Parallel Stories: A Novel (173 page)

Her face became a strange object in the dim light. A single patch of yellowish light fell on her nose and lips. Her innocent statement opened up a secret world in which people discussed one another’s lives behind one another’s backs. For her, this world was probably neither secret nor strange nor repulsive but familiar and natural. She appeared little-girlish or awkward in this world, and this must have been one of her transformations, which I had not understood until then. She could change her age even between two sentences. Now she was older than I, now she was like a child. I couldn’t easily imagine a world in which my aunt would talk about me to a stranger while another stranger eavesdropped. Although I knew that such a world existed, just as I knew that in the real world every sentence was an assassination and betrayal; but in the world that existed only for me, in no circumstance could a thing like that possibly occur. And with the help of these feelings, or thoughts, within a fraction of a second I had finally understood something about this woman, yet somehow I still didn’t know what it was I had understood.

I asked when and in what way my aunt had talked about me, how had I gotten into the conversation, and from where could her boss have known my aunt. But I didn’t wait for an answer; as though I dreaded her answer I turned away and stared out at the street.

The street was more familiar than her face was.

No, she did not think the two women knew each other from someplace. They like to talk to each other because they are about the same age. Her boss had a child very late in life. Sometimes they talk about this, sometimes about other things, about this and that, anything.

And I didn’t even know, I said, that my aunt frequented your shop.

Not only my aunt, she said in her lively, enthusiastic, little-girlish voice, but my older cousin too.

Meanwhile I was looking at the street, because for some reason I had to.

No, I said, it can’t be, she must be mixing him up with somebody else, because my older cousin has never in his life set foot in a store. Unless he was with my aunt.

She laughed and said I was wrong about that too, because he does come to the shop on Wednesdays and Fridays, always between four and five, and he always buys the most expensive dessert.

Dessert, I said. You mean to tell me my cousin buys dessert, I said. He had never bought a box of matches, let alone dessert.

But there must be something to this story.

And I kept staring steadfastly through the swaying, yellowish sphere of the lights from the streetlamps as if I had not the slightest wish to see this unknown woman’s face and was willing to hear her voice only from a distance. This lively, little-girlish, distant voice I didn’t know what to do with. She was talking to me from another world, and the image that Ágost bought desserts at that shop so he could court her was simply unbearable.

There was no woman who would want to avoid his gaze.

And the street was now commanding my gaze. As if I were slightly forgetting what we had been talking about, I too was becoming a bit lost. Or I longed to be lost, I don’t know. I began to long to be out of the car, to lean into the wind and to go home to Stefánia. To return to the country that no longer existed for me. To see at the far end of the garden the six high arched windows all lit up and, until Róza came to open the gate, to lean my forehead against the cool, lance-shaped pickets of the fence.

She asked what I was thinking about, or looking at so hard, or why did I become so quiet.

I said I was remembering something from my childhood.

I should tell it to her.

That’s it, I said, laughing, and went on staring out into nothing in the tunnel of the lights on Dembinszky Street. That’s exactly the problem, I don’t know what I should tell her about, because suddenly so many things were on my mind at once.

I had to look back at her; I asked whether she came from the country.

Wherever did I get that idea.

I didn’t get it from anywhere. I’m just asking.

But she is asking why does that interest me.

Because if she was from the country, then maybe I couldn’t explain anything to her. This is an idée fixe of mine that I had even as a child: that there was a border on Aréna Road and life on the far side of it was completely different from our life on Stefánia Boulevard. I asked her if she wanted me to show it to her. But suddenly I remembered that we hadn’t brought down those drink bottles from the third floor.

The Spice of Happiness

It was clear he was at the right place, and it was equally clear that he was in the grip of a peculiar feeling.

Perhaps happiness in love is what makes such a wonderful promise in the air made fragrant by vegetation.

It would have been foolish to be taken in by such a spiritual promise, but it would have been no less foolish to deny himself the exceptional and groundless feeling of lightness.

Dr. Kienast saw a solitary, one-story house in the forest, standing in the middle of a long, rather narrow clearing, all its windows lit up, and he had to goad himself to look so he could see, instead of being preoccupied with what he was thinking and feeling. It was as if he had strayed back into the same winter twilight. But where in the devil else could he be walking if not at the place where he happened to be.

Everything might have occurred once before.

In light moments or frightening ones when, who knows why, one is gripped by irresponsibility and suffused with happiness, one can easily have the impression that one knows the world by heart. And it wasn’t the first time he had experienced this particular hallucination. A little farther on in the clearing, he saw a smartly built wood-framed shed and, facing it, a handsome little structure whose use he could not guess. This was the fruit-drying shed in which, in Döhring’s dream, Isolde had found the hidden gold, and perhaps the oldest of the three buildings.

The beams and wide trusses of the wood-framed main building must have been repainted recently.

Kienast was laughing at himself a little; one tends, when nudged by an illusory feeling, to make daring discoveries regarding the inner nature or structure of the world that only a moment later may prove useless. In the silence of the foggy woods the noise of fine dripping could be heard. The air was still. And he could be truly content with what had happened in the previous two days. He had escaped, run ahead of himself, and everything was coming together very nicely. He reveled in the joy of discovery, though nothing was exactly new for him. As if he were someone arriving on this miserable muddy globe not for the first time and in all probability not the last either. It’s love again, that damned love, he sang the old song to himself.

Always and again, love, he had sung to himself—and whistled the tune too, to escape the stupid lyrics while traipsing along, going about his dark little criminal cases among unsuspecting people in the city, which was preparing for the holiday and already decorated with electric garlands.

