’t yet over, since I kept exposing myself to these things. Although nobody was forcing me, it was not a free choice. The power of the body brazenly made me do these things; I was sneaking in. The only pleasure in this was that while shamelessly obeying the compulsion, I could call myself despicable.

Perhaps for the first time in my life I realized that my physical being had nothing to do with my moral ideas or my upbringing.

While I sneaked upstairs in the dark, clinging to the peeling walls of the stairwell, all my limbs and inner organs were gently trembling with shame.

That I was capable of doing anything.

I didn’t want to fight down the sensation, yet I couldn’t imagine such a life.

In this familiar mute building, I wanted to gratify my body.

Maybe the moonlight suffused the rushing clouds, or the city lights were reflected in the sky. I really didn’t know what I was doing. In any case the well of the courtyard was shining blue. I was glad my shoes had rubber soles so that my steps were silent.

I stopped for a moment at the open gallery on the second floor. The iron railing cast an unfamiliar shadow on the patterned stone floor. As a child I’d of course never been out here at such an hour. I recalled winter afternoons when the air slowly darkened yet the yellow walls continued to glow. I wanted some certainty—about anything; or to ring their bell, to do anything that would stop the feeling of helplessness. To run up to the fourth floor, throw myself over the railing, hear the thud of my body, the shouts and screams; to end it all on the yellow ceramic paving of the courtyard.

Nothing stirred in the dark building.

I stopped on the last step and leaned my shoulder against the cold wall. No noise filtered in from the street. On the roofs, the wind continued to boom, occasionally strumming a tile or a section of the eaves.

I waited, ready to pounce.

Their apartment was the first one to the left of the stairs. If anyone crossed the foyer in the apartment, I’d hear it. The empty minutes of the waiting were measured only by my breathing. Again, I had to look in through the half-open door of the bathroom, and from what I saw there, my desire congealed in my guts. I could not help following her.

In my fear and pain I kept losing my breath, yet I was standing in front of the patterned glass of the entrance door.

The long foyer was dark, the kitchen was dark. I could see that the bathroom door was not half-open. I could hear no movement anywhere.

Their apartment did not differ from the piano teacher’s. Opposite the bathroom was the larger room’s opaque glass-paneled door on which only a weak light from the smaller room was reflected. Or who knows, maybe some light from the street, I could not decide.

Then they must be doing it in there, in that room.

By now I was not even ashamed.

On the patterned glass my breath collected as vapor.

I seemed to smell the woman’s fragrance in the air, which was the reason I had come this far and why I kept sinking ever lower. The effort not to ring their bell and a dread that I might break down the door weakened me, or my mind became hazy because in my pants fear had made my cock rear up.

Out of ideas, I staggered back down to the second-floor landing; that’s all my remaining sense could dictate to me. But my cock had stiffened to the point of real pain and hindered my walking.

The Noose Tightens

As if the question had called for him to rack his brains, the leather-capped driver did not reply for a long time.

Now and again he studied his passenger’s face in the rearview mirror, her seriousness, her self-imposed severity, the embarrassing sensuality of her features, her mildly wounded pride, and her haughtiness, which she was deploying so clumsily against him.

There was barely any light in the backseat of the Pobeda, but the oval side-window illuminated the older woman’s face. The driver scrutinized, analyzed, and seriously considered which of her features showed that she was Jewish. As a cadet in the Trieste Naval Academy he had learned from his Croatian platoon commander how to recognize Jews. Everyone had eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth, but from that it does not necessarily follow that everyone is equal at birth. When out on individual passes or when amid much noise the big gates on Via Belpoggio were opened and the cadets marched out together in smart ranks formation, they paid close attention to passersby and to the girls hanging out the windows.

That is how he explained to himself retroactively that it was not from meanness but at the dictates of their blood that they’d had an aversion for the Gottlieb child. He clung to the petty officer’s every word. Should he be tormented, as a devout Catholic, were they not obeying their racial instincts when they let the older boys take care of the Gottlieb boy.

Ever since then, observing racial features in any situation excited him.

Even though he had to keep his eyes on the wet road.

He was always able to behave very amiably with Jews, he did not make them feel what he truly thought about their race, and he was especially fond of his own gallantry and generosity.