Parallel Stories: A Novel (94 page)

From the moment he boarded the ship at the Franz Joseph dock, he crossed over into a former world, with different humidity and different air pressure; he stepped back into his earlier life from where he could look back to historical times, even to the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary.

He breathed differently here and everyone was someone’s acquaintance.

The river would rise, the river would fall; the water flowed through everything and threatened everything.

Everything was becoming familiar—the smells, the immense gray sky with its sultry southern winds and harsh western breezes, the silver-gray shoreline, and, behind the calm shores, the tidelands that had given him the gifts of mystical experiences and charged silences. He had not forgotten them, which is why he did not believe they’d been mystical. Visions pervading his body and soul that to this day secretly directed his life. The whirling water along the body of the ship; the murky water with its two-tone surface, bubbling up from different layers of the riverbed, and the river’s unpredictable, wild currents.

He went home at least once every two weeks. He wanted to make use of his time before going to America.

The abandoned workshop and his mother were the ostensible reasons for his visits home, but he wanted to be near the water, the fog at dawn, the smell of fish, and to let their reality fill his life. Of all the ships on this route, he preferred the
Carolina
with its classically severe aesthetic, its reliability and comfort, for it brought something with it from the early nineteenth century that Madzar greatly appreciated: a sobriety and modesty in its proportions, as well as mechanical perfection.

This boy Mayer was from Paks, but the captain came from Mohács, and he was one of the most peculiar people Madzar had ever met; they had sat side by side as schoolboys at the school on Koronaherceg Street.

Mayer did not want to be impolite but he hardly looked at the object floating past them in the water.

That’s not a woman, sir, he yelled over the sound of the engine and against the wind.

No, but it wouldn’t hurt to drown women in water, the architect said, and smiled at the boy.

I’ll manage without them for my whole life, believe me, replied Mayer, yelling into the wind.

Madzar, taken aback, looked into the boy’s immobile, somber, dark eyes, at his thin lips and strongly protruding chin with its taut, stubbly skin.

He scrutinized him, hoping to see whether he was yelling the truth or even knew what he was saying.

But you can’t tell what that red thing is, can you, he yelled back in a friendly tone.

No, I can’t, sir, you’re right, replied the boy readily, but what he thought was, I don’t really care; his demeanor suggested that he was ready to butt and gore the whole world.

To charge anything or anybody.

They remained at the railing for another moment. Madzar wondered who could have hurt or insulted this Mayer boy so much, with what and why. They went on watching the object spinning in the water churned up by the paddle wheels, both of them perplexed and silent.

The red they saw was not a woman’s robe but a loincloth on the naked body of Jesus Christ. For a fraction of a second their eyes caught the crudely carved crucified figure on the surface of the water before it was submerged again.

Without a word, surprised by the red painted loincloth on the clumsily carved body, Madzar followed the young man, who in the tension of his body was proclaiming that it was irredeemable, the entire Creation was irredeemable. The end was near.

He knew Mayer’s father, mother, and grandfather; everyone knew they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and believed that earthly hell would soon be over: the Last Judgment would descend on the human world, possessed by Satan, and Armageddon was imminent. Their manners were harsh and unpleasant, like the boy’s, but he did not know what to make of the boy’s response. There were years when Madzar’s grandfather had built several rowboats and more than two flatboats for them; the Mayers of Paks did their fishing with many different people. This boy must have been the youngest son in a long line of children whom they sent, who knows why, to be a cabin boy. While making their way down the narrow steps to the lower deck, Madzar watched the close-cropped nape of the boy’s neck, his bony, tense shoulders, as if expecting that the body’s structure would explain things. Suddenly, on the lower deck, it was hot. The wide windblown corridor, whose white walls were vibrating with bright spots of light reflected from the water, was filled with the aroma of food cooking, perfumes, and tobacco.