And now he was standing before the unknown house, still whistling the same song, always the same song, and he will sing the same song tomorrow too. Although most of the things he was thinking about now he had not thought about before. Words like
providence
and
muddy globe
usually escaped his attention or failed to settle permanently in his consciousness. He had no penchant for rapture, no inclination toward mysticism, he found esotericism laughable, Nazi drivel, and he felt no special joy in secret correlations or in having exceptional thoughts. Neither his uplifting sentiments nor the volatile upheaval in his love life could make him smile happily. One really must not let signs of such things show. Still, he well remembered that just before his trip, when discussing the first test results in the lab and after he had handed over a few very promising pieces of new material to the lab technician, he had felt like heartily slapping the back of that gaunt, bespectacled man.

Listen, pal, let me tell you what happened last night. Felt like doing it especially because something like that had obviously never happened to the other man. But in the end he didn’t; the man was not his pal. Even so, the lab technician gave him a certain look. What had got into him anyway; he knew it wasn’t quite proper to entrust the technician with the examination of materials that he, the detective, could not have obtained by legitimate means.

When the first sketch of an investigation quickly comes together with almost no missing pieces, one must be especially careful. In the universe a strict logical net holds up not only great truths but also great errors, so it may often happen that one believes one is on the trail of a great truth when in fact one has only been taken in by a rather weak idea of one’s own.

He did not continue under the neatly pruned fruit trees—mainly apple and pear trees, and plum trees farther off—and he did not step out onto the grass of the clearing.

What petty things I investigate, what shitty little things I let myself brood on, and I make myself a laughingstock even with the little stuff; as if he needed bigger and bloodier cases, and much less diligence, for his well-being. He destroys everything with his ambition, as if he were doing the opposite in his life from what common sense required. Which meant that he stood on no firmer moral ground than criminals did.

From behind the shed door he heard the dull thumps of wood being chopped, the banging and the splitting.

A few moments earlier he had stopped his overheated car where on the map the paved road ended. He had hardly eaten or drunk all day, hence the feeling reminiscent of dizziness and a surprise about the twilight, which perhaps wasn’t real. Or he was driving not in today’s twilight but yesterday’s. To stuff something quickly into his belly, he had shouted to the sausage man through his lowered window. The man wasn’t surprised; for almost ten years he had been stationed at the edge of the city in his tin hut smelling of burned oil; he was accustomed to madmen locked in their cars; he made his living from them.

He had to watch it, though, so that they wouldn’t beat him up or stab him and mainly so he’d get his money.

Mustard or ketchup.

Mustard.

With one hand on the steering wheel, he had squeezed together the roll and the hot white sausage with the other and driven on, taking quick bites, aware that the mustard was dripping. Patting the seat next him, he realized that the napkin along with the paper tray must have slipped under the seat. I am empty, busying myself with other people’s shitty little affairs, I have lawful authorization to do stuff forbidden to others, but that doesn’t really get me anywhere. He was dissatisfied with himself for having nothing to fill his emptiness with, and just as dissatisfied with these recurring attacks of dissatisfaction. As if thinking that with such an awful profession as his, which makes him sticky all over even when he does his job properly, he probably wasn’t worthy of the woman, and not just her but anyone. And how should he do things properly. She’s an uncomplicated, fragrant, fragile being whom for years I didn’t even notice. He should honestly tell her, before disappointing her, that he’s not worthy of her and stop the whole thing. Bodily joy isn’t everything. But he could not reassure himself with this foolishness. Why shouldn’t it be everything. If he had a good fuck, he felt at home in the universe. Anyway, who in the world wants to separate fucking from spiritual joy or anything else. He wiped his greasy mustard-stained fingers on the seat and smeared the traces of grease and mustard at the corners of his mouth. As if he should instantly become someone because of a woman like that, or as if the lack of dignity in his life—the problematic relationship between his daily activities and his human compulsions or abilities—were becoming oppressive. He did not know exactly what was missing, but he was missing it very much. Now he’s stuffed full and, having assaulted his system, belching profusely, and certainly he’ll soon be hiccupping. If he didn’t have to sneak around, avoiding daylight, in the thick of humanity, he too might have noticed earlier that he had no one in this world, just like this wretched Döhring.

He was wary of hiccupping, he had vowed many times not to stuff himself with those lousy rolls and sausages and mainly not to top everything off with all sorts of cola.

When he had to hiccup, he had to hiccup, no matter how many well-known anti-hiccupping methods he tried.

Although Kienast was one of those cops who, endowed with great strength of mind and fortitude, did not lose their composure at the sight of even the most horrendous crimes, he was alarmed by even the slightest physical irregularity or the most banal pain of his own. Either his daily activities had dulled his natural good faith, which was why he could not engage himself with another human being, or he had chosen this profession in the first place so that he could experience the affirmation of his natural bad faith every day and thus keep from finding anyone to share his life with.

No one with whom he could be as naughty as he liked.

He went to the doctor with impossible complaints, sometimes to be reassured that the symptoms were harmless, sometimes to hear the fatal news he always expected. A toothache, pinprick, nosebleed, bee sting, blister, or splinter was enough for him to see his approaching end, which he was ready to forget the moment the inconvenience passed; after all, he was busy with nothing else but the deaths of others. Now, against his good judgment, he popped open the Coca-Cola can and drank in almost uninterrupted gulps. He quickly tried to let the carbon dioxide out of his body, opened his mouth wide, stuck out his tongue, sort of burping himself. A little later he raised his bottom, firing away cautiously, not pressing too hard lest he soil his underpants. Which temporarily made a considerable stink in the car. But he rather enjoyed this, sniffing eagerly, not to lose the familiar smell before it dispersed.

Occasionally, no matter how dissatisfied he was with himself, he protected what belonged to his body, pampered it, and found it enjoyable.