Parallel Stories: A Novel (53 page)

Ágost grasped her waist with both his hands roughly to yank her back.

I don’t want to force you, don’t make me, he hissed.

If you’re not going to say it, don’t expect anything.

You mean anything good.

That’s right, nothing good.

We can check who has more power over the other. Who’s stronger.

That’s all we need.

For a fraction of a second they looked at each other as enemies. In this look, the woman was stronger; no doubt about it. Which revealed many things both retroactively and in advance. And this sensation destroyed many illusions, bringing them crashing down from their heights, yet everything was made lighter by the prevailing state of swoonlike unconsciousness. Still they wrestled, as if fighting for their lives. Their bodies were pervaded by the trembling and pulsing of the earth’s bowels, which slowly began to shake the house, the air, the walls, windowpanes, bed, vibrating above their skin and throbbing painfully in their eardrums. They both unleashed their forces: their wounded pride, their loneliness, all the offenses suffered and everything that during four days had accumulated like waste in their muscles and strained their nerves; like dogs, they set on each other in their mutual admiration, but this had nothing to do with fighting.

Devour it all, if you still can.

Their beastliness opened up new liberating and unknown layers of pleasure. And a huge open throat was approaching them, gaping and belching, infernally rattling, coming from far away with an even, continuous clatter, a persistent hum.

It will swallow them. Gyöngyvér knew the noise well, which Ágost could not have known.

Still, in this situation she found herself unprepared. As if, with its terrifying teeth, it were crawling out of the deepest bottom of the night now covering the entire world. An infernal signal to which she had paid no heed until now. A heavenly signal. Their limbs and other parts were merging and submerging in one another. With their tongues, wide-open lips, teeth, and gums they were inching forward in each other and they not only searched but also found, yet couldn’t say just what.

The major bombardments during the siege of Budapest fortunately spared the buildings of Újlipótváros, there were hardly any direct artillery hits in the area, though during the intense street fighting the building fronts with their balconies, loggias, and conservatories did suffer some damage.
*

Now, in the light of streetlamps, shaded by the foliage of large trees, the many small marks of the damage could not be seen.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
enjoyed the familiar summer fragrances and could see the scene as if she were walking through it twenty-five years before. Friendly lights shone in the windows. At this hour, traffic was still busy here. Around open entrance gates youngsters were idling, couples were strolling hand in hand, or were just returning from Margit Island with their noisy children armed with scooters, rubber balls, and small tricycles. Gyöngyvér had erred somewhat, it was just past nine o’clock. The number 15 streetcar, which never had more than one car as far as anyone could remember, made its rounds between Váci Road and Lipót Boulevard, which later became Szent István Boulevard. It still made the same loud clatter on the tracks embedded in hard ceramic bricks, and the noise still reverberated between the unadorned, smooth walls of the surrounding buildings.

However, this approaching deep rumble did not come from the passing streetcar.

On the far side of the massive blocks of the Palatinus buildings, built in the teens of the century, somewhere from the direction of Margit Island a tugboat was approaching, and its dreadful noise spread across the water, shaking even the stone-lined riverbed, and filtered through the side streets and between the buildings. Anyone living in this quarter of the city had become used to the noises that came from, passed across, and slowly died away over the river.

In the evening, in this section of the city, people went for walks either down to the river or to window-shop on Lipót Boulevard. Mrs. Szemz
ő
did not mind having missed the streetcar. She often crossed the bridge to Buda, went along the chestnut-tree-lined Margit dock, and made her way back on the Lánc Bridge. In the evenings, she usually took a leisurely walk to Szent István Park nearby, where one of her friends, like herself, had had a large apartment since the mid-1930s. She took the streetcar only if it rained. Back in those ancient days, their company would meet once a week in Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment; after the war they met more often and since the 1956 revolution almost every evening, except when they went to a concert or the opera, together or separately, but never fewer than four times a week. The concierge had warned them, bickering with them every early morning, that begging the countess’s pardon, but he wasn’t willing to go on with this gate-opening at the crack of dawn, and he would report to the housing authority that he wouldn’t go on with it. This was considered a rather serious threat, but they enjoyed the fact that no one could tell them what to do anymore, not even the concierge, or at least that his complaint would result in nothing because those days were over or perhaps soon would be over.

Yet the countess did not forgive him his early-morning unpleasantnesses. Occasionally, and bluntly, she gave him a piece of her mind.

Listen to me, Varga, she would say, thrusting a twenty-forint bill into the man’s hand. I’ve already told you, you have two choices. Either you politely open the gate for my guests, no grumbling, or you give me a key and I’ll open the gate myself.

Which the concierge would not risk, and not necessarily for the reason he gave the countess.

It was indeed strictly forbidden to let tenants have a key to the main entrance or the elevator.

He could have ignored this prohibition, but he feared losing the extra twenty- and hundred-forint bills he managed to extort with his grumbles.

Who needs a gin fizz, asked Mária Szapáry casually as she came in from the kitchen.

She stopped under the too-bright ceiling lamp.

I’ve got a lemon, for a change.

The two women whom she was addressing were deep in conversation outside in the dark, by the railing of the enormous rooftop terrace.

One of them, wearing a blue, abundantly shirred calico skirt, a rather rustic starched snow-white blouse with leg-of-mutton-sleeves, with a red coral necklace on her daring décolletage and a wide soft-leather belt at her waist, the ensemble giving her a strongly theatrical appearance, turned irritably and, with her eternal smile, replied.

We don’t
need
anything, that’s for sure, Mária, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t mind a gin fizz.

Same here, called the other woman, who, despite her finely patterned, richly cascading dark silk dress, seemed a more modest and insignificant person.

The gin fizz meant that they were again living the way one should live in peaceful conditions.

They could afford all sorts of superfluous things.

