Parallel Stories: A Novel (19 page)

The three men’s enviable and despised light-mindedness, their foreignness and outsider position, was their trademark. They were lounge lizards. This sobriquet gave them status, while their strength and rigor provided protection. Ágost’s own mother did not know or understand him well enough to explain his nerve-racking indifference to her. She disparaged him and constantly disapproved of him; weekly she tried to cast him out of her heart, hoping to make it less painful to acknowledge what had become of her son. Even though she really didn’t know what he had become. A ne’er-do-well, a nobody, a parasite. At the same time, she secretly consoled her anxious maternal heart that, on the principle of birds of a feather, at least those other similarly overgrown good-for-nothings took her son seriously. When they showed up in her apartment with their awful women, it was as if a benevolent wind were sweeping through the large rooms; when they disappeared again, Mrs. Lehr, née Erna Demén, against her better judgment, saw all her well-tended furniture as dead, her life as a desert, her miserable ambitions as meaningless.

What am I talking about, why am I grumbling so much against him, I haven’t been able to succeed in anything either, she kept telling herself. At best, I keep up the illusion of a meaningful life, but not its meaning, and I know the price I’m paying.

Why should my son live a life like this.

Except for the men themselves, nobody knew the richer, more refined, or more tragic and noble sides of their conspicuous traits.

At the next moment, when the irritated cabin attendant looked back from the far end of the corridor, the graying man was grabbing and hugging his apathetic friend huddling on the bench, and the other man was crouching in front of him, his bathrobe barely held closed in the front. They made no movements that didn’t upset the cabin boy. He really must scatter them somehow. Now with both hands André grabbed Ágost’s spread knees as if they were two strange objects and in desperate anger slammed them together, and when the two kneecaps clapped together hard, probably causing pain, he kept shouting in a choked, threatening voice.

Now what’s wrong? Would you mind telling me at last, what’s happening again? Answer me, damn it. What’s happened to you again?

And he held Ágost’s knees in with his hands, as if he had really decided to smash them, pulverize them, if he didn’t get an answer.

What’s happening, nothing. What might have happened, nothing, answered Ágost slowly, listlessly. I simply don’t understand what you’re going on about. I don’t understand your premise, your pitting modernization against progress.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not the one who pits one against the other. I’m not the one you have to beat. You must stick it out, and you will, I swear to you. Otherwise I’ll drown you in this pool with my own hands. You’ve endured six years, now you’ll put up with another few months.

If only you didn’t jumble up the principles. You mix up what you read in
Pravda
with what you read in
The Guardian.

Don’t you understand that along with you, somehow I have to endure my own fate too.

What do we have here, when has there ever been any modernization here. The last time was just before or at the turn of the century, when my loony great-grandfather built this stinking bath. Look around you.
Ces sales connards.
What do you want from them, these serfs, these stinking ruffians from the
puszta
.

I’ll explain it later, Ágó, but you know perfectly well we’re not talking about political philosophy. Please spare me and be straight with me, no deceptions.

But I’m only interested in this,
la guerre ou la paix
. That there will be war again.
La bourse ou la vie.
Nothing else interests me.

Naturally, they couldn’t reply to this.

None of them knew what to do with such a statement, at once defense and provocation. The negative outburst accomplished one thing, however; it paralyzed the other two men. Let them be paralyzed, completely, like bugs in a beam of light. While he locked himself in, he silently hoped, nay, demanded them to help him, to save him from himself.

For the other two men, however, the question was always the same: but how. How can somebody be rescued from himself.

Come on, responded André angrily, you don’t even know what you’re talking about, how the fuck would you know what war is. You were sitting on your ass in comfortable Switzerland while your mother kept sending money to your uncle’s account.

They knew well how the final lap would be run; both of them were aware of its fast approach.

