Parallel Stories: A Novel (170 page)

Of course I suspected that this woman, whom I sometimes imagined was my mother, was among those who were crushed when the marquee of the Duna Cinema crashed down. Probably not one of those whom the rescuers scraped out alive from under the rubble after the dust settled and everyone was sobbing, fleeing, helping, or only helplessly screaming and watching the incredible. That would mean I’d lost my mother for the second time. Later some good people carried the corpses to the corner of Antal Nagy Street in Buda, and then, at the cost of subdued altercations on top of the rubble, the line for bread re-formed itself.

They lay side by side where the tank had appeared earlier.

People in the line slowly kicked the rubble off the curb.

The chaos was too great, and I never saw her again on the boulevard or anywhere else.

Somebody said that the marquee was made of cinder blocks, which is why not more people died, since it’s much lighter than regular concrete.

I preferred to continue weaving the story for myself. In my story she was taken away with light injuries by a Russian military ambulance that showed up for the injured. She recovered in a few days but had no doubts that I’d recognized her, and that’s why she left the country in the last days of December, along with other refugees.

My imagination protected me from the pain somewhat, although the more cleverly it worked, the more doubts accumulated in my mind.

I stood there on the landing above the second floor, leaning against the wall, bent forward a little, my legs slightly apart, like someone preparing to throw up but hoping not to soil his suit with his vomit; I was waiting for my imagination to calm down, so that jealousy and senseless physical desire would not drive me mad. I held my unbuttoned coat together with my fists sunk in my pockets. As if afraid that someone on the dark staircase might see what was happening inside my pants. I was clenching one fist hard to keep my fingers from stretching out, from crawling onto my painfully rearing hot cock, to keep my warm palm from closing around it.

But I could not deactivate my imagination. For that I would have had to scrape the pictures off my brain cells. And since I couldn’t do that, there I was all alone with my cock. And they were doing it in their warm bedroom. I saw not her eyes but a single flash of her eyes, a single flash of your eyes, the sadness of her closed lashes, your sadness, her thinly arched eyebrows and naked shoulders. But I had never seen her shoulders. I was not the one who had seen them, but, together with me, this hateful man had. I wanted nothing more than to open my fly in the cold staircase of this familiar building so I could come together with them.

The pain was somewhat mitigated by my imagination, but only gratification could have expelled the tormenting pictures.

If I could do that, I’d be ready for any disgraceful act, that’s what I felt.

And why should fate save me from disgrace.

What I have done until now, along with my stupid scurrying around and my stupid enthusiasm, has been disgraceful enough.

But one can neither deflect oneself nor hold oneself back with self-inflicted moral judgments.

No humiliation can frighten one away from committing ever-worse disgraceful acts. As if a raw desire for pleasure was saying, no matter what you do, your disgrace can still be increased, only make sure you don’t drown in it.

I knew they were not going to come down again.

Maybe Ilonka Weisz would come, said my imagination.

Nobody came.

I opened my fly, not hurrying at all. The way one prepares for a premeditated revenge.

Potential danger always sharpens the sensation of pleasure, I don’t know why that is. With the booming of the wind in my ears, blood pulsing through the cracking and snapping of the gutters. This was the voice of fear, desire, and trembling. In the pulsing of blood, I expected to hear the opening of the door on the third floor, the sound of their light footsteps on the patterned stone floor of the staircase, their chatter, their wrangling, their sensual banter, anything, even their amorous cooing. I was sure they weren’t coming, but I could do nothing but keep on waiting for them. And now waiting not only for Klára but, though I didn’t notice this significant and involuntary change, for Simon too. And if they were to come, I’d surely have enough time to flee silently from them, out of the house.

I’d go to City Park, that’s how I imagined my escape.

Out there, in the storm, I’d betake myself among the wet trees.

Until then, however, it was as if I were cowering at the bottom of a dark lair, waiting for my prey and ready to pounce.

I was cold and I was hot, but I did not dare execute the last movement on my open pants. Another bus went by; the empty courtyard echoed the rough sound of wheels dancing on cobblestones for a long time. My hand kept pawing the slit in my pants, perhaps to move on, perhaps to be ready to button it up again. The yellowish sky was shining above the roofs. There was no light at all in the Weiszes’ three windows on the fourth floor. I thought that Ilonka Weisz must have grown into a beautiful girl in the meantime. The first was the kitchen window, the other two those of the one room.

By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one’s expectations crashing down. There was some noise from the second floor, followed by a laughing female voice. I paid little attention, the usual sounds filtered out from a kitchen, but I quickly buttoned my fly. Then I heard the piano teacher’s door open, but it was immediately closed, very quietly.

I didn’t understand that.

Maybe it was closed from the inside.

Then for a long time nothing happened, the wind kept booming. And when I was certain that only my useless waiting would continue, and while I heard the pervasive patter of women’s shoes, someone turned on the pitiful staircase lights. It barely made a difference, but it was a little less dim around me. My first urge was to flee. Like a miserable bug. She called after me; she called me by my name in the echoing staircase.

I wasn’t sure I’d managed to finish buttoning my fly. I froze, as if naked; I looked back and her voice made me happy. I hoped my coat covered everything. Suddenly I had many things to say and to ask. How did she know my name, but in my shame my heart stopped beating. It was as though she could see not only what I had done but also what I would have liked to do. And she was standing there, at the top of the stairs, in a long fine fur coat, shining like silk, and I saw she was nearly bursting with her triumph.

I would have asked her but I didn’t have the courage—or enough air.

