Parallel Stories: A Novel (189 page)

They were not talking.

The older, bored-looking waitress amiably advised them—her voice drawing out the vowels—not to drink vodka today but gin fizzes.

Her typical Pest accent, slightly singsong, lent a sarcastic flavor to everything she said.

On account of today being a national holiday, they were handing out lemons at the central office.

All three of them had a good laugh at this—that the central office handed out anything, let alone lemons.

They had their own share of the piano’s white light, which exposed them to the other guests, exposed their shared giggles.

Where do you know her from, Kristóf asked after the waitress with her dyed blond hair left them.

I don’t really know, Klára replied, but maybe from somewhere.

Obviously she wasn’t telling the truth, and didn’t make anything of it.

Quietly they rebuked themselves for spoiling everything with every word—silence or even transparent prevarication was better. Every word acquired an offensive edge. Even though they were thinking of two different things and not blaming each other. And they could not talk about it, if only to keep from spoiling things even more. They kept looking at each other. No trace of fondness or love remained on their faces. Mirrorlike surface of motionless water. They both felt they’d behaved shockingly over the previous hours, their frivolity had been shocking, and there was no point in adding further shocks to the situation. They could not account for their behavior.

No wonder they had frightened each other senselessly and unforgivably. And mainly they had prattled and argued too much. They had made themselves vulnerable and had betrayed the one they loved.

Why had they become so common and shameless.

The people drinking and dancing around them had the impression that the couple in the piano’s spotlight were in the midst of a final breakup, trying to examine what their relationship had been in the past and getting a taste of how shocking it had been.

As they looked at each other impassively, accompanied by drums and piano, their emotional life was changing. In the windy outdoors they had experienced something of their freedom’s devastating power, but in here, under each other’s gaze, they were no longer people existing separately.

Their self-control was working perfectly well, no problem there, and nothing escaped their attention, yet they offered to each other, and to each other alone, some flavors and signs of their existence beyond their neutralized expressions and impassive features. No one could say Klára Vay wasn’t conspicuous—with her big hair, huge eyes, round and heavily painted lips, her mink coat now nonchalantly thrown off her shoulders and revealing a plunging neckline and blindingly white skin, her clinging, frighteningly short dress, immoderately high-heeled and pointed shoes, her shapely calves, little-girlish figure, strong hips and powerful thighs—her body’s anatomical contradictions or disharmony. As they came in, Kristóf had been very anxious about the challenge created by Klára’s appearance, and about people seeing him in the company of such a conspicuous phenomenon. He saw clearly and he felt on his skin that Klára’s beauty and unpardonable elegance made him look ridiculous.

Which turned him into a little prick.

Which in some laughable way he had to be proud of.

That such a dumb little prick’s been dealt such a woman. As if he had been her page, escort, and secret lover for years. Or might nurse realistic hopes of becoming her true lover one day.

At their very first appearance together in public Klára shouldn’t be allowed to see how moved and awed he was. That is why he looked about with a neutral, noncommittal gaze, so as not to reveal his desperate situation to these other people, the total fiasco and catastrophe that until now he had managed successfully to circumvent.

They both hit on the right expression.

They did not look shocking enough to hold curious eyes for very long; after a while inquiring eyes were duly averted. The two of them remained shocking and unbearable at most only to themselves. No one bothered to weigh the obvious age difference between them as a factor in the possible breakup. What people might have considered awful for the couple was that from now on they wouldn’t be able to get along without each other, and wouldn’t be able to account for this either. They weren’t holding hands, as if the glasses they each carried in one hand made this impossible; their coats hung off the backs of the high chairs. Their bodily stillness, or the complete absence of verbal communication, separated them from the dense human crowd around them. There might have been a chance to rescind or cancel some of the preceding events, but not in this present reality.

The ever-present moment was more powerful, and under its weight the significance of the stories they’d told each other was generously reduced.

As though the stories could be forgotten, had become ephemeral sound effects, tiny noises of history, nothing more.

As to the glasses, they really had no place to put them down. They stared at the innards of the piano, the hammers working on the wires and their own reflections in the black lacquer of the propped-up lid.

To look at anything but each other.

The first thing they noticed was Kristóf’s knee touching Klára’s, though he had neither moved nor wanted this to happen. He said, pardon me, and he was truly mortified by his rudeness. If only this was happening between them for the first time, but it was not the first time. The vacuum created between their knees when he quickly withdrew his sucked in their bodily sensations and consumed their physical reality—flesh, clothes, and all.

Their pitiful isolation ended. Or they were only following on each other’s bodily surfaces what had already occurred in their souls but what in good conscience they could not yet accept; but they could not have known that.

It seems probable that the soul is first, followed by physical sensation, and only then comes the decision.

After some time—how long they could not say, though this was not the first time that time had passed like this for them—Klára’s knee touched Kristóf’s knee, for which she hastily apologized. It was more as if her upbringing was speaking for her. Actually they could have laughed about this, but they didn’t. Sunk into a serious mutual muteness, they continued the assessing and weighing processes they had begun, on and in each other, occurring way beyond the realm of common sense. As if they were weighing the proportions of something that could not be seen with the naked eye or deflected with bare hands. It was not possible to get to the bottom of it, it was full of little surprises; pupils dilating, they were amazed.

They were also thinking about something far from what they observed in each other’s face, figure, or motionless limbs.

For a good long time observation and thinking proceeded on parallel tracks.

Perhaps twenty minutes went by before their arms, resting on the sharp rim of the piano, began to move and their fingers found their way back to where they could hook into one another. Which did not come close to making them happy. They had bestowed on each other their leaden fatigue and sadness, had given up their sense of independence, the kind of independence that until then Klára had not relinquished to anyone, not even to Simon.

