Parallel Stories: A Novel (60 page)

The two tugboats were receding, and as they carried their sounds with them, echoing above the Danube and penetrating the water, their throbbing, puffing, and pulsing again separated and became independent.

I don’t mind telling you, you’ve been pretty unfair with me, remarked Irma quietly, and with a little groan she placed Elisa’s body in the wheelchair.

And as if to corroborate her earlier suspicion, Elisa and Mária laughed together, conspiratorially, shamelessly.

For them to get going, along with the chair, Irma had to squat down in front of Elisa and put her inertly dangling outturned feet on the folding footrest. The immobile feet were surprisingly heavy.

With whom else could I be as unfair as I can be with you, Irmuska, replied Mária from above her.

You mean you’re taking your revenge.

Except for you, Irmuska, on whom could I take my revenge, for God’s sake. And if I have a good reason or at least a good motive for it, why shouldn’t I.

I’ll do it.

Which Mrs. Szemz
ő
thought was a funny enough remark to laugh. She may have laughed a bit too hard, factitiously and demurely.

With which she meant to excuse herself for her own cruelty. But she had no intention of retreating.

She took the offense more seriously than if it had actually touched her.

Mária quickly pushed the chair forward so forcefully that Mrs. Szemz
ő
barely had time to straighten up and jump out of the way.

It’s high time to be at the table, she exclaimed. Please open the door. And put her blanket on her knees.

They had done this before, wasting a little time before the card game, which filled them with pleasant impatience.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
opened both wings of the door. Since one of the women would always become impatient during this little interlude, this too belonged to their well-refined routine. In the large space called the workshop, an atelier with a northern exposure originally designed for a famous sculptor, large wooden dummies in various stages of dress or undress were standing around a huge drafting table under the bare lamplight. Nothing shone or glittered, and nothing cast a shadow. On another large table, its surface dotted with myriad holes made by thumbtacks and sewing pins, and with several burn holes left by unattended irons, lay pieces of fabric, cut and waiting to be sewn, stacked neatly in layered piles, blue and claret lining material spread under red and purple silks, measuring tapes, scissors, horseshoe magnets, tailor’s chalks, pin cushions full of pins and attached to rubber bands, which Mária or occasional seamstresses would wear on their arms as they worked, so as to have pins always at the ready. Wheeled clothes racks stood along the bare walls and in front of the very deep, floor-to-ceiling closets, most of whose doors were open. On these racks, in a picturesque jumble, hung basted or finished theatrical costumes along with all sorts of civilian clothes.

Three or four people could hide in those closets at the same time. And not only was it possible to move freely from one closet section to the next, but one could easily move the back panel of the last closet aside and, through the steel door behind it, gain the elevator shaft, from which it was easy to escape to the roof. In theory, Varga was unaware of this at the time; more precisely, he pretended to this day that he was.

On the parquet floor, gray and dry with neglect, so many fabric samples were collected in oversize albums and stacked in teetering layered columns, along with art books, manuscripts, and fashion magazines everywhere, that there was barely room to get by them. Narrow paths led from one door to another, from the tables to the ironing boards and from the clothes racks to the sewing machines. Mária wheeled Elisa very carefully along one of these creaking paths to reach the living room. She wheeled her everywhere, which is why there were neither rugs nor door saddles anywhere in the large apartment. When they got there, the drinks in the tall hazed-over glasses were waiting for them on the table, and the two women were again talking together on the terrace.

At last.

Well, finally.

I see you found everything.

They pushed themselves away from the terrace handrail and hurried inside. They kept interrupting each other, as if each was intent only on what she wanted to say.

Elisa, my dove, what wonderful color you have.

Finding things was the least of it. We uncovered all your dark little secrets.

This terrace is a great blessing.

How pretty that print dress is.

But look at Irma’s new two-piece outfit. I think the material is typical Dobrovan.

And there’s a little bolero to go with it too.

You don’t say.

I had to undo some of the stitches because of all things she had to pick a material that’d been washed a million times.

