Parallel Stories: A Novel (29 page)

This led to an insane thought—perhaps she should reach Ágost through the person of this elderly woman.

During the past weeks Ágost had quietly, politely, and brutally rejected her and not only in his sleep and not by chance. The night before, the struggle had turned brutal; it wasn’t, Gyöngyvér felt, the usual transition between two bitter fights and reconciliation, which sometimes she provoked for its gratifying excitement. Now, with the older woman suddenly opening up, Gyöngyvér felt that these two mature humans were made of much the same stuff. If only she could cross over into Erna, she might be saved. In the meantime, her splitting headache was getting worse. The realization struck her like lightning: if she could manage this, she would truly be saved. It was no longer about mother and son having identical tones of voice, skin color, deep and close-set eyes, piercing and constantly inquiring looks, of being almost perfect reflections of each other. No. Which would explain everything.

Gyöngyvér, contrary to all appearances, was not stupid. True, what she could formulate for herself, based on the reports of her senses, was usually flatter, more banal, more boring, and much simpler, almost primitive, because so much less than what she had sensed. Now, for example, she kept telling herself that if she succeeded in winning over the mother, she would not have to move out of the apartment. Which she dreaded.

Like a child, she was euphoric that Lady Erna would save her.

The survival instinct compels no less greed from her than it did from other people. Still, she often became entangled in situations in which she appeared to have committed some unforgivable impropriety or done something immoral.

As was happening now, when Lady Erna failed to see why Gyöngyvér responded to her overture with silence. She could have gone on looking at the younger woman’s pained little smile, but she was increasingly impatient. She preferred to turn away and look, through the rainwater dripping down the taxi window, at the buildings on the boulevard rushing by. A good thing she did, because the pain and the dissembling made Gyöngyvér’s lips tremble violently. Pain assailed her in merciless waves. She nearly fainted. It was clear to her that she was not going to lose the man, but this was sheer self-deception, because she had already lost him. She sought an explanation for this loss, but there was none, and she should have accepted it like that, as something that made no sense.

They had to stop at the intersection with Podmaniczky Street; the windshield wipers creaked and clattered. Lady Erna grumbled to herself, I have only myself to blame. I had to bring her along. If I only knew why I’m so stupid, even in my old age, why am I going out of my way for this silly goose. How can I be so stupid. And how could this little foundling understand how insanely generous I have been.

Gyöngyvér sensed the rebuke, but from afar, for now she was preoccupied with what might be the great discovery of her life. Not only was the dread gone, but it was replaced by the kind of happiness that until now only this one man had given her. As if a footpath across one person’s body led to the soul of another. As if in proximity to Lady Erna, she knew Ágost’s body better. Not only did she think these general thoughts, but she saw the path before her or, more correctly, the circuitous but ineluctable paths that lead from one person to another. She must choose one, must set foot on one of them. In the exhortation lurked an unpleasant urging or reproach. But I am already on the path. As if she were failing in some way.

I’m going to fuck it up; I’ll make a mess of things again.

She sensed, of course, that she should have returned the touch, she should have squeezed Lady Erna’s gloved hand in return.

Now she could no longer reach for it.

That meant something irreparable.

She was barely nineteen when on a winter morning she stepped out from the gate of the kindergarten teachers’ college in Szeged. A small suitcase in one hand, in the other a cardboard box tied with string. She started out on the wet street in the hazy December cold. In her coat pocket she had a slip of paper with an address where she could stay for a few nights. Ever since then, she had had to find a roof for every single night. This was not a figure of speech; it happened many times that she returned to her lodging only to find, in front of an office door or in a filthy stairwell, her hastily packed and discarded belongings, and she was out on the street again. Then there was only the streetcar, train, or train station, until the police chased her away. She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know. In those places, her head held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body. She had been a night lodger, sleeping in beds rented by others for a day; when she had it a little better she became a real subtenant, first in Kecskemét and later in Budapest. From there, however, she had no place to go. Singing lessons were expensive. And her decision to marry a rich fellow made no difference. Either no sugar daddy presented himself or the men she managed to snare did not want to marry her.

