Parallel Stories: A Novel (7 page)

One frequently remembers what one is breaking away from, or at least feels oneself ready to break away from.

A Genteel Building

Many years earlier, in the spring of 1961, the year when in distant Pfeilen other obscure matters were also coming slowly to light, the celebration of the national holiday
*
in the Hungarian capital turned out badly.

According to the weather forecast, the next day was to be sunny, warm, decidedly springlike. At times like this, though, one never knew, because forecasts on the eve of official holidays were always falsified. They reported something either better or worse than what was actually expected, though occasionally they kept to the facts, with some cosmetic adjustment. There was hope that this time the report would be different, since the previous days had indeed been sunnier and warmer than average, but whatever the officials did or did not know, at dawn on March 15 turbulent northern winds were raging furiously over the country, a three-day hurricane that hit the capital especially hard. The false forecast, based on a compilation of daily requests about and reports on the general public mood, was prepared in the disinformation department of the secret service, whose submitted recommendation could be accepted or rejected only by authorized party functionaries at the next session of its political committee. At such times, the weather report, traversing strange paths, would not come from the Meteorological Institute, but would be delivered, as top secret, by runners to the editorial offices of every newspaper, where it was the duty of the editors-in-chief to supplant the real report with this one before going to press.

When in March the sun enters the sign of Aries and the exceptional hour of the vernal equinox approaches, the elements of nature often collide.

Suddenly the mercury dropped eight degrees Celsius; it was almost freezing again. Something terrible happened at the site of the official celebration, but no one had the details. Swelling clouds rushed across the sky, it was light and then it was dark, it drizzled, it was wet, closed windows rattled in the icy squalls. Festive flags were soaked and flapping wildly above Budapest’s empty streets, the national flag between two red ones. Tiles fell from the roofs; from broken rain pipes water gushed freely. There were hardly any pedestrians; anyone who braved the wretched weather also risked having something fall on his head. In the general din, the streets seemed to have become abandoned battlefields. Heavy broken branches lay everywhere. Anyone trying to make progress by clinging to the walls of buildings would get rain directly in his face and water pouring down his neck from the leaking gutters. And the noise reached its climax when for a long moment at several distant points in the city fire trucks and police cars blared simultaneously and, their sirens blasting continuously, went speeding toward the center of the city.

Ambulances moved in formation along the dead Grand Boulevard.

Why doesn’t somebody pick it up, was heard at the same time in the depths of a huge apartment on Grand Boulevard, a demanding female voice.

She was shouting from the bathroom, but since her youthful strength had been long diminished, she could hardly overwhelm the wind howling in the airshafts and stove flues, or the squealing of ambulances. Please pick it up, somebody, I never.

Still no one picked up the phone, though there were at least three other persons in the well-kept huge apartment fitted with every bourgeois comfort, a home that somewhat defied its historical time.

The sirens of receding ambulances slowly dissolved in the wind.

From four rooms in the third-floor apartment one could see the alternately illuminated and darkened Oktogon Square, while two other rooms and the maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, which gave on to the inner courtyard, remained dim in all seasons. There was a day in June when around noon a thin stripe of light appeared on the eggshell-colored wall in one room facing the courtyard, and this stripe not only reappeared in the following days but grew longer and wider, came earlier and departed later, until in mid-August it vanished for good. Its disappearance was like an otherworldly signal that few people would understand. But now everything was booming, rumbling, whistling, and crackling in this dark inner courtyard, as if something or someone were drumming on the roof tiles, plucking the wrought-iron railings of the red-marble rounded galleries on the courtyard side of the house, playing a trumpet in the depths. To boot, in this morning hour of housecleaning and lighting of fires, all the huge white double doors in the apartment were wide open and therefore no one could deny hearing the telephone or the old lady’s shouts from the bathtub.

The telephone rang three separate times in the largest room, which members of the household called alternately salon and sitting room. Twice it relented, but the third time it kept on ringing.

Each of the three persons thought one of the others would pick it up because each had personal reasons not to.

A pale, freckle-faced woman in her early thirties, kneeling in one of the back rooms, trying to light the fire in the stove, showed the same reluctance to move as did the other woman, a few years younger than she, who in the dark depths of the adjacent back room was lolling on the wide French bed, among the rumpled bedclothes, and with her thin dark-skinned naked arms desperately pressed a pillow to her head so she would not have to hear anything. Her presence here was not exactly welcome, so she picked up the telephone only in emergencies. She felt like an intruder, and rightly so because that is how the others thought of her, and as time passed her situation had become more and more unclear.

She had no place to go to, or rather she did not have the strength to make the unavoidable decision.

The pale woman busy with the stove did not go to get the phone, and not only because the fire she’d managed to light kept going out in the draft with every new gust of wind, which then would blow out of the tile stove and into the room in billows of thick dark smoke, but mainly because she kept to the rules. When people of the house were at home, she was not allowed, even in the morning hours of cleaning, to appear in the front rooms without being called. Although she knew no one was in the sitting room now, she did not go.

Let them pick it up if they want to, she said to herself, as if answering the old lady’s shout from the bathroom, and shrugged her thin shoulders.

She was not the rebellious kind and had no reason to be dissatisfied with her position here; still, at times she enjoyed being quietly vindictive. In fact, it was her little boy’s situation, which she felt to be injurious and humiliating, that made her like this—that, and of course her own self-respect. They lived in the ever-dark maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, and at her employers’ request she had to forbid the boy to leave the kitchen. This was the magic boundary of their living space: the kitchen walls. The child could comprehend it, but how could he possibly accept it. And not only was she, the mother, unable to overcome the constant border violations, prompted by anger, but the little boy’s rebellions continually exposed her willing servility. It was very difficult to find a place for the two of them, and in the difficult hours it seemed they had to pay too high a price for their security. The lively little boy, barely five years old, as pale as his mother, was not even allowed to play in the dim, musty passageway they called the hall, where, except for mealtimes, no one ever set foot.

