Parallel Stories: A Novel (38 page)

Luckily she could somewhat restrain herself. She would gladly have shared all her joys with Kristóf, but she’d have been reluctant to tell him about her torments.

There was hardly an hour, a minute, in which she gave free rein to her emotions or feelings. She could never find out in advance from Kristóf whether he would be sleeping at home or staying away again for days. She envied him too; he probably had a good life. She envied everyone; her entire soul, all her goodness, was consumed by envy, behind which lurked amorous greed. I’m the only one who feels bad. It made a difference whether she could shout and yell freely or whether she had to restrain herself when in the throes of pleasure. Something of her pleasure always remained stuck in her. Ágost could not, probably did not want to crash through the barrier. One of them wanted to give too much, the other held it back. That is why they were not compatible, and this was impossible to understand.

Already in their second week she had begged him, please, let’s get out of here.

We can’t do it here. I can’t bear it. You look at me as if I were saying something insane. I’m whispering even now; I can’t stand this constant whispering.

Then speak more loudly.

How can I talk more loudly when that little idiot is behind the door.

You’ll get used to it.

Sometimes she thought this was a family trait; after all, Kristóf also had this indifferent way of answering her. She wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d be out of the house. At other times she thought this was so because these people were Jews. Very cold, passionless people who keep to themselves.

On her skin and in the strands of her hair she would sense Kristóf’s presence in the adjacent room. Or his absence, because that irritated her too. She sensed when he was asleep, because silence had a different quality then. Or that he wanted to be asleep but was awake, tossing and turning, and torturing her with his little noises. Yet no response ever came from the adjacent room. Although she couldn’t have said what response she expected from its darkness. She would have liked to see Kristóf lose his superior airs.

Forlorn and unapproachable, Ágost was standing in the almost empty room, quite near the tall door connecting it to Kristóf’s room. On this occasion too they did not know whether he was at home or not.

The nightlight, from under its wax-paper shade, illuminated Ágost from below and threw on the wall a long tilting shadow of his naked figure. Its contours would swing out and then back as he moved his hands, elbows, and arms; the shadow would tremble. Behind him the door to the living room was wide open. He hadn’t even closed the shutters on the two tall windows. Engrossed, he was slowly stroking himself with odd, broken movements. Showing and at the same time withholding something. Every one of his practiced movements proved that he knew what he was doing, to what purpose, and needed no one’s help. His smile seemed to hover independent of his face. Gyöngyvér found it especially painful that the smile was not meant for her; it was meant for no one. Anyone on the gallery, or people from any of the apartments facing the courtyard, could see in.

Why are you doing this in front of me? Have you lost your mind?

She received no answer.

They never came home before midnight. As if Ágost had said, let’s go somewhere, anywhere, just so it’s away from here. They went out every night. Then why don’t you want to move out of here. He gave no answer to that either. Most of the time they came home around one, one thirty. And every night they were a bit tipsy. On the way home, Gyöngyvér hummed arias to herself, practiced scales half-aloud, exercised her voice in the deserted streets. Ágost grew morose and silent, but claimed that it only seemed he was in a bad mood. In fact, sometimes, late at night, he was in a very good mood. He really felt good whenever he could withdraw into himself. With her arm in his, Gyöngyvér clung to him, trying to synchronize at least their steps. Anyone seeing them receding down a street with their long powerful stride would have thought, with pleasurable satisfaction, that they seemed very alike. Or if not alike, one could see why they belonged together. Their steps reverberated evenly among the silent buildings.

Icy gusts would sweep between their faces, each new one spraying cold and sticky drizzle into their eyes. They had to huddle closer, which Ágost didn’t mind at all.

That is how they reached home.

In these late hours, a deadly silence covered the entire city. There were no cars on the road; occasionally an empty streetcar would clatter by on the boulevard. In the sparkling drizzle dark Oktogon Square yawned mutely. Hardly any pedestrians anywhere, except maybe on the other side, in the recently reopened Savoy Café. On the Andrássy Road side, behind darkened windows, a bar was functioning again. Drumbeats were battering the walls; occasionally a saxophone wailed triumphantly or dolefully. Guests arrived here by taxicab; sometimes the noise of carousing guests reached the street, and there would always be taxis waiting outside. After the doors slammed shut and the cabs sped away, the night fell silent again. Farther off, where signs for the underground public toilet in the subway station lit up the sidewalk, some idle figures could be seen. The ladies’ section was closed at night; the men’s remained open until dawn. Balter opened it and closed it.

