Parallel Stories: A Novel (209 page)

He would not say bloodstains.

Those stains came off easily enough; sweet apricot is much harder to wash off, because it is sweet and sticky as honey. He had to dip and squeeze out the towel several times.

But you saw, man, didn’t you, that everything was becoming bloody.

He did; he doesn’t want to lie.

The bloodstained towel had dried in the meantime; they found bloody water in the dishwashing pot.

Truth was, he didn’t pay much attention to that because he was in a hurry. He washed off most of it, wanted to catch the first ferry. It leaves at 4:40 unless someone requests a special trip.

He would not have wanted to wake up the ferrymen for a special trip.

He put on the same white shirt, the same dark suit in which he had taken leave of his mates on the Vác shore to take the first ferry in this direction.

He carefully locked the house with the body inside.

The sleepy ferrymen noticed nothing unusual about him.

On the far side, at the end of the landing dock, a young woman waited for them that summer dawn. She had a medium-size suitcase in her hand. Halfway across, the navigator had already noticed that little Melinda was coming home. With irrepressible joy he passed the news to the ticket taker. Until the side of the ferryboat bumped against the landing dock, the two men wondered why she was arriving at such an unusual time. They could see that she maintained her smile, though she seemed a bit sleepy. The ticket taker did not tie up the ferry and the navigator did not even shut off the engine, rather they both began to shout to her, asking her to get on board, they’d take her across on a special trip.

Balter the murderer stepped off the boat without saying good-bye, and the lovely girl got on, laughing. The special trip across the river carried Dávid’s sister, who had thought out well in advance what she would say to the ferrymen and to her grandfather, and how she would satisfy her kid brother’s curiosity.

Balter broke out in a sweat, but nothing happened during the early morning crossing, and the ferrymen certainly did not ask him anything. Later, shrugging their shoulders, they said they had figured he’d been called in to his former workplace. He probably could use a supplement to his pension. As soon as he stepped off the ferry, he removed his jacket and with a youthful motion threw it over his shoulder. He walked up the paved shore like that. There was no one on the street that led him back to the prison.

The single opening in the endless, ancient, three-story-high stone wall was a small steel door. For security reasons, the former driveway had been walled off sometime in the 1950s, but the nicely carved baroque frame of the main gate was left in the wall. He would have thought it improper to show up with the jacket over his shoulder. He put it on at the personnel entrance before he rang the bell. Shortly, an eye appeared in the peephole and the door opened invitingly.

The prison guards, his former pals, received Balter with frenzied enthusiasm. Their riotous shouting lured more of them out of the building and into the guardroom; they all touched him, patted him on the back, laughing, bantering, and he naturally did not respond. The men found nothing unusual about this since they had never known him to be talkative. They pushed him onto a chair, and he, seeing the joy of so many strong men, smiled gently.

Suddenly he remembered something he found funny enough to tell as a little joke.

Is that female rat still coming around, he asked them.

He turned very quietly to them with this question, which magnified its effect. They marveled at him, as at some sage who sooner or later will touch on the main point. This was an offhand remark made among guards, convicts serving severe sentences, and newly arrived prisoners.

Of course they didn’t talk about it in regular conversations. Real men don’t talk about matters of the heart. Only a few words, whispered through clenched teeth, and the terrifying thought would begin to take root in the minds of new prisoners.

Don’t take it hard, partner, thus the old boys to newly arrived ones, at least we have rats here.

This was a team game that sometimes even a rat could not avoid. The prison guards with their dogs were meant to catch rats alive, or they’d help in the hunt, which is no mean entertainment and—the most important thing—not without danger.

It was something they had to do, anyway, when the rats grew too numerous in the food depot or came over en masse in the drainpipes from the bishop’s palace, helped by a high water level.

Once we had a braggart here who could take it for twenty years. He didn’t want to go for the pitcher, you see, but he did get to like one of them good-looking females.

You won’t believe it, goddamn it, but there’s always a meek one among them who gets hooked on it.

All you’ve got to tell a newly arrived convict in the dark is that if she comes just shove it in and let her have it.

Sleep eventually overcomes the terrible dreams on those first nights, and when that happens, in with the rat under the cover.

When the guffawing died down, all he said was that he killed him.

They could not stop their wild laughter right away since they did not know this new version of the prank. But they did know that Balter and his wife had been living in a murderous relationship all their lives, in other words that they had a bad marriage.

Now they saw the strange yellow mud that was stuck to his shoes, saw that his suit hung loosely on his frighteningly scraggy body.

All he wanted from them was to call the warden.

They remained quiet, no one dared do this since none of them saw any reason for or sense in doing it.

Once in a while one lets his wife have a good one, or even beats her up. The next day, or a week later, they make up with a lot of tears and promises, and that’s when women screw best.

While they were thinking about this, they had to notice the hitherto unfamiliar smile on Balter’s suspiciously dirty and unshaven face; until then they had seen that kind of gentleness only on the faces of strangers.

He reached into his pocket for his house key and put it on the table. The telephone was right there on the guardroom table, but it did not occur to anyone to take steps while Balter was sitting there.

They were quiet, looking at him, afraid even to light up. After a while it became impossible not to believe he had killed somebody.

But a long time passed before one of them finally left the room.

From that moment on he answered all their questions from behind his kindly smile.

When the guard came back and stopped by the door, prepared to take him to the warden, Balter readily followed him.

The Lover of Her Beauty

The expensive things strewn on the floor, the brand-new work clothes missing from the hook, and the fine yellow leather shoes kicked to where the stinking ankle boots used to be caused no small headache for the Gypsies. Never in their lives had they seen such yellow leather shoes.

How did they get here; who made Tuba’s work boots disappear.

Nevertheless they went back to work.

