Parallel Stories: A Novel (119 page)

And she hated Margit Huber for this.

These people allow themselves to do even this.

Sometimes, while talking to herself, she addressed Margit Huber’s smile as if it were not a single characteristic of a single person but the cause of her having to wage war simultaneously against the collective experience of several persons.

If something slipped out all right, if she succeeded with one of her phrases and Margit Huber praised her, beaming, yes, that’s it, Gyöngyvér, that’s how you should do it, this is what we’ve been waiting for, then of course she instantly felt her heart beat faster and she adored her teacher.

She was grateful to her for her earlier wickedness.

Médike was redeemed and Gyöngyvér adored her.

She wanted to get rid of this painful, newly acquired habit of hers, the relentless full-mouthed smiling when speaking or singing. The moment she eked out a good result from her many fiascos, she wanted to thrust Médike from her and quickly forget everything she had learned from her. What has this Médike accomplished in life with all her great knowledge, nothing. If she’d been able to make something of herself, she wouldn’t be teaching Gyöngyvér for fifty-seven forints an hour, she’d be singing. Others shouldn’t see who it was who had taught her to make her voice glow like that. This is a shameful betrayal. And though it would be painful to betray Médike immediately because, despite all her hatred, Gyöngyvér actually thought she loved her, I love her, the temptation for a quick all-out betrayal was greater.

And from whom can a natural talent really learn anything; from nobody.

She couldn’t have real pangs of conscience about the betrayal.

In Médike, she discovered a teacher’s unconditional humility toward her profession and her pupil. She’s a dumb slut. Which in Gyöngyvér’s language meant that in the soul of this elusive and merciless female was a spot where she’d left herself exposed. This entire teaching strategy was an impersonal passion that she too had experienced with the children in the kindergarten and throughout her whole singing history, and no less profoundly. She knew perfectly well that without children she too was vulnerable. Her own body gave her the insight into the other person’s passion for teaching; and she saw how vulnerable it had made her too.

If it was possible, she wanted to exploit her even more.

She can’t do without her.

The sheer thought that she would wring the last drop of knowledge from the old hag filled her with gratitude; she’d wring every bit of knowledge out of her. Then she’d toss her aside like a dirty dishrag.

Passions cannot be tamed without a cool smile; she must make every sacrifice for this knowledge. The woman must be squeezed like a lemon. So that Gyöngyvér could acquire a little protection, this little common secret of theirs, a bit of this cunning little advantage.

Even then, she won’t have as many fine expensive things as these people do who are always inheriting things from other people or family members.

It was as if she were learning not to sing but to smile superciliously and cheerfully in a hostilely indifferent universe.

Why should I be the one who never inherits anything from anybody. Well, I shall take things for myself, I’ll rob them and I’ll smash everything.

But out loud she couldn’t even say how grateful she would be to Médike; she could say nothing out loud. Because there was no sentiment in the world that this old bitch didn’t reject. And let Gyöngyvér drown in her own sentimentality.

Let’s not become personal, Gyöngyvér, please. We’re busy with something else now. We do not put our personal feelings on display, we look upon them as the object of our labors.

When will you be able to pay the overdue tuition, if I may ask.

And Gyöngyvér should be drowning in her love and gratitude, since she was not allowed to be free of these feelings. Just once, though, she’d like to tell the merciless bitch that she feels her gratitude in her loins. It hurts my stomach, in my cunt I feel my gratitude, you old idiot, you hag, in my twat, you understand.

How would this Médike know how one should sing onstage if she has never actually taken a cunt into her mouth.

Let me teach you, then, you old bitch.

Cunt.

Say after me.

Sopranos, of course, can throw hysterical fits for you, making their fine town houses resonate.

Oh, she understood the old bitch, she did indeed, very well.

As a contralto, Gyöngyvér, one should know one’s place in the hierarchy of the art of singing.

If only the old idiot would make an exception with someone, with me, for example, with me. She should make me her general heir. Anyway, she hasn’t got anyone. Mrs. Szemz
ő
doesn’t either; these women have no one and still I won’t be inheriting anything from them. Why doesn’t Médike understand her: that she loves her so much for her knowledge; that she wants her.

In my pain and embarrassment I’ll say to you out loud, I want you.

Why doesn’t she love me, what would it take for her to make an exception just once; after all, her drawers are full of jewelry and her apartment’s got nothing but expensive paintings and carpets; what more does she want, why isn’t she more tender with me.

She would like to be a male dog; then Médike would let her climb on top of her.

She couldn’t have many students who respect her this much.

At most, she could call her Médike, and the wicked witch couldn’t object to that. Those pampered ladies, those posh women friends of hers, they called her Médike.

Well, I’ll give you plenty of Médike, to have your fill.

Out of pride, Médike had to pretend not to have grasped how much Gyöngyvér adored and disdained her whenever she called her Médike.

