Parallel Stories: A Novel (146 page)

Simon probably saw this first and figured it out before I did. We had already sped through the huge intersection at Körönd. He must have made his decision in a split second; without slackening his stiffened arms, and leaning into the movement with his entire upper body, he yanked the steering wheel to the right and then, amid terrific jolts, creaks, and thuds, gave another yank to the left, which luckily missed running us up onto the promenade and into the trees or flower beds; he managed to find the roadway between the promenade and sidewalk, where he sped through without slowing down at all.

I won’t deny it, I admired him.

And the explanation for the apparition was very simple. To block that part of the road, the police had put two of their assault cars facing each other and turned floodlights on both of them.

It wasn’t easy to understand why they’d done this. Perhaps something else had happened in the city which we hadn’t yet heard about, not just the terrible accident that morning at the site of the official celebration. But none of us asked or said anything. They wanted either to arrest some people or to keep the entire city under control. One left so many things unsaid and stopped doing things at the slightest hint of danger; we kept quiet because we always expected the worst. In the dark, under the trees, the leather-coated fellows stood in groups. They had not erected such a conspicuous roadblock for at least four years. It was also peculiar that they had chosen this street on which to block this quarter of the city. At the corner, behind a heavy wrought-iron fence, stood the Soviet embassy, now darkened; if one strolled farther down these tree-lined streets one could see that all the way to the Epres Gardens every building belonged to the Russians; the area had become a little Moscow. It was not likely that we could get through the cordon even on a secondary road. But Simon was not slowing down; he turned into Bajza Street at a sharp angle, brushing against the curb and honking his horn twice.

The real game was just about to begin, or maybe it wasn’t a game.

Perhaps he wanted to prove something to the woman. Or prove his superiority to me. He was screaming. It would be incorrect to say he was screaming at the top of his lungs, rather I should say he was screaming from the depths of his chest. As if singing a lonely song of self-justification. Now he increased the speed, now just as suddenly reduced it; the car was rocking back and forth. For long spells he’d let go of the wheel or, thrusting his arms against it, would yank it this way and that, making the car dance between the two sidewalks. It was hard to tell what the old jalopy could endure; maybe it was an old Adler. All the while, he honked the horn rhythmically. I couldn’t be sure whether with this weird running amok he was testing his wife, putting on a show for me, or taking his revenge on the cops we’d left standing and befuddled, for having kept him in a constant fear of threats; he was simply thumbing his nose at them.

In those years, one didn’t do things like that.

There were enough other dangers.

Klára cautiously held on to the seat, but her posture revealed no fear or any sign that she had an opinion about what was happening. She retreated, became neutral and did so inconspicuously, which in itself was a weighty opinion. One did not provoke fate if one could help it. With triumphantly sung battle cries and much honking of the horn we drove across Queen Vilma Road, now called Gorky Avenue, and then across Damjanich Street. I thought Simon had indeed gone mad. Might deliberately run into a building. He drove up on the sidewalk. With a terrible racket, we swept away a few garbage cans put out for the morning collection.

Nobody could be sure that some unsuspecting person might not step out on the sidewalk.

I was counting on Klára to figure out a way to restrain him.

But during those few seconds we drove along the sidewalk in Nefelejcs Street, I chose to close my eyes. I had no other way to protect myself against such an enormous attack of senselessness. Perhaps it would have been more dangerous to do something than do nothing. At the corner of Dembinszky Street, we literally fell off the high curb. At least he left off with his screaming, as if he’d bitten his tongue. Then, as if doing the most natural thing in the world, he drove perpendicularly across the street and deliberately braked so sharply that we tumbled forward.

Voilà, c’est tout
, he said, here we are, and slapped the wheel with both hands, making the horn screech again.

This is when Klára looked at him again, with yet another profile.

I’ll just change, she said dryly, give me ten minutes.

Five, said the man.

Eight, she said, and before getting out she threw a glance my way.

She wanted to be sure that I’d survived the shock.

