Parallel Stories: A Novel (83 page)

In truth, the business egoism of the larger context left its repressive stamp all over this quarter of Budapest.

Writhing under the enormous weight of its ongoing collapse, self-satisfied feudal Hungary drags itself from one economic crisis to another, lugging along the antiquated customs, traditions, and inexhaustible wounded pride of its failed aristocracy, which keeps an iron grip even on those who do not share their hope for prosperity in an illusionary greater Hungary or their confidence in the historical mission of the Hungarian people, but who feel great social responsibility for rural wretchedness and urban poverty, yet nevertheless adjust their professions’ rules and demands to the generally accepted and all-pervasive laws of the corrupt gentry.

If one decides to build on illusions, it is not easy to break free of hypocrisy and the worship of decoration.

It showed through in the floor plans; it showed through on the walls.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
instinctively understood what Madzar was talking about and what he abhorred.

The ceilings and windows were lower than they should have been though not by much. Not by much, and everything was less spacious and airy than what could be called desirable for a balanced, individual lifestyle. Once again entire streets had been laid out so the sun could not shine into the buildings. In the absence of appropriate architectural demands, transparent geometry turned into rigidity and constraint. Empty style. Material and fittings of questionable quality. Showy but inferior facings that could easily be detached from the underlying constructs. On his first visit to the empty apartment, Madzar already had the feeling that he was not standing on but hovering over the floor. Something wasn’t right with the construction. As if he were hearing an echo of barracks architecture from the First World War. Most buildings in Újlipótváros had an improvised look. They lacked the elementary joy that the personality and sensuality of true artisanship offers. As if every building component, in its symbolic language, were saying, well, it’s true, there is peace now, the lost war is behind us, but industry has not yet recovered, it has not been modernized, therefore we are producing inferior goods.

The ceilings and walls were flimsy. Even the more generously proportioned or better-built apartments were unpleasant to go into because the stairwells and entrances were too narrow, and though there were spaces where one could step out of the apartments, what was the point of so many congested balconies and loggia if they felt like dovecots.

The other side of the street was too near.

These buildings with their crippled interiors could not even present their facades to the outside world. They did not have enough room to look at themselves from any angle, and they couldn’t see how inconsiderate they were of one another.

They wanted to show something other than what they could show.

They had no air.

They either pretended to be open or tried to conceal being locked in.

After a few hours in the empty apartment, Alajos Madzar realized there was no partition wall, door, or window that he did not want to change. Mrs. Szemz
ő
had claimed that although historical givens should not be altered, sometimes a single creative professional move, a kind of trick of the trade, was enough, at least in theory, to alter the inner conditions of functionality and to influence the surroundings strongly.

Hearing this practical comment, Madzar asked himself whether there was such a trick in the architectural trade.

Of the many outmoded light fixtures, only one gave any light at night.

And now there was nothing in the spacious hallway except the open, pitch-black piano.

It stood heedlessly in place, just as the movers had heedlessly put it down more than a decade earlier.

In the wake of the wartime devastations, no one analyzed the traces of destruction anymore; neither did anyone look for some trick of the trade when a job was to be done, not anymore.

In her search for a nice warm blanket, Gyöngyvér hurried past the piano like someone about to steal something. She had to go around the piano stool. The movers should be called again to move the piano from the stoppers placed under its rolling legs and shift it a little to one side. Mrs. Szemz
ő
had meant to call them, but she never got to the point of picking up the telephone.

Yellowish light from the street and bluish light from the rooftops opposite filtered into the hallway, and Gyöngyvér stepped back to the piano like a sleepwalker at the sight of an apparition.

Seeing nothing else and forgetting every other intention and danger.

The real apparition in these surroundings was her healthy, tanned, naked body and the restrained patter of her bare feet.

As if she and the apparition could not see each other.

She knew nothing of the missing objects or of the history of the house or of this section of the city; indeed, she knew very little. Although Mrs. Szemz
ő
had mentioned the night when Arrow Cross men opened every faucet and threw out the window all the furniture Madzar had made with his own hands, still, Gyöngyvér did not know much. She felt for the piano stool and sat down. But the strange apartment, the strange building, and the silence thick with the strange city’s history came crashing down on her.

Among the abandoned objects, the haunting soul of the missing objects spoke to her in the warm early summer night.

Exhaustion or happiness, she didn’t know which, was making her want to cry.

Everything of the past sat here with her in the night, trapped between the bleak walls, among the furniture that was temporarily staying in this apartment.

She completely forgot about the annoyingly handsome man in her room.

Her life was here with her, along with all her earlier lives and the memories of her earliest life. A life she had spent within strange walls, among strange odors and strange objects whose history she could not have known, or anyway whose remaining traces simply had no historical context for her.

She forgot about the blanket, whose proper name, in her own dictionary, would have been
pokróc
, a bedcover made of fur and coarse wool.

She could not properly learn the names of objects, therefore they signaled their existence to her as senseless obstacles. In her mother tongue, she could not comprehend why in certain life situations it would make sense to say
blanket
instead of
pokróc
, and sometimes the incomprehensible filled her with hatred. At this moment she sensed something of the world, however, enthralling in its incomprehensibility and beyond the objects’ material worth, usefulness, names, and existence, beyond all personal sentiments. Her bare feet made pleasant contact with the parquet floor, which produced a warm, ticklish feeling where the edges of the dried-out oak laminas pressed into her soles. She could not have known what sort of moistness had evaporated from the wood, but she had a definite notion about the history of drying out. Even Mrs. Szemz
ő
could not have known anything of that since she had escaped much earlier and by the time the event occurred she had been taken away along with her two sons. Gyöngyvér swiveled around on the piano stool, which Mrs. Szemz
ő
had bought from a junk dealer long after the war was over. She wanted to cry but the tears would not come, and therefore neither anger nor hatred could surface either. In the Szemz
ő
s’ villa on Dobsinai Road only those objects had remained that were not easy to move, which is why she still had the piano, but the piano stool that Madzar had designed later, along with all the other original furnishings, had disappeared.

