Parallel Stories: A Novel (206 page)

The pastor’s appearance the evening before was part of the world’s order being cleansed.

For the end of his life he was left by himself; he had nobody and no longer could have anybody. Everyone was at a different place in their lives. When he’d dipped his body into the water last evening every illusion and pain had ended. For him life had no individual condition beyond its historical conditions, and he couldn’t think about mystical or metaphysical conditions. All that sort of thing was the business of women or priests. He had served whom he served, retired, and remained as alone as he had been all his life. He and that pastor had nothing in common; anyway, he disliked priests no matter what kind. No one had anything to do with anyone. He was glad he didn’t even want a mistress for himself anymore.

Just as, at the beginning of his life, he’d thought he’d have something to do with every woman, with any woman at any time.

At most he’ll have to get used to ghosts from his previous life still coming back to tease him.

He continued to trust his steadfast strength. All his life he looked down on men who from birth did not have real physical strength. He didn’t know what to do with men like that.

Images replaced memories; apparitions warning of danger stepped out of the images. These belonged among the inexplicable things a man didn’t bother with. His dead mother held one end of a chain made of these signals; he sat at the other end, content with his mental peace, his big limbs relaxed. His conversation with the pastor had warned him that at the worst someone might appear around his house at any time to take revenge on him. The prowling tramp could be none other than his own son. Just as his mother had sent the young female with his lunch, the woman who would have gladly cooked and washed for him, but whom he hadn’t wanted.

His thoughts about these secret connections were suddenly validated in the air by the unexpected tolling of the church bell.

The fiendishly unexpected sound shook his body, and his muscles jerked, just like the previous evening when he’d noticed the pastor’s motionless shadow under the apricot tree.

It must be close to two o’clock by now.

He was ashamed of a reaction like that; he was no fragile little woman.

The small bell was ringing in the village. The tolling let everyone know that someone had departed from the world of the living.

Even as a child he hadn’t understood why churchmen did not ring the bell the moment they first learned of a death or when they saw it with their own eyes because they’d been at the deathbed.

But they always waited with the bell until the full hour.

Hearing the knell, he stood up; he laughed in joy.

Though he couldn’t have said what gave him joy or why he laughed.

He was no longer free, but he had nothing to do with anyone, not with the dead either. The life and death of unknown people meant nothing. For the sake of his fellow workers he’d always had to pretend a little that life and death meant something to him. He did not go out of his house; with his restless soul he assessed the landscape. He was agitated because he no longer had to do anything for anyone’s sake. Nothing stirred anywhere, but he could not let himself be taken in by illusions that others had created. After the last death knell, he heard no unusual sounds. With his sharp gaze, he looked up and down the footpaths and between the more distant flower beds and vegetable patches. He saw trodden clumps, pressed-down blades of grass, traces of careful footprints. They could have been old, or new, or even the stranger’s. He had two rakes; the one with the finer tines would serve his purpose better. I’ll have my lunch in the evening, he said to himself as if no longer bound by the body’s or time’s simpler needs. From the four stakes marking his boundaries, he would progress toward the house with the rake. If I don’t finish it today, I will tomorrow. He was taking no chances, not because he considered either the size or impossibility of the job, but because he was thinking of the footprints he would obliterate. Occasionally the rake was caught in a clump of grass or cut too deep with its tines. He carefully smoothed over the indentations that might help with the deception. He wanted to see his situation as clearly as possible, and he had no other method for it but this one.

He spent some time under the tree; ignoring the heat and horseflies, he carefully worked around the fallen apricots, which flies and ants had meanwhile chewed and nibbled at.

Still, in the bubble of thick silence, he was not completely satisfied. Something he could not name was bothering him. Until he realized that he had to mark the place where each apricot fell.

He drew circles around them.

By the time he finished raking the entire area, much sooner than he had hoped, it was a red twilight again. He reached back from the threshold to sweep away his last footprint. Not an inch of his land remained without the fine traces of the rake. Thick silence sat over the landscape. He wolfed down some bread, scallions, and dry salami, but he found no drinking water in any of the cans.

He decided not to go to the village for water. But listening to the booming in his ear of dangerously thickening blood, he was not alone in his thirsty vigil that night.

From the willows, he heard the tawny owl, whose sound is like someone dripping water on the surface of motionless water.

Occasionally a ripe apricot fell to the ground.

He could not keep an eye on everything from the door of his house or from the window of his small room. Because of the grapevines and the larger plum and morello trees, he could not see the lower-lying areas. Darkness made his ears the keepers of his attention.

A little later the moon’s pale-yellow waning crescent rose, but it only increased the chaotic picture before his eyes. He could not see into the depths of the long shadows. By midnight the air cooled off and mist covered most things, though the starry sky remained clear and the moon glowed blue in it. He took a firefly for an approaching lamp.

Nothing else happened during that beautiful night.

He had had enough experience in keeping awake.

Some prisoners screamed in their sleep; a good guard could not relax his vigilance, because this was when their charges would go for the pitcher, which meant to be fucked in the ass, or possibly get killed.

On this thirsty night, he remembered for the first time the first night of his marriage.

But he did not keep his mind on it and failed to notice the direction in which his thoughts were straying. As if he had found the source of his life’s bitterness. He looked at what the two of them were doing to each other, but before he could become fully absorbed in his terrible shame, he had to think of his desirable sister-in-law, of course. When for the first time they were finally alone in the kitchen of the super’s apartment on the mezzanine floor on Teréz Boulevard. Because of the heavy downpour he did not have to worry about anyone.

At the very same time, Dávid was lying on his stomach under a light blanket, knees pulled up, and had just opened his eyes in his dark room. Through cracks in the closed shutters, cold light entered in loose stripes. He saw a high, plowed autumn field in the wrinkled rug. He was listening to the rhythmic airy music of crickets and to the tipcarts’ hollow creaking in the distant quarry.

