Parallel Stories: A Novel (197 page)

He made the phone call the next morning, but he was so terribly excited that he had to start several times; he could hardly swallow, let alone speak.

Mrs. Stefanek picked up the phone and put on her husband immediately.

He did it exactly as his grandmother usually did, as dispassionately and briefly, whenever they ran short of money.

What would you say about a small Egry, Kristóf asked.

About what, asked the photographer crossly.

What I just said, about an early Egry.

The quick-thinking photographer had to restrain his astonishment.

And what would you say about an 1850 Neudorfer.

The photographer mumbled something to the effect that he would have to see.

He could come over with the paintings.

Gyöngyvér related almost everything to Ilona, who in turn passed it on to Kristóf on the day of the funeral. They would go to the Rhodopes for their honeymoon; they’ll fly to Sofia and from there they’ll be taken by car to a beautiful house in the mountains, where Ágost’s Bulgarian friends had invited him earlier. Ágost is crazy about mountains. Ever since being recalled from Bern, he doesn’t know how he has survived in this bleak Hungarian wilderness. They might even encounter snow.

Gyöngyvér has never been in the high mountains or in an airplane; true, she hasn’t seen the sea either.

But Ilona did not understand why they were doing it, why they had to do it like this.

However risky Kristóf’s undertaking was, his timing turned out to be good. On the day of the funeral no one noticed that two paintings were missing. Afterward Kristóf himself forgot the whole thing. Empathy for his aunt overwhelmed him—not because of the death but because he understood, from the proportions of the dignified ceremony and the sight of the assembled mourners, how dependent his aunt and uncle had been on each other and what burdens the two of them had carried on their shoulders together, no matter how ridiculous he had thought them.

The young couple left the following morning.

Which for long days literally paralyzed Mrs. Lehr; shocked, she seemed physically to become one with her black garments.

That her own son should do this to her.

She swallowed the secret wedding; she didn’t have time not to because she had to maintain her dignity until the funeral.

She even liked the idea that at the funeral her son did not have to hide his mistress.

But to leave for their honeymoon the next day, well, that was too much.

Kristóf could not let her be alone, even if he had to keep running to the hospital. Mrs. Lehr forgot that she had wanted to kick him out of her apartment. Luckily for her, her memory could retain Geerte van Groot, because she had no one else left, literally not a single human being.

She did not even say good-bye to her son and daughter-in-law.

André Rott drove them to Ferihegy Airport.

Kristóf stole money again from Ágost’s drawer, so he could take a cab to Klára.

Gyöngyvér was about to raise her voice in the almost empty waiting room of the airport and complain that until now Athens had not been part of the itinerary, and what was this new plan anyway.

Think of what I told you last night, in detail, before we went to bed. I hope you can still remember.

Ágost spoke so quietly and pitilessly that she immediately fell silent.

If you want me to, I can repeat it for you.

She concluded from various circumstances at the Athens airport that they would not actually be visiting the Greek capital, because they were going to continue to either Tel Aviv or Istanbul. In her brand-new cream-colored two-piece suit, with a pillbox hat of the same bouclé fabric, she was now keeping her peace with the discipline of an appointed diplomat’s wife. It was as if she were hearing Margit Huber’s ringing encouragement, not so timidly, Gyöngyvér, sustain, sustain. Don’t control your breathing, that happens by itself, with your abdominal wall. Cheerfully she asked no questions and, carefully nurturing her smile, did not comment on the surprising developments, regardless of what might happen.

She did everything the way Margit Huber would have done.

Ágost could be very satisfied with her.

She saw great benefits in her newly gained self-discipline.

They sat on a comfortable leather couch in the waiting room at the airport for about ten minutes, no more. They hardly spoke because Ágost had to look through his freshly bought newspapers. He took off a glove to stroke the fine leather of the couch. The airport was bustling; objects, mysterious people, and their even more mysterious actions arrested Gyöngyvér’s attention. Occasionally something was announced in a number of languages of which she barely understood anything, but she could not truly listen because of her excitement.

