Parallel Stories: A Novel (205 page)

Everyone has a mother, that’s what I say, a baron also shits.

When they reached the boundary of Balter’s fertile land near the shore, clearly marked by stakes, they had to continue in single file through a thicket, its soil soft with silt, until they reached the willows by the river.

Balter went in front, the pastor walked behind him.

The pungent vapors of decaying plants pervaded the air.

The water level had dropped to the deep part of the riverbed during these dry months.

The shore was steep.

As if showing off the splendors of his property, Balter led the pastor to a lovely glade in the willows where, standing side by side, they could watch the landscape reveal the powerful sweep of the river and the bare line of the far shore in the reddish vapor of twilight.

So that’s where you used to work, I heard in the village, the pastor said after a long time.

There it lay, at the northern edge of the small cathedral town of many churches, a shape alien to the landscape and to the water, the old block of the baroque penal institution, with its pointed watchtowers and thick brick walls.

No matter where one looked, one couldn’t help seeing those walls; to live close to them and twice a week to preach the word of God there and give testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ—there was no greater ordeal in the pastor’s life.

For thirty years I served there, that’s right, Balter replied quietly, almost bashfully, as if he had heard the dread in the pastor’s voice. He laughed a little. I began under the rule of His Excellency the regent, if you know who I mean, your reverence, then I served our father Rákosi and I swore allegiance to Kádár too.
*

I have been doing my service for thirty years also, said the pastor. His tone was more resigned than it had been before.

The other man mustn’t sense too much of the immeasurable difference between the two. Maybe a little. But the pastor thought it wouldn’t be right to miss a chance to testify to his own long service, if only in a modest way. As things were, the distance between them had grown too wide. Because of the testimony he had to give to Christ, the desire for merciless revenge only deepened in the pastor.

And so as not to emphasize the various enormous distances between them while they stood so closely together, he didn’t look at the other man for a long time.

No matter how true it was that he had devoted his vocation to following Christ, he had to take his bloody revenge on someone. He could not avoid the feeling and the compulsion stemming from it.

It was January when I got married, Balter related with charming innocence, I took my oath of service in February, and in February of this year I completed my service. Believe me, it was enough.

We moved here in the month of July from the Tisza, which is where I had my first position—ten years at Tiszavészt
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, if you know where that is. That’s how I’ve been spending my service, said the pastor indulgently.

Despite his good intentions the different nature of their services could not be equalized. Or perhaps it could have been if he had eked out of himself a little more goodwill, but then what would he have done about the fate of his only son and his own dark hatred. At best they were equal in age and in the unstoppable rhythm of mortality, which they both had to face.

Still, their long silence did not become unpleasant, since they both were interested more in the intention of what they said than in its literal meaning.

Whatever happened to them before now, they were both on the way out of their lives.

And now I am free, Balter said cautiously.

Which had roughly the effect it would have had if he were a small child who for the first time said something dreadfully indecent out loud. But coming from an old man, the statement had a certain irony. And in the ensuing silence the pastor heard well the sigh escaping from the other man’s heavy body, and then the silence that led to the next sentence.

They were hard years, to be sure, who had it easy. Thus did the pastor go around the problematical subject. Frankly, we shall all make our accounting before the just Lord.

How many things one has to live through during one’s service, replied Balter, equally indulgent. One could go on talking about it until tomorrow morning, but he fell silent quickly, as if he had given himself away with his own unguarded words.

He had much to be silent about. Before he left his job, he had had to reconfirm both his verbal and written oaths to keep his silence.

People say you are alone, is your dear wife no longer alive, if I may ask frankly, said the pastor deliberately but cautiously, as if at the moment when the other opened up he wanted to reach even further into the darkness. But in fact he was thinking about his own fate.

If you only knew how much my old lady is still alive and living her own life, if I may put it that way, Balter replied. It’s not the kind of life you’d understand, he said, and his voice reverberated with a hatred for educated people that he’d accumulated over many decades and which felt at this moment just like the hatred he felt for his wife and son.

Though my wife wasn’t a regular whore, no worry about that.

It was probably his surprise at opening up like this that made his reply come out so coarsely.

I must say, though, to be frank with you, she wasn’t much better. So why shouldn’t she live her own life, he added with an unpleasantly grating laugh. I couldn’t care less.

That is how, at that moment, the ignominy of the two men’s fate became entwined.

They glanced at each other in their mutual shame, as if they had no way to avoid this common ignominy. They could not have been more different; nothing bound them together but their age; and they saw nothing in each other’s eyes but that they were both men.

The first word was lacking.

In the pastor, the lack of a daily dose of good had become so acute that he could make no room for more evil. He asked no more questions, didn’t want to turn more of the man’s evil on himself. When he heard Balter’s indecent laugh, apathy settled into his heart, the most dangerous kind of apathy.

Balter suspected rigid rejection and hard moral judgment behind the spectacles. What more could he expect from such a powerful man. His superiority shrank, now consisting only of the fact that his wife was indeed alive. He could have done nothing with the other man except, in anger about his own fate, knock him out.

Yet the other man’s mute sorrow pierced his self-esteem as a pin would a balloon.

He almost cried out in the evening silence.

My wife waited for me, sir, ambushed me with a sack, and my only son beat me until I was bloody. If you want to know how they did it, I’ll be happy to tell you. With the poker. They broke four of my ribs, he cried, and seeing the effect of his words on the pastor’s face, he added something that sounded truly strange.

If I don’t get killed, I’ll have to kill my potential killer.

The water carried his voice on its whirling surface, and from the reddish shore of Vác an echo returned it.

It could not be determined whether he was referring to his wife or his son. They went on trying to gauge in each other’s eyes what might happen next.

