Parallel Stories: A Novel (184 page)

To find a place for herself, a form for her rebellion. So she would not remain in eternal illegality. Not to be vulnerable. She should not be allowed to sink. She would choose betrayal, destruction, and even more total devastation, whoredom, anything but the resigned muteness in which they had been living as the living dead.

The devil take the hindmost.

And no matter how serious her struggle proved to be, no matter how obsessed she had become with it and how calculating, she found it amusing that this young man from across the boulevard busied himself, so doggedly and enthusiastically, with her person—to which she herself, in her own well-considered interest, paid only moderate attention. He was following her, observing her, becoming her dog. She liked his crew cut, his humility, his gentleness, which at the same time she was ready to belittle or ridicule, his strong forehead; she liked looking at his boyishly soft lips, as though mapping out his dormant lovemaking capabilities and pleasure-producing physical attributes. She sensed correctly that the young man had no definable intentions or at least no conventional ones; he set no preconditions.

Anyway, attractive and beautiful people tend to consider loyal courting and admiration their due.

This admiration was hers; she deserved devotion and humility.

Although it struck her as strange that the young man’s courting lacked manly self-adoration and that he was not hesitant in his humility.

And she was looking for a partner in her rebellion whom she could initiate, narcotize, and dazzle, whom she could shape to her liking with her fingers, like putty, someone who would serve her and no one else.

Perhaps she was looking for a male being who, curiously, was not selfish, who was disciplined even when unbridled, who unlike other men was not too headstrong. So she could exclude Simon to some extent. She wanted independence; she had gone too far with Simon in their mutual dependence. To shake the young man out of his silent adulation—aside from everything else she had always longed for his lips—to make him stop talking and start doing something.

Yet she had given him no signs in this direction.

She deserved this much compensation: to get her hands on such an innocent, handsome boy, nice and slow. Thanks to her traditional upbringing and irregular behavior, she had missed out on the admiration and devotion that should have been hers. She regretted, painfully and urgently, not having had someone to reject. And precisely because she loves Simon, she isn’t going to pass up this opportunity. She loves no one else and she never will.

It is true that she looked at people in love with distrust; I’m a prude, she thought. She was repelled by their toying and dallying; when she saw them she turned away, pretending not to have seen them.

I’m intolerably prudish, she admonished herself, and I can thank that bigoted mother of mine for that too; she knew it, yet she found them disgusting, these dumb lovebirds.

She willingly gave up tenderness; she preferred unruliness, wildness.

What they had was not exactly love but, rather, a covenant or testament. She and Simon said to each other straight out that theirs was a new testament, why not, this was the real new testament, not Jesus Christ’s. Anyway, how can one love a snot-nosed boy like this, I’ll wind up wiping his nose. They will mate. And secretly she was excited about finding out whether he was Jewish or half-Jewish, it was all the same to her; all they had to do was go to bed and then the big truth would out. She finally wanted for herself one of these little doomed ones; this too was part of her rebellion. She had never been to bed with a Jew, and this interested her very much, this was more than rebellion against her upbringing. As though this act promised a hitherto denied quality that she’d become familiar with so she could distinguish it from other qualities; this act was still to be performed and not to be foresworn. Is there a palpable difference. Based on the experiences available to her, she did not think it was feasible to separate personality from race, since a person had no sensory means to do so. She was excited by the image of an unprotected cock, by its being circumcised, because their terrible reputation for lasciviousness lay in this anticipation. To take revenge on her parents, who with their Christian fussing around had embittered her entire love life, deliberately and well in advance. She wanted nothing of their life and still her mouth was stuffed with it; it made her spit all the time.

She could not move for all her inhibitions, therefore she made large gestures.

Hardly anyone noticed.

She also considered changing her name so as not to carry her parents’; they shouldn’t be right about everything all the time. Yet taking Simon’s name would have offended her independence, and in truth she found it ugly, common; she wouldn’t admit it, but there remained in her a proud aristocratic dislike of Simon’s rather ordinary name. It wasn’t in the
Almanach de Gotha
*
and therefore did not exist.

