Parallel Stories: A Novel (199 page)

And he kept seeing over and over how he had thrown the cripple into the freshly forked pig manure.

Better drown in the manure, he can’t work, anyway.

Watch what you’re saying, Teréz, don’t tempt God like that.

You watch it, you shut your stinking mouth or else I’ll sit on it.

You put him out naked in the frost. The Virgin Mary watched over him and saved his miserable life.

Then let your Virgin Mary give him bread.

Once she was merciful to you too.

The ferry receded in the fortieth minute of every hour; in the twentieth minute it approached. With ceaseless buzzing the bees kept busy, with ceaseless jolts and creaks the tipcarts used in the distant stone quarry moved above Dunabogdány. Maybe he’s dead, he thought—he hoped—about his miserable brother, and can speak to me only from afar. At half past ten in the morning, two explosions shook the air, and this was repeated at four in the afternoon. All night long, dump trucks carried stones from the quarry, and when they hurled their load into the bottom of the empty barges, he thought of hell. If he felt some mysterious trembling approach from the bowels of the earth, within half an hour it would turn into the puffing of a tugboat, the loud rumble of its engine; its slow movement occasionally brought with it snatches of radio music in the air. There were also stray noises, a jingling from close by, say, unconnected to any movement; the faint rumbling of a cart, the squeaking of a wheel’s hub, or the noise of shouting, even though no one and nothing seemed to be moving anywhere. Nocturnal singing of some drunk or perhaps that of an approaching or receding ghost, which awakened the village dogs one after the other and they could no longer find rest, howling desperately behind the decaying fences. The steady chirping of crickets. The drawn-out mewling of cats, the persistent music of frogs, the grasshoppers scraping their long legs in the dry grass, the short pops of their takeoffs.

The wider branch of the Danube also brought sounds from the far shore.

So vividly that he seemed to hear, at the appropriate times, the opening of the cells or, in the evening, the reverberation of their closing.

He accompanied them all, from door to door, on the checkered floor of the long circular gallery.

Five months had gone by and he had no reason to regret his decision. He prepared the soil for growing strawberries and raspberries; he hired a well digger. Since he was beginning to learn for the first time in his life what it was like to feel, another furrow grew deep among his feelings. This meant, approximately, that his amorphous dead mother whispered to him, telling him what he should do. After close to thirty years of silence, his mother now spoke as a guardian spirit, from which he concluded that this guardian spirit had always been standing by him because it had no other place. Neither of them had any other place. Even if they had put away his miserable kid brother, they wouldn’t have done anything bad. As if he were saying, laughing hard, in that case I wouldn’t have been fucking around with his wife. In retrospect he regretted not having had that lecherous woman in his life. It seemed that his brother had to stay alive if only for this reason. He had a better time with her than with his own wife. Considering one’s entire life one deserves this much. This was the thought that strengthened him in his final verdict against his wife. Sometimes she tried, made an effort, and sometimes she didn’t, but what could be done if they had no understanding between them.

And that, after all, is painful for a man too.

At the same time another thought made him equally uncertain. Ever since his hearing had sharpened, this other thought also deepened the bluntly aching furrows in the place of silenced memories. As if he had not chosen the right place for himself. As if throughout a lifetime his wife had been doing with his son what his own mother had done with him. That is how his fate caught up with him. He did not regret his decision, he tried not to regret anything; the prices of strawberries and blueberries will be good, but now he heard sounds of the last thirty years coming too close. His fate had him in a double bind. The distance that had seemed, from the other side of the river, looking out from behind the high prison walls, infinitely far and unreachable seemed but a stone’s throw away when looked at under an open sky. From the other shore freedom had seemed different from what it seemed to be here. For ten years he had been preparing for retirement, he’d bought this abandoned fruit orchard in the Tótfalu area seven years ago, it took two years to build his house on his days off, and the more he insisted to himself that he hadn’t erred, that he couldn’t have made an enormous mistake, the stronger his doubts became. He now received what his kid brother and father had received from the mutual protective alliance forged between him and his mother. Still, the unpleasant feelings had a pleasant side. He could not help hearing those insinuating snatches of sound from which he at last had freed himself.

And this was no small gratification.

When at dusk he went to wash up in the river and while he stood in the water up to his ankles, soaping his body, his eyes gazed longer and longer at the towering prison walls on the far shore.

It happened on one of these quiet summer days that another human being appeared in the landscape, congenial even in its isolation.

This man had very vague notions about where he was coming from and no notion whatsoever about where he was going.

Where he had come from must have been a bad place, since moving in itself, being on the move, was good for him. He possessed abstract and refined notions such as those whose lack Balter was beginning to realize in himself but did not know what to do with because he had no experience in abstraction. The further this other man moved from the palpably bad, the more he showered himself, in his heart and mind, with inexplicable good—until everything turned out to be good for him and none of the bad remained. He had crossed over on the other branch of the river, on the Visegrád side, so the ferrymen had not brought him here.

A few people saw him walk slowly across the bridge at Tótfalu.

He did not have to engage anyone in conversation. He couldn’t have, anyway, because he thought exclusively according to the most ethical standards.

If someone had stopped him and told him to turn on his heels and go back where he came from and be quick about it or else he’d be in big trouble, at most the threatening tone might have frightened him. This is how he interpreted for himself what he did not understand in this world, putting things into his own language after some delay. There was nothing wrong with his organs of hearing or speech; as a child, he was just like all the other children. He became the victim of an adolescent shock and since then had neither heard nor spoken, and instead of seeing people’s faces he saw only vague spots. He did not look anyone in the eye. Ever since that incident, the condensed sense of any one moment of his life, good or bad, could almost completely replace the condensed sense of any other moment, good or bad; in one respect, then, he was occupying himself with the same kind of ethical issue that philosophers—always touchy about their concepts—have worried about ever since Aristotle.

