Parallel Stories: A Novel (31 page)

Each sat facing the other as if facing a mirror.

As if they both had drawn in their bellies, thrust out their chests, and with tightly closed thighs pressed themselves to the seat. It was pleasurable to be here together, at each other’s disposal. They were entrusted to each other, and that is very different from the usual, everyday routine, deeper and more carelessly familiar. If this was true, then it was possible to get to Erna through Ágost, and Gyöngyvér hardly even noticed how it happened. Whatever the moment contained had no opposite pole, no charge of attraction or repulsion, and therefore the moment’s space and duration became infinite. And Erna did not even notice that the dying man, who might no longer be alive, had vanished from her life. A burst bubble would leave more of a trace. Their gazes opened wide onto each other, mutually revealed that each was not unacquainted with these lesser-known territories where no males ever enter. Of the two, Gyöngyvér was more experienced but also the more cautious and reticent. Lady Erna had always relied more on her imagination and memory, which made her demanding and greedy. But now the cabbie, much as he would have liked to, could not look in the rearview mirror. The wind was pushing the taxi this way and that; the entrance road to the island—still paved with the same smooth yellow ceramic tiles produced in Demén’s brick factory in Budakalász back in 1898 when they began building the ramp off the middle pier of the bridge, resting on the tip of the island—was slippery.

A careless thought or a wrong move while taking the curve would have been enough to send the cab into a spinning waltz.

The two women did not notice.

Their sensation was much more brutal than what is felt by little girls crazy about their female teachers, or by female teachers dazed by their own feelings for their frenzied pupils.

Every emotion has a primal state, the seat of instinct. Laughter had thrown them back into this primal state, whence they could continue, arm in arm and led by instinct, down another path. Instincts work the same way in everyone. But primal states, to which everyone always returns, are not the same and may not even resemble one another. In some people, the primal state lives on as a single experience that the person remembers only vaguely or would prefer to forget. Others forget so successfully that a vacuum is created where the experience had been; and the only reason to be aware of deliberate forgetting is that one cannot fill the vacuum with any old thing, for then it becomes a burning lack that can no longer be named. In yet others, the primal state means a chain of rippling interwoven experiences that cannot be untangled, and whether or not a person remembers which sensation produced which subsequent sensation, the primal state reveals itself according to the person’s instinctual needs.

Showing one of its pulsating and throbbing countenances—now this one, now that one.

Lady Erna, from a distance of several decades, looked back to the sole experience she cherished above all others as a sacrament. Gyöngyvér might have looked in several directions but did not want to see her experiences, neither yesterday’s nor yesteryear’s.

Yesterday’s experience filled the place of everything.

Instinct cannot be steered.

Once it stirs in its reeking den, there is nothing can keep it from flashing into view a few unavoidable images from a primal experience, even if it does not show the entire storehouse. One of Gyöngyvér’s primal experiences was that she had no one in the world and therefore felt as though she herself did not exist either. Or the very opposite: she did have somebody somewhere in the world, and the moment she could find this somebody would mark the beginning of her existence. Until then, pitying, cruel, caring, or indifferent girls and women would keep passing her on from hand to hand because they didn’t know what to do with her. She does not even have to look at them; one is just like the other. They are different in every way but similar in that none of them is the woman she belongs to.

Who does not exist.

The stream of others never dried out, however; they kept coming, replacing one another as though there was a magic source somewhere from which women sprang. She had had enough of women.

She’d preferred to look for a man who would supplant the only woman she’d been looking for, would fill the empty space.

Although she had spent her life in unceasing search, she never found what she was looking for, or rather, she always almost found it: a man, after all.

Lady Erna paid attention to only one young woman, one very special creature, in whom once, and only once, she had had a clear glimpse of herself. In her mind, she always returned to the same one and only young woman, whom she had failed to see for many decades though she knew she was still alive, and whom she truly did not want to see in the flesh since she could always see her in other women.