She raised her gloved hands lightly above her head as though playfully asking, with a modicum of self-mockery, aren’t I wonderful, and what have you to say about this transformation, and isn’t the fur coat wonderful too; look how nicely it falls when I spread my arms like this. She raised her head as if wearing a crown, and look, what a wonderful hairdo, created all by herself. It surely was wonderful. My wish had come true. The most wonderful thing was that she so easily transformed herself; there was no end to the surprises and transformations. I forgot everything; I forgot all the anger and shame of having had to wait, and they dispelled my presumption about what they had been doing in their bathroom or bedroom; I forgot all my accusations.

Her beauty made me forget my entire meaningless life.

I did notice, though, how unsuspecting she was, how preoccupied with herself or with something I could not have known, and therefore she did not care what was happening to me. As though she weren’t interested in that or not interested in me. I was only some odd decoration on her completed life. But I had to forgive her for this instantly. Nothing could possibly have happened to me that would be of any interest to other people; I realized that right away. I had nothing to complain about and I had to keep my joy on a short leash too, lest I become overexcited by something that might disturb others. I had learned that I could not burden people with my feelings and, having no choice, I made myself believe I was indeed someone who not only wanted to avoid being a burden but who positively tried to please everyone at least a little.

And it seemed that in her own play she had cast me in a role that called for my presence but did not cramp her style.

She was wearing black antelope shoes with incredibly high heels, and under the fur coat a tight-fitting unadorned black dress at once soft and tight, which left her knees and thighs exposed—shockingly so by the prevailing standards of good taste. Her snow-white neck, her legs shining in their stockings, and the power of her knees and thighs were her jewels. Her strength was her most conspicuous feature, showing how strong that body was, carrying the proportions of her strength as some kind of armor. Her maddeningly blond hair, now done up in an utterly new coiffure, was her jewel. The glittering of her eyes, her plump lips painted blood red were her jewels. I wouldn’t have dared touch her lips, though I wanted to take them into my mouth, I ate them, I reveled in them, and they threw me into terrible confusion.

It had been in the air already that women were wearing short dresses, but until then only a few had dared to go this far, and right away I worried about being seen with such a striking woman. Although I had never seen a hairdo like hers, it reminded me of someone, I didn’t know whom. Not knowing somehow felt good. I would have started up the stairs for her, but I took only two steps because of another struggling impulse within me.

She would sweep me off my feet if I touched her.

I was left with words colliding into one another, a stammering, which happens usually when one is trying to do something against all odds.

I asked where she was coming from.

And she latched on to this, to the raw words, as though in doing so she could rescind the exaggerated gestures she had made.

She said, what do you mean where from, where could she be coming from.

And how did she know my name, I asked. It’s a pretty insane thing, but actually I had never introduced myself.

How does she know. Well, she knows everything. In other words, she knows what she wants to know or has to know.

She started down the steps like a scheming prima donna. She must have seen someone do this in a movie or something.

Indeed, we hadn’t been introduced, so perhaps she couldn’t talk to me now.

But she was quickly embarrassed by her revealed beauty which she had just shown me. Her temperament proved weightier and more somber, so she was able to ignore the fact that she had already shared it with me.

And where did she leave Simon.

She said, we’re going without him, because suddenly something cropped up that he had to deal with; he was furious, ranting and raving, would probably break everything in the apartment. Can’t do much damage, though, they have hardly anything. This time they had a really terrible row, they weren’t talking. Until tomorrow for sure. If he wants to, he can come after us; if not, he can stay home and then he’ll drink himself under the table.

He’ll throw up; she’ll have to wash everything he’s wearing.

While her words echoed impassively, bouncing dully off the stained, filthy walls decorated with graffiti and bullet holes, she kept coming down the stairs as if to demonstrate that she was granting me the grace of her approach in well-apportioned doses.

She made me feel like a stupid little kid.

I said I’d told Simon that I’d known this house for a long time.

I asked her if she knew the Weisz family, did she know Ilonka Weisz. Because while I waited I had plenty of time to check the list of tenants, and it seems that almost everybody still lives here.

Protecting herself from my childish flood of words, she laughed. Then, slightly taken aback, she asked what Weisz family, what Ilonka, and she was sorry she’d made me wait so long but she’d thought I was sitting downstairs. They hadn’t lived here long enough to get to know everybody in the building.

Of course, I continued, and I’d be happy to tell her about it one day, but now I had something more important to ask: how was it that she came out of the apartment on the second floor when they lived on the third floor.

Because a friend of hers lives on the second. And was I a police detective. To interrogate her like this.

She couldn’t have thought that seriously, and I asked if her friend was renting a room there.

This really got her going. She protested, why should her friend rent just a room; she lives there, it’s her own apartment.

But my old piano teacher lives in that apartment, Andria Lüttwitz.

There were no more steps for her to take during these superfluous sentences, because now she was standing right next to me on the step above. She flooded me with her fragrance. I should have stepped back, but I could not make myself do that and stayed put like a dumb obstacle. Nor could I keep myself from touching her fur coat, at least with my fingers.

I said, this is mink, as if voicing a professional opinion, and my hand remained where it was.

She responded quite vehemently to my movement, as if she had been waiting for it; she put her gloved hand on my arm.

Yes, it is certainly mink, she said quietly, as if revealing a secret, and how did I know about furs. She borrowed it from her friend because she’d seen that her spring coat had bothered me.

Because of me, I asked, alarmed.

You’re right, it’s not a very attractive coat.

I asked how she had noticed, what sign of mine had she read, and I was ashamed—but she could not reply because suddenly I shouted out, now I know, now it was clear what had been so familiar.

It was Andria who had done her hair.

Yes, she did, but how did I know, and she asked me to go back to the second floor with her and bring the drink bottles she had left there.

That’s what she said, the drink bottles.

Only Inches from Each Other

How did I know, how did I know that Andria also had that same hairdo. Nobody but Andria has hair like that.