At dawn, at night, and several times a day, he had to limp across the boulevard, and for that he collected a separate salary from the Metropolitan Sewage Company. Sometimes, even at this late hour, a head might appear in the bright light, coming up out of the ground, rising on the steps, then joined by the rest of the body. It might be followed by another figure or, conversely, somebody might be going down those steps, slowly disappearing in the ground.

It was hard to tell what was happening.

Other solitary men, like shadows, huddled in nearby entranceways, waiting. Some of them stood behind the lit-up round advertising column, smoking cigarettes. Others pretended not to be hunting for anyone, only waiting for the streetcar as they paced the island of the stop.

But when the streetcar came, they would not get on.

Gyöngyvér tried not to make noise, she wanted both of them to keep their voices down. They always woke up everyone in the huge apartment on the boulevard when they came home; some were startled, some only pulled the pillow over their ears.

Have you gone completely out of your mind, she whispered angrily, and in her light semi-high-heeled mules decorated with swansdown she hurried across the large room to close the shutters of the two windows giving on the courtyard. The darkened, desiccated old parquet floor followed her steps with loud creaks. How can you do such a thing, for god’s sake. Ágost did not answer. Not even for a second did he break contact with himself.

Their arrival had its own routine. Gyöngyvér first went to the toilet, then to the bathroom, Ágost right to the kitchen. He rarely ate at strange places; starved, he had to wolf down something very fast. Doors opened and closed, light switches clicked on in a predetermined order. The abundant and powerful stream of Gyöngyvér’s urine either made a harsh noise as it hit the toilet bowl or splashed hard in water.

Kristóf couldn’t do much about this.

If this happened while he was asleep, he saw it from close up, as if touching it with his tongue. It was a frequently returning memory. On a hot summer afternoon, when in a darkened room Viola pulled off her panties and squatted above him and Lilla demanded that he lick it. This room was in Dunavecse, not far from the river. In the darkened, creaking, large rooms of the house, they could smell the heavy, pervasive odor of Danube mud. Lick it for her, lick it. She whispered excitedly. Lick it; it’ll be all right, what are you afraid of. He felt its taste on his tongue for a long time.

Nothing had a taste like that.

He also understood from the excitement that Lilla had already done it to Viola. The characteristic odor of the mud mingled with this taste, he couldn’t get rid of it. Thinking that other girls might ask him for similar services, he spied on them, though he despised himself for the girlish trait of spying on people. Lilla and Viola rubbed themselves red. After that, he only remembered there was a certain taste he no longer smelled in the mud’s odor. He looked for it in vain. He nurtured the thought that he might find it. Half asleep, he sank into the mud, could barely extricate his feet. That’s when he woke up, to the memory of the taste and the odor, of there being a real Lilla and a real Viola, two little girls who were his cousins. Still, the taste was nowhere to be found, no matter how much he moved his tongue in all directions inside his mouth. He didn’t know what it belonged to, whose taste he remembered in his dream, the taste he could not find in his own saliva. His agitation was separated only by a wall from the aggressive loud sound of splashing urine. There was no point getting irritated because he had been awakened again. As much as he resented it, he in fact found the noise of Gyöngyvér’s peeing attractive; he daydreamed about her cunt.

And if he also had to hear her cautious farting, amplified by the wide old-fashioned toilet bowl with its hairline cracks, he could say good-bye to sleep for good. Gyöngyvér did not fart every night. Even when she did, she would release no more than two small hushed ones, briefly, in quick succession, not letting herself go completely, though she probably thought no one would hear it. As if she were ashamed of herself. Every person is a master of dissembling; people sharing an apartment must pretend especially that they don’t notice the life signs of others, and that the attempts made to conceal these life signs are also invisible.

