Parallel Stories: A Novel (163 page)

I changed my mind, Madzar replied, shocked.

What mind, what did you change, that’s what I’m asking, Bellardi said, becoming irritated.

You told me that at the appropriate moment you would come for my answer.

Bellardi said nothing for a long while; the silence was icy. As if he were busy with the thickening traffic and could say nothing until they got out of it. When they had left the boat station behind and then the silk factory with its long brick wall, the riverside road again became empty and he could once again speed up.

When, twenty-three years later, he thought about this long, deep silence of his, they happened to be driving past the jail on Margit Boulevard.

What I told you then, he finally said, unexpectedly, after Madzar had given up on getting a response, was that I would like to spend the rest of my life with you.

You must have thought I was joking.

Madzar turned his head slowly toward Bellardi, looking at him in alarm, even though alarm is always rapid.

What could he say to this.

Leave off with your embarrassing jokes.

Everything else is delusion, Bellardi replied with his most playful world-disdaining smile. Believe me, this was my only sincere sentence, perhaps it will be the first and last one of my entire life.

You don’t have to call special attention to it, Madzar replied hoarsely, this makes it even more embarrassing.

I meant everything else was evasion, prevarication, and who can remember all the things I rambled on about and when.

But you can understand, can’t you, that I also thought about your patriotic fantasies.

And now I ask you to forget them, please.

Should I understand, then, that in the meantime you and your friends have dropped your plans concerning me.

Now it was Bellardi’s turn to look at his friend.

My reluctance must have made a discouraging impression, I understand, Madzar continued, to his friend’s curious disdainful look.

This must have been the test. I have to acknowledge I passed the screening.

A rare moment, given that Bellardi detected offended vanity in Madzar’s melodious voice. Which he liked. That with his offense he’d managed to penetrate Madzar so deeply.

If you reject me, my little friend, I also reject you.

We’ll see who is the stronger.

Only now did Madzar notice how alarmingly his one and only friend had diminished in his shirt and pants while he had waited for him in vain all summer.

How the bitter grooves of his face had deepened.

How chapped his lips were.

But now I must tell you something entirely different, Bellardi said dryly.

No, not that, exclaimed Madzar to himself, guessing instantly what kind of story Bellardi wanted to tell him with his shockingly chapped lips that almost looked like one large sore.

Actually, his friend continued relentlessly, I wanted to tell you about it in April.

The very moment, he thought to himself, when I saw you on the deck of my ship. How good to see him; he had been my only friend, I’ll tell him about it, he’s my man.

Which made him, as a hot flush would, love the other man even more.

We’re not yet thirty, Madzar shouted desperately, his words sounding like a thunderclap because of his deep voice.

I thought these things then, now I can say them aloud.

It’s possible I can’t tell you even now, Bellardi continued, as if he had not heard or understood the reason for his friend’s shout.

You don’t have to be afraid of me.

Madzar didn’t want to hear from his friend’s lips what he could know from his own life; he did not want to hear about Elisa.

He wanted to force Bellardi; they should not yet give up hope, should not seal their fate by talking.

Which the other man instantly understood, how could he not understand his friend’s insane and sober rejection, and he stopped talking.

That is why Madzar loved him.

No matter how insistent he was about something, for the sake of a little sensible love he could give it up. But it was hard for Bellardi to stick to the cavalier exchange. He could not quite understand what the other man had not understood. He could not accept his friend’s incomprehension because he could not explain to himself why, for the sake of his little son, he should remain all alone in life.

They had not left town when, just past Gottlieb’s abandoned lumberyard, the paved road ended at Calvin Street. And then he’d have no choice but to kill his little boy before ending his own miserable life. The cloudless blue summer sky expanded above them with a flock of swallows preparing for evening. Madzar wanted to ask Bellardi what his view was on why he, Madzar, always had to fall in love with married women. What sort of weakness was this. That’s what they should be talking about. And he’d ask Bellardi to name this weakness of his, no matter how harsh his verdict might be. He should not be spared. But he did not ask Bellardi, and therefore Bellardi could not answer him. Why does he have to snatch these used-up ladies from their boring marriages. Why does he always fall into the same trap. And if this keeps happening because that’s his destiny, then why do these same women always destroy him instead of letting him pull them out of their predicaments. Why wouldn’t Mrs. Szemz
ő
go with him to America or anywhere else. And why wouldn’t she go as far as letting him fuck her at least once.

Why don’t they let the new life find its voice in them.

Wasn’t he worth at least that much.

The screeching of the swallows above them overwhelmed the noise of the engine.

Sweet Irma, it was the first time he addressed her like this when talking to himself, why can’t we.

He did this, busied himself with this, so he would not have to grasp Bellardi by the shoulder.

Could they possibly predict my inconstancy.

Meanwhile the bright and vast vanishing greenness of Réti Lane filled their eyes as their ears were filled with the swallows’ evening screeches. Which drastically changed many things; it turned their mood around. Their mutual rejections made them finally turn to each other. With its enormous willows looking like uncombed heads of hair, the Cigányzátony, or Gypsy Shallows, lay before them, splitting the river into two channels; these shallows, obeying the force of currents over the centuries, had become a romantic island.

Bellardi drove slowly along the high embankment.

Their thoughts had retrieved so much from the past, immersed them so generously in the present, that there could be no room for talking about anything.

But Bellardi felt once again that Madzar’s sheer presence had a calming effect on him.