You, on the other hand, haven’t washed anything since Elisa’s birthday, and your refrigerator is full of leftovers gone bad.

Voilà
, everyone grab your glasses and be quiet.

It stinks.

As miserly as old Demeter Lapusa. Where, now? In which novel? Oh, of course,
Poor Rich People
.

No it’s not, you little fool, it’s not in
Poor Rich People
.
*

Now, we shall put the chair over here and if we ask Irmus very nicely she will put the blanket over her knees.

How many times have I asked you to stop finding fault with everything I say.

You’d better believe I know Jókai’s novels.

Where the hell did I put it. If you paid a little more attention to me, I’d like to tell you something.

If you sit like that, you’ll see right into my cards.

Irmuska, this is your glass.

Just a second.

Don’t give any to Elisa.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be coming with Boriska, that’s the decision of the Party. We’ll toe the party line relentlessly.

I really don’t understand why she needs alcohol.

It seems you’ve forgotten that today is the beginning of the first festival of lemon blossoms.

Santé, santé.

Come on, girls, let’s drink, and then it’s really time we sat down.

A ta santé, ma chérie.

But what kind of holiday is that, for heaven’s sake, I’ve never heard of it.

Forget it, at times like this, no one’s paying attention to you.

This holiday is for the Jews what cherry blossoms are for the Japanese.

A pagan jubilee.

I see.

Or like the famous squash-blossom holiday in Slovakia.

That means it has its own time, like Yom Kippur.

Exactly.

The Dobrovans would never have missed celebrating it.

For a change, they ate maize pudding with onion, because it’s such a festive meal.

Ever since they were girls, they had been enthusiastically touching on these delicate points, and now all four were laughing hard.

Elisa looked at them sheepishly, quiet, listening like an animal.

When there was a sudden, finely self-conscious silence, they could hear the soft puffing of the receding tugboats on the river, from farther and farther away, softer and softer with every puff. One of them, to the north, must have been passing the public baths in Dagály Street, the other, to the south, near the Lánc Bridge.

This is how a hog wallows in a sunlit puddle when peace returns to its soul.

They refused to acknowledge that these jesting little remarks no longer had any effect.

Seven flights below, in the dark Szent István Park, crickets were chirring peacefully in the grass among the trees. Occasionally they could also hear the sound of strolling lovers’ footsteps creaking on the pebble paths and echoing on the walls of nearby buildings. They looked at one another, slightly moved by their own embarrassment. Their broadminded liberalism, with all its historical instability, had become like a grandmother’s well-proven recipe for which, in truth, they could not find the ingredients.

They simply pretended that everything could be still set aright; with this pretence, at least, they kept their attitudes.

It was a little empty, but not mendacious.

They raised their glasses, silently, took sips of the sweet-and-sour drink with the fragrance of juniper.

Before we sit down, said Mária Szapáry, inspired by a sudden idea but speaking rather lazily, we should take the time to tell Irmus that, with Médi’s help, the famous Mrs. Lehr, this Erna Demén, is looking to make contact with her.

While she spoke, she looked in front of her rather than at anyone.

Hearing the name, Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s heart skipped a beat and then throbbed much faster than before. The quiet creaks of pebbles made her glance down seven floors, and she desired no continuation, she did not want to hear it.

So this will not be a party, then, but a storytelling evening, she said in the frozen silence, and the stubborn decision made a wry smile tremble on her lips.

Because I also have something to tell you, she continued. She absentmindedly picked up one of the two packs of cards and then put it down.

I think it would be best, said Mária Szapáry, virtually ignoring what Irma had said, if Médi told you about this. After all, she’s the one who spoke to Mrs. Lehr.

Imagine, said Irma quickly, as if interrupting not only Mária’s but her own words, before I left to come here, I was already near the door, and in the foyer—

She could not finish the sentence because at that moment Margit Huber, at the opposite end of the table, angrily shook her loosely pinned crown of hair and, ignoring Izabella Dobrovan, who tried to stop her with a belated movement and a commanding whisper, stepped closer to them, glass in hand, and in a raw penetrating tone cut in. Médi, Médi.

