Parallel Stories: A Novel (16 page)

In the end he shat in his pants for us, said one of the older prisoners, though he remained alone with his laughter.

In an instant, the smell rose to their nostrils.

All the more reason for them quickly to abandon the pinioned, stinky human remains.

They hurried, did not even close the door behind them. They immediately found hunting outfits, ammunition, work clothes, warm socks, boots, striped and checkered flannel shirts. Not everything was freshly laundered, and so along with the clothes they put on the cooled-off scent of strange German male bodies.

They would have liked to move on before darkness.

They found nothing of value. As to money, only five imperial marks in a wine-red purse in a windbreaker pocket, even though they looked everywhere, turned everything over, while they kept eating and searching, eating and searching.

Everyone in Their Own Darkness

It’s a lot of hooey, the whole text, every bit of it, said the man standing stark naked in the door of his cabin.

He had been leisurely drying himself for minutes.

Now he would wipe his neck, now his ears, while turning his head to the rhythm of the words, and often he would reach between his legs with the thick towel.

It’s of no interest at all, I don’t understand why you bother with it, came the second man’s irritable reply.

Who’s interested in a text like that today, added the third man quietly.

I see that, of course I do, how wouldn’t I, but it’s impossible not to notice what they’re doing, continued the first speaker, who might have been the most restless of the three. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on these comrades.

He gently and quickly wiped off his testicles, then rubbed his luxuriant pubic hair, maybe a bit too vigorously, and when he was done with that, he returned to his shoulders and neck even though there was nothing left to dry there.

Oh, André, my dear, the second one started again, a large, blue-eyed man with pale gray hair, who was irritated not so much by the affected lecturing tone as by the nature of the prevarication. It doesn’t interest anyone, believe me, not anyone. Not even you.

You mean you know better than I do what interests me, called out the naked man from the cabin; his body was thin as a blade.

A long silence followed.

You’ll be surprised, but it happens that I really do, growled the gray-haired one benevolently.

He spoke with a slight foreign accent, as did the man continuously drying himself—who sounded sort of English and stammered nervously like a little boy—but the voice of the gray-haired man was more German, powerful and reliably manly. According to his birth certificate, he bore the high-sounding name of a well-established family from Erzgebirge, without the title of baron, and not only because in Erzgebirge titles and ranks had been done away with, but because he had been born out of wedlock. Hans von Thum zu Wolkenstein would have been his honorific, and this became the object of much jesting, especially since, according to his official documents, he had the simplest possible Hungarian name, János Kovách. They called him Hansi, or Hansi Wolkenstein, a name that had a good dose of childlike kindness, about the same amount of loud contempt for Germans, and a portion of truth, since in his childhood the name on his documents had been simply Hans von Wolkenstein. His mother, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, had tried to soothe the indignation of the Thum family by leaving Thum off the birth certificate.

Since the Middle Ages the Wolkenstein family had lived mostly on its name; they had not in fact been in possession of their magnificent fortified castle since the sixteenth century.

His close-cropped hair was indeed, for his age, surprisingly grayish white, his eyes offensively blue. Opposite his friend’s cabin, wrapped in his light blue bathrobe, his large white terry-cloth towel wound around his neck, he was stretched out to his full length on a wide bench, leaning his head against the hairless thigh of the third man.

He looked like a large wild animal, a kind of lazy cat, and occasionally he could not hold back caustic remarks. His friends thought him cynical because of his biting remarks, and perhaps he was.

Or he may have chosen this allegedly manly pose, sometime in the past, as a permanent defense.

The intimacy with which he rested his head on the third man’s hairless thigh obviously meant more than a chance physical contact.

This third man, with his friend’s prematurely graying head on his thigh, sat at the very end of the whitewashed bench, a bit squashed against the backrest, and was looking impassively out the window giving on to the pool, which meant he had to twist his entire upper body uncomfortably. He had no bathrobe on, and one could see from his skin that he was a bit chilly. Maybe he should have put something on, but that would have meant tearing himself away from this minor bodily contact.

Every mid-September, here in the Lukács Baths, large glass panels were put back between the columns supporting the upper floors, and in May they would be taken out again. In the open courtyards, the two swimming pools were surrounded by rows of wooden cabins on several floors, just as arcaded corridors surround a cloister courtyard. In summer it seemed that what one saw and heard was a cloister of bees: bathers swarming in great clusters around the sunlit multitiered beehives. As the nights grew cooler, the stairs leading to the cabins on the upper floors were closed off; in winter, snow settled on the corridor railings. But the sight was no less fascinating now. From the springs of Saint Luke, medicinal waters of various temperatures keep bubbling up, the warmest close to sixty-five degrees centigrade, the coldest seventeen degrees on the average, and the bath attendants mix them so that the water flowing into the so-called men’s pool is no more than twenty-one degrees. Those unable to swim can splash around in the warmer water of the women’s pool. But the moment the outside temperature drops, the open pools begin to fog up, steam, nearly smoke; on overcast winter days, such a thick fog settles on the enclosed space that swimmers are always apologizing for bumping into each other.

The vapors were fairly strong now too; a gusting wind picked up small clouds of steam and carried them along, or simply whisked the vapor off the surface of the water, which at once became blistery and ruffled. While the storm raged like this over the pool, the long hands of the clock on the opposite wall of the yard were making their indifferent rounds. But one could see the passing seconds only until another gust slapped the next burst of a shower against the clock’s convex glass cover; then the clock grew hazy for a while.

It was getting to be half past nine in the morning.

This third man was interested neither in the exact time nor in the spectacular display of the spring storm, and even less interested in what his friends were going on about. He made no effort to be polite, did not pretend to be interested. With other people, he was usually rather indifferent or at least very reserved, but this time he took strong offense, which he did not bother to hide; this may have been one explanation for why he chose to turn away from them, however uncomfortable it made him. The previous evening, when they had had supper at the Fészek Club, they had taken him aside and told him that today, as soon as the pools opened, Viola would be there with her husband; he should be at the Lukács by six.