In the stormy half-light, in the taxi saturated with their perfumes and the acrid smell of tobacco, each stared coldly at the other’s strange face. As if the head of the young woman had been cast of bronze. Lady Erna had no use for a living person. But Gyöngyvér could see a double face in place of the single one. One of them wore face powder hastily applied, unevenly painted lipstick, and fatty beads of mascara as superfluous and clumsy armor.

No traces of their little laugh together remained on these faces.

Mother and son looked at her simultaneously, and if the son belonged to her, then she belonged to the mother.

This was terrible. This was no laughing matter. Once again, both women’s lips trembled with emotion. Which could not be taxed further. What is this, fumed Lady Erna to herself, in place of her own infuriated mother. And she fumed for Gyöngyvér too, because she had to be a mother to the younger woman. If the taxi hadn’t swerved a second time, in their embarrassment they probably would have leaned back on the seat and continued their chatter in an entirely different direction; it had strayed into dangerous territories and times.

The cabbie swore quietly to himself; the women heard only his muffled grumbling, not the innocent curse.

The swerve made them fall on each other and they couldn’t have said whether it was by accident or whether their instincts, quickly and almost shamelessly, took advantage of the moment. And once in this situation, they would have liked to touch each other’s face with their lips, lightly and fleetingly, to put an end, as it were, to the painful comedy that could not have been avoided. But this too turned out differently because of the taxi’s slipping and swerving. Lady Erna’s soft, lipstick-covered lips did encounter Gyöngyvér’s firm, perhaps too firm, dry lips—not directly, but as if the edge of one mouth enclosed the corner of the other. And each of them felt the other was the initiator, and deliberately so. That was horrible. Before one mouth could slip over the other completely, they both recoiled and restrained themselves. The swerve, the inevitable pleasure, the jostling, their fitful protestations, the entire turmoil was enough for Gyöngyvér’s hard little forehead to push Lady Erna’s wide-brimmed hat off her head.

Gyöngyvér reached for it carelessly. She did not catch it but managed to knock the silver box out of Lady Erna’s hand. Both women squealed, one after the other; and the large black hat adorned with a shiny cluster of ribbons landed gracefully on the front seat next to the cabbie, while the silver box snapped open and the blindingly white pills scattered on the ribbed rubber floor mat.

Relieved and squealing, they laughed simultaneously. The cabbie, busy steadying his vehicle, could not help them. They fell silent in almost the same instant.

They were both gripped by the fright they had caused each other.

The residual sensation of the other’s lips clung to their own like a painful mark that brands rather than rewards. But it was not so easy to dismiss the whole thing. To arrive at the bedside of a dying man with one’s loins swelling with blood, squealing and laughing, as they were doing now, was a bit much. Sane persons do not behave like this; they expect better of themselves. In their confusion they froze for a few moments, the silence turning icy between them.

At the same time, she was suckling a baby on an unupholstered Dutch chair.

Gyöngyvér moved first; bending down, she began to collect the pills from the rubber mat.

Oh, I’m so ashamed, she said, switching back to her plaintive tone, I’m so sorry. Don’t be angry with me, I always wind up making trouble.

Come, come, never mind, replied Lady Erna, and she too bent down to look for the etui, which had disappeared under the front seat. She had to be careful not to crumple the documents in her lap. There was also the danger of bumping into each other again.

Oh, leave it, let me, I’m so sorry.

Oh, come on, you silly little thing.

I’ll pick them up.

To do the job, Gyöngyvér had to remove her gloves. The little white pills were stuck between the ribs of the rubber mat. In taking off the gloves she felt as if she had indecently bared herself in front of the wrong person.

She did not understand why she would feel this way about the mother.

And then, like a huge splash, the mass and loud noise of the wave filled the entire cavity in the rocks. For a second, between the uprights of the bridge railing, she could see the churning, windblown water below.

Would you mind giving me back my hat, said Lady Erna to the cabbie.

Right away, give me a moment, please, replied the cabbie, coolly and readily.