For that instant, I could cling to her attention, but this brief encouragement proved inadequate to help me endure the following minutes. She released the car door carefully, it barely clicked shut; with hurrying steps she walked through an open, dark, gaping gate. Leaning across the seat and pushing out the door a little, the man yelled after her to bring some cigarettes. The door clicked closed again, there was silence at last; again an impossible moment. Outside the wind was raging, slamming into the tin gutters. We were out of life-threatening danger. In the rearview mirror he looked at me hostilely, as if he were still preparing something against me or against the world; I looked back at him. It was an unfamiliar look; I couldn’t tell what he might be up to. But I ran out of the reserve of Klára’s encouraging glance. Now I couldn’t have given a good reason for leaving.

It was getting late, but that wouldn’t do for an excuse.

I said, I’d like to stretch a little, but now I wasn’t thinking of anything else except getting away. I wasn’t going to wait for Klára to come back.

Of course, it also occurred to me that I should cut across dark Aréna Road. I seemed to feel in my limbs the elation of getting away, the liberating steps.

As if freedom were truly waiting for me on the other side under the storm-tossed trees.

I still called it Aréna Road, its old name, because there stood the house, facing City Park, where I was born, and which my grandfather had built. And behind the M
ű
csarnok art gallery, among the large plane trees, the underground public urinal yawned invitingly with its pale light; this was where men thirsty for one another always waited in droves.

He asked me if I had any cigarettes; he said he’d get out and stretch a little too, but he’d gotten very wet before, which made me glad. At least we clarified the distance between us. I said I was sorry but I did not smoke, which was not completely true, and we both got out of the car. For me it was harder because I had to climb around the front seat, tipped forward. And to lessen my humiliation, I said if my memory did not fail me, there was a bar nearby. While waiting for Klára, I’d be happy to buy him some cigarettes there. He burst out laughing as if to brag about his embarrassment. He said that would be very considerate of me, but he could hold out for another few minutes. But I was right about the bar, he said, there, and he motioned toward the farther stretch of the street.

They have pretty lousy cigarettes.

His leather coat was short, I could see now under the streetlamp, its leather rather worn, its surface scaly with time. Private chauffeurs and farm managers had worn coats like that before the war.

The bar was indeed there on the bleak and shabby part of the street. Who knows how long the shadows of men had been standing there with their beers and spritzers in front of its illuminated window. This bar was one of the most mysterious places of my childhood. Regardless of what kind of family one comes from, in the city where one grows up there are always some forbidden places. This was not a hostile world; if the drunks weren’t on a rampage it was a rather peaceful place, yet I knew I should not step inside it. Not because somebody had forbidden it; life simply presented no situation that would have required it. Lately, this was the starting point and terminus of the number 5 bus line. The bar was always dim with smoke; it buzzed like a beehive; there were always so many men that some of them had to stay on the sidewalk, even in winter. They put a bench outside, along the wall of the building. The streetcar on István Road was also discontinued. The bench was painted blue, like the buses, because it was meant for resting drivers and conductors, but most of the time this is where the drunks lay about.

From the dark City Park, the spring breeze with the fragrance of wet trees pounced on us freely.

Then something perplexing happened again, something I hadn’t counted on.

Hans von Wolkenstein

He was but a tiny spot in the landscape, the boy about whom they had spoken in Baron Schuer’s study. The one with blond hair streaked so noticeably with strands of dark brown.

An ant, a hard-shelled little bug, no more than a naked worm that anyone might absently crush underfoot.

A little boy with brilliant blue eyes and close-cropped hair, slightly sluggish movements and a slouchy walk, who had no extreme thoughts or unpleasant feelings about himself. He was not grinning now, but he wasn’t bothered by premonitions. Nothing indicated to him that something might be out of the ordinary in the universe or that any danger was lurking.

