Parallel Stories: A Novel (96 page)

These boys avoided Bellardi lest he imperceptibly put them under the yoke of his family, which already ruled the entire town.

Although his privileged status was part of his birthright and could not be denied, nobody knew what to expect from him or how to prepare for what he might do, except by being very cautious with him.

Bellardi was oblivious to these complications, however, and after his initial declaration of friendship with Madzar felt no need to say more. Madzar could not possibly forget the confidence Bellardi had in him.

Madzar was a heavy man, with a soul filled to the brim, a man without secrets almost to the point of tedium.

He was looking at the captain and reassuring himself that his friend was indeed a good boy. He could not pretend he did not know the less favorable aspects of Bellardi’s character, and the captain must have known this though he pretended otherwise, satisfying his longing for appearances. Once, Madzar thought, Bellardi’s embarrassing characteristics had not been embedded so obviously and deeply in his features.

He had light-brown, confidence-inspiring eyes, a finely cut, well-proportioned nose, shapely, strong, full lips above which he sported a rakish little mustache.

My dear, dear friend, he shouted thunderously from a distance. My sweet, good old pal.

He was fond of exuding such phrases, for they befit a lively disposition, full of life’s energies.

The motive for these extreme appellations was his wish to express in a single gesture both his monumental sentiments and the social distinctions he was obliged to respect, and, with that, to designate unequivocally his position in any possible hierarchy. The two adjectival signal rockets he launched made a little pop, shed a little light, then fell into the void, and the Great Hungarian Plain grew dark again.

They had barely shaken hands when he changed his tone.

Welcome, he said gently in a low voice, as if withdrawing the tone he had just used publicly and implying that this low tone was his true timbre.

At times like this, he spoke with the impersonal love of a priest, ready at every moment to share with almost anyone his most heartfelt emotions for the Almighty. Of course he never shared them; he never shared anything. Perhaps he had nothing to share. To tell the truth, he whispered in a voice full of emotion, your arrival is most opportune for a number of reasons. Whenever Bellardi hit this tone, Madzar knew from his childhood that he should stay away from him, tolerate him if he had to, but keep contact to a minimum. Now, after all these years, he also realized that this tone was not Bellardi’s but that of the Franciscan priest who from time immemorial had been the Bellardi family’s confidant and the son’s spiritual guide. Bellardi allowed no time for sulking or reticence, because with another change of tone he put the previous dissembling one into a more desirable perspective. Very soberly, he added that later they would talk more in detail about all this,
au coup
; they would find time for everything.

I’m certain we shall, Madzar answered, no doubt about it, but he was aware only of standing there again, in front of Bellardi, awkward and clumsy, and this made his limbs feel heavy.

Yet he could not get enough of the playacting.

There was a crack through which he gained an image and some sense of his own heavy disposition.

It was as if he were saying to Bellardi, you never fail to amaze me, when in fact it was his firm intention to demand that he stop, leave off with these tiresome and superfluous appearances, this foolish masquerade. But Bellardi, encouraged by his success, did exactly the opposite of what his friend expected. First, he took a step not toward, but sideways before his guest, coming so close as to make Madzar inadvertently recoil, not unlike a horse held short by its bridle. And then he took another step, beyond the necessary or possible, thereby issuing a challenge, a provocation.

He could not let go of his friend, patting and squeezing his solid but helpless body, which made Madzar, who carried this body on his powerful soul, blush deeply.

Don’t even hope, my friend, that the masquerade will end. Be honest with yourself, just this once. You wouldn’t like to see it end either. You’d keel over with the boredom oozing from your Protestant soul. You like it when someone plays theater in your stead. I don’t have a real face, you can see that yourself, but if somehow you had a chance to catch a glimpse of it, you’d die of fright.

I am your representative in everything you are too craven to participate in.

Perhaps you won’t hold it against me, he said, smiling at Madzar with benevolent, charming, and ironic eye beams, that I’ve disturbed your solitude so impudently. I too long for monastic solitude above all, but I can’t get along without your company, he said loudly, as if he needed this big sound to make himself utter the words.

The captain took pleasure in filing away his cruel little victories in the records of obligatory modesty and politeness.

On the contrary, replied Madzar graciously, helped somewhat by the routine politesse, I would hate being a burden to you with my importunity, and he enjoyed his lie as much as if he had spoken the truth. It did not even occur to me.

Come, come, Bellardi shouted, his face darkening for real, what are you talking about, old pal. How can you say such a silly thing, Lojzi. How can you even think such a thing, he said, and then, after a minuscule pause that took the edge off his indignation, he quickly added, I am profoundly shocked. All the while his huge eyes were flashing kindly and tenderly in the pleasure of the performance. True, he expressed a bit more umbrage with that sentence than his acting could plausibly support.

And even this ambivalence seemed intentional.

What should I say, what would I most like to do with you, he said loudly. Of course, my first choice would be to get off with you at Mohács.

He burst out with a sudden laugh.

We’d let the old ship drift away all by itself and spend the remainder of our lives in a sweet duet in Mohács, my dear. We’d listen to the constant barking of dogs, and you know very well I’d never let you go to America, he cried in the voice of a scorned lover.

He kept laughing, as a child would go on tasting the sweetness of revenge, for his very expertise in concealment allowed him to see behind every possible human hiding place.

With Bellardi, compared to Madzar, everything was the other way around. Bellardi’s huge, weak body groaned under the crushing weight of his soul.

We’d expose the mass graves, or we’d—oh, whatever the hell it was, but we’d do it, we’d realize all our old plans, he exclaimed. We’d do something utterly useful and noble. We’d support the destitute. Let’s leave it at that, he added, growing somber at his own jesting, which he also intended as a sort of gift. And now, as a gift to my dearest friend, I shall offer up a sight of my soul’s sobriety. He seemed to have drawn enough strength from himself with his irregular, solitary dalliance and now was ready to repudiate, with genuine feeling, his own noisy sounds and to end the public interrogation.