She did not quite register when Ágost put down the newspapers and stood up.

Excuse me, he said with peremptory sternness, and this made Gyöngyvér look up and pay attention. He took off across the large hall with his briefcase.

He could have left it on the couch, but the stupid man even took his overcoat with him.

For the first time in her life, Gyöngyvér was left all alone in the echoing waiting area of an airport. Had she not always been left alone, she probably would not have reacted so vehemently; primal fear would not have awakened in her with such force. She wanted to call after him that she too needed to pee and would like to go along. But it was clear that she had to stay put and keep smiling, if only because of their luggage. Don’t be anxious, Gyöngyvér, remember, the job is to sustain, sustain, and she sustained. This helped a little. Ágost did everything with such apparent assurance, was so maddeningly at home everywhere, that she had to leave things to him.

At least she could see where to go when she’d have to. She was terrified that someone might speak to her and she would not understand.

She could still see, and she never forgot, that Ágost, in his hazel nut-brown
millepoint
traveling suit, at the far end of this white marble hall divided by pilasters, walked at a very leisurely pace down the marble steps. That is when, and in this way, she saw him for the last time. Later, though, she told the Greek security people interrogating her that, quite inexplicably, he had taken with him not only his briefcase but also his sand-colored Burberry coat.

The basement washroom she found at the bottom of those steps had no other exit, at least she could not find one when an hour later, having lost her patience and already in tears, she managed to entrust the luggage to somebody.

It wasn’t even his briefcase.

What briefcase.

A very nice, brown leather case, she thought it was brand new, she thought it was calfskin, which, along with their other luggage Ágost had taken out of the trunk of his friend’s car at Ferihegy Airport.

What friend.

Now she was confused, uncertain whether to reveal the friend’s name.

Had she seen the briefcase before.

Was she familiar with the contents of the briefcase.

She knew she didn’t have to answer these questions, she should not have mentioned the briefcase at all, or anything else for that matter, because they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, as Ágost had explained in detail the previous evening, but by now it was very late.

It was the same car, André Rott’s, in which one summer morning, after having awakened so happily in the maid’s room of the Pozsonyi Road apartment, they had driven to the Tisza.

As they say, they were as happy as larks that long-ago morning.

She saw that the security men were hooked on the briefcase like fish on the bait.

They jotted down André Rott’s name, but she corrected them, saying she had made a mistake earlier, his real name was András Rott.

As a very suspicious-looking interpreter translated it, she had not seen her husband with that briefcase before and its contents were unknown to her.

Gyöngyvér was living proof that the Hungarian government, in accordance with an agreement, wanted the Eichmann papers delivered to the court in Jerusalem.

Her confession was calculated into the game.

The disappearance of the embassy’s chief counselor on the way to his post was duly recorded, and this official record included the missing person’s overcoat and briefcase.

A Fecund Apricot Tree

He was free at last.

And if he had thought about anything specific during the last happy weeks, anything related both to his everyday activities and to his entire life, then it was this condensed sentence, only four quietly jubilant words, which kept repeating: I’m free at last.

He said this to himself several times a day, hundreds of times a week, without becoming bored with the feeling that could be expressed in these words or with the ultimately empty words themselves.

Silence reigned over the landscape, stillness and peace pervaded the lovely sunshine-filled early summer.

With those four words, which he had heard so many times from released prisoners, he had to reassure himself about the correctness of his feeling, which he had never voiced to himself nor said out loud. In a peaceful state, noisy with the rush of blood, work-induced heavy breathing, and the buzzing of bees, he returned without realizing it to the time of that feeling, which he thought had been lost forever.

