Parallel Stories: A Novel (109 page)

In his soul, Gottlieb was crestfallen.

As he covertly and incredulously observed the blue shadows on the other man’s delicate white skin, always ready to blush, and his strong, darkly red hair, he could not chase away the thought that red-haired people were always sly foxes and mean swindlers.

They exchanged a few words about what the price might be, paving the way, so to speak, for later bargaining.

The mind could not comprehend what the young man was doing and why.

This young man’s father and even grandfather had bought wood from them, not from Roheim or Gojko Drogo, and in an instant he recognized in the young man’s face the long-forgotten features of those two older men.

After all, this young man had been a classmate of Gottlieb’s own boy in the school on Koronaherceg Street.

And because of these useless thoughts and unappeasable indignations, his fate opened up, his everyday life came crashing down on him. He saw before him his little boy as a grown man, the unlucky, miserable little boy. Never mind, we’ll have him study a trade, he’ll be a watchmaker; that’s what they planned for him.

Which made his soul whimper.

He saw his beautiful, strong wife at a time when she hadn’t yet gone mad. She had been not quite right in the head even as a girl, but no one would have thought that as a woman she would go mad. Still, he blamed himself. He was feeling the threat of the final hours groping their way toward him, a total darkening of the spirit. He hadn’t recognized the Madzar boy. Not only can I not find my hat and to my greatest shame I’m standing here without a head cover at the sight of my Creator, may His name be blessed forever and ever, but I don’t even remember whether I put my own hat on my own head this morning.

His negligence confused him, the other man’s presence and incomprehensible behavior upset and hurt him, and he must not allow any of this to show on his face.

When he was finally left alone with his desperation, limping back to his office, going across the yard alive with the chirping of sparrows, he began to whistle, but with him this was a sign not of jollity but rather of unbearable tension.

All right then, this hour too has arrived.

He could console himself that at least he managed to sell the wood after all.

And the architect strolled along the embankment to the boat station. He sat down on a large stone by the ferrymen’s small kiosk and watched the arrival of the almost empty ferry from the island; creaking mightily, it slid up on the paved shore. Serbian Gypsies in snow-white shirts were the first ones off, leading three restless horses amid a loud pounding of hooves. There was no feature of the landscape that didn’t bring back something of the past. The sun was very strong, and nothing was left of the early-morning mist above the lively surface of the river; the water reflected the current-driven image of the sky in vanishing brown, blue, and white spots.

There were moments when the landscape made a profound turn, because he felt that everything, after all, was referring to Mrs. Szemz
ő
.

It was for her that he fantasized about the darkening color of the oak, but he did not understand the connection between her and the color.

As for Bellardi, well, the sooner he forgot him, the better.

And what about that certain deep purple visible on the densest part of the surface, on the knobs and knots, would he find it on inner surfaces exposed by cutting the wood. Among the women, whether on foot or with bicycles loaded down with packed baskets, gabbing loudly and cutting into one another’s words as they followed the horses to the shore, he did not see a single one with a bonnet on her head. But it was too early for his mother to return from the island; she never came back before four in the afternoon. These women were Hungarian, he could see that from afar; Catholics and Protestants wore their headgear differently, while the Slavic women, who used their white linen kerchiefs only during work, spread them taut across their foreheads and tied them not under their chins but at the back of their heads. The most fertile lands belonging to Mohácsians were on the other shore, along with shepherds’ and fishermen’s accommodations and the so-called bush farms, owned by rich German farmers who moved there with their households for the summer months. In his childhood Madzar had frequently experienced a strange anxiety at the thought that among the uniformly dressed, constantly chattering women he might not recognize his own mother.

Standing by the railing, he might lose himself in watching the ferry and would never find her. But in his dread he was not allowed to cry, not there among the horses, the carts piled sky-high, the bicycles and people. Look at him, a boy, and sniveling, some German woman laughed derisively, what kind of man will this one grow up to be, and then somehow his mother’s hand, the one with the ring, suddenly turned up from somewhere and slapped his mouth.

No kind, if you let him get away with everything, he won’t become a man.