They made cutting remarks; they would not suffer the boy. Ilona, why don’t you put that child back in the kitchen, the mistress of the house would say. I’d hate to have him break things here.

The hall was the only space in the apartment, by the way, that revealed the changing times and the unpleasant deterioration of circumstances. Originally its sole function was to be the place from which to reach the bathrooms, the two bedrooms, the dining room, and the kitchen—a kind of inner corridor but much wider than similar passageways found in other apartments. In an earlier interior arrangement of the apartment, this is where large linen closets had stood and it was the place for ironing clothes. For the last few years, however, it has housed an old sideboard of imposing proportions and a matching large dining table with stern-looking chairs. Yet not even by mistake did they refer to the space as a dining room. Necessity and expedience do not necessarily make life friendly, and that is why they couldn’t call it by that name. Although the hall window, kept shut at all times, was concealed by silk drapery and the glass in its panes was opaque, it gave on to a narrow airshaft, and the air was often filled with the stench of sewage or equally offensive smells from strange kitchens, not to mention embarrassing noises emanating from toilets and bathrooms. During meals, the most they could do was to pretend not to notice any of this, to pretend they did not hear, let us say, that somebody on the second floor was groaning, pushing, and evacuating while they went on discussing cultural topics and enjoyably consuming their beefsteaks. It happened once, while they were at dinner, that somebody on the fourth floor heaved a burned and still smoking milk pan out the window and into the airshaft, where the pan unluckily hit the wall, ricocheted, broke through the double glass of the opaque window, and landed at the diners’ feet.

For long minutes no one at the table could speak.

In their unpleasant situation, it was no help to them that an oriental rug covered the floor, that the table settings remained more or less intact, and that two exceptionally precious paintings were still hanging on the walls. These paintings, by the way, could hardly be discerned in the dimness. They were old, darkened pictures in heavy gilded frames, and only a single unshaded wall lamp provided some light in the hall. It was kept on day and night to keep people from tripping on the wrinkled rug or from bumping into an out-of-place, stern-looking chair. The many-branched gilded baroque chandelier dangling from the ceiling, with its complicated tendrils appearing as a shapeless shadow capable of endless metamorphoses, was turned on only at mealtimes.

The ringing of the telephone reached all the way into the hall, but now there was no one in it. On the larger painting one could just make out scenes of a battle, the shiny deep-brown haunches of rearing English thoroughbreds, a Hungarian banner as it fell from the standard-bearer’s hand, half-naked human bodies trampled under hoofs. Glimmering vaguely from the recessed gilded frame of the other painting were the rosy cheeks of a young man’s face, painted in glazed colors; he was József Lehr, a captain in the Hungarian army of 1848, who with dreamy eyes looked out from the space in the parted silk drapery into the eternal dimness of the airshaft. From the bathroom one could hear running water and the quick, rapid squelching sounds of soap.

And the person who could have picked up the receiver without any trouble, an attractive, tall young man barely nineteen years old, with nearly ramrodlike posture, was simply not in a position to do so. He saw everything, weighed everything, clearly heard the phone ringing, yet somehow, for quite some time, had not been present anywhere. At any rate, there were many things he could have done but did not do because he was busy with other, much more important matters. As if he had to have a complete overview of his entire future life before, from his imaginary distance, he would consider what he could and could not do.

Who is capable of taking on such a great responsibility; it paralyzed him.

People in his milieu sensed a passing absentmindedness at most, but not his threatened mental state. He had a flawless education, and when he talked to someone he smiled persistently, paid unflagging attention, showed interest, and asked questions without being intrusive—all of which was enough for people to consider him truly endearing. Even his own relatives ignored the unpredictability of his behavior; they thought he was a bit of an eccentric but essentially a fine fellow.

He was now standing at a front-room window looking out at something, while leaning with his hip against the windowsill. He kept his eyes on something; his eyes were submerged in something that no one but he could see; with his eyes he seemed to have grown into this something, but this was revealed only by his unnatural posture, the stiff little half-turns he made. When he leaned forward and felt the pressure of the wood on his loins, he almost touched his temple to the window; simultaneously he had to retract his neck lest his head press the glass from the window. Nobody could have understood what he was doing here. Had he simply stopped at the window without paying special attention to anything, he would have seen the festively deserted square with an occasional yellow streetcar crossing it; or the trees swaying in the wind, their bare, glittering branches knocking together; or perhaps the enormous sky in which cracks of white incandescence had opened up and clouds, heavy with rain yet flying swiftly, were effortlessly chasing one another without piling into a thunderhead.

The vision did have a sort of unpredictable rhythm.

The rain shower did not necessarily batter the windows when the sky grew dark. Up above, the clouds were moving more rapidly than would have seemed possible while also releasing the rain to swoop earthward; so it seemed as if the water were flowing through the white incandescent cracks.

He saw this too, though he wasn’t looking at it, just as he also looked at things that he could not possibly have seen. And one cannot even say that he was thinking about something. He was not thinking. With his body, he responded to the rhythm of the gusting wind, and thus he adjusted his rhythm to match any thought or any other form of sensation that crossed his mind. As if inside him too, the elements had taken control that day, as they had in the entire city. He became gloomy and then cheered up, he found supporting arguments for his mood and in a little while discarded them; they seeped away from him; then suddenly his feelings ran dry, he grew despondent and became hopeful. He had no explanation for the simultaneous diversity. Out of this embarrassing lack, the soul’s chaos was yawning at him, his own. But not a single feature of his face became distorted; on the contrary, self-discipline made his countenance seem frighteningly indifferent.