Parallel Stories: A Novel (44 page)

He’d never speak of them to anyone.

When we were on vacation in Normandy or Anacapri, he continued, as if interrupting himself, the situation was very different, of course.

Actually, what Gyöngyvér should understand is what he is not saying and never will say.

Word got around that the Hungarian boy had a pecker bigger than anybody else’s.

He said, this wasn’t like a vacation abroad, when, though you jabber all day in a foreign language with other children, you’re still a Hungarian kid because the vacation will have an end, just as it had a beginning. At this place it didn’t matter whether you were Hungarian or not.

I am Hungarian, I would say. They didn’t understand why that should make anyone blush. Politely they nodded, all right, good, or maybe just shrugged their shoulders. It was of no importance. Or rather, the light switches were just in different places. There were all kinds of kids, but they felt at home in those two huge languages. This lends incredible self-confidence to even the stupidest of them. Believe me, we Hungarians don’t understand this, and this is also something you can feel in my voice. If a Congo native can speak a human language even though his nose is as flat as a gorilla’s, then what the hell am I boasting about with my Hungarian. Who cares. And with them, everything was nicer, neater, better groomed, and I liked that. Maybe that was the deepest humiliation. That everything was more beautiful. Most especially those wonderful mountains.

You see, again you use the word
humiliation
.

Until you notice that by two in the afternoon, the sun is gone in all the valleys. Or the women’s legs, as they make their way up on their strong, stockinged legs. Those fuzzy woolen stockings. If you see only the legs, you can’t tell whether they belong to a man or a woman, both kinds are strong, short, with bulging calves. The bathroom towels were also fluffier there. The doorknobs more beautiful, the locks more considerate of humans, surprisingly quiet and without grating clicks, the streetcars much more beautiful. You have to admit that. Maybe not more beautiful. You can’t even imagine there not being yellow streetcars, but the streetcars weren’t yellow.

What do you mean, not yellow, what isn’t yellow, asked Gyöngyvér, puzzled.

The streetcars are not yellow, the color yellow is reserved for something else, Ágost explained. Yellow is the color of summer, and blindness, and envy, or madness. You found yourself in a place where everything works differently, you understand. That’s a pretty big shock. You must have experienced something similar. If someone says streetcar, for you it means white, brown, or yellow. You can’t imagine any other kind of streetcar. Which means that you should be different from what you are.

That’s impossible, he went on angrily, and in that instant, Gyöngyvér could see the erstwhile little boy in him.

Simply not possible. And as soon as he said, you know, your mouth is not fixed right for this rotten strange world, he saw before him Lecluse’s aggressively red lips, sickly pale face, and cruel blue eyes. He did not know what the boys saw when they looked at him. He had to take it because he was on his own and there were so many of them. He wanted to back away but his feet found no firm support, they were slipping on the wet wooden grating. He didn’t think it mattered who had a bigger one, and all he could think of was that he was in for another beating. There was no other world, no world he could understand better.

After all these years, he understood from the bewildered attentiveness of this strange woman that Lecluse’s countenance had made him accept the impossible. He had to trade in parts of his body. From his fictitious worlds, which he carried along in his native tongue, he had to move over to the only realistic world. Everything depended on size and strength, after all.

And Gyöngyvér began to giggle bashfully that no, no, not so.

And right away entered into the spirit of protest.

You’re kidding. How could I have had similar experiences. Where.

She thrust him away from her.

I’ve never been abroad, not anywhere.

Their torsoes, slippery with perspiration, on which only the purple-brown of their nipples glowed in the dimness, separated. She pounded the man’s chest with her fists, you’re kidding, and her small breasts quivered. How would I know, for god’s sake. I know only what you tell me, and I don’t even understand that completely because I’m silly, a very silly girl. Of course, how could you people here know anything like that, Ágost responded slowly.