One man would have been ready to marry her anytime but she did not want to; she was disgusted by him even though he worshipped her.

Slowly she outgrew the marriageable age.

As soon as she got to know someone new, the familiar dread returned, and no matter whom she went to bed with, in what fashion, she felt she had an intestinal obstruction and should spend the trysts farting rather than making love. And whenever she broke up with someone, the destructive excitement went away.

As if she had to wander down a wide, hopelessly dusty highway without end or beginning. But every cell in her body, her every hair remembered the paradisiacal state that she had left behind and to which, due entirely to her own clumsiness, she could not return. Still, secret little footpaths might cross the long wide highway even now.

This promised a greater experience than if she had found her mother.

When she had thoughts like these, there often appeared to her the image of that woman, now forever ten years her junior, who probably always traveled on this highway of despair.

Now, however, she felt something that might be called an acquittal and it was close to happiness.

She thought she should say thank you, she was happy.

Oh, my, suddenly I am so happy. And if ephemera hadn’t entered her mind, she would have let those words spill out. But luckily she could not say them out loud because her enormous bitterness, the thin-aired plateau of her dissatisfaction, and her own grave self-rebukes filled her with ephemera. Suddenly she didn’t know how to address Ágost’s mother. Actually she had never known, and therefore avoided doing so. Hard as it was to accept that Lady Erna unceremoniously addressed her in the familiar form, there was nothing she could do about it, and she’d never dare do the same in return. Maybe after she had been discovered as a great singer. But now she did in fact want to use the familiar form with Lady Erna; having her hand squeezed by the older woman’s gloved hand not only paralyzed her sense of reality but gave free rein to her imagination and made her uncontrollable. She felt an unhindered flow of possibility, which Ágost had never given her completely nor completely withheld. She had been living with him in a state of constant agitation. The passion so unceremoniously unleashed by the mother may have been matched in every respect by the passion that alternately flared up and died away, though not completely, in the son. Gyöngyvér had to catch at the mother. And as a second, final possibility, even her early morning dream appeared. Perhaps to protect her from hope’s exaggerations.

The enormous, murky river with its deep current, this is the familiar river, but familiar from where.

Unfortunately, I have a singing lesson this afternoon, she said hoarsely after a little while, which was a quite ridiculous response from the other woman’s point of view, almost insulting and coming too late. If I could get to a phone and cancel with Margit Huber, she added hastily, as if hearing her own words had brought her to her senses, I would love to go downtown too.

She felt she had extricated herself cleverly and just as cleverly managed to avoid addressing the older woman directly in the formal or familiar form.

But now Lady Erna would not even look at her.

The voice was false.

It gave away that the singing lesson was more important. Lady Erna knew only two extremes. She either engulfed the other person, all but devouring her, not letting go, hugging the other to the point of suffocation, or she kept a proper distance, observing everything coolly and scornfully, picking at every little fault one by one. Every little mistake. Every last little weakness. As if explaining to herself why this relationship was beneath her. Don’t bother yourself, my dear, she said to herself while Gyöngyvér was going on about her singing lessons, complaining of the cost if she failed to call off a lesson in time.

It was ridiculous, it was downright painful to listen to this.

And where is this lesson, where does this Margit Huber of yours live, she asked in the same grating high tone she had used earlier to instruct the cabbie.

In Hajós Street, right behind the Opera.

I see, Lady Erna replied, as if with these two words the entire matter had been settled forever.

Just as she had not beaten about the bush with Kristóf either; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. No betrayal fazed her, and this was a source of her strength. There was no empathy or love, nothing, there was nothing without a beginning, and in that case why shouldn’t everything have an end as well. There was perhaps one amorous exception in her life. Whenever she remembered it, she shuddered with joy and sorrow. Hatred is more persistent, unfortunately, but even that comes to an end one day. At the same time she realized that her nihilism was a strength only in the eyes of others, because at bottom she always had to choose it; that’s how it is when misanthropy is born of insult.

