Parallel Stories: A Novel (160 page)

But that is not what happened.

They both stopped and the young woman unhesitatingly dropped her shoes. The shoes landed silently. On the morning of the day this happened, he had given his first talk as an appointed expert at the People’s Tribunal. That is why he behaved so bravely at night. This was the phase of the attack—
la petite troupe fut attaquée par surprises
, as he described it to his most trusted students—which allowed him to consider that his work as an expert in the courtroom was not a tactical betrayal. There was no doubt that the figure was a young woman wearing waterproofed silk overalls, which might for a few seconds have made her seem like a man; and it was beyond doubt that she was insane.

He had never seen such innate, inherent agitation, the strength of which his mind could not follow.

Mechanics in the American air force wear overalls like this.

During the one moment when he could not possibly know what was or might be happening to them, what her hands were or might be doing, the young woman with one decisive gesture unzipped the zipper that ran diagonally down the overalls. He heard the metallic susurration. Stark naked from her neck to her pubic hair, she whimpered with expectation. An insane nymph, a pagan priestess. Never had he a more convincing body in his hands. Never had all accompanying thoughts so completely melted away.

Only much later did he manage to recall everything that happened between them, because right afterward he was too busy trying to sober up from the experience as he staggered home.

For months he kept going back, until in the late autumn a verdict was reached in court, but he never found the insane nymph again.

He should have been pleased, because although accused number 1 and number 2 were condemned to death, he managed to yank accused number 3 from under the gallows.

He could never make up the enormous loss, which also made a sensitive dent in his theory of copulation, though he remembered her face, the texture of her skin, her eyes, and the incredibly rich pubic hair. He was compelled to remember every personal thing that he now missed, and missing them was not possible without lasting pain.

Libido is inseparable from a person, and therefore the Jew rightly holds it to be the cornerstone of individuality, he pronounced at the end to his students. To realize his aspirations for world domination, he must not only destroy the nation but also break down human society into its individual parts. As opposed to this, in inherent copulation each individual experiences the communality that characterizes us all—even the Jew, strangely enough. In inherent copulation the communal overrides the individual, as it were.

He did not understand why he could not find the insane young priestess anymore.

It did not matter that he found others.

Lady Erna discovered the smeared green of grass on the elbows of his jackets and the knees of his pants. She also noticed sticky filth clinging to his fine wool overcoats and to the velour or rabbit fur of his hats.

In the years after the war, the city at night was full of great dangers.

She always found some kind of grayish fuzz that reminded her of cobwebs. She did not understand this, because in her great jealousy she thought about the things she and her husband did together, which weren’t to be sneezed at, and embellished and colored them a bit in her imagination, to make it hurt. Let it hurt, and may her jealousy perish in the pain. But she could never have imagined that the famous professor, object of both general esteem and public obloquy, was driven by a passion of an entirely different nature, which lured him to danger, to abandoned promenades and strange attics, which pulled him into dark doorways where it would happen amid filled garbage cans, while he trembled with the insane urgency and risk, and that this was the only way it could happen, in a state of impersonal excitement brought on by a childlike fear of punishment and a sinful desire for union.

Not to mention wafts of smells and odors that one simply could not have in a well-cared-for apartment.

She dismissed the scandalous odors by thinking she’d gone mad, but she couldn’t go mad. And she couldn’t go around smelling her husband’s underclothes. But she did, and frequently too, for the smells always caught her unprepared. And then she would acknowledge with considerable relief that her husband had stepped in dog shit or human shit.

It could not be that his own shit was smeared on his underpants.

It’s not possible, István, that you went in your pants.

That would surprise me too.

There was no scientific career that could exist without secret, rather dubious human relationships; also, generally speaking, there was no such science.

Still, with her imagination bordering on hysteria, Erna sometimes so upset herself that she would have preferred screaming to having knowledge and understanding.

I can’t bear it.

The things I keep imagining.

But what if I can’t endure this very hour.

I can’t endure an entire life like this. What hell hasn’t this accursed man thrown me into.

