Parallel Stories: A Novel (57 page)

Except for the kapos, they kept on having their periods, and not only because they had food. And the
Blockälteste
, the head of the barracks, she menstruated too. They had permanent lovers, they had so-called normal sex lives and got extra portions of margarine. These are elementary conditions. All I need now is a piece of plaster and a pair of scissors and you’ll be properly taken care of.

The attention felt good to Mária, who was praying that Irma would go no further with her story, but whom she wanted to have close because, to be not the caregiver but the recipient of care was a treat she rarely had a chance to enjoy.

And telling a story was part of the care.

Mária had been taking care of Elisa night and day for more than two decades, and this period included air raids, bombings, living in the cellar, arrests during which she had no idea whether anyone was looking after Elisa in her stead, the endless days of the siege, the war. She should have interrupted, found another topic, but could think of nothing else to distract Irma with, until she remembered that when they couldn’t carry Elisa down to the cellar during air raids she took the girl’s head on her lap, right here in this bathroom. If anything should happen, at least she wouldn’t see it.

It happened, they couldn’t resist it; this is where, in their fear, they kissed and licked each other all over, surrounded by the shaking walls and bottles, they acted as two people who had reason to hurry. In her confusion, a little awkwardly, with her good hand she again twirled and then tucked behind her ear a strand of her straight gray hair.

You might even find some antiseptic pills there, she said. Médi is right: my whole apartment is one big mess.

And this is probably so, said Irma, continuing what she’d been saying before, as she found what she needed in the mirrored medicine cabinet, because in the end one’s left with nothing but one’s admirable or not so admirable traits. Don’t you think. There can’t be that many surprises. Or there can be, but nobody wants more injuries. The way your heart beats, that’s personal. But your blood is not, blood is impersonal.

Maybe that’s what you find repulsive. When one is young, one simply doesn’t acknowledge such embarrassing things.

You don’t mean to tell me that the same kind of blood circulates inside everybody.

Not in you, of course, you are the big blue-blooded exception. But think about it, she went on, her wry smile still on her lips. Your blood has its substance and its type, but even according to its substance or type, it doesn’t taste differently from other blood. Bókay always made the students in Andor’s class taste one another’s blood, a pretty hair-raising idea, wouldn’t you say, but in those days they had different ideas about hygiene.
Blut is ein besonders Saft, jedenfalls
, a special juice that’s not part of your character but exactly the other way ’round, you’re a part of it, along with your famous character, because you are one of the warm-blooded creatures, and I’m putting it mildly. This is annoying and insulting. What’s the good of all those original independent thoughts, what’s the point of this glorious individuality of ours. It means that you are also ruled by this enormous rabble, and who is to stop the janitors and dictators from following behind.

She sat back down on the rim of the bathtub and again carefully took hold of and raised Mária’s strong hand with its injured finger.

You know damn well I don’t know what to do with such concentrated social psychology, replied Mária quickly. She judged these dictators to be very dangerous and they might take Irma away from her.

She shrugged a little, as if to indicate that she was aware of the riskiness of her own moral relativism.

They can follow right behind or go where they please for all I care. My starting point is that there is a given surface and if I want something, I should be moving inward on that surface. Or downward, or upward, hell-bound or heavenward to the angels, anywhere.

And you are always doing the very opposite.

I can’t presume that people have character or can possess any traits. What I have to follow is a man’s shape. For me that is his only trait—the surfaces, curves, configurations, the limbs. All of which is flesh, only flesh, and form. What might happen, at best, is that after a while you discover that another human being has something you wouldn’t mind being attached to, has, let’s say, something properly constituted that determines his behavior, that has some sort of permanence and keeps making him repeat some sentence or gesture. But this is rare. In other cases, what you discover is that the person’s behavior has no iconography at all, and then that becomes the person’s characteristic feature. That’s what makes people adaptable, my dear. Whatever happens, they must remain flexible.

Nothing can compel them, or at least they feel no moral compulsion. That’s what produces their blissful chaos. You can stare at me like that all you want, but yes, this is your average human being. You talk as if everything had been already decided, and that’s why everything can be arranged. Well, nothing is decided.

No, no, generally, I talk about two things at once, but people usually hear only one.

Two is too many for me too.

Your monologue is very nice, maybe a bit much even for you.

It sometimes happened that one of them offended the other.

They were watching something on the surfaces of each other’s eyes that in good conscience could not be called personal yet was not impersonal.

Like lamplight reflected in the eyes.

At which both could change course. Mária could get over being offended, and they could both hear from the other side of the door Elisa’s odd, rhythmically repeated little whimpers. They never wanted to reach a conclusion in their conversations, never, and perhaps that is why their contact was so powerful.

The moments they bestowed on each other kept them captive, but this did not explain why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

Why must they part again and again.

Just look at it, look right into it, continued Mrs. Szemz
ő
, in a seemingly indifferent voice, cleansed of all passion.

You’ll understand what I’m talking about.

But under the influence of some unnamed shame, she was the one who had to turn away from Mária’s wide-open eyes. She didn’t want to betray Elisa, whimpering on the other side of the door, with Mária, not even symbolically.

And if she had to leave the illuminated surface of Mária’s eyes, she peered at her open flesh again.

Her head had a tendency to tremble, lowering and adjusting itself to spoken words, but she did not let this tic have free rein. It was an embarrassing, uncomfortable matter. When alone with it before a mirror, she would study the tic for a long time, trying to find ways to eliminate or tame it, to make this little professional fiasco of hers as unnoticeable as possible.

The flesh itself is what’s strange, she said quietly. Even though she was thinking of something other than what they were talking about.

