Parallel Stories: A Novel (200 page)

At any rate, judging by the light, he figured it had to be at least an hour past noon.

Nothing was happening in the motionless heat.

He was waiting for a nonexistent ringing of bells. Settled in his ears were old sound-memories of the bell in Jászberény.

And then the thought positively pounced on him: he must have gone mad a long time ago. He waited patiently for the thought or sensation to pass, but waiting did not change the insane condition. Light made time disappear in itself, and that was the reason nothing could happen around him that would return his stolen property.

Or perhaps an atomic bomb had been dropped somewhere after all, as they had promised it would be, and he was the only one left alive for miles around, all alone. In his fear he should get up. Everyone had perished; no living thing was left except him.

In the meantime his shirt had dried on the branch, from which he had to conclude that some amount of real time must have passed. He looked up into the foliage as if expecting a message there. Then his wife must have perished in some bad way, and it felt good to acknowledge that. His kid brother must have gone with her; at least no one could blame him for their miserable lives.

He saw nothing unusual in the foliage. But the sky above was incandescent.

This apricot tree stood at the center not only of his garden but also of his heart and thoughts.

Ten years earlier, when after a wedding feast that had stretched into dawn he took leave of his friends and went roaming aimlessly in the unfamiliar fields, he picked out not a site for the coming years but this gigantic apricot tree. Or one should say that between him and the apricot tree it was the tree that decided their common fate. Innocently, he urinated on the tree trunk, looking up involuntarily at its branches heavy with fruit. Stuffed with rich food, drunk on cheap drink, his voice surfaced to say that he should live here. And the unclaimed apricot tree dryly confirmed, yes, you’ll live here with me, you have no other place.

The tree stood at the center of a flat bare landscape; more precisely, it gave meaning to the wide-open nothingness staring at the sky. He had never experienced anything like this in his life. No apricot tree grows this big. He didn’t have to do work on it, because he never found even a single little dry branch or worm-eaten holes in the trunk or worms in its fruit. It raised its enormous, healthily dense, and proportionately arranged crown above the flat world. Reddish veins ran along the stalks of its shiny waxen leaves. It gripped the loose soil with roots as thick as a man’s arm, because in its youth it very prudently had allowed the dominant wind in the area to tilt it a bit. It seemed to have acquired its circumstances with its shape. It was the sole survivor of a former fruit orchard. Every two years it had an abundant crop of juicy, richly colored, aromatic, tasty fruit.

Now he was standing under his apricot tree, holding in his hand the elusive proof of measured time: his dry shirt.

A little later he saw two bicycling figures approach.

Because in the meantime the pastor had come home from his mission in the cathedral town across the river, and been told by the puzzled yet malicious ferrymen that there had been no noonday bell. They were godless, all of them, and if they could do nothing else they swore terribly in front of their pastor. And he waited in vain for his grandson, first by the window in his cool office and much later at the gate; the boy didn’t come home on the street but turned up much later from the direction of the gardens. When he heard behind his back the dull thud of feet on the long brick-paved veranda, at least he no longer had to struggle with a fear that perhaps the boy had drowned in the river.

He was puffing like a child.

With the momentum of his inexplicable anger, the pastor swiveled around and Dávid received a powerful slap on the face.

Barefoot, wearing only his small red bathing trunks, the very shy, daydreaming teenager stood before him, shirt in hand. He was at the age when boys begin to grow as if they were being stretched and their voices deepen but they are completely unaware of the maturing processes in their bodies. From running, his thin naked body was thickly covered with dust in which his perspiration drew stripes.

He’d run more than two kilometers in the scorching sun. In his head, throbbing with the pulsing blood, the heat, the thumping of his feet, and fear, he had thoroughly prepared to account for his time, but this he hadn’t expected. He’d known that his negligence would not go unpunished, and he also knew that his grandfather would be back from the city at half past one. But the slap caught him unprepared. He had truly hoped that his grandfather would not be told of his negligence. He had to make his carefully prepared explanation credible, and therefore he could not pay much attention to the sudden physical or mental pain.