She was unable not to love him and want him; the thought made her loins ache. She had piercing pains in her ovaries and she could not understand her longing after so many years. Soon I’ll be an old lady, so why is my body doing this to me. I’d rather perish. Why are you punishing me like this, Almighty God, why are you humiliating me. Even though she did not believe in any divinity; humbug, she could not believe in anything or anybody. We are born, we suffer, and then we perish.
C’est tout
. Therefore, all her life she thought that a body, her own, had to be given its satisfaction occasionally, and that should take care of this whole frivolous business.

She saw it on her son, she saw it on the two good-for-nothing friends of her son, what her husband had been doing behind her back, and what these good-looking filthy men were doing to poor women. There is not one among them, not one, she could call a human being; there are no exceptions, they are all animals. It was the exceptions that repelled her most because they were the loudest—the murderers, the possessed, the Arrow Cross men, the priests, the psychologists, and the party chiefs.

I must be paranoid, mentally ill; I’m exaggerating, taking things too much to heart.

She could not help noticing that these men did not extricate themselves from one affair before becoming entangled in another. She could not help noticing that they did not bother to keep their disgusting little affairs separate, and, what’s more, shoved and pushed one another around in the fray, with their softer or louder show-off challenges. They thrive in a single large body. These men are not persons but rather identical bundles of impulses that must, in as large a circle as possible and as abundantly as possible, spew forth their sperm.

All this hugely disgusted her and filled her with furious envy.

She positively approved that her son was doing this, at least.

A good thing too that he’s not tying himself down forever to a goose like this Gyöngyvér.

These men, with their single body, simultaneously tempt and deceive all women.

And this woman is really a shapely bitch, nothing more.

What more should her son do with her; at most, he could pass her on to another man so that he too could empty his sperm into her. These rotten men consider women to be nothing but vessels into which to empty their sperm.

Here I go with my eternal Jewish accusations, as my dear István would say.

Instead of defending this birdbrained little Gyöngyvér, this wretched little foundling, against my damned son.

It will overwhelm me, I will drown in my own malice, but what can I do if I hate every one of them; and indeed she hated all women. And that’s also the women’s fault, my mother’s fault; I left Geerte only because, thanks to my mother, I loathe every woman.

And since she loathed every woman, she tended, with some relish, to despise herself.

I did not trust her, I couldn’t trust her, because somehow I did not think it natural that someone should be a woman. What need is there for different sexes in the world, anyway. And in time, there must have been something of the mentally ill in her, because she began to see how she turned her own son into a misogynist, how she imbued him with her own hatred for and aversion to the sexes.

And when her husband infected her, once mildly, once more seriously, and once, to her great astonishment, with crabs, she remained silent, mute, made not a peep, merely endured it. After having consulted her physician, who sent for additional tests even though he had no doubts about the diagnosis and treatment, she merely remarked at the breakfast table that the professor would do well to seek the help of a dermatologist.

To which the man, from the far end of the table, with a single elegant flick of his wrist replied that he had already done that and everything would soon be all right.

I hope you didn’t go to see Szemz
ő
.

Dear Erna, you should know me by now, you’ve never had reason to complain about my tact or courtesy.

But why didn’t you warn me, István, she asked him without any recognizable sign of rebuke; she was genuinely curious.

She wanted to understand the man, to see whether their entire life had not been a sheer misunderstanding. Truly to understand, just once, what the other was thinking. Perhaps to understand him now, at this particularly difficult moment.

No, no, answered the man with buttered toast in his hand, from which, as usual, honey dripped onto the tablecloth.

Which, of course, had been changed only that morning and which, because of her husband’s absentmindedness, they would have to change again right after breakfast.

I’m the one who must thank you for your advice, Erna, for your fairness and understanding, Erna, for your kindness.

You are teasing me, István.

You know I am not; you must know that you cast a golden glow on my life.
Vous avez pour moi un coeur d’or, ma petite.

My one and only, Erna whispered in response, her eyes swimming with tears.

I worship you, whispered the man, and neither of them moved from the table.

Which is to say that neither of them left his or her half of it.