The young men, glittering with perspiration, interrupting their even and until now most powerful strokes, suddenly drew in their oars with a single decisive movement. She could not take her eyes off them. All she could think of was that they too were capable of it, and might have even done it during the night. She saw, and she wanted to shout to them, that in the next instant they’d be smashed against the rock. This sight appeared to be closer than the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck; she was still looking for the pills on the taxi floor. With a loud report, the waves slapped against the side of the boat. It was a light, narrow boat, but much heavier than the dinghies on the Tisza.

Signora
, heads down, mind the hats,
Signore
, your head, down, the young men shouted in their bright voices, in the early sunny hours, as they were tossed by the murmuring gentle waves of the sweetly fragrant sea; then the boat slipped through the narrow, craggy opening of the cave.

They were in nocturnal darkness and silence. She could continue to moan to herself, as she had done all night long, often outdoing the crickets. Nothing separates the different worlds. Impossible to separate pain from pleasure.

She put on her gloves again, adjusting them on her fingers as if that were the most important task in the world. She leaned forward a little, reached across the back of the front seat, but the driver still hadn’t returned her hat.

She had to press her knees close together to keep from feeling in her vagina this rapid little slipping across the seat as the powerful, rhythmic slippings of the night before. It was still sore. Just as it was back then, years later, when with her knees apart she sat on the hard Dutch chair suckling the baby, and the weak wintry light glimmered through the long, tall row of square-grid windows. Barely penetrating the fog and clouds. But under the gaze of the other woman she did press her knees together. To the demanding sound of the little mouth’s sucking, her womb contracted. She had plenty of milk, though. She had to press her bottom to the seat to lessen the pain when her womb’s opening convulsed; she could not help emitting tiny hissing sounds. Which she found pleasurable. The soft, glowing countenance of the other woman pampered, all but caressed her. The other woman knew well what caused those little hissing sounds. Wanted confirmation of her impression. When their eyes met, she knew the woman’s body was hungry. In the meantime, the opening of her womb repeatedly contracted and relaxed and she couldn’t have said, not even to herself, what she was hoping for and what she wanted to devour.

A sober, bright morning; the baby is working on her swollen breast. Does she hope that the turgid body of the cock and the large mass of its head, taut to the point of explosion, will still reach the mouth of her womb; or that this senseless and humiliating pain will dissolve in the enormously grotesque mouth of this woman, and that her parts will never be pried open again.

The first time they journeyed to the island of Capri was in the first year of their marriage, in the spring of 1924.

They stayed in the Villa Filomena, in Anacapri, the quieter, less expensive side of the island. The villa, with its antique columns and decorated terraces built on the edge of cliffs, hovered about a hundred meters above the sea. That morning, they went down to the water on the narrow, ominously steep steps cut into the rocks. There was no end to them. She said not a word of complaint about the steps, though her knees were trembling, albeit not only from fear. The small boat with the men floated below them like a blown dry bay leaf fallen onto the back of the waves. She held on, moved step by step; the depths attracted her irresistibly, as though another being were breathing inside her, one she ought to fear because it was ready to fall and take her with it. A gentle breeze kept her light blue silk dress close against her skin.

This provided enough pleasure to stifle complaints.

Down below, the little boat rose, then dipped gracefully, and on the shady rocks the waves kept roaring and rumbling, the water foamed white.

The woman who years later in the wintry light glimmering through the thick northerly fog watched the suckling was Geerte von Groot, daughter of the hotelier in Groningen. A peculiar creature, to whom she could not help returning in her mind because she never saw her again. Geerte was a few years older, herself a mother of two. After a few years of marriage, for reasons they would not talk about for a long time, she and her little ones moved back to her parents’ home. In a tall, narrow, Gothic house in Groningen, maybe the wallpaper changes, but otherwise everything stays the same for centuries. Geerte von Groot lived in the mansard apartment of the house adjacent to the hotel, in the same little room where she had lived as a little girl.