Parallel Stories: A Novel (121 page)

Do this, it echoed.

At least have mercy on my elderly mother.

My elderly mother, derly mother, mother, other, it echoed.

Then everything fell silent in the stairwell.

If it had been Mrs. Szemz
ő
coming up in the elevator, Gyöngyvér would have left the piano and quickly returned via the bathroom to the maid’s room, which Madzar had turned into an office for Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s assistant.

It would not have been the first time for her.

No, they would have no mercy.

And it was as if she heard a single piercing scream, then again a rattling and a crash. In her many sublet situations, she had learned how to listen to and hear things above a general noise, sneak and scurry through hallways and corridors, take furtive bites out of other people’s food, use strangers’ belongings silently and unnoticed. Towels, the landlady’s cotton, a few tea leaves, soup powder, break off a piece of bread, slip a couple of cigarettes out of a pack, take a swig out of the milk bottle. Leave no traces.

Had she known she was listening to the past, she would have turned to stone.

Not to make the floor creak.

But it was not Mrs. Szemz
ő
now, and Gyöngyvér did not move from the piano stool.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
said, Gyöngyvér, listen to me, you should probably sing Monteverdi, the sweet, seductive, and terrible Gorgone, for example, yes, and she asked if Gyöngyvér knew that role.

How in the name of cunt could she know everything. Why was Mrs. Szemz
ő
asking her such dumb things.

Sure, Irmuska believes they were playing Monteverdi for me in the chicken coop, right.

Madzar had carefully worked out who was to go where in the psychoanalytic clinic because Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s patients should theoretically not ever meet even in this unpleasantly echoing but otherwise most attractive stairwell. At least that was the demand, which Madzar kept well in mind: that patients should not encounter each other. But the pounding increased as they approached from floor to floor, step by step, with their rifle butts knocking on the apartments’ thick oak doors.

If you listen for the inner world of your voice, Gyöngyvér, you will turn to stone, that’s how strong the primal force is in it, and the horror. Your voice cannot be loved, Gyöngyvér, don’t ever expect that, but you will be idolized, your voice is
einmalig
, I can tell you that much,
einmalig
.

Don’t mind me saying this to you, you must make use of your terrible thirst for revenge rather than being ashamed of it, don’t be afraid, if things turn out well you’ll be paid a bundle for your vengefulness.

It’s best for me, Mrs. Szemz
ő
explained to the architect at the time, if my patients remain ignorant of one another.

There are nights, however, when the walls of Budapest apartments reradiate the sounds they once absorbed.

The architect questioned the woman in detail, tried to follow her. Based on what he had heard, he figured out where her patients could wait for a few moments to avoid unexpected confusion.

Gyöngyvér could not have known anything of this, of course, which is why she did not believe her ears. That night, the Arrow Cross thugs led by an eager theology student named Mayer threw every piece of furniture out of the apartment windows and, so that Jews in hiding could never use any of the other apartments either, they turned on all the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom. The water rose for a while and then spilled over the threshold and began streaming down the stairs, at first only at the sides, and during the next days it froze, getting thicker and thicker.

With the double-edged characteristic of visibility and concealment in mind, the architect decided that a folding screen should be put here, or something reminiscent of a folding screen. The moment a person entered the clinic, she or he had to be reassured that one could find refuge if the need arose in this bright space. He placed the screen where the black concert piano stood now in the hallway. He also arranged for more seating than one might expect in this space, using only the chairs and armchairs he built himself.

He asked Mrs. Szemz
ő
to please observe which seating accommodation each patient chose.

These objects must stand on their own in the space, he explained, and Mrs. Szemz
ő
had to concentrate hard to understand him.

As if they each had an individual personality and, believe me, they will. I don’t try to make my objects beautiful, but they should be independent, with a strength that is uniquely characteristic. One of your patients might sit only on this chair, while another would prefer the armchair.

That’s my observation: different chairs, different human types.

Come on, my dear architect, don’t irritate me with talk of human types and my patients. You know very well, and I’ve explained it several times, for me there’s no such thing, for me these things do not exist.

It’s a good thing you haven’t started in on theories of racial purity.

There are no human types. At most, people’s socializations differ. Or there are problems in their social interactions that make them behave oddly, but that doesn’t make them sick. Both of us should intervene with a person’s systems of interaction. Believe me, we are traffic police, nothing more. I cannot cure anyone. But sometimes a single inspired suggestion is enough to change the inner conditions of mental functioning and for the change to have an impact on the historically altered surroundings.

At least in theory.

Madzar had to focus hard to follow the woman’s words. He also laughed at her a bit, making his own analysis a little easier.

Well, now, don’t be so afraid of me, he said, laughing at both the woman and himself, in theory I’ve understood and noted everything, but I can’t say your concepts are finding their way easily into what I say.

Or into my mind, of course. That’s true.

I only take my patients on a journey of discovery. Your space and the objects in it should give them similar impulses, and you can leave the words to the patients.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s strictness made Madzar chuckle. He recognized himself in her asceticism adopted in the interest of utopian ideals, and this irritated him, yet she remained a woman, and that also irritated him.

We won’t get anywhere with ancient concepts such as ill patient and mental illness, symptoms and human types. You can’t work against me so obviously, or if you do we might as well say good-bye to our shared ideas.

Stop, please, hold it. Madzar was laughing.

Don’t go so far. Sometimes one assigns certain borders involuntarily, but I take it back, I beg your pardon, I take it back and join you in declaring that there are no limits.