From which, of course, Erna understood what she already knew: that once again she had dared to come much too close to the man and would have to back off. Something inexplicable and unavoidable was happening in this creature shaped like a man, though not a very spectacular one, whom she despises and loves; and now she might be carrying one of his painful diseases too. In other words, she could not avoid what was happening in the man until she understood him, and by then it might be too late. If fate had inflicted on her this strange, slightly paunchy man, with his narrow bony shoulders, pathologically concave chest, too large hands, thick thighs, and too big head, then this is how things must be. From which it follows logically that, along with him, she had accepted insanity.

He is a leech. And she did not yet allow herself to think of their little girl, who had been killed by the deliberate negligence of this human wild boar, this coyote, this polecat, this eel.

And she did not think of her son either.

But how could she not think about them.

She was living with two men, living under the same roof with two common criminals. In the building that her adored, handsome grandfather had built and left to her. He must not have been very different from these two, she could not help thinking, maybe even meaner than they. But this is what a solid bourgeois upbringing is supposed to do, help one to gauge, understand, and accept every circumstance and situation and then, armed with this knowledge, to resist chaos. Yet occasionally she felt she’d collapse under the spiritual and moral weight of it, which was far greater than her load-bearing capacity. But she never talked of this with anyone. More correctly, it never occurred to her that she could in fact speak to anyone about the peculiarly muddled organizational and economic aspects of her life.

Had I stayed in Venlo with Geerte, I’d have had another, I don’t know what kind of life.

However, couples leading lives similar to theirs, in high social positions, discussed mental problems, concerns about their emotional lives, or even strictly professional matters only when they touched directly on the family’s existence. Similarly, they did not chat about their household problems or daily routines from the standpoint of their emotional lives. Lady Erna had to solve such problems alone, because her husband was weighed down with his scientific work, his correspondence, the required and recommended reading of texts that towered in piles all over the apartment, his public life with its labyrinths and complications, the obligations that went with his official duties, his travels, and his lectures. Their lives were measured out to the hour and minute, which meant spotless shirts that could be changed at a moment’s notice, ties and suits sent to and delivered from the dry cleaner, vests, overcoats, and fur coats, but also rugs, table linen, curtains, and tableware—she had to see to the maintenance of all this. The brass door handles and brass ornaments had to shine brilliantly and at least once every two months the silver dinner set, along with all its accessories, had to be polished. This meant a house where unexpected guests could be welcomed at any time with the greatest reverence, and the same for guests formally invited to dinner. Or where hungry students were to be given used clothing and stuffed with slices of bread spread with goose fat or crunchy goose crackling, scallions, and salted black radish.

Who would not have wanted to break free of this yoke, this terrible treadmill of obligations, at least once a week.

When, of an evening, the professor would suddenly stand up from the table, and this happened at least once or twice a month, and reach not for a bottle of his favorite Hungarian wine, egri leányka or soproni kékfrankos or szekszárdi bikavér, but, having shed his corduroy housecoat for his jacket and hat and, after breathing a gentle kiss on his wife’s tastefully bejeweled hand, leave the apartment and step out on the boulevard, he had a choice of several places to go. The nearest beer hall was in Király Street, but because of its proximity, it could be the most dangerous. The simplest solution was to walk toward Lövölde Square, at the corner of which was a very dark, in the strictest sense of the word barely illuminated, and stinking bar, a plain drinking place with an oily floor, which in Budapest argot was called a stand-up bar, consisting of two enormous rooms that opened into each other; they were always jammed. There, while nursing a red-wine spritzer, the professor could almost always pick out and then quickly pick up a female who suited him. He loved the women here, in the condition they were in, to the point of adoration, though undoubtedly he did not love their persons, not their inner characteristics and not even their pitiful bodies. Lost petit-bourgeois women sunk to the bottom of alcoholism, or bitter proletarian ones filled with brutality. Who did not want anything but a drink. Or, at most, hoped he wouldn’t hit or pummel them but either stroke them or leave them in peace. They were grateful for his stroking, which never ended in the usual brutality; after all, he loved them, each one of them individually. They were so pleased with the refined manners of this peculiar man, with his pleasant smell and with his fee arranged in advance, that they would cling to him, hang on to him, until they reached the next doorway or cluster of bushes, and they never remained dry.