Parallel Stories: A Novel (85 page)

In their embarrassment they could do nothing else: they listened to the loud creaking of the pebbles under their feet. For the man every step was torture. This was not the first time they’d been silent, but until now they’d known what to do with their silences, until now their luck had not abandoned them, as the man put it, nor their upbringing, as the woman put it. Now they feared they had no more reserves and that something might crack, burst open. A situation well balanced until now would become awful. The man could not but think about what he would do with his cock once he was back in the hotel.

Ultimately, it was about a lot of money, about work, nothing else. But it won’t go like this. I cannot go to bed with the wife of every client. And nothing is really forcing me to take on this job. And I owe no one any explanation as to why I might not do it.

They kept telling themselves, enumerating to themselves, their respective reasoned and realistic arguments.

If he doesn’t want to do it, he shouldn’t. I’ll furnish it myself; after all, the building has its own tradition, so if won’t be hard. And that way it won’t cost much. I’ll put the sofa there, the desk over here, and that’s that.

Or maybe someone else can do it.

But that person will not be a man, that’s for sure. Belluka probably knows someone she can recommend.

Each summer the promenades on Margit Island were replenished with fine pebbles from the bottom of the Danube.

They sank into the pebbles, and because they weren’t paying attention water got into their shoes. They were both wearing strong shoes, medium-brown and welted, the woman’s with a raised, athletic heel, the vamps divided in the shape of a heart, the toes ornamented with an elegant twisting pattern. The woman’s coat was held together at the waist by a belt, the collar turned up to keep the wind away from her neck. He could not tell what she was wearing under the coat, but the grain-patterned wool of her dress seemed identical in quality and pattern to the wool of his English suit.

He could not see her silk-stockinged legs, but he thought they were too thin. She had no breasts at all. In a few years, she’d be like a board, like a poker.

The woman was struggling with the thought that although the man’s hands were not particularly handsome, still it would be nice to hold one of them and together dig into his coat pocket. Or to restrain the hand that kept mangling his hat, to hold it down. He might have habits like jiggling his legs, and he probably wasn’t well brought up as a child.

Their steps grew stiffer and stiffer. If one may say such a thing, the man’s hands were positively ugly, his fingers short and thick, his wrists too powerful. Still, she would have liked to feel them, to walk with their fingers intertwined and to keep on walking. To get away from here and go to America with him. They should have stopped to shake the pebbles out of their shoes. And neither of them could bear thinking about the long stroll stretching out before them. The farther they walked from the entrance to the island promenade, the more certain it seemed that once well inside the island, in spite of everything they would irresponsibly fall on each other.

A saving idea occurred to the architect.

They shouldn’t continue in this direction because there was too much wind on this side; they should cut across at the casino and take a look at the new covered hall for the high-board diving tower at the Sports Baths and how it had been marked out; he’d heard it would happen this week, according to the plans.

Maybe he would find the renowned architect Alfréd Hajós
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there.

The woman understood the implication of this suggestion, and at the same time the enormous ache surprised her.

She felt in her throat and in her chest that although she would accept the man’s arbitrary decision, she wouldn’t get away scot-free with a surrender.

Because it hurt very much, she would not be free of this pain for a long time. She was suffering and she would continue to suffer.

Luckily, they found nothing and no one.

They found only traces of uprooted trees, a few abandoned ditches from which the designer must have taken soil samples, and a few stakes at various points on the neglected lawn. The construction had been halted for some reason. This gave them an excuse to talk about neutral topics, look around, roam about, linger and be silent, and then quickly turn back.

At the island’s entrance, which is one of the city’s most exposed spots, the wind stormed across their bodies, pushing them relentlessly.

They tried to resist, laughing loudly, they held on to their hats, kept on shouting, accidentally bumped each other, and then deliberately leaned against each other back to back and, holding on to each other, kept guffawing about how they were so enjoying themselves and how each successive gust took their breath away.

Or who knows what took away their breath.

There was nothing to be done about the wind; in the end, they took the streetcar.

In the empty car, they panted loudly, right in front of the conductor, flushed and wide-eyed. They behaved as if they had just saved their lives.

And if they already had, then they could quickly part company at the very first stop in Pest.

Which is the second-stormiest place in Budapest; here, tin gutters often become loose, rain pipes detach themselves from the walls, plaster and roof tiles take flight and crash to the sidewalks.

They parted on Lipót Boulevard as if they never wanted to see each other again.

Otherwise It Couldn’t Have Raged

I don’t know where I got the courage finally, valiantly, to spit it out. The sentence was bad, but I said it anyway. I’d like to have a date with her. It sounded like another person’s voice calling over into my own life.

Maybe today’s young people no longer say things like that, they say something entirely different, but back then that was the proper expression. Propriety, of course, did not make the declaration less shameless.

It wouldn’t have been possible to wipe out or remedy one of my shameful deeds with another.

Only nine months had gone by, I figured out quickly while standing by the rain-lashed living-room window, yet those events seemed to have receded into a calmer distance.

During the fall, there was one foggy evening when I ventured back to those places, but luckily I found not a single soul among the trees and bushes. Yet it seemed so useless to go on with everything as before when I could not help looking continuously into another life. Into a life running parallel to the one I was leading. I should have kept the secret even from myself. I needed more time, maybe the same length of time that has passed until now, this was my ascetic hope, and then I’d forget it completely. Though the best thing to do would have been to kill, that’s what I kept imagining, to kill everyone, leaving no one on earth who might remember those things.

Sometimes I even recalled the black dog, the way it stood over me, panting into my face, longing to lick my eyes.

With legs spread, hips thrust forward, there above me stood the men who knew everything better than I, did everything better than I, and wouldn’t miss a single opportunity.