Between ill-being and well-being there really isn’t a border or bright line, my dear architect, no matter how often you joke about it.

But why would I be joking.

Even the classical scientists admitted that at most we can speak only of degrees. It’s a nice romantic idea that there are borders between people or even within a single human being. An individual has permanent traits, yes, but the essence of humans is easily permeable, and the traits themselves are malleable, showing different faces in different situations, which means that they offer us different inclinations. What else would make people so accommodating. I willingly admit that this lack of borders or limitations is very difficult to grasp or follow linguistically. Linguistically we are always pitting something against something else. If I say black, you add the thought of white but not the many hues of gray, one more beautiful than the other. If you say madness or speak of mental illness and its opposite, then you also have the murderous commonplace, the stereotype, the destructive linguistic convention, and you don’t even notice that you’ve passed off a culturally well-prepared sentence on others and yourself. Using that concept separates you from what is archaically common to us all, which none of us can escape. Using stereotypes and conventions, you gloss over the collective traits of individual humans. I hope you’ll forgive me for accusing you of such common crimes.

Even in a jungle, you can’t put down two stakes and declare that the area from here belongs to this one, from there to that one, because after the next rain new growth will cover everything.

Of course, you’re not alone with this mistaken notion.

And don’t forget, either, that it’s not in the negative but in the positive sense that no border exists between illness and well-being.

I can only guess what you mean.

I just want to reassure you that you don’t have to be either defensive or offensive when you think that way; after all, the absence of illness is health.

Now I really don’t understand you.

If I remember correctly you’ve already read
Tonio Kröger
.
*

I can’t say it was easy.

Then you must know exactly what I mean.

They both had a hearty laugh at this.

For Gyöngyvér at this strange moment the physical mission of her naked, shuddering body became evident.

She does not have to escape via the bathroom, not yet, because this is not yet Mrs. Szemz
ő
, this is not the elevator. She hears shouting, but in reality there is dead silence on the street, in the stairwell, everywhere. The sounds she hears are unfamiliar; therefore they do not exist. I am so tired I’m hallucinating. And she reassures herself with this word, though it’s the very one that should alarm her, given what it describes. She did not understand where Mrs. Szemz
ő
tarried so late. At the crack of dawn, what could she be doing with her friends. Somebody should report her to the police, that would put an end to her staying out so late, and Gyöngyvér’s apartment problem would be instantly solved. But no matter how frightened she was or how many accusations and hateful statements she was making, she thought she should tempt again that miserable little F sharp. Now she knows where to put it. During the singing lesson it had happened by chance, rotten little Médike was right again, because she knows everything ahead of time, but this time, in the hallway, Gyöngyvér deliberately raised it to its proper place.

She had lifted it out of her violent hatred.

I am a sounding board, she thought triumphantly, and adored her taut, naked body in its shuddering skin. I bring the sounds of hatred with me, she thought triumphantly.

And the living souls of destroyed objects found their voice in her.

As if she were saying, I am not a person, not a mere structure, I wait in vain for live people to address me or make me speak first.

Her entire miserable childhood had been spent in not being able to speak. At the sight of people, fear and astonishment kept words stuck inside her. I must be the one to address this depressing space.

Madzar regarded furniture, especially chairs, as being like statues. He followed Rietveld,
*
who said that when a person is about to lower himself into a chair, the dramatic connection between his corporeal sensations and the place he takes up in space becomes clear. Because Madzar had thought a lot about this, Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s explanations and objections excited him. Indeed, a chair must grasp the dramatic relationship positively. This is why he was revolted by
Tonio Kröger
’s cataclysmic decadence, though he saw that Mrs. Szemz
ő
positively enjoyed his revulsion, which is why she had insisted he read it. He must first accept that he found decadence repellent before he could see it objectively, and only then would he understand it. Yet she always provoked a smile, no matter how many interesting things she told him about decadence, because she remained a woman he was attracted to, or could not be not attracted to, which raised them to the level at which visceral forces are at work.

As if they should have a fuck simply to understand something much more essential and basic.

In Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s eyes he must represent something strong, headstrong, and primeval compared to the timid, probably impotent Tonio Kröger. In her imagination he was the embodiment of archaic man—he tried to follow Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s thinking—which I’m not, he thought, and never was. She needs a weakling like Tonio Kröger, but she lives with a brutal character like Szemz
ő
. He was flattered that in Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s eyes he differed so greatly from whining Tonio Kröger and perhaps from her husband too. It would have been better to resemble brutal Mr. Szemz
ő
than Tonio Kröger. A chair cannot give in to nostalgia, to a catastrophe or to the small tragedies of personal life, not even to pleasant sorrow, like Tonio Kröger, whose physical fits of madness never ruffled him because he did not give in to them; a chair can’t put on airs. Madzar knew almost everything there was to know about what a chair should have; he was sensitive to objectification. And in the perspective of this utopian knowledge, he considered it imperative to be repelled by German decadence. And, no less, by Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s Jewish decadence. And not only did he read Thomas Mann with great aversion but it was also very difficult for him to listen to compositions by Wagner, Mahler, or Richard Strauss all the way through to the end; they nauseated him.

Years earlier, when studying in Weimar, the chair had become Madzar’s specialty, and if he ever was dissatisfied with his work, he never doubted his ability to deal with matter, any material, or his perfect sense of space. He had problems with his constitutional love of comfort and his archaic slowness, though, which is why he well understood what the Jewess from Budapest was talking about or had in mind. He could not free himself from the rhythm of the surroundings he came from. He acknowledged this, but dreaded awareness of it as he would a court sentence.