He was still thinking about Bellardi, and he did not forget Bellardi’s lover either, whose arm had smelled like fish all night.

Nor did he forget that to Hungarians every German was a Swabian because their prejudices made Hungarians incapable of identifying any concept correctly. Although at this moment he could not have told Bellardi whether he was thinking of himself as a Hungarian or as a German. Was he lashing out at the Hungarian element in himself for the slipshod phrasing or was his German blood protesting the
Grobheit
. In which case it would be Bellardi speaking from him, after all.

The word of the blood.

As if without Bellardi such a thing could not have occurred to him, blood.

He used to be plagued by nightmares in broad daylight. He was especially frightened of Hungarian women wearing dark kerchiefs. Congealed blood clots.

He kept scaring himself with the notion that one fine day, if he failed to behave correctly, the German women with their ringed fingers would pummel him and thrust him from their circle and then the Hungarian women would take him in between their legs. The envisaged image was of the huge, fat great-grandmother with the pus- and blood-soaked bandage on her ulcerated leg as she lay on her pallet in the dark kitchen. Her leg would never heal. Because Hungarians wash only to their waist, it’s a good thing they wash at all, and they couldn’t wash out this bandage, he heard this complaint enough times; mainly on Sundays they slap some water on their upper bodies, and only at the well, and Hungarian women won’t even take off their vests or undershirts to do it. The blood stank. He’d never have dared to reach into the cleft of his buttocks while washing, not to mention his hole. It never occurred to him that his underwear wouldn’t be shit-stained if he cleaned his bottom properly. He did not have his mother’s permission for this, which caused him no small inconvenience in college.

Not even after graduating from high school did he receive permission to do what had to be done with his foreskin.

The fine deep purple, which only the most experienced eye would have detected on the oak’s dark gray surface, ran through with yellow streaks, also stood for a grave threat.

For a very long time, he used to turn away, ashamed even before himself, when he drew back the foreskin from the bulb of his penis. It could mean that water had somehow managed to make its way into the structure of the wood after all, and was still working into it. He was about to purchase some material, having fallen in love with it because of Mrs. Szemz
ő
, whose inner characteristics were unknown to him.

He tried to imagine the two of them in the empty apartment on Pozsonyi Road, what he could have done with the woman in the twilight had he not let her go. Good Lord, what couldn’t I have done, he kept saying to himself; as if the woman’s hand had left a trace on his arm, where with her touch she strengthened his awareness of the mutuality of their feelings, which he was now tearing asunder. He could have done everything with her. But he did not see anything there except the reflected yellow light on the ceiling. His wish now grew so strong while sitting on the stone that he did not know, or rather did not wish to imagine, what might have happened had he reached after her and held her back.

Don’t go away.

The more he tried not to imagine it, the more he reinforced his inability not to desire this woman.

He considered it scandalous on the part of nature that it had presented the human male with such a member. As if the demanding gods had turned his raw insides, so sensitive with their mucous membranes, out into the light of day, had denuded an inner organ with no aesthetics of its own commensurable with other surfaces of the body.

He could think of nothing else except that while groping in the dark, searching for the true inner structure of things, with his erection he was feeling Creation’s sole palpable instruction.

He was standing before God with his head uncovered, he remembered that too, and then he suddenly rose from the cool stone and started off after all, though he knew they wouldn’t be bringing the wood yet, no matter how much he wanted to hasten things. It was as if he had to reach the end of the world to complete his mission. He’ll wait at home for the wood to be delivered. And when he got home, first he opened both wings of the workshop’s enormous door as wide as they would go, to let light and warmth at last pervade the huge space where he might spend the next few weeks working. As he wedged open the heavy iron-framed oak doors, which would grow hot in the sunshine, frosty cold invaded him from the inside, which made the moment even more celebratory. As if he had released both past and present, letting them flow into each other. And he saw before him the morning a few days after the funeral when the assistants pushed the last completed barque out of the yard.

This time there were no loud cheers when the barque hit the water with a great splash, only the dogs barked and yelped in joy, being used to it with their master.

