Parallel Stories: A Novel (92 page)

Later, an eyewitness could say only that the inner pressure had become stronger, though the outer one hadn’t weakened.

The loaves of bread exhaled hot fragrances.

And if someone inside had been so favored by fate as to get a loaf of bread at last, that person wanted to break out, while the fate of one who wanted to break in trembled in uncertainty. The latter acted so as to get bread. The one hoping to emerge safely with his hot bread acted to save his life. Although nothing had been sorted out properly, the shrieking and screaming somewhat diminished. The line began to move. Which did not reduce the cacophony, now a clamor of agitated indignation. No one was shouting but everyone was swearing wildly, imploring, explaining.

We shuffled slowly forward. In the soles of our feet we felt there was still hope.

And then I saw the woman. Sometimes only her turban, sometimes the vague profile of her burned face. Slowly the sun came out and we started to move quite rapidly. The light felt warm, and the smell of the nearby river was in the air. Nobody talked about what had just happened or what might have happened. Because, after all, nothing had really happened, and if we kept walking at this rate, very soon we’d have our bread. Within a few minutes we reached the corner of Sándor Fürst Street. The happy ones were coming out one after the other. As you moved forward, you paid attention to every little shuffle. Your situation changed drastically. You were no longer at the end of the line but well in the middle of it. You were alert, making sure that no one gained an unmerited advantage, and you were careful not to give the impression that you might jockey for one. The line is moving, everybody’s fine nerve endings are atremble, and everybody keeps their stings at the ready. Everybody is out to gain an advantage, even if only a centimeter or so, and everybody is trying to keep everyone else from gaining the same.

As if each person had put reins of morality on others while the reins holding him were in the others’ hands.

People restrain their own selfishness in one another. If I can’t get ahead of them, into a more advantageous position, at least I shouldn’t fall behind them. When the line moves, there’s no time for argument, and once it stops no one can change his position for a better one. Only now, while still moving. That centimeter and a half must be gained now. And it must be gained not as if I were driven by the dark intentions of selfishness, but as if other people’s slowness or clumsiness made my position more favorable than theirs.

When we reached the corner, the line came to a halt. It was still dark and cold in the narrow street. Only from the roofs did some sunshine drip down to us. And that little warmth and light hit only that small side street that connects Sándor Fürst Street with Pozsonyi Road.

When the line stops, it is a magical moment. Everyone has to acknowledge, alert as they might have been and hard as they might have tried, that they are not next to the people they started out with and not quite in the same relative position to them. Everybody’s efforts were directed to not letting anything change, yet everything did. The familiar coats and familiar faces are the enemy, because many of them are now in front of you. In the next few seconds, you have to establish new alliances with strangers. A bitter moment. This is when quarrels erupt and often become physical. Or suddenly a deadly silence prevails; there is no more hopeful feet-shuffling. In the silence chairs and stools make small noises; sighs are heard. Someone says something, somebody responds. Once again one has to set up residence forever on this one and only spot.

Trouble occurs only when one does not accept one’s place in the universe. Actually, this is not my place, you say to yourself, and, unguardedly, you give voice to your indignation. Most people are wary of this trouble.

Sometimes a common fear even stifles a quarrel that has already started.

Not rationality.

There was silence.

Everybody is afraid.

This could have been the silence of an ordinary autumn morning. There were no sounds of gunfire anywhere.

I got lucky and could lean my back against a wall. Of course, I did a bit of manipulative navigation to reach this position. One could still see on the building wall the damage left from the Second World War. Bullet pockmarks in the plaster had been blackened by soot. I grew up in this city and never thought that this should not be so. But our silence now was not a real silence, because it was touched by a uniform rumbling sound coming from far away.

By then I knew that in the bakery three ovens were working simultaneously, producing a new batch of fresh bread every thirty-five minutes. We figured that we could progress about thirty meters with each new batch. Provided the ovens could keep up the pace. If there was enough firewood and they didn’t run out of flour or received a fresh shipment in time. If they could manage the kneading and leavening as fast as the ovens did the baking.

This was not likely.

We also knew that as of last night, all the ground-floor apartments in this building had been taken over for the purpose of leavening the bread dough. Some people figured out that at such a pace we needed to wait for twenty-five baking sessions and we’d be done in the late afternoon. The question was not whether we could stick it out but whether we’d get our bread before nightfall. Or, if we didn’t reach the entrance by then, would they lift the curfew, giving us more time.

To violate the curfew was harder in the evening than at dawn. It was virtually impossible in the evenings because the city then swarmed with various patrols. The fighting always died down by dawn.

The rumbling steadily grew louder. After a certain point no one had any doubt that it came from an approaching column of tanks. Columns of tanks were not especially frightening. Tanks turned up from somewhere and then moved on to someplace else. Unless they stopped, there’d be no trouble. And it was unlikely that they would choose to come through this narrow street. They preferred the wider streets and avenues, moving at the edge of the road so it would not be easy to throw Molotov cocktails at them from the buildings. The rumbling came from the direction of Angyalföld, and we could guess from the noise that the tanks would have to pass through either Pozsonyi Road or Pannónia Street. And when in this maddening rumbling we could also hear the squeaking of caterpillar tracks, it was clear that they were rolling on the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, on which every squeak sounded harsher and was more amplified than on regular asphalt. First, only the rumbling filled with squeaks took up the space between the buildings, and then, in the sunny junction of the small side street, we saw the tanks.

They kept an equal distance between them as they moved. One would disappear; the next one would appear. The faint sun grew blurry above the clouds of gasoline fume.