Alas, I can’t leave the boat, he said like a good soldier summing up his life situation, but we shall consume our last supper together.

What makes you think it will be the last one.

How does one know when one’s life ends.

Not only did they say things to each other they didn’t mean, but they compelled each other to analyze continuously and in several ways their deeply disingenuous words.

Conventional logic was insufficient to cope with their secret language.

Madzar was taken aback by the captain’s offer to get off at Mohács with him, though he knew it was only playing with words or, at best, only a playful thought. The captain was playing with their shared memories, with the mass graves, reaching back into dangerous depths all the way to the sweet duet and the tragedies. He wondered in the meanwhile what the captain’s intentions were, where they would be seated, where was the table set for the two of them. He noticed no such table in the dining room. From which Bellardi instantly sensed the effect of his words; he could see he had nearly gained his friend’s confidence or at least made him anxious. Madzar also found it odd that the captain spoke of dogs barking in Mohács when in fact they could hardly have heard any barks in the Bellardis’ mansion on Városház Street. Even now, he has that devilish ability to read my mind, he told himself. And since he himself had been thinking similar thoughts only moments before, standing at the railing on the upper deck, he wondered once again whether or not he was in the presence of the most significant friendship of his life.

No matter what, Bellardi always knows what I’m thinking about.

Because Madzar has always harbored suspicions toward men, he rejects him for the second time.

Perhaps this time I should make an exception.

By the time the cock crows thrice, you will have betrayed him at least three times.

How could one take seriously the proposal of the two of them spending their lives together. In dialogue between men, there is always an intention to search for a firm hold that reveals the nature of the relationship. Should I strive for a favorable position in what I say or should I just tell him that I already occupy a favorable position.

Try as he might, he can’t keep up with me.

Nevertheless, the captain reminded him of the longing and promise that every little boy wants to make come true at least once in his life, and if not as a child, at least as an adult.

They could not forget it.

Where the river current had washed out a high section of the shore, the surprisingly intact ends of human bones stuck out of the sandy wall in thick layers—skulls, shins, pelvises, and toes that along with the sand crumble into dust in one’s hand. They happened on this scene, forgotten for centuries, south of the city, about two kilometers from the tip of Gypsy Reef, even though they knew that according to historians the battle had taken place at an entirely different location, at the foot of the Majs hills. If the desperate swallows had not been protecting their nests on the collapsing chasm so fiercely, they might have tried to dig out what they thought was there, in hopes of sharing a great discovery. They encouraged each other; they were both terrified of touching human bones. This was Madzar’s third time on the
Carolina
going back to his parental home, and on the two earlier trips he and Bellardi had already come to understand that the more they used the memory of the bones to preserve their common past, the stronger their disappointment in each other.

There was no limit to what they could have done, but their youth was gone; they could do nothing anymore.

It was not that nothing remained of the old attraction with which they could bridge the almost historical distance between them.

They had discussed everything thoroughly; they had revived their more innocent memories almost to the verge of boredom. They left everything else untouched out of mutual consideration, and as a result they always found themselves surrounded by issues of which they did not speak.

In complete darkness, they bumped into familiar objects.

They smelled each other’s fragrance, and as the captain yanked the architect close, on the surface of each other’s hard body they both could definitely feel rejection being expressed. The two of them were shocked that despite their now obviously weaker attraction to each other the mutual rejection was still so powerful. As if they were being reminded of a former rejection, as if even prior to that mutuality they had had a common life that designated their places next to each other and condemned them to mutual impassiveness. Moreover, even as a child, Madzar had found Bellardi’s smell repulsive, though his repulsion was coupled with a fierce curiosity. He had felt it most strongly when they came out of the water together; perhaps it emanated from Bellardi’s hair or skin, which was given to shivering even in summer. He’d decided that this was something peculiar to the bodies of rulers and princes; he was smelling the odor of history.

And now he was assailed by it again, along with the repulsion and curiosity. Stale earwax, which one scrapes out of the outer ear with one’s nail when it itches, smells like this.

The captain meanwhile, despite his own embarrassment, kept patting and squeezing the architect, gleaning some joy from the strength of his rejection. Let him feel that it was his privilege. This caused an embarrassment for the architect at least as great as the joy he elicited from the captain by recognizing the aversion.

And because of their shared past, they both had a rightful claim on these genuine sensations of aversion and repulsion.

Madzar remained mostly naïve about his own feelings and therefore had barely reached the threshold of his sensual compulsions.

The captain’s behavior was comparatively unembarrassed, though with his every word and gesture he followed the gentleman’s code of etiquette, the very code he poked fun at and sometimes attacked with other words and gestures. He brought attention to something, which he had no intention of doing, and Madzar, although he perceived this, did not understand or have any feel for it.

Or rather, he knew that while superficially Bellardi always seemed to accede to every request, there was always something else he wanted. To get away from this upstream area of the great river, he was sure to keep an eye on the great exit at the delta.

He had once organized an expedition to the South Pole, but he did not include Madzar in that plan, only boys from the better families. The two of them had gone on shorter trips of discovery, though, and once on a longer one. Anyone growing up near a great river is familiar with the desire to entrust one’s light human body to the current’s immense strength.

As everyone learned later, Bellardi had run away one summer with some Serb and Italian tobacco smugglers. He had told them he was an orphan. Gendarmes brought him back to Mohács. At his father’s order, he was taken to the town hall and, exposed to the view of passersby, made to stand in the huge echoing lobby, flanked by two gendarmes with bayonets fixed on their rifles, until his father was ready to receive him.