Not for anything in the world would he tell the pastor more serious things about his son, though he had much to tell.

The water was lapping the sand gently in front of them, and if the two men did not go at each other it was because of the heart-numbing apathy that had somewhat tamed the pastor’s murderous impulse. Bats flew over their heads and the screeching of nocturnal birds was heard from among the willows. When the pastor finally spoke again, only the Creator might have known what nonsense he was going to come up with.

It’s been four full years since my poor dear wife, my sweet little Emmi, my one and only died. This was his dulled, pained response, and he almost broke down in the middle of it; while he struggled for words and for air with his trembling lips, he had the feeling that with every word he should bow to the ground.

He wanted to throw light on the other man’s fate with his own.

The disgrace of the uttered words instantly disgraced his dead.

His dull cry of pain had no echo.

Even after so many decades, he could not predict what a man locked hermetically in his will and physical strength might do with his feelings. Neither of them failed to notice that in the interval of their struggle with these blind emotions, the searchlights on the prison watchtowers had been turned on. The beams bore through the twilight; the harsh light spread and stretched out over the water.

Reflected light fell on Balter’s eyes and on the pastor’s glasses.

My dear son, my only one, like a common criminal, like a dog, he continued, crying out in his pain even more dully, they threw him into an unmarked grave, you must know who they were, I don’t know anything, nothing, they shot him or hanged him.

Without tearing himself away from Balter’s shining face, he jerked his head toward the other shore.

It’s true. Not where you worked but in the terrible prison on Kozma Street,
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at least that’s what one supposes. This much I had to tell you.

He managed to unload this portion of his rage and then retrieve some of it with his explanation.

Balter had to take his eyes off the tormented man, though his professional curiosity was immediately aroused to know during which political wave the death sentence might have been issued. He had little doubt it had to do with 1956. To place the case correctly in the chronology, all he had to do was to look at the pastor and gauge the quality of his agitation with his sense organs. He could endure his own defeat only if he unilaterally relinquished their fellowship, which until a moment ago he had strongly expected the pastor would do. War criminals and relatives of Arrow Cross men behaved humbly; they could not afford such outbursts. And the debased and humiliated relatives of communists lacked anger and hatred, and they never gave up their rebellious, haughty conviction in the rectitude of their cause. Balter yanked his shirt and towel off his shoulder and slapped them down on the cracked silt; before the other man could try to stop him he undid his belt and shed his pants in a single vehement movement.

As if denying his decency, he stepped out of his pants and started for the thin stream at the center of the riverbed. As if with this majestic gesture he was telling the pastor that their audience had ended.

Before he could comprehend the other man’s nakedness, offered up as prey, the pastor quickly turned aside and without a word began to walk away. Not to see the other man’s genitals again; he did not wish himself so great a humiliation. And when he was certain he could see nothing of the man but his shadow in the light hovering on the water, he stopped and very loudly called back.

May God bless you, then.

Hearing his words echo from the other shore, from the episcopal see and from the heavy reddish brick walls of the prison, he knew his request for a blessing was in fact a curse.

By then Balter was in the water up to his knees, slapping some on his chest and shoulder before dipping his whole body in.

Driven once more by the zeal of correction, the pastor began.

May the Lord watch over you, guide your every step. That is what I shall ask him to do.

Again his voice came back to him as a threat; his apology to the other man was in vain, and in vain would he pray for the immense mercy of forgiveness.

There is no forgiveness.

The first ripe apricot fell off the tree in the middle of Balter’s garden just after midnight. It fell from somewhere near the top of the tree, hitting and grazing branches in its fall, and the first thud, which awakened Balter, was quickly followed by others.

Dávid slept peacefully that night, though he usually tossed, talked, and shouted in his sleep, or even walked around the dark rooms of the parsonage as if he were awake. His older sister and grandfather had to be on the lookout, though in the one-story house he could not harm himself as he might in the apartment in Budapest, where he also sleepwalked.

But in the morning Balter did not find fallen apricots under the tree. He stared at the ground dumbfounded. Of course, in the shade of the wide-crowned tree and on this sandy rise grass grew very sparsely. He kept looking but did not find any fruit under the outermost branches either. He hadn’t bothered to separate the sounds and sights of his dreams from those of his wakefulness, or perhaps to look for some connection between them. He quickly deflected his thoughts from this issue; some animal must have taken them, he said to himself, he only dreamed of hearing them fall; and he went about his business.

But he knew of no animal that would take or eat ripe apricots.

At noon, when the horseflies arrived and he was cooling himself under the tree, as was his wont, another few ripe apricots fell to the ground.

As some sort of last warning.

He looked at their soft flesh against the sandy-gray ground, but did not touch them. Later, after the last ring of the midday bells, he stood up to put on his shirt. But he couldn’t find it on the sunny branch where he had hung it a short hour earlier. He was amazed. He looked at the empty branch for a long time, then went into the house but did not find the shirt there either.

As if the landscape, dizzy with the midday heat, denied every answer dictated by common sense.

Of course, eventually he’d have to assess what was happening to him here.

He sat on his only chair in the room and forgot about his lunch. If I can’t find it now, he excused himself, I’ll find it later. A weak breeze barely moved the air. The wind couldn’t have carried away my faded old shirt, the earth couldn’t have swallowed it. That was the sum of his assessment. Anxiety and fear, which at other times might have quickly weakened him, did not recur today. Today he was not confronted with an imaginary danger; for the first time destiny had sent palpable signs to him. Now he was sure that apricots had fallen from the tree during the night, no matter how often he tried to defend his memory by calling it a dream. Nor did he doubt that he had spread his wet shirt out on the same sun-beaten branch today as always. In response to these ominous signs, he entrusted himself to his own calm nature; he seemed to know exactly what to expect of those signs.