The strange shadows of huge birds.

That is why I hesitated, helplessly mulling over every prepared sentence, that is why I waited for weeks for the right moment, and that is why I became so harshly determined with my dumb sentence when the right moment finally arrived that blustery March morning.

It was as if for the first time in my life I’d blurted out my wildest wish to a total stranger. Until then everything had been the other way around: I either rejected or expected crude invitations from others, which was much simpler. And I still did not have enough insight into the secrets of men, I still didn’t know exactly how they carried on the dangerous game of making overtures, even though I observed things very carefully, wanting so much to learn the ropes.

I probably should have appeared before a woman in the guise of an innocent, instead of presenting my wish as gloomily as I did when it finally burst out of me. My awkward sullenness made it awkward for both of us to begin like that. Her immediate response to my gloominess was a sadness of her own. As if she were saying to me, this is not what I’d expected from you. I should have been lighter, kinder, sweeter, and hidden my secret wish between two more innocent sentences. Shouldn’t have barged in like that, asking for a date. However, I was anything but innocent. Should have given her every opportunity to refuse without offending me, or to pretend she hadn’t heard right.

She wore a wedding ring, and seemed older than I was.

She shouldn’t have been able to humiliate me even if she rejected me.

Yet to my great surprise, she did not reject my proposition. But not because I played the role of seductive lover well. She must have had some other reason.

Maybe she enjoyed my ridiculousness.

She closed her eyes for a moment, I could observe her dejection, and then she opened them again and nodded. And by that time her sadness was gone. Maybe it had been neither dejection nor sadness but something quite different. I understood nothing; nothing made sense to me, least of all my own existence. Facing each other we were just as much strangers as we had been before, and she’d said not a word. We ran out of time as someone with a receipt headed toward her from the cash register. The key moment was over and we hadn’t even set a time or place for our date.

And we couldn’t, not only because of the approaching stranger but also because it was no longer clear why we should meet at all, never mind where or when.

I was unprepared for her sadness and unprepared for her acceptance, which like my proposition was unrefined and undisguised. If I’d had a way of knowing what she wanted from me, perhaps I’d also have known what I wanted from her. I had just enough experience to decide on having a little affair and I did take the first step, but then had no idea why I should take a second one if she wasn’t glad about the first. I figured that if others did this because they found joy in their amorous romping, then I too should learn how to do it. Something told me that without this knowledge I’d perish. If I get up every morning, I should know what other people do in the successive hours of their day. The thirst for learning urged me on, but the object of my study looked back sadly at me.

My fate had once been shaped by coincidences, but for some time now I had been gripped by decisiveness.

After voicing my awkward proposition, I hadn’t expected much beyond a sweet little laugh and then her telling me, come on, kid, what do you think I am. That would have been a game, something joyful. I had a prepared sentence for it too. And when it didn’t happen that way, it was precisely my calculated decision, nurtured over several weeks, that made me not know what to do. Not with her sadness, her resigned indifference, or my prepared sentences. I didn’t understand anything.

Why is it already turning out differently, why can’t it be predicted.

Other than what my eyes let me see, I knew nothing about her. I did not understand what complete strangers might possibly do with each other so suddenly. Or why they didn’t sink into the ground in shame if they wanted to start something together. I had entered into something that offended my sense of decency, though I’d expected it to turn quickly into liberating pleasure. When you live in a herd of juveniles or students, everything happens by itself, because one way or another everyone is familiar, everyone is driven by similar compulsions to a wild search. Now I was standing by the counter, bare and exposed, having stripped naked. This woman wasn’t a classmate whom I’d run into because of coincidences in our class schedules. It was as if I had said to her, very loudly, that I wanted her and that I wanted to realize this wish of mine as quickly as possible.

Which wasn’t true.

I didn’t even want her by my side. I liked looking at her; at most, I’d have liked to find a way not to have to observe her secretly. I didn’t even want to talk to her. What did she or I have to say to a complete stranger. And I definitely did not think of touching her.

What I wanted was something I always had to be alone with, otherwise it couldn’t have raged.

I thought to myself, all right, now we’ve tried this too. I’m free to go. As if again I had several persons within me, which was not at all surprising, and one of them has been incited by the others to commit this stupidity.

But now it was all over.

She wasn’t looking at me, as if I were no longer there or never had been. I was free to go, all right; nothing was stopping me. I kept standing there clumsily with my glass of coffee, undecided whether to put it down on the marble counter but remain flagrantly in place, or perhaps withdraw with it and watch her secretly in the mirror as I had done many times before, or put down the coffee, which was only an excuse for my staying, and simply walk out of the place.

On the rainy street, a bus pulled up and spewed out a cluster of people in overcoats, some of whom came inside.

On this blustery spring day, central heating was still going strong. The small establishment’s vaporous warmth was filled with the smell of coffees, teas, pastries, and wet coats.

It seemed unlikely that we could exchange any more words.

There are moments when one’s attention is so reduced that one sees only a single object, nothing else. At other times one’s attention may be so fierce that objects aren’t even visible. There was this big coffee machine with horn-handled levers and small towers of glasses on top placed inside one another, warming up. She grasped a lever with both hands, pressed it down, and kept her entire weight on it until the hoisting gear clicked across a buffer; only then did she let it go. She had to make a big effort because her body in her white work coat was incredibly light; I truly enjoyed watching. Her breasts or bra bounced against the robe, I could see the outlines, and her strong buttocks and hips made an equally good showing. The lever returned to its original position; out of the resulting steam she smiled at the older man who stopped before her, holding his receipt. It was as if I saw nothing but the irritating glitter of the heat-and-steam-producing metal cylinder and heard only voices in the distance.