But they were late; at this stage it was a mistake to continue talking, and they always wound up being late. It was as if on his face they were seeing the approaching, threatening waves of a natural catastrophe. Occasionally they even talked about it among themselves, it was so strange, extraordinary, to see such a thing on someone’s face; alarming. It wasn’t more than a bright summer sky suddenly grown dark because of a large cloud. Who could avert it, who could prevent what happens inside another person. He became overcast; something set upon his body, his features, his mind, and overwhelmed him. Perhaps his skin darkened too; at least that’s how they saw it. And as if someone who is still talking, now for much longer and somewhat more loudly than usual, no longer sees out of himself.

And that ended too, he wouldn’t answer any questions either, as if he hadn’t heard them.

In the eyes of others, they were bound together not only because they each spoke with some sort of accent, but also because of their impressive appearances. André Rott was the oldest; his skin dark even in winter, if he stayed in the sun he looked as if a gray veil had been drawn over him, on his brownness. This appearance is sometimes called Gypsy-like, but he could have passed for a Yemenite warrior or a Bedouin tribal chief. Everything in his body was gothically elongated, his skull and his bones, also his muscles. He was the type on whom hair grows in abundance, but even in this, nature arranged things favorably: in proportionate, harmonious, energetic, but not exaggerated waves. As if from the mouth of a well-sculpted baroque fountain, hair from the packed bush of his loins sprouted up in a straight stream on his hard and flat abdominal wall until it bumped into the rim of the breastbone. There it split into two branches and with elegant waves surrounded the hard breast muscles that peaked in darkly purple nipples; evading the thin and nakedly protruding clavicles, the current of the two branches clashed tempestuously and, like a foamy froth or gaudy frill, shot up to his close-shaven neck. If he was not careful while shaving and did not go low enough with the razor, a few hairs would impudently remain and peer over his closed shirt collar, curling outward. He was an impeccable dresser—if he had to, he shaved twice a day, and carefully at that—so a small bodily disobedience like the peeking hairs, relating to his body’s more concealed territory, would indeed attract the attention of strangers.

Ágost Lippay, André’s junior by about five years, also had dark skin but that was the sum total of similarities between them. There was nothing dramatic in Ágost’s colors or in the shape of his body; at most he could boast excellent proportions. His complexion, inherited from his mother and through her from his Jewish great-grandfather, whom he often mentioned, was very different. He was hairless, except for a few short individual hairs curling on his chest, stretching across his muscles like a wrapper made of some delicate material; on his chest muscles, buttocks, powerful thighs, and classically molded calves his skin practically shone. And Kovách, with his illuminating blue eyes, the youngest of the three, differed from the other two not only with his imposingly loose-limbed build but mainly with his amazing colors. He was at least two heads taller than the other two, wider in the shoulders and ampler in every way. A kind of ideal big-boned, hulking, Germanic forest dweller, whose limbs nature had created with no special refinement or suppleness, but whom, since he had to endure much, the gods had given muscles capable of great expenditure of energy. According to his own story, his hair began turning gray the week he entered high school, and the following summer his hair turned as white as if the sun had sucked out his blondness. The physician he went to see only shrugged his shoulders and didn’t know what to say to the eighteen-year-old boy with a full head of snow-white hair. His eyebrows remained blond, interspersed with some long black hairs. Ever since he’d sported a crew cut.

There must have been something unusual in his pigmentation, an irregular trait whose initial signs puzzled the experts who examined and evaluated students at the boarding school in the hunting lodge in Wiesenbad, assessing whether they met the strict criteria of the pure Nordic type, which scientists wanted to refresh genetically. The examiners came every other week from Berlin, from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, where his own mother worked as a eugenics researcher.

Most of those who proved unsuitable, because of the measurements’ results or because of behavioral problems, were not removed from the boarding school, however. The objective was to create in the same location a statistically measurable sample that could be followed later of individuals among whose ancestors there had been non-Germanic Aryans. Hans was examined for an especially long period. Already in his early childhood, dark hairs had mingled with blond ones in his eyebrows. Since one examination always followed another, it was impossible to know who belonged to which scientific category. At first he thought they were examining him so thoroughly because his mother was their colleague, but slowly he became suspicious, and not without reason, and he began to suspect himself.