He must catch her, they explained, before she went in the water or, they suggested, when her old husband disappeared in the showers.

He had overslept, had had to run, but he’d gotten there in time.

It wasn’t that his friends had played a trick on him—it wouldn’t have been the first time, and he understood why they would—but in this instance he could not forgive them. Something, he could not exactly tell just what, had become too much for him. They simply wanted to lure him away from the Sports Baths so that he’d be with them and not alone, and mainly not with that silly goose he had been living with for a while. Viola did not come at six, or later, only the elderly dentist arrived; Viola was nowhere to be seen, which did not put him in a bad humor but, on the contrary, relieved him. And that is how he surrendered to hopelessness, which had been waiting for him with open arms. All three agreed that Viola, although a little loud, was an entrancing woman. His friend swore up and down that she had promised to come, they weren’t lying, he must believe them, but of course she was unpredictable. And he despised this place where every morning the crème de la crème of Budapest came together. He did not believe them. Viola was anything but an entrancing woman.

He despised them for choosing such a measly swimming pool, where one could get from one end to the other in just six strokes; and he seriously thought that Viola might be his last chance.
Je m’en passerai bien.
However, it would be easier without her. A witty woman of considerable temperament who, on top of it all, had a rather flashy appearance and to whom he was related, though fortunately not by blood. In any case, he did not have much of a chance with her. How could he have believed that Viola had promised them she’d come. The young woman had decidedly rejected him; moreover, she had publicly made him a laughingstock. From which he understood why, in her childhood, she and her younger sister had laughed so much behind his back. For reasons unknown to him, those two were always laughing at him.

Which, of course, could have meant the opposite of what it did mean. He knew it did not mean anything else, and that hurt him. Still, he could not give up the possibility of a last chance, and that is why he had gullibly taken the bait.

In such awful weather, there were very few guests in the heated glass corridor on the ground floor. The three men were conversing at the end of the left row of cabins near the telephone booth, in a spacious corner where for some reason the pool’s not necessarily pleasant odor was strongly felt. The man called André, whose first name was originally András and whose family name was Rott, for which many people thought him to be a Jew, did his undressing and dressing every morning in the very last cabin.

Anybody who was anybody at the Lukács Baths had his own cabin, which of course demanded the appropriate social standing along with an entourage. These were his favorite friends, though he could have called them his subordinates. They had known one another for only six years, but there was no doubt about the depth and strength of their relationship. András Rott’s offensive nudity was part of the threesome’s close and mysterious relationship. Not that they had no secrets from one another, even bodily secrets, for they did. But it was as if Rott had to convince his two friends or keep them captive not only with his pronouncements but also with the sight of his naked, sharp-as-a-blade, dark body. There are secrets weightier than bodily secrets, and this truth well suited the connection among these three.

Concerning the secrets of their lives, which they could not share with anyone, it seemed more propitious to retreat behind flagrant nakedness. They displayed their unconditional trust in one another with the bareness of their bodies. André especially enjoyed doing this because, coming from a militantly Catholic family, he was no stranger to ceremonial exhibitionism. In addition, he was often on the losing side against his two friends, and the loss had to be made up by the introduction of physical perfection. Not that the other two were not at least as perfect as he was in their own ways; as if every moment they had to cajole the proof of self-denial from one another, though their mutual and common silences always remained weightier than their proofs.

His two friends regularly conspired against Rott, and since he was an emotional man, he took up the challenge heroically; he either struggled valiantly with them or willingly threw himself on their mercy, but in fact he was more powerful than they and, of the three, surely the most influential.

He glanced at his body and the sight filled him with contentment; he felt it to be a worthy gift to bestow on his friends.

Accordingly, he fell silent for a while. Then he let go of his testicles and with one quick movement pulled the foreskin back on his cock. Let it be said in his defense that one has to dry the bare bulb or rounded tip of one’s penis well, or it might easily become mucous and, in a few hours, develop an unpleasantly strong smell.

Male nakedness has no higher degree than this.

No women were allowed in this row of cabins. If because of some small but pressing business on the other side, a female cabin attendant had to come through here, she would start by shouting from afar, heads up, gentlemen, I’m coming through, woman on the way, look out; and to emphasize her words she would rattle her keys or slap them on the closed cabin doors, and still she had to take a lot of lip from naked or half-naked men, each in turn, as she went past the open cabins.

Until the mid-1920s, men and women had bathed separately. And to this day, the lasting reminder of that strict tradition is that men and women are not allowed in the other’s corridors. Yet no signs were posted to this effect. Even people who knew little or nothing of the bath’s past or of the merciless local rules of conduct sensed the invisible borders. An unsuspecting man straying into the corridors between the floors around the courtyard might easily end up in an unpleasant situation. Believing he was still in a shared area, he might suddenly find himself in the company of scantily dressed women who in exceedingly friendly tones would shout for him to come on, don’t be afraid, come on closer, at most we’ll unscrew your thingamajig.

Or he would find himself face-to-face with a naked woman who without hesitation would throw her wet towel at him.

Nobody was swimming in the women’s pool, used more and more nowadays by children and uninitiated occasional bathers. The only voices to be heard came from the cloakroom, somewhere in the corridor connecting the two wings of the bath. Except for the three men, there were hardly any guests in this transitional hour. In the men’s shower room, the water ran behind the white canvas curtains, steam rolled outward, but no doddering old men shouted under the hot water. Nobody in the long row of cabins called for an attendant, nor did the attendants chat with anyone. As with everything else, such activities had their order, time, and rhythm.