Mária couldn’t divine how closely connected everything Irma was saying was to everything that she herself was ruminating on. Most people are unsuspecting toward each other in this way.

Irma was busy thinking about that strange man’s tightly packed back muscles shining with perspiration, the coiling grooves of his spine, his surprisingly round, powerful buttocks with its cleft open all the way to his anus and immersed in slow-moving thrusts, its sides at the base of his thighs made concave by tension, she was thinking about his straining thighs and his hard testicles flashing in their slipperiness.

For a single instant, he even rolled his head back over his well-defined shoulder to see who had surprised him.

Because in itself, perhaps it’s not so interesting that humans are the only beings whose behavior and thinking are completely imbued with the continuous, relentless desire for possible copulation, along with all the attendant fantasies, that’s what she was thinking about, that’s what she was weighing while talking with her friend about something else entirely. The image was sharp and immovable, but the fantasy or memory of it was probably more important for her than the reality of the act. This only shows how unlikely it is that one can individualize the actual act. Acknowledging this might be a turning point in one’s life.

Everyone strives to individualize the act of lovemaking because otherwise one would miss the proper share of its pleasures, and everyone fails at this because the act exists only in reciprocity. If there’s enough mutual pleasure in the act, one will not find one’s own person; if one strives for the personal, one becomes stuck on the other person’s personality and the pleasure is broken, uneven, or perhaps totally inadequate.

The search for the act, then, is directed not by instinct alone, but by the need to individualize and, at least equally, by the inevitable failure, big or small depending on the level of individualization.

One must move on, hoping that the individualization will succeed with someone else.

Religions and myths are not mistaken on this question, she continued aloud, your own flesh is impersonal, only the imagination is personal. Though frankly I don’t know why your cut from that stupid glass is so deep.

I’m not going to look at it, so you might as well stop trying to make me.

But you could, said Irma, with obvious relish. There are ugly wounds, but this one is handsome, an extremely well turned-out injury.

I believe you.

It probably doesn’t hurt now, but it may throb later.

Please forgive me, but we must look in on Elisa, I may have alarmed her with that racket. She’ll keep up this whimpering until I kick her around a little.

Keep pressing on it a little longer.

It feels too tight.

Don’t worry, that’s how it has to be.

They stood up simultaneously, to put an end to their unpredictable shared moment.

Mária was ready to withdraw her decision, however, even though she had been the one to suggest it.

Irmuska, I’d like to ask you something, she said suddenly, and, very uncharacteristically, she blushed.

Come on, out with it, and then I’ll tell you something I have a hard time keeping to myself.

Something one doesn’t like to talk about, or ask. But this I just can’t swallow.

Before she spoke, for a flash it occurred to her that maybe this was the moment to tell Irma about Erna Demén’s request.

This would be the most favorable moment.

Why didn’t you want, she said aloud—and with these words she silenced her other sentence—why didn’t you let them take you away, I don’t even remember now from where, the name of that city, what was it. In other words, why did you come home, that’s what I’d like to know, why on earth didn’t you go away with them.

What are you looking for here.

Could you answer that for me.

Irma needed a moment to catch her breath and throw her mind back.

Why indeed.

But why are you asking such an awkward thing.

The question was like a shout for help. After a few days, when she could finally walk on both feet without leaning on anything, she had managed to get hold of a coat. She did not know what Mária was planning to do but had a premonition it was something fatal. She was cold, always cold and shivering, and she took off in her coat, heading who knows where.

It was hard to carry the coat.

How can you ask such a stupid thing, she moaned.

I can’t live without knowing. Answer me.

But how can I answer, for God’s sake. You could exercise a bit of Christian humility.

Mária laughed warmly, which did not mean she was ready to forgo an answer.

In less than a half hour on the empty sunny road, an armed patrol took her back to the hospital barracks.

Mária stood in front of her, motionless in the doorway, and Elisa kept on whimpering.

And then for days she could do nothing but lie on her pallet, helpless and fevered.

The second time, it was the bumpy ride on a wagon with two Czech peasants that took her back. The peasants had set out to plow their field and now had to lose time dealing with her; they were cursing her Jew-whore mother in their unfamiliar language.
Ty skurvená židovská d
ě
vko.
She had to be careful in the bouncing wagon not to let her already injured body slide into the sharp plowshare. They called her rotten Jewish bitch or something like that. She had a hard time arranging these images.

Should have dropped dead, bitch.

They must have been saying something like that when they carefully lifted her off the wagon.
M
ě
las radši zdechnout.
First she remembered the coat and the smell of the coarse fabric, and then the servant’s room in whose door not so much the sight but the beastly exhalations of the two bodies held her back, and that is why she wouldn’t let them, did not wait for them to take her away with the others.

Do you have any idea why you are asking me this, she inquired cautiously and quietly. By the way, it’s Prachatice, she said, that’s the name of the place. I’m really interested in why you are so interested in this.

Where on earth is Prachatice, asked Mária in a tone that suggested she found the name itself outrageous. She has this compensation coming to her. After all these years, she has the right to punish Irma a little bit.

How can I tell you.

In her gentle way, Irma Arnót would have been more than willing to answer Mária Szapáry.

From what I can see on the map, and I’ve checked it several times since, the border is about fifty kilometers east of Regensburg.

But her willingness was also nothing but a quiet revenge. As if she were saying in advance to Mária, you’ll regret having asked this question.

They were herding us across the Regen valley, you know, over the pass, I mean the ones who could make it. I don’t remember the name of the pass. Maybe not very far from there. A little bit closer to Budweis, if that means anything to you. It was called Aussig in the good old days of the monarchy. They herded the rest into the hay barn, those who could barely move, and then set the barn on fire. This happened on the next to last day, can you imagine that. And we were allowed to move on.