Parallel Stories: A Novel (34 page)

As if they had been running alongside each other for a long time, they panted together.

Did you hurt yourself, my dear, asked Geerte, fearing her clumsiness might have caused Erna pain; her face returned to its former state, her features cleared.

How laughable the whole thing was.

Last time she had been involved in such horseplay was when she was a little girl, and always with boys. Arms around each other, they were lying lazily on the cool floor. And how pretty she is. As though this were happening to strangers whose warmth she could feel.

No, I’m not hurt, she replied, as if breathing words into the other woman’s breath. But you were about to tell me something, Geerte.

I’ll die, she shouted, keeping her voice down, I’ll die if you don’t tell me.

Geerte, in surprise, held her breath.

How could she possibly know I wanted to tell her something.

And then, along with the next sentence, hoarse with pain and shame she spat the words out.

I wanted to say that I’m hungry, I wanted to say I’m starved, Erna.

I’m thirsty, and I absolutely don’t feel like bringing you your stupid pump from the next room.

That’s what I wanted to tell you.

Silently and perhaps involuntarily they both laughed, which had the effect of a sobering wink, indicating how well they understood each other.

Erna freed herself from the embrace and slowly sat up, but neither of them let go of the other’s eyes.

Geerte, not to be alone, not to be left desperately to herself, reached after her.

She has finally understood; and this filled Erna with great serenity.

She felt enormous, powerful; with her blue-veined, swollen breasts, she ruled over and could have fed all humanity, but she no longer had any weight. They made barely perceptible movements. Even if in their own minds they were addressing themselves to each other, from this moment on they spoke each to herself, and about strange things that had no connection to and very little to do with the situation. Erna said to herself, I must check the dates, the years. She had a great urge to grab her coat, go to the library and look up the years, and she felt it so naturally that Geerte sat up, startled, sensing something of Erna’s strangeness.

However, she was wrong in assuming she was being rudely rejected.

Simultaneously they let go of each other’s gaze and hands.

And as they came off the bridge onto muddy Margit Boulevard, the convex basalt cobblestones began to rattle and toss the heavy taxi, whose springs were too stiff to absorb the shocks. I’ll get it for you in a minute, madam doctor, patience, please, said the cabbie, raising his voice against the noise, almost shouting. Just let me get through this damn section here. Anyway, I’d like to ask you something, madam doctor, if I may.

She didn’t understand where the driver had come up with this stupid
madam doctor
phrase, and what did he want from her anyway. She did not like, she could not get used to the idea of the help becoming independent. How could he possibly know that she had earned a doctorate when she never used the title.

The road ahead was clear all the way to Török Street. Gas pipes were being replaced, but now no one was working in the long wet ditch.

Above Geerte’s huge, meaty, heavily ribbed lips, a sharp-edged vertical scar disappeared into the cavity of her wide-winged flat nose. She had come into the world with a cleft lip;
labium leporinum
is the Latin name of the deformity. At the time she was born, during the last years of the nineteenth century, this condition was far from harmless. A cleft-lipped baby cannot suckle, because the various tissue lobes of its face have failed to join. The upper lip normally gains its shape from the union of a middle and two side apophyses, the lower lip from the union of two side ones; a cleft lip is an abnormal or irregular union of apophyses. It appears mainly on the upper lip, when the union is imperfect; the flesh of the lip is completely rent breadthwise. Moreover, a baby with a cleft lip cannot be operated on immediately but must first gain strength. Feeding it artificially, not suckling it, was not a simple matter in those days; babies easily got infections from the utensils used to feed them. A vicious circle developed. Because of infection, the artificial feeding would be discontinued, which posed the danger of dehydration. Geerte was three weeks old when she was finally operated on, and nobody dared vouch for her surviving the critical phases of the healing. They carefully sliced away the edges of the severely inflamed and suppurating cleft and sewed it together with three stitches. Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip, the natural mark of a proper union of the facial-tissue lobes. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round-looking—at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body’s wholeness or hint of at any threat to it.