Which was in every way adequate for the man’s proletarian pride.

She could have taken her mother’s name had she not felt a certain physical revulsion against her mother for her own joyless conception. She could never touch her mother, let alone carry her name. She was even repelled by her mother’s former beauty, though she could not ignore the hereditary path it traced in her, and by the fact that it was allegedly her mother’s little-girlish physical perfection that had caused Klára’s father to fall madly in love with her. Although Klára did not know exactly what governmental position her father had held or in what areas he had performed his delicate, highly confidential activities, she forgave him, blindly, for everything. She adored and worshipped him for his circumspection, calm, and wisdom. Whenever he came home for a few days after one of his secret missions, Chief Counselor Elemér Vay had played with the little girl, giving her rides on his knees for hours or shooting glass marbles with her on the living-room floor, as if he were her grandfather.

At the bottom of Klára’s memory, images of these occasions settled into patterns for happy hours ahead.

Even though she also had rather ominous presentiments about her father.

Once she was in school, on exceptionally happy days he would speak to her in German to quiz her on her French vocabulary, and they both enjoyed this immensely. She made excuses to herself, a little ashamed, for his having been taken by Arrow Cross men to the military prison in Sopronk
ő
hida, outside Budapest, along with the elderly papal nuncio and Count Esterházy.
*

On such sensitive historical terrain, concerning the question of how these men wound up in Sopronk
ő
hida, it was advisable for her to move cautiously, if only because of Simon. She decided not to ask, not to explore; a few inadvertent or malicious remarks were enough to persuade her not to inquire further. On her admissions applications she wrote that although she and her family had been relocated, which was why she graduated from a Franciscan high school, not only was she a confirmed atheist, but her father had anti-German views and had carried out important activities in the resistance; before she was born, pro-German factions had forced him into retirement and the Arrow Cross had failed to execute him only for lack of time. Yet anxiety about her father persisted, as well as shame about her own exaggerations and distortions, shame that she felt forced to talk like this, to lie so much. She could not deny or ignore that during the war His Excellency the regent had reactivated her father’s career and entrusted him with special missions, because everybody in the family was very proud of this.

But if something deemed incriminating were revealed about her father, Simon would leave her; this too was very clear to her. Although among some quietly accumulating counterarguments was the fact that recently Simon had come very close to being offered a job in the diplomatic service; since it was hard to imagine a screening process that would not uncover her family background, perhaps it had already been done and did not conclude with a negative result.

For his intemperate hatred, Klára loved Simon even more, though she could imagine a hatred so intemperate that it might make him break up with her. In fact she could not go past a certain point with him, despite the hatred she harbored for her own family. The chief counselor’s old sports car, in which they were now headed toward Stefánia Boulevard, had weathered the Hungarian Nazi regime—and, after its collapse, the requisitioning of goods to pay reparations to Russia—in a garage in Börzsönyliget, hidden among bales of straw. Only after 1956 did they free it from the straw, using pitchforks. For years afterward, the car seats smelled of hot Hungarian summers, of larks and hayed fields. Before starting out in it for Vienna with their two grown daughters that year, wearing army boots and awful-looking trench coats, so that the girls could finally dance with their peers at the opera ball, they had to obtain a new license plate and papers for it. Were the girls to be stuck in Budapest, neither of them would get into any Hungarian university, and without that, their future would have been very bleak. In those days there were no special problems in obtaining the right papers, and nobody raised objections. After a few years of enforced silence, the old network was functioning again. On the last Tuesday of October, the ready-to-fight core members met for the first time in Lehr’s apartment. While the hoi polloi on Köztársaság Square were busy hanging people, shooting, storming the Communist Party headquarters looking for underground torture chambers and, with their own ears, hearing freedom fighters banging inside the fortified secret-police cells, the men in the Teréz Boulevard apartment, bright in the languid sunshine, were reactivating their secret society.