If not for this weakness of hers, she might not have had heart problems. Now Gyöngyvér managed to say something that made Lady Erna turn around.

At least I’d get to see some ready-made suits, she said pensively, and was happy that when talking about clothes she did not have to feel Ágost’s body inside hers, his face on her face. There’s no use looking for an English suit. Not only in black but in any color. Besides, the English style is too severe and not very feminine. If you ask me, it’s not worth having one made, either.

While the taxi waited for the light to change and an almost empty trolley passed in front of them, the cabbie watched in the rearview mirror, hoping to understand what the women were talking about, in his concentration forgetting to take off when the light changed.

But for god’s sake, exclaimed Lady Erna irritably, what makes you think I want a black English suit. I never said anything so asinine, and why would I.

Please believe me, Gyöngyvér went on, any seamstress can come up with a nice little suit in two days. And it’s something that has many uses. You can wear it with a blouse or a thin turtleneck, which is very nice. The better the fabric, the greater one’s playing field with a suit like that.

You may be right, Lady Erna replied, surprised.

Why did she have to share these delicate matters with this woman. She wanted to withdraw, not let their shoulders touch.

Yet there was something impressive and self-assured in what Gyöngyvér had said. And it was news to Lady Erna that the English suit was passé, démodé; she’d never heard English tailoring called overly severe. What idiocy. As if it did her any good to learn about English suits. Still, the contact of the shoulders felt good. Taking advantage, deviously, of what seemed accidental. What had been cut off between the gloved hands a moment ago now streamed through their coats and dresses. But, refusing to believe it might make her feel better about herself, she could not. And she let it happen for another reason: Gyöngyvér sat on the side of her heart, and her touch had a decidedly calming effect on the rhythm of her heartbeat.

Her medication had largely resolved her two attacks that morning, and she had some satisfaction in having emptied her bowels properly; in the pericardial depression, however, there remained a certain amount of tension, a restlessness that had deepened with the news from the hospital and the ensuing haste.

Very close to a fatal ventricular fibrillation.

It seems I’ll be indisposed again, she thought suddenly and for good reason. What she felt was less than the usual forewarning of an attack but more than a mind set on self-preservation could ignore. She grimly monitored her body functions and could not arrest her rising fear. Her tension was eased somewhat by the involuntary contact with Gyöngyvér’s shoulder, though it communicated tension radiating from Gyöngyvér’s body, unhindered by any excess of weight or fat.

Unexpected happiness radiated directly into the muscles of Lady Erna’s heart made tense by dread, and her pulse slowed, the auricles and ventricles working less convulsively. In proximity to the other woman, the cardiac tension she had been carrying around for weeks as a terrible ache of the soul was subsiding. Of course, she could not count on any lasting relief. Any feeling that originates in another human being, however pleasant, by necessity leads to new, possibly harmful stimulation. If you need me to calm you down, I’ll give you something, but you can be sure I shall take it back or make you work it off. And assaults of pain or pleasure are all the same to one’s system. It responds to both with agitation. Agitation raises the pulse rate, the pulse increases the blood pressure, pleasure and pain exact the same price. Young people hardly distinguish between the two payments: a young body takes joy in sensing the heart’s pursuit of either pleasure or danger.

A damaged system will, however, after perfidious silence avenge emotional excess with an acute shortness of breath. Not when first stimulated to excitement but a little later, when the heart muscles can no longer meet the demands of rising blood pressure, speeding pulse, and localized hyperemia. Pressure and asphyxiation are warning signals when the shoulders or lips or loins, engorging with blood, are no longer points of stimulation, but the entire body is—from the hair on the head to the tops of the toes, when the very flesh of the heart labors under the spell of stimulation.