Although the other boys could not help worrying about the regular racial-biological measurements, he wasn’t even fazed when one of their mates jumped off the Ochsensprung at dawn and died instantly. He often irritated his counselors with his constant grins. Which the others enjoyed no end: that he had the courage to grin and, when the counselors cautioned him that now you really have nothing to grin about, my boy, that he responded by grinning even more foolishly. Perhaps he found their displeasure comical, perhaps he was glad to receive more than the usual share of attention, for which he was willing to do much, because he liked to playact and clown around. The others thought him daring. They admired and feared him. They wouldn’t have dared behave as he did or approve of behavior like his.

The counselors assumed that since the other boys laughed at him, the community’s severe judgment would affect him.

But that was not the case; on the contrary, the boys laughed in sheer enjoyment. Involuntarily and communally, the boys were also laughing at something they shouldn’t have laughed at. Progressing carefully, step by careful step, Hans led them to unruliness; he was unruly on their behalf, which gave him enormous pleasure, always to go further than the others would ever dare and thus to lead them to sedition. The counselors failed to notice that the laughter was a shared and organized display of insubordination, a veritable rebellion. Or rather, they noticed it only when it was too late. They should have recorded every occurrence in all its aspects and manifested forms.

From a genetic viewpoint, they regarded a proclivity to rebellion as an important telltale sign.

The baroness also thought it outrageous that a person should be grinning all the time, unable to look at anyone without grinning.

Hans, you are behaving preposterously, my boy, your behavior is simply impossible, that is how she chided him.

But her son listened to her less than to anyone else.

Every year several boys tried to throw away their lives; only the childish methods or the results differed. But Hans took nothing seriously—the baroness had reason to worry about him, for it didn’t matter what she told him; he did not care about her motherly pain and sorrow, did not listen to her chiding or warning; she might as well have talked to the wall.

He’d follow her with his wide-open, slightly wondering, incredulous eyes as if out of curiosity, so as to fix in his conscious mind her every gesture; emotionally he remained far removed from everything. In this the baroness recognized herself in him, and when that happened she fell silent, contented. Even though it was the boy’s father who looked back at her with those rebellious, challenging eyes. It was as if, relinquishing their ritual sentimentality, the three of them had suddenly become closer. And none of them could deny their shameless intimacy.

This was Hans’s fourth year in the boarding school. Had they not opened this school, his mother would have had a problem finding a place for him. Several times during those years, he had lived through a peculiar hour or day, such as today, but unlike the other boys he found nothing to object to in the leap to death, not even the first time. At most its finality surprised him rather benignly. Those boys had saved their integrity, which everyone else loses several times an hour until they’ve used up their last reserves. He appreciated the suicide boys’ perspicacity, their consistency. In the depths of his soul he approved of them, considered them superior to those, including himself, who were willing to endure their lives simply to stay alive. He put a good face on his life, since he didn’t want to make his own or anyone else’s life more difficult by whining or complaining; he became fate’s disgraced conspirator, and with his entire physical being he suffered from existence.

He constantly felt that the raw materials of his body, his organs and limbs, had been put into the wrong skin, and the soul that was added was inappropriate to such a skin or such flesh. He profoundly disdained those who spent their lives eagerly fulfilling their filial duties and paying naïve respect to their parents. No matter what. Anyone can deceive people like that and make them do anything. In his eyes, those boys were laughable creatures. Still, in his disdain he failed to overcome his deeply rooted religious presentiment that perhaps the devil had tempted the boys when they threw themselves into the depths.

And now another school year was over. During the short summer vacation he had to stay here, could not go to Berlin. And, because of her work, the baroness could not come to Annaberg.

While roaming about alone during these three weeks in the enormous Erzgebirge landscape, he thought a lot about these matters. But even in retrospect it did not occur to him to be horrified, as others were, by the suicides. At most he found it ridiculous that some of the boys miscalculated the direction of their jumps or changed their minds at the last minute and were caught on the first rock and were injured but did not die. Or those whose plans were faulty to begin with. They were ready to throw themselves onto the tracks of the narrow-gauge railway, the idiots, when they knew the train had to slow down before the viaduct and would only cut off an arm or a leg.