Memory first gave him signals when he moved; the movements led him back to knowing how to hold his tools, spade, hoe, and scythe. Then his muscles reminded him how to manage his movements. He returned here, to the past with its out-of-the-way groves, abandoned fields, and empty pastures, vineyards overrun by weeds, and decaying orchards where the normal silence of nature reigned; peace. He wished to reconquer this abandoned landscape with his labor, except that what he had forgotten most during the lapsed time in his life was how to manage his energies sensibly.

A while later, when the remembered movements led his muscles back to the forgotten times, for brief moments his childhood summers flickered up and glowed. An unknown bird would screech. He would look out from behind a grapevine as if peering out from behind the shaded leaves of the erstwhile bower into the wild blue, and he seemed to hear the voice of his long-dead mother calling him. He did not know to what place she was calling him. The blue of the enamel bucket, its familiar clinking, the water, some of which always splashed on his dusty feet—that’s what he remembered, such cloudless summers, the blue enamel bucket.

And the sweetly hovering dust, the sound of cowbells coming closer, together with the approaching twilight, his feet stamping in the dirt.

Now too, time went by, day after day, week after week, without the tiniest cloud in the sky, and it seemed as if all those long-ago summers had also been cruelly and eternally blue. Had he not felt free, had not the river, misty in the cool nights, produced a little dew on the blades of grass each dawn, he would have found these signs threatening, ominous, terrifying.

And they were indeed ominous.

It made a difference how much each planted thing yielded, because he wanted to be sure that what he raised would last through the winter. The threat of a protracted drought hovered over the incandescent landscape. He was free at last. But he could not but remember the long, oppressive, and dizzying spells of privation from his childhood.

When it made a big difference how many of them sat down at the table.

For all he knew, doomsday might be near.

He did not expect rain either.

He rarely saw anyone, did not long for anyone’s company.

Did not think about whether he was cheerful or sad; he was now in the process of forgetting thoughts that were indispensable for the awareness of happiness, just as earlier he had forgotten his youth and childhood. Still, he did sense something of his happiness; after all, he kept telling himself he was free at last. As a person who has reached his destination; his calling was answered by his being free. At last, he kept telling himself, he was free. As if he had served out a long sentence. Perhaps he kept repeating this because he was coming close to a state in which he would neither long for nor insist on anything.

Being bitten by horseflies was the only thing that upset him during these weeks.

And a horsefly bite is indeed very unpleasant.

A horsefly always appears out of the blinding blueness, it circles unnoticed above the deliciously sweating skin, slyly picks its spot, lands gently, and even if you shoo it away, it finds another unprotected spot where it will bite you, ejecting its saliva into the living tissue. If the attack occurred in the middle of the day, there were at least two, sometimes three horseflies coming at him in formation, one to divert his attention while the other two bit him elsewhere. The bite is painful; a hard lump swells under the skin, turns tight and itchy, burns and tingles in the flesh. And if at times like this he turned and bent over his nicely thriving plants more obstinately and restlessly than usual, as though denying that something might be bothering him so much, it was because in his own way he was trying to find an infallible method for outfoxing the horseflies, so to speak.

But he should have realized that horseflies are infallible.

He remembered the horses and the silky-hair-covered bony knot on the tails of cattle, the swishing and slapping sound of their swatting at pests.

After all, he reasoned, a horsefly was not as lighthearted and cunning a creature as the common housefly, but in comparison rather sluggish and clumsy. In the instant it bites you it’s easy to whack it, and it’s no small satisfaction when its dust-gray body cracks under your palm.

But by then it’s too late; its secretion is already spreading and working under the skin.

Whenever the horseflies’ hour arrived, his entire body became covered with gooseflesh because of the awful unrest; he was annoyed, he fumed and grumbled; why wasn’t man more resourceful than a horsefly, being so much smarter. He should be more inventive in that crucial fraction of a second. Why wait for the moment of the bite, why not act beforehand, why does his skin signal him only afterward, he complained. As if with only a little adjustment of Creation everything would be perfect.