Chaos could set in, however, when he happened to linger in the murky waters of the bad or in the very mud of the worst, because to remind him then of the good with nice words was futile. While in the thicket of good he could still almost remember the bad, but if he did not behave himself and was administered additional doses of bad, even with the kindest medical intentions he disappeared completely.

This is how he thought about things.

In his exterior, by the way, there was nothing conspicuous.

His slight build, acquired before the adolescent shock, a hesitant good-natured smile on his lips, large, badly scratched, and infected pimples on his forehead, scabs on top of scabs ready to bleed at any time, and the shirt of his brand-new dark-blue workman’s clothes buttoned to his neck made him seem much younger than his years. Heavy black stubble covered his face; still, he could be taken for a pale apprentice sent to the store for a couple of rolls and half a liter of milk.

He had been on the road for three days.

He’d escaped from an asylum in the Buda area and had been peacefully making his way across the mountains. He first stole something to eat in Pilisszenkereszt and then in Pilisszentlászló. At Leányfalu there was an ice-cream vendor, and he came off the mountain to the highway that ran like a ribbon along the foot of the mountain, but he couldn’t get his hands on any ice cream.

The vendor was hawking his merchandise on the steep, badly paved streets. His wagon bounced on the cobblestones as he worked to keep it steady, and he never left it unguarded, not even for a second.

Now the road was leading him through this miserable little village, stifled in the midday heat, where neither trees nor bushes could grow tall, not around the houses and not in the gardens. There wasn’t any shade anywhere. Only in the churchyards or on the priest’s and parson’s quiet properties could one see some old linden trees. Dogs lying in the shade of whitewashed walls or gates did not bark at him, because his feet made little sound. He wore loosely laced much-too-large ankle boots that flapped a bit, and no socks.

He had filched the boots and the new workman’s clothes the day before in Leányfalu from an open and unattended trailer for workers while the road-building Gypsies were having a beer in the nearby roadside kitchen with Bizsók, their older, Hungarian work manager. In exchange he left behind the clothes he had on, just as he pulled them off his body; he had stolen those the day before from a weekend mountain lodge he had broken into, where later the astonished owners found his old pair of pants, ripped at the seat and around the knees, a pair of bad-smelling white sneakers, and a striped pajama jacket with the oval emblem, reminiscent of a bloodstain, of the health institution from which he had escaped.

Hens were pecking in the open ditch running in front of the houses, and when he stopped at a roadside morello tree to eat some of the overripe fruit, a rooster began to crow in the bare yard.

He probably would not have moved on until he had eaten all the fruit he could reach or until some indignant person ran out from behind the picket fence, under repair, to protest his stealing the sour cherries. But people in the general store across the street noticed him and, somewhat puzzled, acknowledged that in the midday heat a stranger had appeared in their village. And then, before they could make any comment, a medium-size truck whizzed by at breakneck speed, tarps flapping wildly, a cloud of dust in its wake exuding the smell of freshly baked bread.

The bread’s here, Mariska, shouted an older man toward the darkened house behind the picket fence, and the women in the store were saying the same thing.

It did come, after all.

Didn’t I tell you it would. You see.

Every day, the arrival of the bread was regarded as exceptional since on some days no bread came at all or the amount delivered was much less than was needed. The villagers had to be on the lookout. Ever since they had handed over their land and animals to the cooperative farm, they hadn’t baked at home. They received grain from the cooperative according to work units performed, but for miles around not a single mill remained where they might have ground their meager stores of grain into flour; eventually they dismantled the brick ovens in their homes too.

The truck slowed down and then in a wide arc backed up to the store’s open door.

Without a word the stranger followed the scent of the bread.

That day there was no midday ringing of bells.

No wonder then that Balter, who had been cooling himself under his fecund apricot tree while waiting for the midday bell, felt an unjustified restlessness in the silence.

This day remained in the village’s history as the day on which it should have been midday at any moment but midday never arrived.

Ever since horseflies had forced him to retreat, he had no need for a watch, because this hour was the culmination of Balter’s day.

The horseflies signaled that the sun was at its zenith.

He took cover from them in the shade, taking his time, carefully removing his perspiration-soaked shirt and hanging it on a sunny branch. Sat down on the bare sand and let mild shady breezes slowly evaporate the moisture from his skin. It felt good to stretch his limbs, tired from the morning’s work, and give them a little longer to rest. His eyes closed from time to time, he could easily doze off. His eyes emerged again from under his heavy eyelids only when he saw or felt something that ultimately he could not have seen or felt.

On this day, for example, midday did not happen.

Which he would have to understand somehow if he wanted to accept it. When he was working, he met with the more pleasant or more unpleasant half of the same recurring thoughts: he was either happy or anxious, struggling with his doubts or praising his circumstances. But in the hours of idleness, sensations and notions signaled their existence with no pleasant or unpleasant sides. They simply existed, like a mirage among existing things, though one’s hand could grasp neither the crank of a well nor a church bell rope that appeared in a mirage. He felt his mother’s hands resting on his shoulders; heard the thick soup sloshing in the multilayered food container, which in his imagination the slender girl-child brought to him every noon, a girl who probably did not exist in the real world.

The monotonous buzzing of bees became painfully beautiful radio music in his ears; cool foam from the top of a beer bottle spilled on the ground.

And once he was at peace with the sensations and images, there was no point in doing more either for or against them.

That day, way past the time when the first strike of the bell should have sounded, he slowly raised his head, which he had lowered between his spread knees. He began to wait for the sound that, deceiving his senses, remained absent. Perhaps it had come but he’d slept through it. Actually, he should have also heard all the bells from the cathedral town on the other side of the river.