He looked for a place where they could drive off the embankment. On the dangerously damp soft grass he wouldn’t be able to get close to the willows on the shore. By the time they got out of the car, both of them were dazed and a bit woozy. Bellardi had had nothing to eat or drink since morning, but in his current giddiness he did not notice his hunger. They sank to the bottom of a green sea in their daze. High up in the blue sky, swallows went on twittering. Bellardi sought a physical antidote for giddiness by undressing hastily and provocatively; Madzar followed him hesitantly. Telling himself that Bellardi’s showing off had no effect on him. And in fact it didn’t, because he didn’t let it. Bellardi threw his things back into the car, his white shirt, his white linen pants; Madzar put his things, carefully folded, on a black-and-red leather seat. When Bellardi stepped out of his brightly striped white poplin underpants, Madzar took off his own. For a while they stood naked on either side of the car, both of them bashfully enjoying the warm air, laced with cool currents, on their nakedness.

Because neither of them wanted to look at the other just yet.

The sun’s disc glowed at the rim of the western sky.

And the little Cabriolet remained at the vapor-filled bottom of the slowly graying green meadow, like a colorful insect at rest, wings spread wide.

The willows on the shore swallowed up their figures. A little later they showed up on the sandy stretch near the water. But before they threw themselves in, after more than a decade’s absence, after many eventful years during which they’d barely thought of each other, they took a long moment to observe each other. They did this simultaneously and unreservedly. As people who couldn’t do without it. They did not stand too close together. They acknowledged with a certain satisfaction that during their adult years spent without each other everything had changed and yet nothing at all had happened to the other’s body. This was beyond comprehension yet its reality could not be denied.

And from then on, everything happened the way it had happened so many times before in the heart of time.

Bellardi hit the water first, snorted and splashed about a little, and then began to swim with large strokes toward the opposite shore; his crawl was impressive, his feet fluttered powerfully. Madzar followed him in a more deliberate clumsy manner. The lateral arm of the river had no significant current; still, at the deepest part its strength caught them and carried them along. Bellardi looked back occasionally; they both tried to keep up the tempo and stay on course.

With his denser musculature, Madzar resisted the current more, but he was slower.

Bellardi did not wait for him when he reached the other shore; he quickly disappeared into the island’s vegetation, flaming red in the advancing twilight. They did not see each other among the trees, where every year, because of repeated inundations, wild undergrowth sprang up in the sunny spots. They signaled to each other with hooting and ululating sounds; they signaled their belonging to each other. When Bellardi didn’t ululate for a long time, Madzar’s hoots sounded impatient. He had to be ready for Bellardi not replying on purpose.

Even as a young child he had liked to toy with the idea of disappearing.

At such moments, heavy with the other one’s sudden absence, the riparian woods suffused with light began ominously to close in on Madzar. But Bellardi always waited for him on the shore. Madzar could count on that.

Where the world finally opened wide and the broader branch of the mighty river showed itself with its raw power and the colors that revealed its depth.

Madzar was afraid of it, but Bellardi could not resist trusting it.

Madzar was afraid that even after these many years Bellardi still knew no caution or self-restraint. For a while they traipsed around on the stony shore, letting the water dry on them, enjoying being naked, and with occasional glances trying to gauge what the other one was planning to do or how he was managing.

The edge of the opposite riverbank and the woods reaching deep into Mohács Island were improbably red in the setting sun. In the empty sky, however, the moon was already shining hazily over the water. From far away, somewhere from the endless plain on the island, the low sound of a cowbell and sharp little yelps, the barking of nervous shepherd dogs, could be heard. But mainly they heard the plashing and lapping of water breaking on the shore in uneven thrusts. The creaking and grating of stones, pebbles, and shells under their feet. Occasionally a nearby splash made by a jumping fish; the brief flash of a slick body followed by a graceful downward arc back into the water. The current had a steady, uniform whisper, like a susurration of silks rubbed together, as varying masses of water of varying temperatures drifted and rolled over one another. The willows above them were quiet now except for an occasional solitary drip.

The great summer heat remained motionless in the air, despite the proximity of the water.

What madness had they got themselves into now; there was no other name for it, madness, insanity.

Not even a childish or adolescent madness, because neither as children nor as adolescents would they have started something like this so late in the day.

And now it was Madzar who headed for the water first, Bellardi following him only when, fighting the strong current along the shore, Madzar popped up to the surface. Then Bellardi took off too. It had often happened like this in their childhood; Madzar would be first to throw himself into some madness that Bellardi had cooked up quietly and treacherously, just so he didn’t have to follow Bellardi.

A good ten minutes must have gone by before they began to look for each other in the water. They were well into the middle of the river, where speed is speed and water is water. There is nothing but water and speed. One can feel how much energy is lost by a careless movement of the head or a searching look, and how the place of the lost energy is filled with the all-powerful force of the river. Which within a split second can change irreversibly, setting back one’s personal situation and chances. Though here, in the middle of the mighty water, the river is harmless.

With its innocently smooth current, it can take one straight to eternity.

In the middle of the river, where the enormous mass of water with its changing surface and refraction of light blinds everyone, Bellardi had to be careful that nothing he wanted to tell Madzar would reach his consciousness, especially Elisa’s dying.

He had to keep himself on the surface of his consciousness and to continue with his strokes on the surface of the water.

It seems that the opposite shore, bright red with the last rays of the sun, toward which you are heading with all your most efficiently dispensed strength and strictly controlled breathing, is being pulled away from you, taken farther and farther away with incredible alacrity. They wasted much energy, had no idea how much, did not find each other on the endless surface of the water for the longest time. It’s the vigorously changing mass of the surface water that blinds one. Eyes cannot cope with so many consecutive and overlapping changes. And the mind gapes vacantly when it has nothing to comprehend over the terrible depth below it. While in fact one should feel most secure in the middle of the river, where there is no whirlpool and seemingly nothing needs to be done in order to progress.

One begins to fear and tremble.

Theoretically one should not look around until one is close enough to the wildly retreating opposite shore, let alone think or rise out of the water.