He was thinking that one always prepares for something other than what really happens. They had not beaten him. He disdained these Hungarians, especially this woman with her submissive tendencies who was playing up to him; he despised them all, every Hungarian. He looked down at them for their sham naïveté, their insane selfishness that had nothing to do with individuality, and he scorned them for their real gullibility. Still, he was attracted to these traits as to something kinder, more intimate and time-honored. Withdrawing behind a smile of contempt, he tried to relive his former disowned self, the shared Hungarian self turned loose from every form of reality and locked into itself, self-pity within self-hatred. The tense feeling of lacking something, the continued Hungarian longing for something else, which simultaneously produces insatiable voracity, painful envy, haughtiness, incredulousness, and destructive indifference. But this was not what held his attention, because now appeared before him Lecluse’s other face, the attentive, caring one, the face of the great tempter.

And why should anyone here know anything about this, he added, still drawing out his words.

I’ve been to Lake Balaton twice, though, Gyöngyvér whispered back, making a face, and that was really a big thing in my life, don’t forget. Making faces gives the impression of being ashamed of something, but she actually meant to boast a little. She admits, she said, that something is missing from her life, but this lack makes her life unique.

Which they both liked so much they pounced on each other with their laughing lips. Once, twice, their teeth knocked quickly together. This hurt a bit, and they assuaged the pain on each other’s lips with the tips of their tongues.

A foreign tongue, you know, is paralyzing and alluring.

I know, squealed Gyöngyvér.

How would you know, you don’t know. It can swallow you up mercilessly, it can reject you—he would have continued the earlier subject because he wasn’t quite in the present; he was still back there trying to cope with the situation in the old shower room on the wet wooden grating.

Let me, don’t reject me, Gyöngyvér giggled into his hesitant sentence, which he had meant to be somewhat instructive.

Such a pampered little idiot shouldn’t try to teach him lessons.

Come on, let’s have that paralyzing foreign tongue of yours.

As if she were both interested in everything and bored by each new piece of information.

In response, with their tongues they reached into each other’s nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Ágost was merely following her like a good pupil; he was busy trying to break free of Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s presence, his wet body.

And now you must wash everybody’s back.

He thought the woman was common, her idea primitive.

Who was working herself more and more frantically into the situation; your seductive tongue, she moaned, more.

She was demonstrating the reverse side of their pleasures; she was being deliberately rough, but this is what made it interesting.

This means she can also be sarcastic with me, Ágost thought, surprised. She sucked in her lips and thrust them forward; what she wanted to do was conceal her sentimentality. As one making amends with her tongue for what had or could have happened to the man, which she did not see as having been all that bad—behavior radiating such warmth and candor that the man could not ignore it, despite his aversion.

They filled the little room with their continued laughter, and it responded with strong, cold echoes. The apartment houses on Pozsonyi Road had been built at the end of the 1920s in accordance with pre–First World War regulations that called for enclosed courtyards in this district of the capital. The builders used the latest, sometimes most expensive materials, among them bauxite-based concrete. This not only proved to be brittle but also created unpleasant echoes in the apartments.

All right, so you’ve seen the whole wide world, Gyöngyvér cried out, into this echoing laughter, but I don’t think you ever swam in the Tisza.

They had to be careful about shouting in the apartment because of the landlady whose subtenants they were.

Gyöngyvér modulated her cries to harsh whispers, filled with all sorts of seductive force, firmly sliding her voice as if along a sharp spine on which she was pulling herself back and forth.

Her single voice included two or three opposing shades.

Admit it. You have never but never swum in the Tisza.

You’re right, I have never swum in the Tisza.

Then you don’t know anything about water.

You’ll laugh at me, but I have never even seen the Tisza.

How lucky can I get, Gyöngyvér screeched, I can take you to the Tisza. I’ll take you to my foster parents. We’ll go to the farm.

I’ve swum in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, and in the Adriatic too. Abbazia was our home base.

That’s nothing, hardly worth mentioning.

I swam in the Atlantic Ocean, also in the Bay of Tangier.

Come on, come on, bay or ocean.

If I were to take you to a place like that, your jaw would drop. I’d like to inform you, sweet Gyöngyvér, that you were born in a hopelessly bleak country.