It seems, Lady Erna thought, fate always brings me together with these thick-mouthed ones.

The dying man also had huge lips.

Pardon me, she yelled to the cabbie because otherwise they wouldn’t hear each other as the taxi bounced along, what makes you think I’m any kind of doctor. I don’t understand why you would say that.

The man, without turning around, spoke in a loud voice.

I took the professor to the university many times, to the academy, to Party headquarters. You’ve ridden with me too, but you don’t remember because it was at night, in the dark. One evening last year, when you went to see
Aida
in the Erkel Theater and we had that big snowfall. And once before that, when the professor, you remember, got that award, Order of the Red Flag.

As you can see I remember everything exactly, believe me, I do.

That’s very good, very nice of you, answered Lady Erna impatiently, but I still don’t understand how this follows from my being some kind of doctor. What sort of joke is this.

Listen to me, said the cabbie, laughing, and for a second he even turned around jovially. It’s very simple. I heard what you and the professor talked about. Please permit me to say, such a conversation demands at least a diploma and a doctorate.

I never mention my doctorate.

And my job is such, you know, I mean, its basic nature is such that I don’t have to understand everything to know whom I’m driving from place to place.

She couldn’t imagine what they might have talked about back then; she did not remember. She was sure they hadn’t talked about anything confidential, they would never do that in a taxicab.

And while with her fingers she grasped and then raised a little the swollen nipple of her left breast, she saw that milk was indeed seeping from it, she would have liked to ask the cabbie to tell her anyway what they had talked about during that trip. But she did not want to be so intimate with him. With a secret policeman who might have also been an Arrow Cross man. But now she had the feeling that neither assumption was correct; this man was somehow deceiving her in some way.

Geerte at the same time lowered her eyes but not completely, and from then on the two memories ran side by side.

Sometimes it’s best to separate tactile sensations from visual ones.

Nevertheless, Geerte does peek out from under her eyelids to see the nipple’s nodular, purple areola at a time when Erna entrusts her senses to its power of attraction. It never even occurred to her that she might deny herself this pleasure or that there might be any moral reason why she should. She’ll find me; let her lead. And Erna was admiring Geerte’s heavy, lazy eyelids, her auburn lashes whose roots were a transparent blond. It seems that her face, like seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, has hidden features. This is a secret they have in common.

Perhaps no one has paid attention to this or analyzed it until now.

The Thirty Years’ War with all its horrors is concealed in her special sense of family and home, in her inimitable tenderness and all-embracing attention, and in her gentility. It is like a benevolent curtain, hiding those aspects of human nature that the uninitiated should never see again. Or like a wrinkle, she thought, a soot-covered groove, sign of a blazing, continuous pain.

Should look up those years, to see if this is really so.

She had been regarding Geerte’s face, her bony and prosaic figure, as if in this small, strange town she had found the living model not of a single painter but of an entire tradition of painting. Just as it sufficed to step up to the square-grid windows to see what magnificent scales of depth and height the substance of air had taught Dutch painters. Now the situation was completely the other way around. In the face of a living person she had found what had been hidden in the paintings of a magnificent era. And if the dates of the years corroborated her assumptions, all the emphases would shift.

But this came as a hovering, uneasy feeling, something that seems to be on the tip of one’s tongue, not fully formulated, then vanishing and reappearing out of reach.

Of course I understood a lot of it, she thought bitterly, laughing at her old naïve self, at the entire brutal prewar world that had pretended to be so innocent, clinging to strict traditions and rules of etiquette. And all the while she pondered what the subject of their conversation might have been on that snowy evening, what indeed, and whether she should ask the leather-capped cabbie, who probably had not been an ÁVH but an Arrow Cross man but in either case was very chatty.

The help shouldn’t be chatty.

He was an Arrow Cross man, yes, now she was certain of it, an Arrow Cross man who later became an ÁVH man.