Gyöngyvér was sitting on the piano stool made for young ladies which Mrs. Szemz
ő
had bought as a replacement, remembering the ones she knew in her youth. There were countless chains of causation in the world and they were not perceivable in sequence yet were not imperceptible either. At this moment, Gyöngyvér may not have known what her senses were registering, but, like other people, she felt something definite and therefore formed certain suppositions.

She instantly looked for a possible intonation in place of crying, a vocal passage in her own range reminiscent of shouting, beseeching, or praying; she accompanied her search by tapping two consecutive keys at a time on the piano. She was chasing after a single note or semitone but did not know what she was looking for, while the old piano stool creaked meekly on the well-worn parquet floor.

With her buttocks, she enjoyed the cool leather of the stool, though after a while the contact with the cool cowhide again revived in her bladder the urge to urinate. She had nothing more to let dribble out of her. Her bladder would have liked to inundate the leather on the piano stool.

She wouldn’t have budged but would have just let it all out.

The urine would first collect on the stool and then drip down from it.

She would listen to the trickling.

She saw it; she saw immeasurable amounts of fluid flowing out.

She became alarmed at the mere desire for a flooding.

She had to repress, squeeze back into herself the heat of her burning slit, which made her posture rigid.

She stared out into the night as if watching a movie about her frightened and irritated self.

A sliding glass-paned door opened from the hallway into the living room, whose own wide window, encompassing and framing the entire room, looked up at the empty sky.

Gyöngyvér could not imagine her own home, but wherever she lived, she always had to imagine it anew.

Except when she was singing.

A future home, the home of a famous opera singer, refused to take shape in her mind. Whenever she thought about this, what she remembered was an old, large, worn iron key and bluish-purple lilies on the silk wall tapestry ripping loudly under her hands. In the castle at Tiszadob
*
they had to tear all the silk tapestry off the walls, and in their enjoyment they screamed and yelled happily together with their instructors, along with the sound of ripping silk.

She could not shake the thought that their enjoyment had meant pain for the silk.

Together, they were busy girls and their instructors freeing this castle, where they lived and worked, from the dark tyranny of the sinister Countess Katinka Andrássy. The windows were closed because Mrs. Szemz
ő
was afraid of sudden storms. The pervasive fragrance of valerian in the stifling air may have been the same fragrance that had eaten into Mrs. Szemz
ő
’ s every belonging.

Here, in the heat trapped between the buildings, the night had no cool edge, yet she shuddered a little.

One of the tin-helmeted towers of Palatinus Mews planted itself in the empty sky and, as if pinged by the moonlight, glittered in the darkness.

Madzar used the soles of his feet to try to overcome or at least understand the strange floating of the apartment; he stamped, treaded, and trampled on the floor.

He was walking systematically back and forth across the well-laid parquet because he wanted to feel clearly what caused the sense of floating. He listened to the entire building, to how it rustled and made other small noises; without a stethoscope he auscultated the building’s heartbeat, as it were, listened to its echoes, the trembling of water pipes and the gurgling of drainpipes. He let out shouts of various lengths and strength. He did not find this pleasant. The otherwise attractive glass cylinder of the stairwell behaved like an ear trumpet, brutally amplifying the tiniest sounds, elongating them, repeating them individually. Given the interior proportions, the poor quality of the materials, and the lack of insulation, noises within the apartment were received by the cold reinforced concrete and reradiated back into the apartment in the form of imperceptible vibrations. The interior spaces therefore did not project a sense of proper enclosure, had no warmth, and did not provide a feeling of security.

A future tenant would be exposed to irritations for which there would be no remedy. A building might possess several characteristics that a person, though experiencing them, refused to acknowledge, and then it might seem as if the person was creating his frequent and serious bothers on his own, not realizing that the architecture was at fault.

If the ceiling had been higher by just twenty centimeters, the partitions by, say, thirty centimeters, the sound box would not have been so unpleasant. But neither the owners nor the builders had clarified the relationship of the interior to the exterior, which led to fatal disproportions. They had used the idea of functionality to hide their own wretchedness and their profit motive, and this infuriated Madzar.

As if they considered disproportion the incontestable reality of things.

He could think of no architectural statement more irresponsible.

Light was the only thing of any worth here. Strong saturated light whose sources were, of course, decipherable, and one would have to make a thorough examination of the surroundings. Direct light mingled with two indirect lights that had a completely improbable, unreal general effect. He could begin there. But no, he could not, because he would have felt he was merely doing something clever in an emergency situation of unknown proportions.

The problem remained: could he do the job with impunity. The light was indeed very good; he’d hate to give up on it.

I really can’t find it in my heart to do this job, he told the woman flatly.

And, to be honest, I am not very interested in this whole spiritual-poverty business, this whole emergency situation that has become permanent in this country and even put down roots.

Not my cup of tea
, he said in English.

It presents conditions I don’t care to deal with, conditions I don’t know what to do with.

You’d rather not touch it at all, said Mrs. Szemz
ő
quietly but pointedly.