The kitchen was sizzling, sputtering, almost bubbling over; each time its swinging doors opened and closed, waves of noise were released from clattering dishes and yelling cooks, waiters, and scullery maids. Light from sconces glittered on the highly polished cherry-red wainscoting in the commodious salon and somberly furnished dining room, while on the low-coffered ceiling the bright, reflected lights of the river swam in the opposite direction. It was as if he almost understood something, as if to a certain degree he comprehended something of the connection between the nature of reflexes and his own attraction to them.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
did not appeal to him. He could not even imagine her as somebody’s type. Yet he could not deny being attracted to her. When he had had the chance, he had searched Dr. Szemz
ő
’s face to learn whether he could harbor the same sort of feeling for her as the doctor felt for his spouse. This woman surely had a lot of money. An enormous inheritance. Perhaps the husband married her for her money. Which in his case must have been as persuasive as the light was in convincing Madzar to take on the job, those multiple reflections on the ceiling of the empty seventh-floor apartment created by the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, the surface of the Danube, and Eliel Saarinen’s tin domes, reminiscent of conical caps. And he did not even want to think about the apartment’s interior. Well, one needs money. And the only thing the tin domes, or indeed the entire group of buildings, had to do with Saarinen was that Emil Vidor had followed Saarinen’s ideas for a few years.

One could say that Vidor stole his ideas from Saarinen.

Madzar also remembered the strange words with which Mrs. Szemz
ő
characterized the neuroses of her Jewish patients.

The tin dome cast a shadow on them in this brand-new quarter of the city, as did the memory of the Judenhut, the stigmatizing hat Jews had to wear in the Middle Ages. Nothing like that would have occurred to him, and he was surprised by what Mrs. Szemz
ő
was saying and how she said it.

The spray over the water often rose up to and swept across the wide low windows on the lower deck; occasionally, rebounding waves splashed the panes. Here one could hear the even seething and churning of the gigantic wheels, the axle’s empty, unexpected creaks. Below this lower deck carpeted in wine red, in the enormous engine room, the engine with its carefully oiled wheels and gears, valves and pistons, siphoned and pushed, squelched and clicked and snapped repeatedly. From the engine room spiral stairs led even farther below, all the way to the ship’s bottom, where two half-naked stokers, blackened by coal dust, worked in the red glow of the boiler and the noise of the puffing engine.

On the upper decks the passengers had to raise their voices a little.

The passengers were already seated at their tables and the din of the dining hall had increased, though on this late April day there were few people in first class—a number of German officers, egging each other on to louder and louder exchanges, and a little farther off, a couple of very constrained honeymooners from Pest, reminiscent of drenched birds. Obviously ill at ease, they held their aperitifs distrustfully in their hands. Perhaps a rich relative had paid for their tickets and they were unsure how to handle themselves. Beyond the couple and isolated from everyone else, at a table set for one, sat a very well-dressed man in his fifties, Elemér Vay by name, the government’s chief counselor, who, at the personal instruction of His Excellency the regent of Hungary, in the following weeks and without drawing attention was to inspect every port along the lower Danube. At the fourth and largest table, Serb hardware merchants sat in poorly tailored frock coats, Gebrocks, greasy and stretched by overweight bodies, badly in need of pressing, along with their massive, colossal, bejeweled, and painted wives in completely inappropriate evening dresses with plunging necklines.

Madzar had the impression, and not for the first time since his return from Holland, that here in the land of his birth, at some point in the past time had lazily come to a halt and now with its last ounce of strength was moaning softly, saying something like, why should I bother to go on ticking. He observed these people with a profound horror as if seeing different variations of himself in his own staid future.

No, not like this.

With the exception of the well-dressed lone gentleman, they were all extremely ridiculous and pitiful.

If Madzar were to stay, his fate would be no different; there was no ingenuity that could enable him to avoid the inevitable.

He would marry somebody, an attractive woman, probably, who would bear children and gradually, imperceptibly become like this, ever thicker, more obtuse, and louder.

