Parallel Stories: A Novel (210 page)

Sitting in the high saddle of the steamroller, his arms resting on the steering wheel, he watched his men from behind his thick glasses. These round spectacles were surely a peculiar old item. The ravages of time had turned the translucent frame yellow, and it seemed to have become organically fused with the dark, sunburned cushions of his fleshy face. A battery may run down, an axle may wear out, the cohesive tension in the molecules of artificial materials may diminish, but he had a hard time giving up his longing for eternity even when it concerned only a pair of glasses. Not for himself, not for his family, but on the roads and in his apple orchard he worked for eternity, or at least against mortality.

For years this reasonable and experienced man had been conducting a quiet battle against the natural fate of his glasses. He could not have cherished his own life more; as a soldier and a prisoner of war he’d learned not to value life too much, but he treated his glasses with a circumspect caution bordering on madness that he never accorded himself or others.

The best place for his glasses was on the wide bridge of his slightly flattened nose, where he could nourish its material, in the perishing cold of winter and in the heat of summer, with the warmth of his skin and the fine grease of his perspiring pores. He never removed his glasses unnecessarily. Not even when walking from the cold air into a warm place, which fogged up the lenses. He owned something he could protect only by touching it as rarely as possible. He was content with his fate too, as long as he didn’t think about it.

István Bizsók was the full name of the man with the glasses.

The road builders hauled two gray trailers with them to their jobs; they never built a new road, only repaired existing ones, doing their share to keep the old highways in working order. Among themselves they called one trailer the office because under the barred window was a small table covered with wrapping paper on which Bizsók kept drawings of road sections to be repaired, plans and accounts relating to the expected materials to be used, warehouse receipt-books, work logs, workers’ time sheets, a ruler, a few pencils, and an eraser, but nothing else. Empty pay envelopes were kept in the drawer, which had a working lock. Next to the door stood the stove on which they cooked supper in the fall and early spring months or on rainy summer days.

In the dim far end of the trailer Bizsók had his bed, which was considered comfortable. The second trailer served as quarters for the four Gypsies.

Sometimes they set up the two trailers perpendicularly to each other, creating a small courtyard, and sometimes they had the trailers parallel and facing, making a small street for their communal life.

They picked carefully the locations where they settled. What sorts of folk lived in the area, were their dogs wild, what was close to them, what was farther away. Gypsies from the Alföld traditionally did not consider peasants as human and they feared them as they did wild animals. But Tuba came from Transdanubia, from the boundary region on the shores of the Mura river, and things were different with him; he also behaved differently with Hungarians. He knew ethnic Croatians, Serbs, and Slavs, and he claimed they were even wilder and crueler than Hungarians. Because a Hungarian, when he’s alone, is a coward, but these others are wild even when they have no help from anywhere. Bizsók had to be on guard to see that the locals did not blame the Gypsies when something went missing. They had to know the directions the wind blew, where there was water, where the nearest well was. For some time now he had been relying on Tuba’s judgment to answer these questions. János Tuba was the first Gypsy to be hired on this work team; other Gypsies then joined up as Hungarian workers slowly left the company. Later, Bizsók brought in the Téglás brothers and in turn they brought their hapless sister’s son, poor little Jakab, who had been with them for only a few weeks.

Hungarians did not work at such hard and ill-paid jobs.

When Tuba joined the team, he had scarcely been older than Jakab was now. The other men hadn’t wanted a Gypsy on their team for anything in the world, but because of his appearance and behavior they just swallowed hard. They did not even discuss among themselves whether they should say no to Bizsók’s choice. As things turned out, Bizsók made an effort to get to know these Gypsies, but he did not really succeed. And he couldn’t even be absolutely sure that his foster daughter, Gyöngyvér Mózes, for whom, at his wife’s urging, he might buy an apartment in Budapest, was not a Gypsy herself. She sang nicely, and it was probably her blood that drove her into the arms of so many different men. Even if she did not bring every one of them home with her. They had found out, or heard, that Ágost Lippay was no longer with her; he’d run away from her while they were abroad somewhere, and now she was with some poet who had helped her to get radio work. In time, Bizsók realized that every Gypsy was different.