After that, the workshop became overgrown with the bare tendrils of woodbine.

He stood for a long time in the dead, spotless, and for many decades useless yard, waiting impatiently and helplessly and with a rising sense of ceremony for a knocking at the gate and delivery of the wood.

After that, two of their dogs were beaten to death.

But nobody was coming, because first Gottlieb, insensitive to his own forgetfulness, had to look in the office, helplessly and furtively, for his hat.

He had to do this before going to find somebody in the neighborhood, this he remembered, but, and this had never happened to him before, he even forgot what he was looking for. Yet instinctively he kept looking. He looked among his papers, under the furniture, and if he came upon it, he’d remember it. In the meantime he murmured fragments of a prayer designed for other occasions, about our God, who was one, as if he had to convince himself that he had someone he could trust. Our Lord is great, His name is sanctified and awesome, he continued in Hebrew, remembering it by chance, not praying consciously.

For years he hadn’t asked for anything, only given thanks for everything. When he asked for something for his daughter in Dombóvár or for his son in Coney Island, he simply recited what he had learned fifty years before in the heder, and had the nagging doubt that he’d never fully understood what he was saying. He saw no point in asking things from the Lord. Although he had fulfilled his obligations toward Him, his wishes and intentions had simply died away in him. The Lord has not heard my wishes, he said to himself in secret, somewhat reproachfully, even when He answers one. The Lord does not listen to wishes even though He is not deaf.

There is no causal relationship between the Almighty’s mercy and man’s appeals to Him.

A little later Madzar walked into the house; in the hallway, smelling of mold because of the cold winter, he opened the lid of the hope chest in which his father’s, grandfather’s, and their old live-in assistant’s oft-patched, clean work clothes were kept.

He found everything in the chest ironed and neatly folded. While he changed into work clothes, exposed to the pervasive smell of home-boiled soap emanating from the chest, no one came with the sleepers on his shoulder. Soap boiling was done everywhere in the autumn, when the golden yellow leaves fell from the poplars; sometimes Bellardi would go with him to help push the wheelbarrow home with the collected bones from the old granny’s house.

Driven by shame and restlessness, Gottlieb finally closed his office.

That was actually very nice of Bellardi, helping to push the stinking bones in the wheelbarrow; after all, his mother was a princess. It was very nice of him. And it was very nice of the Lord Jesus that he blessed both of them with the most deep-felt childhood love.

He was literally fleeing from the words of his prayer, was it holy or sanctified be Thy name, the angels sing Your praise each day, he was in a hurry and picked a detour along which he might meet the least number of acquaintances as he rushed along, uncovered, at the very nadir of his shame.

He wanted to avoid everything and everybody.

He hastened along the flood-blackened brick wall of the silk factory, and he kept on saying the words, shouting over the monotone booming and clatter of the machines, the metallic clangs of the combs, reciting the words to himself. With the fragments of the Hebrew prayer he displaced every Hungarian word so that his thinking would not be Hungarian, so that he would have no imagination, no Hungarian imagination either. Let us praise the exalted sanctity of this day. Terrifying and forbidding, Lord, what Thou hast given us today. May your realm and golden throne, resting on mercy, tower above all abomination.

There could be no living tie between the ancient text and Gottlieb’s practical thinking, since he no longer believed that people’s stupid wishes could touch Creation. He no longer believed; did not believe in his own faith that there was a god on whose terrible deeds anybody would build an empire, or that there was any other kind of god either. He imagined, keeping it a secret from himself, that the world was an empty vessel, completely empty, anything could be poured into it in any way, no matter what, since everything flowed out, spilled out, dripped away and scattered in the dust, dwindled and vanished. These were the kinds of thing he envisioned and thought about, though he continued to celebrate all the major and minor holidays, strictly observed the ritual rules and regulations. He concealed his own convictions from himself as if in his old age, supplanting his parents and taking over their role, he related to himself as if he were still a child. He must remain the same. Whatever happens, the world cannot change, and if his eyes saw far-reaching changes, he would not allow his mind to follow his eyes, lest his personal experiences improperly violate the depth of his faith or that of his skepticism.