This is what Kristóf did, out of politeness, but when Gyöngyvér startled him out of his sleep, it was like hearing a nice, rude, irresistible joke. He was shaken by involuntary, almost uncontrollable laughter. What he saw before him was the woman’s continually clenched lips and the fart emerging from them. Her disgusting attempts to gratify every desire. She certainly gratified every desire now. He saw Viola’s cunt rubbed raw. He was writhing, practically coiling up in his bed as he kept laughing silently. He could not laugh aloud or he’d be discovered, Gyöngyvér wouldn’t dare fart again, and that would be the end of his recurring joy. He was guffawing while winding and burying himself in his cover and pillows. This miserable creature defines herself most appropriately with her cautious little farts. The harder he laughed in the darkness, the stronger he felt that this had less to do with his good mood than with humiliation. His tears were flowing, his sides were about to split, the linen shoved into his mouth was all wet. In fact, he was on the verge of crying.

Meanwhile there were noises from the kitchen; the lid of a pot brushed off and made a huge racket on the tile floor. Eating and shitting. And if not only men but women could fart like this, his life would not be the kind for which they’d been preparing him. Very different from the one this finicky woman, or the others with all their affectations, made it out to be. A glass clinked; a plate thudded on the table. A simpler, more amusing, much more disgusting, more ordinary life. Later, in the bathroom boiler, the gas, with a tiny explosion, caught fire. And in the kitchen Ágost turned on a damned faucet.

Every evening Ilona carefully prepared and put out food; Ágost preferred to eat straight from the pots, with spoons or with his hands, and pots make a lot of noise. For him it was a belated satisfaction to eat out of pots late at night in the parental home, to dip bread into sauces and let everything run, dribble, drip, and flow. No night passed without Ilona waking up in the maid’s room. But whether she got up to feed Ágost, or stayed in bed and from there followed the noisy events in the kitchen, she took care not to awaken her little boy. They slept in one bed. There was no room for another bed or even a cot. Lady Erna would not have stood for it, anyway, because she did not want to provide any support for, let alone any legal confirmation of, the fact that the unfortunate child lived here.

He was a peculiar child; she admitted she could not warm to him. Or she kept her distance because she didn’t want him around. This was the situation Ilona had to accept. And at the beginning of every month, when collecting the rent, the concierge grumbled that the child still hadn’t been registered and he could not have such a situation go on much longer. They didn’t tell Ilona to take the child back to his grandmother who had been raising him until now, but they didn’t tell her that he could stay either. She had to get up very early to make breakfast for everyone and also have time to take the boy to kindergarten.

The water in the old pipes, given to cracks and bursts, made a clanking sound, almost like a moan; unwanted air bubbles held it up before it began to flow, gushing out and pelting Gyöngyvér’s thin brown body, pattering on the tub’s enamel. Every other week, Gyöngyvér had to get up early, without an alarm clock, of course. She followed Ágost’s schedule; sometimes she would give up sleep altogether, but not her nocturnal shower. Perhaps this was the only thing she stubbornly clung to, even though the restless pipes, rattling in the walls, often seemed to threaten to explode. Her smooth body, delicately shaped limbs, elongated and strong musculature, taut and almost poreless skin had no fragrance until she applied her cheap perfume to the crook of her arms and the area behind her ears. And oddly enough, her short, thick hair had no smell either. Ágost did not think about this, but it was important to have no smell. She probably wouldn’t have smelled even without the showers, but she took them constantly. Like a compulsion, a passion or obsession of unknown origin. She took a shower before going swimming; she took one before going into the pool and after coming out, and at night she took one even if she had already showered in the afternoon because they were going to the opera or to a concert and she had to change her clothes.

Until he was taken to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road, the professor was also startled to wakefulness every night by the unpleasant noise. Still, he slept a lot both during the day and at night, perhaps because of immoderate doses of medicine; he slept very soundly and if awakened was barely conscious of himself. Or he may have been conscious of something entirely different. He would sit in the dark, staring at the lights trembling and shadows shifting across the spines of his books. From the time his wife no longer put up with him in their conjugal bed, a good ten years earlier, he had been made to withdraw to his study, filled with books and papers, and onto the sofa that once had been only a place for an afternoon nap or snoozes during breaks from his work. No one knew whether he still remembered things like naps or work. His condition had been deteriorating rapidly and unstoppably for months, and then one day it suddenly leveled off. As if the process might be reversible, after all, bits of memory sometimes revived, and then quite unexpectedly he caught a glance of himself in his own situation. He stood among his books, sat at his cleared and cleaned-off desk, and wept.