But he did not know what to do with this realization of his.

Actually he should have; after all, he had been together with Gypsies in the POW camp. Whether or not she was a Gypsy, he balked at buying the apartment, yet he could not say no to this little woman.

The Gypsies had customs he did not comprehend but instinctively felt it was best not to pry into.

They had heard Gyöngyvér sing on the radio twice, on Sunday mornings, old folk songs, accompanied on original instruments. She bent and stretched her voice and made it tremble. Bizsók did not like it at all.

He liked Vera Jákó more; she sang regular Hungarian songs.

And then there was this Jakab whom the others had sheared bald for some reason.

Bizsók heard what they were doing, saw that the boy’s curls were gone, but he did not interfere.

They’re young, that’s the time for foolishness.

When the giant Tuba joined them one summer, in the great heat Bizsók ordered the men to park the two trailers in the shade of a gigantic, solitary tree. Tuba had just mustered out of the army, along with a friend who was with him and who also was a well-built strapping lad, probably not a Gypsy.

And he said that before the army he had never worked anywhere.

Which made a big impression on the others. Bizsók did not like to remember this.

And how excited this calm boy, this János Tuba, became when he said, right in front of the others, that lightning might easily hit that big tree. He flouted Bizsók’s authority not with opposition but with excitement. If they didn’t steer clear of trees like this, then the lightning wouldn’t steer clear of them. And he turned his dark frowning face away not only from the men but also from the gigantic, solitary tree. He moved among them with his head bent as if his prediction might come true at any moment, as indeed it did two days later.

They never talked of these events among themselves, not then or later. But Bizsók could not forget the centuries-old giant tree splitting in half right before their eyes. How with a frightful clap the brilliant light struck among them, and its flame, sizzling and whimpering with living sap, burst up to the sky raging in the darkness.

And who could tell what Tuba remembered or forgot or what he was thinking about all the time.

The man fascinated everyone, not just with his size and behavior but mainly with his beauty.

What anyone could see with his own eyes was, oddly, the thing everyone chose to keep quiet about. Perhaps it was better that way. Beauty is not something worth talking about with anyone. Bizsók had the reputation of a man who loved fairness and equality. Then why would he concern himself with another man’s looks. Everybody should do his job properly, that was all that counted. Some people believed he was a member of some sect in the Alföld, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Anabaptists. It was rumored that Anabaptists had to immerse themselves, one after the other and stark naked, in the waters of the Tisza or the Túr, at midnight, while other members provided light with tar torches. Of course, the compelling characteristic of a good reputation is that it binds to the person concerned even if that person hasn’t the slightest inclination to be fair, say, or even if the notion of equality goes contrary to his personal interests.

Bizsók treated others with unusual consideration, so his men counted on his considerateness and wouldn’t have allowed him to be inconsiderate.

It was also rumored that men and women did this contemptible obscene thing together in the Tisza and the Túr. And they took young girls there too.

They too could feast their eyes on my old man’s balls.

Bizsók knew that no matter what people believed or said, there was no one who knew more about old machines and motors than he did. Maybe as much as he, but not more. Since there wasn’t a whit of show-off in him, he remained modest about his knowledge. Whenever he became absorbed in his work and the irrelevant sounds receded from him, in the pleasant giddiness of work he caught himself feeling on his hand and on the nape of his neck the weight of his father’s stern regard. He did everything as his father taught him, perhaps the way his father had learned from his father, stealthily watching him work. But he could not hide from his father the new techniques he developed using his own common sense. He had to introduce these methods in defiance of the paternal surveillance, as it were.

Or perhaps it wasn’t that he felt something but that suddenly his neck began to itch and he had to turn around.

These moments became even more peculiar if it turned out a live person was observing him.

In Tuba’s silently observant huge eyes, Bizsók discovered his own hungry childhood face. Whereupon he reverted to being the unpleasant but reliable father, the eternal master who keeps on teaching his sons. He had never bothered with his sons as much as he did with Tuba. And though he wouldn’t officially give his name to his foster daughter for anything in the world, and would have preferred to pay for only half of her apartment, no more, yet he loved her more than he did his boys. Passion is not something a man can will; at most he can be on the lookout for it and make sure it won’t engulf him.