The effort to ignore it distorted his features, but his eyes, filled with real tears, remained attentive. And, waving his blue-striped shirt, he said, winded and weeping, that a man had wanted to take this away from him.

What man wanted to take it from you, what did he want to take from you, shouted the pastor, famed equally for his great physical strength and for his gentleness.

His voice reverberated down the street.

How could he miss the boy’s cunning look.

It seemed he not only had to avenge the already committed negligence but might also be catching his grandson on the verge of telling a terrible lie, committing a deadly sin.

Dávid had never heard such sounds escaping from his grandfather. In his alarm he wanted to add something to his explanation, but anger at his grandfather blocked his words.

How dare he hit him.

If Melinda had been here, he wouldn’t have dared. But at the moment his much older sister was visiting in an old villa in Leányfalu, working on her dissertation out on the villa’s lovely wood-framed veranda. Without Melinda he had no support. His mumbled words turned into hiccups, but he managed to squeeze out that he had no idea who the strange man was except that he was completely naked.

The pastor did not intend to restrain his raging anger. He regretted neither his loud outburst nor the slap. Let everyone on the street see it and hear it. He owed this much to his prestige in the village.

The negligence is unforgivable; it cannot remain unpunished.

But the words, coming out twisted because of the crying and hiccupping, made him lose confidence.

What naked man, the pastor groaned.

A hot rush of blood in his eyes darkened the yard, shaded by chestnut and linden trees.

Where is he, he groaned.

If someone had told him, trembling and devastated, that his grandson had drowned in the river, then his faith in the boy’s innocence would have poured balm on his immense pain, and he would have accepted God’s will. But the way things were, he had to take himself into the worst thicket of horrors. Had to be careful what to ask and how loudly to ask it. The sun beat down mercilessly on the back of his thick neck and a single careless step might pull his heavy body into the bog.

The village had to be compensated, but it did not have to know everything.

The prison guard from Vác came to mind first; many people talked about this man because he shopped in the general store and took his water from the common well, but he had not yet met him or seen him walking about naked, not even from far away.

If he had not been blinded by anger, he would have sensed the nature of the problem immediately, because Dávid would never show himself naked in front of anyone, not even in the greatest heat. He yanked the boy to him with both hands. He wanted to know everything. Peremptorily, shaking the boy’s bare shoulders, he asked what the man had done to him.

Dávid sobbed, leaning against his grandfather’s chest.

He tried to make it understood that he was sobbing, trembling, and reproachful because of the mercilessness of that slap. But in fact his helplessness was weeping behind the deceit.

He didn’t do anything, he sobbed.

And where did you leave your pants, asked the pastor, his voice growing thin as his impatience mounted.

He took away my pants, cried the boy. He wanted to take away my shirt.

As if the boy’s smudgy tears were dissolving his light body on the pastor’s chest.

The innocence of this reply gave the pastor some relief, yet fighting his conciliatory urge he thrust his grandson away, but without letting go of him.

Why would he take away your pants, how could anybody take away your pants, he shouted.

The boy stopped bawling, he was hiccupping. From his grandfather’s point of view he indeed had to consider himself an incorrigible recidivist many times over, so it was important to muster everything he could to dispel all possible suspicion. From his incoherent answer his grandfather understood only that he had been to the big pit.

He admits having gone into the water and having swum to the other side. From there he saw the man taking his pants away.

He ran after him, managed to get the shirt out of his hand but failed to retrieve the pants.

Gone were his nice summer pants.

At this, the pastor released his grandson from his strong grip and with large steps took off for the shed.