Kristóf had given up his once before, but only for ten minutes, with Ilona. Those ten minutes stuck out in his life like a bone from a bad wound. The child had awakened on the bed in the maid’s room that summer morning, and they had triumphantly completed their act, the child’s countenance open and lively, since at the moment they had no choice, there could be no way back.

As if each of their fingers, separate from the other fingers, had several issues to deal with. So many restrained emotions and so many hitherto suppressed thoughts had found their way into what they now were feeling that they almost shouted with excitement and clapped each other’s palm. At this thoughtless juncture they noticed that the dancing couples had returned to their tables. And the two of them were no longer exposed at the edge of the blinding white light, because the musicians were taking a break and the spot had been turned off. And only now did the two fools notice that in the benevolent darkness, which they accepted as an unexpected gift, they had for some time come close together and were holding each other’s knee, their recently rejected knees; they noticed all this only in retrospect, as it were. Now they acknowledged that unaccountable things could occur in a split second, in the blink of an eye. Although they would have liked to inch their way up, higher on the thigh, toward the groin, these areas having a stronger attraction, and especially to feel knees clasping thighs mutually, but they weren’t appropriately determined about this. As reasonable, adult, and responsible persons equipped with prepared movements, they faced each other as if short-circuited somewhere between rough action and inner compulsion. Unaccountable inhibitions stood in their way. Not because strangers might see and curb their actions, but because their mutually gained new freedom and their lost independence were at stake.

And it could not evolve in small increments, secretly, in unguarded moments. Because they did not know what was supposed to happen since what was happening now was very different from many of their rational experiences.

And if the waitress had not very politely taken away their empty glasses, opaque with lemon and sugar, laughing rather too intimately and maternally, they would have continued for at least another forty minutes, sitting stiffly in front of other people, frozen at each other’s melting point, constrained and expectant.

That is when they realized that they each had another hand, and had had it all along, holding a long-empty glass.

This was not vacant time but time full of event, each moment filled to the brim.

Finally they grasped each other’s free hand. Only then did they notice how attentive the waitress had been, not only addressing Klára in the familiar form but also calling her by her rarely used nickname.

They could stay no longer; suddenly they had to leave as quickly as possible; out on the street they ran straight into the winds coming from two different directions, then found each other again, this time not only in great haste but also clinging to each other along the entire length of their bodies, shyly and sweetly.

And then, with their coats open, they ran again in different directions into the big, darkly blinding void.

By the time they drove into the deserted downtown area, their excited breathing had subsided.

They got out in front of a small mansion on Újvilág Street and stood under trees swaying in the wind, but even there they said nothing to each other. At moments their mutual silence seemed hostile and at other moments just the opposite, soaring and moving with the power of their mutual discoveries. In any case they seemed to be coddling each other in temporal terms, both of them wanting to prolong their time together.

Klára lifted out the wine and vodka bottles from behind the backseat, four in all, and handed them to Kristóf, but then she took back two of them for herself. By sharing the work in this way they seemed to go on fondling each other. That is how they went up to the second floor, carrying real bottles, immersed in the loveliness of their first mutual undertaking.

She walked ahead of Kristóf as if she knew her way around, but Kristóf watched only her calves and ankles and how she stepped up the worn-out stairs, one by one.

It wouldn’t have occurred to them to talk about anything in the dimly lit staircase.

Already on the first landing they could hear bits of music, thumping, the din and humming of people crammed into the apartment.

By the clock on the nearby Town Hall it was almost eleven. The clock would strike on the hour, and the old mechanism was preparing with loud clatters for the four strikes that would fill the narrow street, but here there was no day or night because the party had been in full swing for two days running and no one could tell how long it would go on.

People did not know where they were going, to whose party, they had only heard about their hosts. But that was the interesting and wonderful part of it—the anarchy. There were no rules anymore, and no rules meant no rules. When there are no units of measurement, there is no time either, and we can’t tell when the reckoning of time stopped. All they knew was that the ancient tailor whose trade sign had adorned the facade of the handsome little mansion since the late nineteenth century, who made splendid evening jackets, tailcoats, smoking jackets, and formal suits, and whose shop was now run, theoretically, by his grandson while he, darkly tanned and wrinkled, was shooting the breeze on the terraces and in the corridors of the Lukács Baths with old people who were in every way younger than he, that this tailor had a few days ago emptied his second-floor apartment and third-floor workshop, which—in return for his long and faithful service—his family had been allowed to retain as leased property, though they could not own them, since the Land Registry records showed that they’d been taken away from him. No one any longer needed the magnificent garments whose specialist he was, not even in the highest circles. He had made tailcoats and jackets for Mátyás Rákosi that required all his professional experience, but János Kádár, with his quite good build and carriage, bought his suits from the Red October Clothing Factory’s tailoring workshop, and other high-ranking functionaries followed the leader’s austere, plain example.
*
The old tailor could not imagine a world in which nobody was interested in shirtfronts, dickeys, cufflinks, silk vests, and the cut of lapels. And regarding the modern lines and fashionable new patterns, his family slowly lost their courage. The new tailors and assistants simply didn’t have a feeling for true tailoring. With the family’s exceptional connections, they managed to obtain emigrant visas to go at least as far as Vienna. Once there, they would see, perhaps there they could still make it, maybe their skills were still needed. Most of their objets d’art had been declared national property and been turned over to the state. They were allowed to take hardly anything with them; fortunately their money, kept in foreign currencies, along with the best of their jewelry, had been smuggled out of the country before the war.