It seemed to him that the dark hairs were becoming predominant, though on the basis of measurements and other characteristics he would be considered a pure Nordic type, like his mother, who sought, relentlessly and methodically, the scientific evidence to support her conviction. They had set up this special boarding school on their estate in Erzgebirge, where the Wolkenstein family had turned over their hunting lodge for a protracted period of time. When Hans first realized that something irregular had been detected about him in the examinations, something that might expose him once and for all, secretly he began to pull out the black hairs, but he could not cope with them; later there were so many he had to give up because of the pain. Even after the hair on his head had completely grayed, his pubic hair remained blond, which to this day he considered a special bit of good fortune, but on his legs, chest, and abdomen, later on his back, more and more dark hair appeared.

But beyond all the sensual peculiarities of their exteriors, it was their life stories that bound the three men together. Their fate had brought them together by accident and kept them firmly at one another’s sides. Obediently they bowed their heads to one another. Either because the exchange of intimate signals was more important than words or because it seemed expedient to keep things to themselves, they never spoke of any of the experiences they had lived through before they met. If one has a few things about which one cannot talk, involuntarily one does not talk about a hundred other things either.

They overcame the strict prohibitions, at most with cautious allusions.

All three of them worked for the state news agency, up on Nap Mountain, and the only thing that distinguished them from the other drudge translators was that they were given separate rooms on the top floor of the extremely ugly quasi-military building, far from the storms of local intrigues and the continual mayhem that hurried news agency work generates. Their three, almost completely empty, bright rooms opened into one another, officially as a separate unit, with André as their chief. They translated strictly confidential state documents from Hungarian into foreign languages—André to English, Ágost to French, Kovách to German and Russian. Eventually, these documents would reach an international public, but just when and how, or by what means, was decided not by the news agency director but in every case, and not always logically, by the highest political circles.

It wasn’t their linguistic abilities but their trustworthiness that was priceless.

They were now beginning to discuss one such document, namely the latest report of the Theoretical College, which all three of them had translated in the previous few days, though there were signs that in the highest circle mud wrestling was still going on about the text.

The infamous and powerful body, the highest circle, had only three members, each a well-known university professor, Ágost’s father among them, but he, because of his recent mental decline, could not have had much to do with this. Still, André brought up the subject in hopes that Ágost might know something from his family sources. Hansi had been well along in the Russian translation when they telephoned from the prime minister’s secretariat to say that for the time being they would not need the translations. This call made André suspect that something was amiss; he did not understand why the secretariat had put a stop to the project. He knew the prime minister had direct contact with the Russian secret service, and he also knew that decisions were made based on the prevailing situation or, rather, on how the prime minister was leaning in any given situation. And he wanted to know which direction it was this time. Officially, the prime minister had no contact with the highest circle; yet with one of its most powerful members, Ágost’s father, he did have a close personal relationship. During the Spanish Civil War he had worked as a political officer in the International Brigades, yet he belonged to the influential circle of clandestine nationalists. André believed the text would never be published officially in Hungarian but would be floated for a while in foreign versions—not in Russian, though, because from the Russian viewpoint something was wrong with it. But why should they let the translators know this unless they had a definite purpose in mind. It would also be nice to know what exactly the Russians found wrong with the text. They could just dump the finished translation in the wastebasket without calling attention to it. If the call from the prime minister’s secretary was a hint that the Russians had protested even before the official translation was completed, what did he really want to convey to the translators. It surely was not a secret to Hansi that they had other sources giving them advance notice of various officially planned actions. So then why the phone call. The prime minister couldn’t have just wanted them to know what everyone else knew, something on which everyone, including himself, was working diligently.