It took only a few days.

By the time they had the false papers and the phony license plate, the Russians, together with the city police of Gy
ő
r, had sealed off the borders again. Now, sitting in the car together, Klára and Kristóf could not have known that when Kristóf fled home from the devastated square that very Tuesday to tell the speechless and incredulous elderly gentlemen what he had seen, virtually breaking in on them in his agitation, he had chosen Klára’s father’s face to focus on. As if this oldest pair of eyes having been the most skeptical were the safest, as if it was this gentleman especially whom Kristóf had to convince that he was not exaggerating or distorting anything, that charred stumps of bodies really were lying out among the burning books and documents, that people really were being hanged in the street.

It would please Klára to take a secret small revenge on her worshipped father by getting together with a Jew and thereby also inflict a nice wound on the young man. This too belonged to her rebellion; Kristóf himself had nothing to do with the passion with which she would touch him. Then she would really succeed in touching the Jew in him. No one should remain untouched by her universal pain and universal anxiety; this would be Klára’s only satisfaction.

Simon was the one; love was meant exclusively for Simon, not for Kristóf.

To see how much she could torment Kristóf and watch his torment—that is what Klára wanted, not his love.

And she saw clearly that he could be tormented.

Which Kristóf himself did not consider wholly unjustified, since his own father, killed by his comrades, had been a die-hard Stalinist; he did not forget that for a moment. It wasn’t enough for either an excuse or an explanation.

Kristóf and Klára turned their raw self-hatred, their historical perturbation and exasperation, on each other.

Oddly, the mutuality of this somewhat satisfied them.

If Kristóf did not want to lose moral credibility in his own eyes, and why would he want to, he could not object to Klára’s taking her revenge on him for the family insults she had suffered because of her father. Klára listened to Kristóf’s lamentable story with a certain empathy derived from her feelings about her father and from a vaguely delineated historical remorse. Nevertheless, she couldn’t deny that her concern for him was overshadowed by her gloating, raw and unforgiving.

Which, because of Simon, she had to deal with cautiously. She would protest whenever Simon tried to wipe off the alleged sins of his class on her, which she found extremely unfair, and would become sharply indignant.

Where does he get off.

At the top of her voice she would yell, you’re talking to me, not to my mother, not to my father.

But this was not their biggest problem.

In the darkness rhythmically illumined by streetlights, Kristóf could not get used to the woman’s freshly applied perfume. He liked the earlier one better; it had been fuller and more subdued. Also, he was unusually cold and could barely keep from shivering, which was humiliating, not very manly. And this was not only because the soles of his shoes were so thin, but also because their closeness had grown too intimate, hugely increasing his anxiety about the abandoned giant, who, although he was physically far from Budapest, surely was aware of what was going on. He had to be feeling what Kristóf felt and didn’t want to feel toward the woman. A sense of his presence made Kristóf breathe as if he were taking small samples of air into his lungs and then expelling them when he uttered his sudden, unexpected phrases. This behavior had nothing to do with his response to the giant’s unmistakable animal smell. As though he were saying to himself, Well, I’ll be, I can’t get to the bottom of this. The giant initially had no idea what to make of this attitude. Slowly he realized it, jostling among alien sensations, and only then comprehended it.

Indeed, they could not get to the bottom of anything; Klára, Kristóf, and Simon, coming together as they had from three contradictory social environments, either misinterpreted or plain misunderstood one another’s gestures. No two of the three of them could be together, on their own, without the third. This was hard for all of them to grasp. Yet the attitudes that Klára and Kristóf had each absorbed in their strict upbringing were alike in that neither of them felt free to understand certain things that it was more pleasant to misconstrue politely. Kristóf’s bottomless sexual subversion and Klára’s anarchic rebellion actively required them to find each other—now, however way they could, heedlessly.