Their bare elbows touched lightly on the railing. Until now they had been talking not to each other but into the darkness, to themselves. They were both past sixty, but their postures retained their former elegance, in which there was not only diligently invested hard work—they exercised, hiked, swam at the Lukács Baths in the morning—but also some deception. They began their evening easily and always saw to their appearances, but the tension between them was noticeable. That peculiar antagonism or irritability that aging people provoke in one another. The strict rules of card-playing kept them from speaking much. They spared each other their daily worries and, to reveal as little as possible of these efforts, paid great attention to their attire and their enduring smiles. By the wee hours, however, they grew heavy, their makeup wore off, and in the heat of the card games their hair became mussed, which they didn’t even bother to fix. By then it would have been superfluous to talk about anything.

They looked at the third woman, without having to be ashamed of anything.

The glass wall of their hostess’s big living room was kept wide open from spring to fall.

Surrendering to the splendid view, every evening they would stroll out on the terrace for some fresh air and to exchange a few confidential words. Now, however, they paid no attention to the city, which with its glittering lamps and bridges barely registered on their absentmindedly contemplative countenances. Southward, one could see all the way to Gellért Mountain; to the north, though, past the island sunk in darkness, the bleak shadow of the Árpád Bridge was hovering above the river, shining metallically with the reflection of arc lights, and beyond that was nocturnal wilderness. The lowlands of Fót, where artillery fires had first flared in December 1944 and seemed so close that people hadn’t known whether to be hopeful or fearful. They were talking quietly into the space before them, cutting into each other’s monologue with unguarded words and sweet, almost dutiful smiles; their gaze roamed over the ridges of the Buda hills, resting occasionally on the range’s distant peaks blending softly into one another.

There, in the west, where later the front moved on, something of the twilight red was still shining, making the mass of mountains glimmer in dark blue; their eyes were drawn to the meeting of light and darkness.

The noisy little tugboat, towing at least six linked and fully loaded barges upstream, had just reached the pillars of the Margit Bridge, and there, between the pillars, the engine noise was so compacted and amplified that involuntarily the two women raised their voices.

A truly brilliant idea, Mária, continued the woman in the silk dress, almost shouting, but I think we should wait for Irma. We could invent a little holiday for her. Let’s say the festival of lemon blossoms or something like that.

The card table waited for them at the open terrace door; around it, four hard-backed and probably not very comfortable chairs, to the side a tea trolley on which Mária Szapáry put a pastry tray as she raised her eyes, surprised and mistrustful, to the two women on the terrace.

The faience clinked on the glass surface.

Is something wrong, she asked. You probably came with bad news again, didn’t you.

The two women on the terrace exchanged glances, losing their smiles. They had no secrets from each other, and if they did they couldn’t keep them. But with Mária Szapáry they had to communicate differently.

No, nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong, nothing whatsoever, replied the woman in the silk dress, her voice rather colorless. We were just mulling over something that has to do with Irma, actually.

I don’t really know what to do, added the other woman, who, because of strong French cigarettes or perhaps naturally, had a slightly rasping voice but a most contagious smile.

The breeze coming off the river caught the tiny funnels of the freshly watered white and mauve petunias hanging in abundance from the terrace railing and gently wafted the sweet fragrance into the spacious, almost empty apartment. Mária Szapáry would be put out if her friends spoiled her good mood. The summer evening was too lovely.

The fragrance of the petunias did not overwhelm the stench of carrion that, try as she might, she could not but imagine smelling. Neither could she pretend she did not sense the tension in the other women.

I’d be grateful if you shared it with me, she said, slightly irritated at her own politeness, as if declaring right off that maybe they shouldn’t and please don’t expect any advice from me, she couldn’t offer advice about anything, anyway. She wore wide, gray linen trousers that seemed rather tight across her belly, and white, yellow-soled, down-at-heel linen shoes. Her white blouse, with long sleeves rolled up to her elbows, looked more like a well-worn man’s shirt. In her nonchalant appearance, there was something quite masculine, strong and free, or, at least by common conventional standards, something blatantly not feminine. As if nothing compulsory in her wider surroundings had ever affected her. She took a step toward the other two. Never a piece of jewelry on her, never any makeup. They weren’t to think she wanted to stick her nose into things. She had two quick and characteristic movements for fixing her heavily graying short-cropped hair, parted in the middle: constantly brushing it off her forehead, and tucking it behind her ears to keep it from falling forward, which it always did, immediately. Perhaps this was her only visibly compulsive habit.

She wouldn’t want to know more than required by common courtesy.

If the name Erna Demén means anything to you, said the woman of festive appearance and contagious smile with her deep, rasping voice. The belt on her surprisingly slim waist was fiery red; her name was Margit Huber, though among themselves the women called her Médi.

Oh but it does, cried Mária Szapáry, surprised. If we are speaking of the same secondhand junk dealer.

Your memory is rather selective as to her human qualities, noted the woman in the silk dress, who, though no shorter than the other two, was ethereal, slight, delicate, all nervous tendons and fine long muscles.

They all laughed.

Sometimes one is too vulnerable out of self-interest,
en fait
, came Szapáry’s contrite reply.

Supposedly, Irma as a little girl was often their guest. In their manor house in Jászhanta or some such place.

Yes, the Deméns did have a place like that as far as I know, Szapáry replied wryly.

But your family had no contact with them.

There was a brief silence. This
your family
was a topic that they, for lack of a shared background, could not touch. Or rather, that caused certain difficulties, created unspoken tensions among them.

I don’t think there was an opportunity, replied Szapáry in a tone that forbade more inquiry.

Irmuska would stay with them only a few days, added Margit Huber quickly, to take the edge off the embarrassment.

The question was indeed improper; how could they have had any contact with a Jewish landowner.