Parallel Stories: A Novel (88 page)

This is how our story began.

I didn’t notice that it had already begun, because I was not daydreaming about what would happen if I could touch her. Rather, I was contemplating what would happen if I forgot her. If I could eject her from my mind. What would happen if I never went back, if I left her to her fate, if I could convince myself that I neither had nor could have any need for such escapades.

I should look for other kinds of adventures. As if I my old self still existed, the same person from whom I could expel this other self, or my attraction to her, or my insatiable interest.

I can’t say I made no efforts in these directions.

I thought it was some sort of sexual urge from which one could break free. But I could not satisfy this urge, because I longed for nothing and no one, or rather, I couldn’t make my usual fantasizing in this area work with her in mind.

Nobody else interested me, yet somehow I had to deny this.

I made great efforts to be at least interested in others, as they had to some extent interested me before, but any person I engaged in conversation instantly ceased to interest me. And this happened because of her, but I did not understand how and why such a light-minded little promise in my life had become so weighty. Attraction had not been an obstacle before; one should expect at least that much from attraction. But now it was as though it pricked me at my most sensitive point. I could not cope, no, no, with the temptation of waiting for someone else. I should evade or avoid the ominous experience I am about to acquire. Except I don’t know what to do with the insistent sense of urgency.

Neither did I know what to do with the threat that without this experience I’d forever remain alone and my wounded pride would destroy me.

Nothing was happening as I had imagined it would; I knew this too, of course. As if I had to tear myself away from the fatal conviction that I’d been born into a world in which what I wanted to have happen, what only I and no one else wanted to have happen, would simply not occur. A world in which every intention missed its target, every action went astray. As if, using my head, I had to break through a wall that I myself strengthened every day.

Naturally, I had no such thoughts, because what I’m talking about was neither a thought nor a way of thinking; it was just there, hanging in the air, like a zeitgeist. Hope did not vanish, it was somewhere else, impossible to know just where. Elsewhere. Helplessness coursed though the brain cells, and inevitably I had to believe it was my own helplessness. A birth defect or something I developed because my mother had abandoned me. Others are deserving of love and find each other, or from the start possess the ability to love, which I lack. I just stood there with the glass in my hand. She reached for it; I wouldn’t give it to her. All that was missing were six words. Where should I wait for you.

Without an answer, I simply couldn’t leave the store.

She wanted not a word. She waited, resisted, with both hands in the air to take my glass, but with her hand she forbade me to spit out my question.

Others drank their coffee and left their glasses all over the place. I always returned mine properly and put it down on the counter in front of her; otherwise, she’d have to go and collect it. Sometimes she came out from behind the counter, stacked the glasses into little towers, the plates into piles. Perhaps as early as during my second visit she noticed my consideration and responded in kind; she took the glass from my hand and we both nodded, tipping our heads a bit. Sometimes she said, oh, very kind, how nice, really nice of you. I didn’t understand why she had to make fun of me.

And the next day, in revenge, I wasn’t going to bring the glass back to her, but she stopped me with her voice.

You brought it back yesterday, why not today.

Perhaps she felt she was overstepping a boundary; after a while she wordlessly accepted the situation and watched as if to see whether I was really like that or only pretended to be and wanted her to like me, and was trying to deceive her.

And then even the small nod was abandoned.

I’d have liked to say in gratitude that today’s coffee was especially good. Or some such little foolishness, lightheartedly, as people somehow expect from one another. The glass wobbled awkwardly on the saucer and I didn’t say anything. Because it seemed as if my hand were shaking. I did not want the inapt sentence, I didn’t want other people’s sentences. My grandmother had, with the best of intentions, stuffed my head with all the commonplaces, and they would have worked well in appropriate situations, but I wouldn’t let them.

If she took the glass from me, the tips of my fingers involuntarily touched the tips of hers.

Sometimes she, sometimes I, successfully avoided this involuntary contact, the game being no longer about that but about the avoidance of it. As if both of us preferred the contact to be voluntary yet neither wanted to risk it. I couldn’t do it now, anyway. At the same time, it would have been impossible to stretch the moment out longer under the boss’s eyes, because Klára did not want anything like this to be happening in the shop. As if with her eyes she was asking me not to involve her in a dangerous situation in front of the wicked boss.

In that case, I preferred to take on my own humiliation again; all right, I’ll resign myself to leaving once again without the redeeming words.

I saw everything, I understood everything, I realized what I had to do, yet I did not leave.

The insatiable little child reached the end of his wishes and the three small bags filled with candy, fudge, and jelly beans were lined up next to the scale. The boss could openly raise her eyes to look at me.

She gazed at this lunatic for a long time.

Now I could only hope that a customer would come in and distract her so she’d turn away. Because she wouldn’t turn away to deal with the child, she let him stand there, in front of the counter, jingling the coins in his hand. The glasses the boss wore were small and round, and the thick lenses, when looked at from up close, enlarged her eyeballs. Her alarm was directed at me, but her gaze was always frightened, as if she feared everything and everybody. Her thin bony body was full of emotions. She sucked in her upper lip, the lower one protruding hideously as if she were ready to pucker it, her jaw set and taut. She wore a much-laundered yellow cardigan over her white work coat, perhaps to break the impression of a uniform, to be a little different from the other woman, and as we stared into each other’s alarmed eyes, the yellow of the cardigan particularly bothered me. Because of the emotional knots in her body, she pulled up her shoulders. Her voice was hoarse from heavy smoking, and the humorless edge of her words was at once a defense and an attack; a malicious woman.

She tempered her nastiness with exaggerated obsequiousness, or covered it with sugary tones when she felt compelled to defend herself.