No one in the line moved. Those who could see into the side street paid close attention. But the stench of gasoline grew so strong, the noise increased so much, that everyone kept quiet; no one would have been heard anyway. It seemed the column would never end. The buildings picked up the trembling, as did the street and the sidewalk; I could feel in my limbs how the various tremblings blended into one. It wasn’t I who was trembling.

The rumbling and trembling increased as the tanks, squeaking and screeching ever more loudly, turned up on the ramp of the Margit Bridge, and now the entire bridge was shaking. We could feel the bridge in the soles of our feet. I’ve got a city; my city is split in half by a river, and now the familiar bridge over the river has turned into a sensation. The bridgehead took on the shaking of the bridge, the bridgehead’s shaking was taken over by the blocks of buildings around the bridgehead abutment, and I felt the trembling in my back also. Because of the trembling, one did not think of anything; at most one could listen to the trembling of one’s body.

I sensed no danger. And it did not sound as if anything was about to end.

After all, there were larger military operations for which the Russian troops regrouped, but the civilians did not bother too much with them.

In those days, it was not completely out of the question that the Russians might leave altogether. Leave the capital or maybe even the country.

From where I stood, I could see into the small street. I saw the tanks following one after the other in front of the Szamovár coffee bar. Behind the sunny glass of the display window hung a large photograph of Hedda Hiller, the aging, beautiful nightclub singer who had appeared there every evening until a few days ago. The coffee bar was open and full of people even now. Faces were glued to the glass, watching the passing tanks. Some people stood on the sunny sidewalk, watching the tanks from there. Then something happened that to this day I find it hard to make myself believe. Lazily, as if still thinking about it, one of the tanks seemed to change its mind, and it turned into this small narrow street, grazing the sidewalks with its tracks and making the curb throw sparks, scattering the people on the sidewalk. People ran into the coffee bar, some into the adjacent building. The street emptied out in a second. Only the smell of gasoline and the wide strips of sunshine pouring down from over the roofs remained. We, in the line, did not move. The tank was coming toward us, its barrel raised.

It occurred to me for a second that perhaps this tank was securing the safety of the moving column, in which case everything was all right. It advanced halfway down the small street, stopped but did not turn off its engine.

Nothing happened.

Then I thought that perhaps something was wrong with the tank and that is why it had left the column. But I felt that trouble was near. In the next instant the tank’s barrel moved gently downward. Nobody moved. It seemed to be taking aim at the building opposite or at the wide marquee above the entrance to the Danube Movie Theater. But there was nothing there; people in the bread line were waiting underneath it, motionless. It happened so fast my mind could not keep up. My eyes saw it. Still, I could not acknowledge that the flame bursting out of the barrel and the backward jerk of first the turret and then the entire tank meant that a round had been fired. And then another one.

Two mute pictures.

And a horrific explosion in between. And the next one slamming into the crumbling, collapsing chaos within the cloud of dust, also followed by an explosion.

Tearing up everything.

They Could Not Forget It

A few days later, Madzar was standing alone on the deck of the
Carolina
, the oldest steamboat on the Danube, and he felt very lonely in the spring twilight.

Under his feet, down in the deep bowels of the boat, the engine was working at a uniform rhythm.

The enormous mass of water absorbed the muted puffs rising from the hollows of the ship, not allowing them up to the deck.

The muted, delayed vibrations, the thrusts of the steam engine’s pistons, the metallic trembling of the hull, the gentle breeze that carried the scent of blooming as well as the cold, heavy fish smell of muddy water from the shore, all coursed simultaneously through his body.

Boarding this ship, which sailed regularly between Vienna and Belgrade, meant journeying back to his childhood. Already then, one of his favorite daydreams was to penetrate the immense universe that breathed like an animal and was, in every single one of its elements, suffused with the currents of existence. Let me see how every species of all living things, along with their functions, all the stars, internal organs, and snow crystals, pulsing bloodstreams, myriad details of bridges and cathedrals, how all of these are linked together.

The river was swelling.

His cosmic efforts led to no convincing result, of course, neither then nor later, and it would have been strange indeed if the little son of a shipwright from Mohács had succeeded in reconstructing the metaphysical structure of a pantheistic world.

He had the impression that he attributed significance to relationships and analogies that had none or, worse, that he was unaware of certain phenomena and overestimated the significance of others, which kept him from understanding them. He couldn’t understand, for instance, into what category he should put those of his own deeds he considered ungodly.

Yet he kept at it, began over and over again, buried himself in encyclopedias, ventured into the thick of phenomena and data, wandered off, fell into the depths. He tried to take inventory with his sense organs of every manifestation of every element in his environment and to assign them their possible positions. He realized with alarm that one prerequisite of this effort should be not to make arbitrary choices and separate individual objects from each other, but to know what belonged to what, to clarify the causality of their belonging together, to penetrate them with his imagination down to the last detail, and at the same time to remain outside and, aided by physical and cultural experiences, to establish relationships among all the things he observed, not only between them and himself. He should discern what in their functioning was similar to or different from human functioning, what was personal in the universe, what remained impersonal; by connecting the contact points of the various systems he ought to be able to map the construction, the higher mechanism that perhaps held all autonomous things together.

That was his guiding vision.

He would have liked to uncover how Creation’s objects fitted together; in return for this knowledge, he was ready to be burned alive like Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori.

If they had told him what he was really doing, what he went on thinking about even as an adult and why he did it so compulsively, as if possessed, he would have replied, raising his somber eyebrows, come on now, balderdash, I am not looking for any kind of god.

He leaned against the railing, holding his visored Scottish cap of the same material as his suit, and lost himself in admiring the familiar river as its mute shores lined with silver gray willows floated by.

They were going downstream. The old steam engine scarcely had to work.