What the villagers called the big pit was a long-abandoned sand mine. More than a hundred years earlier Gypsies had made adobe here every summer. They soon ran out of the material necessary for adobe. Under the layer of clay was an enormous amount of brimstone-yellow sand glittering with quartz; people came to take it away by the wagonload, even from faraway villages. They gave up sand mining only when they reached, about four meters down, a water-permeable layer of gravel in direct contact with the riverbed. The gravel was peculiarly granulated, like rare pearls. And the shovels turned over rather curious things in it. Shards of pottery burned black, sooty bellies, ears, and beaks of cooking vessels with small legs. Worn-down thin blades of crudely forged iron tools and human bones turned spongy or polished to a marble smoothness: split pelvises, skulls smashed in with battle-axes, and fractured shinbones.

The first heavy snowfall put an end to a shameful treasure hunt.

Older people still recall the spring when, where the pit had been, they found a lovely round little pond with translucently motionless water.

Now not even children went to swim in it because nobody could forget that there was a cemetery under the water. And strangers had no way of knowing that behind the clusters of trees this pond lay concealed. What was under the water was a treacherously destroyed military camp of the early Avar era.
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Ice-cold ghosts populated the area; the pond became the home of ringed snakes, water spiders, and frogs. His grandfather did not believe in ghosts but he forbade Dávid to go into the water there alone. No one who lives on the shore of this mighty river should forget that water is strong and always unpredictable. Silver-leafed and gray-trunked poplars, willows slowly dripping their sap, and thick growth of shrubs surrounded the pond and barely let the light graze its mirrorlike surface. That day, Dávid was at the pond when he should have been at the belfry to ring the bell. Here the trees had spread their branches so generously that the surface of the pond could not be seen even from the church tower, so he believed that his peculiar feeling was safely concealed and for the first time in his life he forgot about ringing the bell. He did not forget the place itself and the hearsay connected with it, not to mention the relevant proscriptions. Almost every year he spent his vacation months with his grandfather. Once, when still a small child, amid terrible shuddering, he had swum across the pond all by himself on a dare and a bet.

He won a popgun, which in the end he did not get.

He did not take the fears of the local boys very seriously, but despite all the prohibitions he too was a little afraid of ghosts. This summer he rarely did things together with the boys. He preferred the dark, cool, and spacious rooms of the parsonage, where he read romantic English novels, replete with screeching wind in old fireplaces, abandoned dusty rooms, and haunting ghosts in whose company he roamed by himself, dreaming of his future life, or together with them looked for isolated places by the river whence he could observe the bathers and rowers who sometimes camped on the island for weeks and lived their own mysterious lives before his eyes.

He sentenced himself to sheer observance; he tried to renounce everything that might be considered amusement or was beyond a strictly objective survey of the world. He was curious to learn what the minimal activity was that he needed to exist. His impression was that the smaller the area of contact with his surroundings, the smaller his food intake, and the less love spent on others, the more clearly he would see his own intentions, would not lose his way, and could hope to find more meaning in his actions in the dim world of instincts and in the pitiless chaos churned up by adults.

His grandfather noticed in all this only that the otherwise lively and talkative boy now fell silent for days, the once voracious child hardly touched his food, sat daydreaming with a book in his hands, listened to inspiring parables with a blank expression of incomprehension, evaded questions showing concern about him, or simply lied. The grandfather could not have known that the boy’s monastic vows, made to himself, were dictating and determining this changed behavior.

He was silent not because he had something to hide but because he had vowed not to speak. He picked at his food not because he had no appetite but because he was testing his self-control. He was daydreaming not because he was uninterested in the continuing chapters in his grandfather’s devotional history but because he was timing the duration of his ability to keep his mind on a single topic.

He failed with his most delicate vows.

He decided not to let his thoughts flit about unbridled. He also decided not to go to the pond ever again since he already knew everything there was to know about it; but a compelling force was still at work contrary to his vows, and no matter how carefully he listened for it he could not catch it; undetected, it laid him low. Indeed, he knew everything in advance that was worth knowing of the joy and sorrow of sheer existence, but he considered his knowledge as straying, because he had no idea that everyone had the same experiences.