In everything that required extraordinary physical strength, inventiveness, or quick-wittedness, this young man was better.

For example, nobody could light a fire out in the open more adroitly than he. The wind could be blowing, rain falling, no matter how wet the firewood was, his fires burned clear and smokeless. He knew which wind carried rain, how the shade would shift, what the arc of the birds’ flight meant, which well had stale water, and, when necessary, what could be made out of what.

He was also the first to find common ground for trust with strangers, even though everyone was averse to Jews and Gypsies.

Or they’d hardly have arrived at a new place when he’d be bringing to his fellow workers a capful of mushrooms, wild strawberries, and pigeon eggs, and rolling them out for the others.

Bizsók did everything to keep the men from seeing how deeply this touched him.

During the last months, when on quiet evenings, having stared at the dying fire’s random flames for long minutes under the majestic night sky and the stars spread over them, and then amid groans and yawns and cracking of numbed joints they turned in, Bizsók closed his trailer door feeling he had failed to take care of something important.

Perhaps because in his family he had taken care of almost everything.

The fire’s heat and light fed a feeling of closeness among them, but this could be sensed only when the fire died and it became dark and cold and they missed the closeness.

Neither here nor anywhere else did they have a home.

As he listened to the sound of thumping feet, various thuds and seemingly endless murmurs and rummaging about, Bizsók contentedly acknowledged that their place was too small for the Gypsies. His contentment had to do with his privileged position, and perhaps there is no just man who doesn’t find his enjoyable privileges flattering.

Somehow he had to consider himself to be a little above the others.

To do this, he sometimes considered himself better because he was their supervisor and mechanic, sometimes because he was older, sometimes because he was Hungarian, and sometimes because, to his great good luck, he was not a Catholic.

They were all lonely here, so much so that they couldn’t accustom themselves to other people anymore, couldn’t share their loneliness with others. But they were also used to the fact that in their loneliness they lived in close proximity to their fellow workers’ loneliness. Although he enjoyed his small rightful privileges very much, with passing years Bizsók began to miss, especially in the night hours, the special silent attention of another person. As he locked himself in his trailer every night, he’d sometimes think that tomorrow he’d take care of this too. To spell it out, what he meant was that he should make up for what he’d missed or neglected. First thing tomorrow morning he’d move this other man’s bed into his trailer. He was thinking not of Tuba, not of sharing his privileges, but of Tuba’s bed.

He had already picked out a place for the bed.

We’d be much more comfortable like this, he would say bashfully on that imagined tomorrow morning.

The Gypsies shouldn’t be so cramped.

When talking to himself, he addressed Tuba as if he were not a Gypsy. In the mornings the dangerous proposition would lurk in the back of his mind because, ever since Jakab had started working with them, the day began very rambunctiously in the other trailer. Luckily, by afternoon he’d forget what he had wanted and didn’t remember it until going to bed again. What he envied was not their rambunctiousness but something indefinable. Actually, he could have said it out loud, for now there was no other Hungarian on the team from whom he’d have to hide his generosity and love of humankind.

He imagined the festive moment; they would all be together. He imagined the deep silence that would follow his words. But it was precisely the image of this pampered silence that kept him from finding an appropriate occasion for the needed words.

They knew everything about each other, or almost everything.

Behind János Tuba stood his dead grandfather who had raised him until he was twelve. Everything he knew he knew from him—his concentration, the broad arcs of his movements; he learned his ease and dignity from him too. His grandfather had neither land nor house; there was nothing anyone could take from him. No one had given him anything for free, either, but he had a fine axe, a good gouging hoe, and a few homemade curved and straight-blade knives. From early spring until the first snowfall the two of them roamed the villages along the Mura. Tuba very seldom saw the inside of a school when his grandfather was alive. If gendarmes turned violent or county officials threatened his grandfather with fines, they stayed outside a little longer than their work required. When there was nothing left of a tree felled in autumn and his grandfather could make nothing further from the shavings, they had to move on. For a long time he had no idea what it was like to play; his childhood passed without a friend who might have initiated him into secrets or knowledge other than his grandfather’s.