Madzar was not dressed for the occasion; he wore simple traveling clothes, a so-called knickerbocker outfit—a six-buttoned, high-necked jacket decorated with a permanently stitched belt, facing pleats, and sewn-on pockets; a vest with buttons one could see above those of the jacket; loosely fitting, baggy knee pants. To match this outfit, he had picked thick, pale-green fishbone-patterned knee socks and thick-soled shoes; out of season such a minor violation of social etiquette was permissible.

Though he was a bit anxious about it.

Supper was served earlier than was customary in the regular season on a luxury ship like this.

It would have made no sense to rent a cabin for such a short trip. He traveled without luggage.

His coat and hat were taken from him by the old Viennese waiter who continually mumbled to himself in different languages; accompanied by the waiter’s purposeless words, he was escorted to Captain László Bellardi, who in addition to being a baron was also a Vitéz—a title given to valiant, heroic veterans of the Great War. Seeing them approach, the captain took his leave of the noisy Serbs.

Behind the protection of his charming smile, for long minutes now the captain had been waiting for Madzar, patient yet almost angry; where was he, he should come and relieve him of his burdensome duty, where is he tarrying.

Not that he needed anyone to relieve him, but he could not forgo an obligatory act without giving an excuse or having a pretext to dodge it. True to his upbringing, he held nothing higher than duty. Now he wanted to chat with his sometime friend rather than with Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, with whom he had a distant familial connection.

God, religion, homeland, the good fortune of every subject of the realm—these were among his duties. He could do nothing publicly unless in the eyes of the world the act had a conventional reason or at least a conventional explanation. All manner of social demands were made on him that were incompatible with his temperament, which, fickle and intuitive at its core, leaned toward arbitrariness and improvisation. He suffered from temper tantrums because he could not consider as his duty everything he could not help performing. And ever since his wife had left him, his body and soul had been held captive by sheer horror and dread. None of this could be seen on him, of course, not in his bearing and not on his face, though he grew somber as he approached Madzar.

As someone who, in the transition between playing two different roles, retains only the physical shell of his own body.

Under the heavy weight of the secret mental burden, his attractive lean visage caved in; bitterness sat on his lips.

But behind the appearance he could show only another appearance.

Moving from event to event, he systematically cobbled together a narrative of appearances that did not conform much with his inner life or most personal intentions, yet this external tale became his biography. When he completed something in accord with appearances, he would tell himself with a measure of self-satisfaction, well, we got away with it. He acted as if the supreme value of individual personal life was the survival of the impersonal life of the group.

As if his sense of I was ruled by the sense of we. He was coming toward Madzar as if he were being pulled by the weight of his head.

Until, between two swaying dancelike steps, he switched to another preprepared smile of his. With this smile he ceremoniously raised his head high, because it was not he who was smiling from behind the woeful mask or who made his feet move as if dancing, but the role he was playing. Right now, he is demonstrating his true attentiveness and genuine kindheartedness to those who eagerly watch the meeting of two friends.

This meant at best only the honeymooners, who followed the two men with their eyes; in their apprehension, they paid close attention to everything.

The strangers’ regard made Captain Bellardi grow taller, he needed the added stature as he needed air, it helped him give meaning to himself, to every one of his gestures. Thanks to the attention his mortal shell filled out with flesh and blood, with hunger and thirst for life.

Madzar felt uneasy at this revelatory spectacle, though he saw no more than what he had already known about the man.

Bellardi was playing a solitary game with himself. If he hadn’t been brought up halfway between small-town gentry and a sophisticated aristocracy, he could have easily spurned or cordially disregarded ordinary fellow human beings. But the duality of his upbringing did not allow him to use either approach, so he regularly disappointed himself. Thanks to his mother, his behavior was designed for a much larger stage than he could ever perform on or even have a chance to see. Yet he was not allowed to complain about the narrow-mindedness and unworthy conditions of the locales he moved in, as everyone else did in the great Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was positively forbidden to blame others for anything. This was the traditional
bon ton
: to accept every situation without comment. He could not scheme, as everyone else did in the larger milieu of his life; he could not prattle, bear a grudge, or hate to his heart’s content. And he did not realize that in his obedience he relinquished vital mental functions, over and over again.