Geerte’s strong arms were again around her waist. It’d be better not to get into a conversation.

She was looking at this male head and she was looking at this memory of hers, observing the fleshy lips closing in on her nipple, tugging it away from her fingers. She released it, let her take it.

As if it were not pleasure but a noble deed to quench the thirst of these deformed lips. The gesture of nourishment acquired new meaning in this carnal pleasure. She sank the thrust-out fingers of one hand into Geerte’s woolly red hair; she thrust the other hand, a little clumsily, as much as the stiff, striped cotton dress allowed, and a little bashfully, between Geerte’s thighs. Still, for a little while she wanted to feel as if she felt nothing. She deflected her senses with thoughts, or rather, she seemed busy with something other than what she was experiencing directly.

What she was thinking about was the question of how the painting of a given era could deflect itself from the horrors of that era.

And that is why several minutes may have passed before she let out a loud moan.

She was thinking so hard about all this that she did not see the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck, did not notice when she had gathered the pills from the ribbed rubber mat and when she took her place again on the taxi seat. It was very painful to immerse herself in this old pleasure. She even berated herself for having torn herself away from Geerte. Though the years had passed the memory had not faded. She should have stayed there.

If not in Groningen then in Venlo, where they traveled together with the children. Then, maybe her little girl would still be alive. Why can’t one stay in the moment.

Why must one leave?

Or why doesn’t one know which moment to stay in and never move until one dies.

Besides, the cabbie shouted cheerfully toward the backseat, I don’t mind telling you I hear a lot of things from my son. He was one of the professor’s favorite students, and he’s been to your apartment many times.

To this day he goes there often.

I see, responded Lady Erna, who wasn’t especially fond of her husband’s favorite students and found interesting only those who visibly disliked or positively detested him.

Now I understand, she added with a certain reserve. And what’s the name of the young man, she asked. I mean the name of your son.

Himself in the Magic Mirror

He could not go back during the next few days because of the steady quiet rain. Or rather, it was as if the fog were drizzling. It did not want to stop. On days like these, the city fills up with vapors, heavy clouds settle on it, and under the wheels of automobiles the rain sizzles steadily.

Döhring waited for it to stop.

Standing by the window, he was staring at the slowly bursting bubbles of the raindrops. He was gazing at this simple phenomenon obeying the simple laws of physics, and drew the conclusion that he had not gone out of his mind. He could endure this. Perhaps he’d manage to separate his continuous dream from his normal life. At least he had left no trace of anything; he’d cleaned up everything. He hoped there’d be no consequences. No telephone rang. Even if it did, he wouldn’t pick it up, because the state of emergency still made his soul shudder. He did not go downstairs to check the mail. He wouldn’t find anything but junk mail anyway. Before stepping out of here into the hostile outside world, he wished to return to that rational self of his that perhaps never existed.

Now he knew.

He took out a map to study his innocent outings of the previous days.

Maps are rational objects; they deal with physical differences based on observation and are checked with precise measurements.

The body of water he had discovered on his first day in Berlin was probably Teufelssee, Devil’s Lake.

He found a similar small lake on the map called Pechsee, Pitch Lake, probably because of its dark water. He couldn’t decide with absolute certainty which of the two was the one he had been to. On his second excursion, however, he definitely rode as far as the Havel river, next to the Grunewald Tower. While studying the interconnected blue spots of lakes and rivers on the map, he had an irresistible urge to go to the water, to be on the move, to swim, to feel his limbs.

Let the water wash the night out of his skin.

Not to smell the shit anymore.

There were other kinds of lake on the map. But the rain would not let up. His aunt’s top-floor apartment was just under the roof. It had only five rooms and only one of these was disproportionately larger than the rest. An empty, evenly bright, barn-size room that the sun never penetrated. One wall, sectioned by densely set high windows, faced north, and from here one could step out on a balcony larger than the floor space of the entire apartment.