No, oh no, this, this cannot be. You can’t seriously mean this.

The flesh under the tanned skin on her open chest quivered. With her large hand she slammed her glass on the table so hard that the drink spilled out and lemon pulp stuck to the green felt tablecloth in a small flat opalescent puddle.

You’ve lost your marbles, Mária.

What’s that supposed to mean, snapped Mária Szapáry. Your style is atrocious.

Atrocious
style.
You think it’s atrocious. You dare mention
style
. Oh, this will kill me. You, of all people, for whom everything is rotten and always has been.

She would have sent her voice into the safety of hysterical laughter, her helpless limbs in a spasm of rage, but then she decided to end this tactlessness and suppressed her laugh.

You’re telling
me
this. You have the nerve to tell me a thing like that, she cried frantically. You know what you are, you are a born traitor, and you dare lecture me on style. You. Lecture me. You should be ashamed of yourself. Lecture me. Me. Me.

In her inconceivable excitement, she was casting about helplessly for words.

And then something peculiar happened. She suddenly felt unspeakably sorry for herself, for all the things Mária had done to her over their lifetimes, and they weren’t minor. Not only could she not stop saying me, me, me, me, but simultaneously she turned against herself the fire-red nails of three pressed-together fingers; and while, ever more loudly and in ever higher tones, as if gliding upward on an infinite scale, she shouted the one-syllable word reproachfully, unappeasably, and unstoppably, soaring so high that her lungs failed to support the sound with the proper volume of air, she mercilessly lunged those fingernails, to the rhythm of her screaming, into her firmly resisting breastbone.

She seemed to be transforming herself into a giant colorful bird that, in the moment of metamorphosis, was destroying itself with its own beak.

With the tall glasses in their hands, they all stood frozen in place.

Perhaps, in the first moment, with the vain hope or thought that they might somehow stop her.

But they had neither the strength nor the ability to do anything but stare at her with parted lips and eyes wide.

Yet in the next moment they couldn’t have said what they were staring at, or whether there was a next moment, or what might have been the subject of the conflict provoking such a mythically proportioned fury.

Anger died out in Mária too, even though it was she whom Margit Huber’s outburst touched most personally.

They saw her living flesh as she was tearing it off herself, or as if she were ripping her soul off the bones to which it had clung. There was no human experience on the basis of which they could have predicted with certainty that this, and no other, was the nature of their friend.

But when these many self-lacerating utterances of me, me, me reached the top of the scale and her injured self could no longer hope for more self-pity, her voice unexpectedly slumped back to its original register and stopped bleating, cooled off to its normal temperature, jounced back to its usual dimension, which, to the ears of the others, was no more credible than all her former sounds; vision and hallucination.

Didn’t we agree, you miserable creature, said Margit Huber in a sober everyday tone, speaking directly to Mária over the green felt tablecloth, that we wouldn’t say anything about this.

At virtually the same moment Mrs. Szemz
ő
dryly asked what wouldn’t you say anything about, for god’s sake, about what.

Something happened that overwhelmed and then completely swept away this reasonable question. Elisa broke into an ugly laugh—harsh, irritating, and vulgar, and not without justification.

For a moment they all looked at her. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be so gloating, so harsh, so unfeeling, they protested to themselves about this interference.

Elisa was laughing at how the women had given Mária what was coming to her; her laugh could not be misunderstood.

Mária must have been ashamed that the other woman’s commonness always managed to show its face through some hole, aperture. And Médi, in whom the struggle between anger and self-pity continued, made sounds as if something had gotten stuck in her throat and then she burst into tears, choking on the unspoken accusations. As if with the last remnant of her strength, she staggered to the bulky leather couch, torn at several places, and fell on it as if on a warm living being, a mother or a friend, hugging the stuffed armrest, which responded with a whiff of the strange, strong odor of cowhide.