Please don’t move, I beg you.

What are you doing, moaned the man.

How come you have so much hatred in you. I don’t understand what we’ve done to deserve it, I really don’t.

What hatred, I don’t have any hatred in me, none. If I can’t move, don’t you move either.

And he said all this aloud so he could openly enjoy his own loud moans.

Tell me, my sweet, tell me what you feel now, of me, of my body, what do you feel so strongly.

I have never talked about things like this in Hungarian, never.

But you’ve whispered in the ears of every French slut what you do to them—now I’m doing this, now I’m doing that—or what you plan to do.

Why wouldn’t I have whispered,
chuchoter
. Remember this,
il me chuchoté à l’oreille.
Repeat after me.

Please, knock me out like that too. You know I must learn French.

But you still wouldn’t understand this. This comes long after the tenth lesson.

Two brief, staccato shouts escaped from her.

You’re wrong, that’s the only one I do understand, she moaned when she regained her senses, for her own barbaric shouts were distracting her. She was afraid Ágost would find her repulsive. While digging her nails into the wide muscles of the man’s back, she whispered again. She would have liked to satisfy the man’s every need and therefore she seemed to be singing deliberately either above or below every note, showing herself alternately cruder and more refined than she actually was. But this too came to an end. Deathly silence fell on the echoing little room or maybe on the whole world, and now she had to be all ears to ascertain it.

She had not noticed whether her landlady, Dr. Szemz
ő
’s widow, had left or already returned. The mute mass of lost time appeared in this deadly silence, though she had no idea where they were in what they were doing, or whether it was the previous evening or the following afternoon.

You’re wrong, a mistake, she gasped, just a mistake, everything’s a mistake.

Hearing her own gasping, she felt truly liberated in her entire being. Her thin body trembled as if someone were shaking her.

Nothing, don’t say anything. As if each spoken word made her colder. And don’t move either. I made the mistake. Now she was not playacting, she was not out to satisfy anything, please anyone, or seem to be anything she was not. Take me away, please, quickly, pick me up and take me away from here.

What she wanted to say, in fact, was that they should die together.

Hot and slippery with perspiration, locked into the hard scissors of each other’s thighs, melted into each other’s arms, they were lying under a light cover on the narrow creaky sofa in Gyöngyvér’s little sublet room. The woman was trembling. As if he could make her wish come true, at least with his arms the man completely surrounded and enwrapped her; that’s how he took her away. In their happiness, they both shut their eyes tight, for a little while did not even breathe. From under the cover, they could hear the wet contacts of their bellies and groins.

Something of the rubescent, stifling summer twilight was still glimmering in the spacious courtyard enclosed within the building’s unfriendly rear floors and bare firewalls.

Let’s lie like this, whispered Gyöngyvér into the man’s neck, just like this, stay still inside me, and as if it were pouring across the shivering skin, she felt her own hot breath skim across the perspiration’s cooler coating. Her shivering would not subside. If you speak, no, don’t speak, because when you do, I feel your voice entering me. She wanted to add that that was terribly good. She could not imagine how she would get up and go to work. In the depth of my body, in my womb I feel the waves of your silky voice coming into me, coming, and I am continually being gratified. But she kept quiet about this because she was afraid. Like a person hoarding something. Maybe it was dread that made her tremble. She felt the increasing pressure of things she could not, that were impossible to say out loud.

From outside, they heard the sharp squeaks of tricycles, shouts of children, bouncing of balls, and various radio programs from open kitchen windows. Their bodies were tossing on the pulsing, intermittent waves of intermingled music and speaking voices. The window of this maid’s room, placed much higher than was usual in buildings of the Újlipótváros section of the city, was open a crack; they felt the aromas of their soaked bodies in the pervasive, pungent smells of fried onions and peppers and sweet tomatoes. Gyöngyvér’s perfume mingled unhindered with the penetrating odor of sausages slowly seething in stewed onions and tomatoes, which the man found repugnant. While the woman was hoping to become familiar with Ágost’s strange fragrance.