The cavernous easy chair stood in the middle of the freshly plowed meadow.

Protruding from beneath the shadows of his clothes strewn on the chair, the arching armrest was like a raised fist of a hand bent at the wrist. He knew he was seeing the armrest, yet he seemed to feel the eyes of the invisible human figure sitting in the chair.

A shudder glided across the surface of his skin but he could not move.

A man’s resting arm was attached to the apparition’s fist, and a strong shoulder to the arm. Dávid raised his pelvis a little to ease the pressure on his bladder. He should go to the toilet. But in this condition he could not entrust the sight of his body to the eyes of the ghostly figure.

The first thing that occurred to Balter was that the woman was undressing by the chair, which had been kicked aside. While, in fact, he was trying to figure out which of his moves he should change on this most painful wedding night to keep from ruining his marriage forever.

He began to ruminate on this, for the first time in his life, yet what he was seeing was his sister-in-law taking off her bloomers and later letting her skirt down. Which Balter thought was heartrending, and in his brain the blood simply stopped moving; he nearly lost his self-control. This wily woman was curving her back so as to offer the least surface of her skin to the yellowish light. Only then did she lift over her head the pink satin slip glittering wildly in the light. Her big firm ass slipped out from under it, followed by her undulating spine.

As though the big slut was struggling with her meager feminine modesty.

He also remembered the bones sticking out of the half-eaten aspic on the plates.

Gyula, stop gobbling up Imre’s aspic.

She was yakking too as she took off her clothes, as if she had been his mistress for twenty years.

But I will, dearest Aranka, I won’t leave a single mouthful for Imre, you can be sure.

She didn’t wear a garter belt but elastic stockings, the kind old women wore.

All I’m saying is leave him a plateful, that’s all.

Not only will I leave nothing for him, I’ll chew, look, everything off the tiniest little bones too.

The woman stuck two fingers under the elastic while with showy bashfulness she pressed her thighs together.

You’re doing that so I can’t see your pussy, eh, Balter yelled at her from the table, his mouth full. But he continued to chew and to tear off more bread.

The woman did not reply but with her hands and arms kept stroking her long curly pubic hair to keep him from seeing her pussy, which he wanted to see so badly his brain nearly exploded with his boiling blood.

Then for the sake of your mother’s ass, at least eat it properly, with the marinated onion. You shouldn’t leave him any of that either.

Balter was panting as he inhaled her powerful smell pervading the kitchen.

I’ll take a look at yours, don’t you worry, I will, for the sake of your mother’s good goddamn lord, he yelled at her, and his body kept swelling from the urge to take his revenge. I’ll surely fuck this one, he thought.

Meanwhile, though, he did not leave the aspic tray.

They both had been drunk for quite a while and he wanted to sober up a bit so he could fuck her with a cool head.

Then he asked her was she ashamed, seeing how she kept hiding her thighs.

Or maybe he asked her that before.

He remembered that in response to his question the woman shook her freshly curled dyed blond mane as a horse would when breaking into a full gallop. She looked back at him sharply, her teeth flashing as she laughed, and then slapped her foot on the chair, which made the ample flesh of her thigh tremble. Leaning on the chair with all the weight of her compact body, as though not caring about the man at all, she rolled the elastic stocking down to her ankle. The movement meant, who the hell would feel ashamed in front of you. The moment she reached her ankle, her breasts with their swollen nipples swung forward from under her arms and the enormous apple of her bottom opened.

The silence became thick indeed and remained so for the rest of the night.

At least there were some cells from which a heavier silence emanated, where they were preparing to do something or were already doing it, though not every activity was to be noticed. No prison guard strictly observed all the house regulations in every case. After all, one has one’s own interests; a prison guard is also a human being, isn’t he. Let them do it, it won’t make him either poorer or richer. At other times he didn’t let them do it, or maybe he knew in advance whom they were going to kill and he let them, or whom they would screw in the ass, and he didn’t interfere.

At most, he would look surprised in the morning when his relief found a dead body.

He always sensed things correctly, even though he didn’t always know exactly what.

As to the nature of a silence, Balter could not be fooled.

As it was, the tramp had been sitting in Balter’s tree since four in the afternoon, not too high up, and he too was thirsty but no longer could get away unnoticed. His animal-like attention made the silence tense, which Balter recognized with the concentration of an experienced but helpless man. He had already been sitting there when Balter carefully marked his fallen apricots under the tree.

But Dávid decided to act: he rolled onto his side and, preparatory to getting up, stuck his foot out cautiously from under the light summer blanket. After all, the armchair filled with human shadows did not seem hostile. He wanted to anneal himself to his false feeling or expose the feeling as false.

He had to put his courage to the test in the middle of the night. He will not grow up to be a real man unless he passes the test.

He let the chair alone for now; let it hover on top of the furrows in the cold light.

But Balter’s hearing could not reconcile itself with the dense silence, with its personal characteristics, as it were, because he was counting on flitting and crackling sounds, on footfalls and familiar rhythms, on his son’s huge build, large beefy nose, and grinning face sporting a Hungarian mustache.

He was familiar with the logic and mental state of crime but not that of insanity.

That night, Dávid was visited by his dead father.

There was no image to match Balter’s feelings. And the same thing happened to Dávid that night. His experiences and expectations did not match the reality of the apparition. With his breathing, he whimpered audibly into the impossibility of his feelings. At which point he could not separate his desire from his dread, and this was the happiness necessary for confirmation. He could still hear his own breathing. The shadows in the armchair did not move. He was able to straighten up in front of it, a move that instantly emptied the chair, however.

It was not empty because no one had been in it before.