She always had a cigarette burning somewhere; she would leave it anywhere in the store.

What she really needed was to light up and feel the pleasure of the heady first puff; after that, the cigarette was free to smolder as it pleased.

These first puffs left the imprint of her deep-red lipstick on the edge of the paper.

American Dream

A restless Madzar, on the very same day, returned to the building on Pozsonyi Road.

The wind had calmed down somewhat by then; it was around seven in the evening.

He walked up to the seventh floor and did not turn on the lights because he wanted to see the effect of natural light in the opalescent glass cylinder of the stairwell. Opal diffuses light, strengthening the insufficient and dimming the abundant. Which made twilight lighter inside than outside. When he reached the seventh floor he was surprised to find the apartment open, because he remembered locking it himself that morning.

Perhaps this was the moment that decided their fate.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
was standing by the window of the inner room, the one in which she would receive patients. Sufficient light remained within the bare whitewashed walls, where raw smells of fresh construction were trapped: planed wood, oil paint, and lime.

He saw a face of hers that no one had ever seen.

They both had on the same coats and hats they had worn in the morning. Time had not shifted; nothing had changed. Madzar was about to say something but he faltered halfway. Perhaps the woman had not heard his steps for some reason. She stood, stiffened, in a state of utter concentration, but it was not possible to know what she was looking at. She was looking out toward the darkening sky, but obviously she was listening inwardly. This sight, more alienating than exciting, made Madzar recoil.

And the woman still hadn’t noticed that someone had surprised her.

It would only lead to a hysterical outburst; this woman would love him madly, she would writhe, go wild, be like a bursting dam, he thought; she would sweep him away.

In the afternoon in the Britannia, he had tried to gratify himself so that he could forget about the nagging need and concentrate on his work, but he did not succeed, because he could reach satisfaction only if he thought of no one in particular. And he thought about this woman whom no one had ever awakened and should not awaken.

At the same moment Mrs. Szemz
ő
slowly turned toward the man, but just barely, only with her head, and a peculiar, desperate shout issued from both their throats.

I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to frighten you, cried the man.

Good Lord, what are you doing here at such an hour, moaned the woman when she caught her breath, recovering from her fright.

I’ve got a job to do here, so I can easily explain myself, said the man, experimenting with a little laugh and some flippancy, but I’d like to know about you.

I wanted to check on what you had told me. I realized you were right. And if that’s so, I needed to see whether in fact you don’t have anything to do here.

You’ll laugh and probably think my fickleness ridiculous, but in the meantime I have changed my mind.

I’d put the sofa there, some kind of desk here, and that would be all. It was just a passing idea that we might come up with something together.

The man did not know how to respond to this.

You know, there’s an unrealized or uncompleted artist in me, and that’s why I always have an ambiguous idea instead of a concrete solution, the woman continued, as if making an obligatory apology, and quite aware of what she was doing. But now, to make an exception, I was thinking simply that we could take psychoanalysis out of the usual stifling dimness—not into sunshine, because it doesn’t belong there, it would go blind there—but at least to half-shaded light, into fresh air. It’s a nice, noble idea, in theory anyway.

Why do you speak so ironically about yourself.

That, at least, you should leave to me.

On the contrary, the man protested, I admit I was talking a lot of nonsense this morning. All I can say in my defense is that with the help of all that obstinate nonsense I managed to get closer. He wanted to say closer to her, I managed to get closer to you, but he stopped in time. He fell silent, but he had the sense that the woman knew exactly the words he had suppressed. Now I understand the nature of your work better, he continued indecisively. After all, you can’t abandon your patients, can’t take them with you anywhere for my sake.

This last sentence, fueled by powerful passion, had the effect of an involuntary confession.

Embarrassed silence followed.

As if he had just realized that he could not take the woman with him to America.

Although it had not occurred to him before that he might want to.

They could no longer rescind their desire. For weeks they had been trying to talk about a job that had to be done, and what they finally said meant something entirely different. His only excuse for himself was that his words had not been clearly understood.

I suppose I’m bringing you into this American dream of mine, he continued, because, he added quickly but still indecisively, I won’t find for myself there the kind of clean architectural situation I once dreamed of.

But in the empty twilight this meant that he might stay for the woman.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
hastened to help the man out of his discomfort. And I’ve realized, you know, that the structure and characteristics of our utopias may be similar, but their substances are different, and we mustn’t forget this. I don’t know, I must not, no, for me it is outright forbidden to transplant my problems elsewhere.

But that’s exactly what he had come to understand, the man responded gratefully. Your sense of reality must work more strongly than mine or, put another way, I’m still chasing ideas that somehow insulate me from the same reality that you cannot ignore. This is the actual difference. But it’s also possible that my profession is what gives me freedom. I’ve been thinking about that too, whether I can simply move on with my ideas. Perhaps I’m guilty of turning away too quickly from something or of turning my back on things.

Perhaps, the woman replied.

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about all afternoon, said the man, which of course was only half the truth.

Until now they had been standing motionless, speaking through the open door from one echoing empty room to the other. Madzar noted that the apartment’s lights seemed no less improbable in the twilight, and so he did not tell her about the theoretical question he had been brooding on in the afternoon. The lights occupied his full attention. As if his powerful passion for the woman were sliding into his professional passion for lights. Up above the nacreous sky was tending toward crimson, while below, closer to the street, yellow-beamed lamps were already shining through the loose green foliage.

Then it’d be better if I left you alone now, the woman said.

The man did not respond, because he felt he might stutter and somehow embarrass himself.

He had expected from himself something other than what happened.