Although not everything was in perfect order they could not stop. If only because the tar was melting, boiling, bubbling in the cauldron, and they were being paid by area of repairs completed.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the big machine was puffing.

Usually they did not talk while working, but their silence now became bitter and agitated. They were also affected by the beer they’d drunk at the nearby roadside food stall, as if at a friendly celebration, in the company of their Hungarian foreman, an older man named Bizsók.

The work team had five members.

A kid named Jakab stoked the fire of the machine; he also handled the cauldron’s feeder. He was a tall, puny young man, still an adolescent. The stubble above his overly thick lips and on his round, childlike chin was more like fuzz; on his well-shaped shiny skull one could see that it was no barber who had sheared him so mercilessly. One fine early morning he’d awakened to find his limbs tied to the bed while a pair of scissors went snipping around his head. In vain he shouted and implored them to let him go; in vain he yanked at the straps as hard as he could, which was not very hard, or hurled terrible curses at the men. They told him, stop jumping around unless you want scabs on your pretty mug. They lathered his head and shaved it smooth.

He let them work the razor; he was afraid, trembling, he endured it, sniveling; not very manly of him, but he cried.

Now his large dark eyes were again filling with so many glistening tears that he could barely see what he had to do. Two men pushed their metal wheelbarrows under the feeder. The iron sizzled and sputtered as the boiling tar flowed into the barrow, the hub creaked and grated under the hot weight.

The two men with the wheelbarrows were brothers, both of them mature men with families; they resembled each other too—skinny, hairless, black, and small. Muscles hardened into knots kept their backs curved even when they were not wheeling their barrows. They wore cotton work pants, long faded from too much light and too much washing, asbestos gloves on their hands, and wood-soled clogs on their feet. One was László, the other Imre, but nobody called them by their first names. If somebody asked for Téglás, everyone knew the caller was referring to Imre, the younger brother, since the older one hardly ever said anything and one could not talk to him as to a human being. But Imre talked a lot, quickly and enthusiastically, so there was no point in addressing the other brother, not even by his family name. He acted as if he were mute, yet he enjoyed laughing at things and one could tell from the roguish squints in his eyes that he knew what was what. As small children they had slept by their father’s side, curled into each other. As part of the world’s natural order the smaller boy nestles into the lap of the bigger one. The smallest boy was always pressed closest to the father, clinging to the large body with his tiny hands, and the other boys, in order of birth, curled into one another. Their mother and sisters were available to the boys only in the light of day; this was the strict moral code. But where was the mud-walled, sod-lined shanty, half dug into the ground, with its handsome, carefully built little oven and the always spick-and-span cooking plate. How many years ago did their parents die. Nevertheless the strict law of birth succession still ruled the boys’ relationships. Death too they could imagine only as they did the red-hot, empty cooking plate when there was nothing to cook.

Whatever laughing László did, crackbrained Imre did as well; he couldn’t help it. But if Imre, head and arms flying in all directions, began to pour out all those superfluous words, László would accompany the many sentences with the lazy nod of an experienced man. The truth of the younger brother was reinforced by the prestige of the older. Bizsók also noticed that the older brother never questioned the younger one’s word when they were around Hungarians; at most he’d busy himself with something else.

Perhaps it was only that eternally valid difference in the depths of their souls that made their furrowed faces slightly different.

In a state of constant readiness, his eyes wide, Imre concentrated on what the right thing was to say, while the older Téglás brother knew what they should do.

They ran as they pushed the wheelbarrows heavy with the hot molten material, and then they emptied them with a single quick lift, neatly tipping them over; sizzling and sputtering, the tar oozing out in front of Tuba, who with wide leisurely strokes of his very heavy leveling blade smoothed out any lumps in the hot mass, kneeling then squatting then kneeling again. He worked with incredible elegance and absolute inner discipline. The fifth man on the team, Bizsók, was both their mechanic and their supervisor. Sometimes he would check with his level and other instruments on a half-finished job when it was still possible to make corrections if need be, but the judgment of Tuba’s eyes seldom disappointed him. This Bizsók was the oldest and, by the nature of things, most consequential member of the team. The Gypsies idolized him for his fairness, though they had his weak points pegged as well. Sometimes among themselves they would contemptuously call him dumb peasant. Because it was not his work, not even his nice family, but his apple orchard that meant everything to him. He’d hardly have gotten home from work after a long train ride when he’d head straight for his orchard; he never stopped working. The Gypsies considered him a wastrel, a man who’d wasted his life for the sake of unpredictable profits. If the road construction company, which covered half the country, hadn’t urgently needed every skilled hand it could get, and if Bizsók hadn’t had the sense of duty he had, he could have retired, but as an old-fashioned man he considered the world’s anonymous needs as a law governing his personal life.

He kept at both his job and his apple orchard for the same reason, though he couldn’t have expressed in words what his compulsion was.

And the Gypsies certainly couldn’t have told him what to do differently.

Since both his grown sons had built their own houses, many different jobs awaited him, and him alone, in his enormous bountiful orchard. Occasionally he even helped his foster daughter, though because of her foreign blood he was a little afraid of her. Bizsók was rational and somewhat reserved, a man whose circumstances had taught him sensible husbandry, so he created order for himself out of whatever was at his disposal. He came from one of the most deprived areas of the Alföld, but he’d never thought of himself as poor among the truly poor. He couldn’t, in any case, because a man in a Tiszahát-region village with two threshing machines to his name was considered a rich man in those days. He had inherited one machine from his father before the war, the other he received when he came home from a POW camp, from the bequest of a Jewish thresher who had perished in the war. It did not take long before both machines were taken away from him, and thereafter he had lived away from his family.

He left because he couldn’t swallow the insult of being ordered about at the collective farm’s machine and tractor station by his former day laborers, the very men who’d been responsible for taking his expensive threshing machines away from him.