I’d kill myself if I had huge, wrinkled, freckled breasts like hers. Médike was one mean-spirited bitch and because of her Gyöngyvér had to suffer so much. I shouldn’t have breasts larger than a boy’s. She had paid a lot to be able to suffer from Médike, true, but she also hadn’t learned so much from anyone as she had from this dear woman. A slut of a Swabian woman like this could be so damn stingy and with her an hour was only fifty minutes. And even after the lesson one couldn’t chat with her for free, oh no. For five minutes of yakking she charged a whole hour, and on top of that she pretended not to understand your indignation.

Gyöngyvér would have liked to sink a good long knife into her for such pettiness.

Or, good Lord, to fall on the harridan with her bare hands.

Good Lord, imagine that once upon a time a man must have loved this ugly woman.

And properly strangle her.

When she could no longer listen to her remarks, neutralized by her smile, that this was not to be sung like that, nor that like this.

In full voice, Gyöngyvér, not loud.

Watch the descent.

As if you were squeezing it.

It was intolerable that everything was supposed to be done differently from the way she was doing it or hearing it. That her feelings should be discounted. And if she had a shot of something to help her get through an hour’s worth of anxiety, even smile back at her teacher and feel just a little better about things, Médike had the nerve to tell her she could smell it on her breath.

If you’ve had a drink, Gyöngyvér, don’t come to the lesson. Please, do not let this turn into an inveteracy.

Inveteracy. That’s the sort of thing she says. Neither her colleague at the kindergarten nor Ilona Bondor knows this word.

She chewed some coffee beans after her drink, that’s how she tricked Médike.

It can’t be that in one person everything works the wrong way.

At least a good cognac before the lesson, she should have at least that. All right, maybe two.

How could she remember so many things at once. The old crone bleats so much because she wants me to take more lessons. The old hag could fill all her waking hours with lessons. How could a person satisfy so many demands. You don’t have to tell me. Yet she couldn’t even find an extra free hour for you to make up a missed lesson.

I can’t learn three foreign languages simultaneously. She can’t shove every stupidity down my throat.

It did not seem reasonable to put up with so much shame and humiliation and to pay so much for it.

But she did not give up, she kept hitting that fucking F sharp on Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s piano, following its sound with her voice.

In the meantime, she was locked up in the chicken coop.

When did anyone lock up Médike in a chicken coop, or Irmuska and the famous Mária Szapáry and the rest of the grand ladies, when. Never. They gave her nothing to eat, she drank out of the trough, she had to drink out of the cattle trough.

Out of what else.

When had these women ever suffered as much as she had, and she couldn’t have known that this was mental suffering because she hadn’t learned the appropriate words from them. In the morning they gave her a turnip to chew on. She’d never tell anyone that she had picked a live worm out of one and eaten it. How could she have known there would be punishment for that too.

She did not understand what sins a little girl like that could have committed, or what sin was. And she did not know what a little girl or little boy was because they kept her as if she’d been a dumb animal, and also punished her for being one.

She drank the chickens’ water.

She was capable of doing it, that useless thing.

She looked for her uselessness everywhere, tried secretly to feel it on herself, where it might have entered her, and to figure out what made other children so useful.

And they always shoved her back here, hungry and thirsty, and she felt that anybody could put her to shame, degrade and humiliate her.

She could never be free of this. The only reason she could endure the long hours, the whole nights, in the chicken coop was that she didn’t know she might die or that she had been born; how could she have known. How could she have known any of the things other children knew. The bolt clicked again, they locked the chicken-coop door from the outside, and this was her punishment for drinking from the trough again.

Ain’t yah a disgustin’ li’l animal drinkin’ the water o’ them cows. What am I wastin’ time teachin’ yah what to do, an’ aks fur water when yah thirst. Didn’ I gi’ yah turnip. I’ll leave yah here all night, but if yah budge, the ugly fox come take yah away an’ bite clear across yer throat.

From the depth of that night, there glimmered in Gyöngyvér’s brain a realization about her first foster mother. She could not remember her face, only her meaty arms tanned dark by the sun, her approaching heavy steps, and that strange large man and what he had done, in the midst of intimate and ominous sounds, to this larger-than-life woman who now seemed to have been the Médike of her old life.

That is why she is so terrified of her, or of Médike, and of men in general.

These figures metamorphosed into one another; she could not be rid of them.

That is why she can’t learn from Médike what she should, not because of the cognac.

Paying her in vain.

She will kill her.

She’d like to take my entire salary.

These two very different things, her unconsciously committed sins and her sheer existence, were inauspiciously coming together. This was not something she thought; she actually witnessed it. She saw the fox from very close up; in her life, not in a fairy tale, the fox and the rat came in the night and kept chewing and pushing at the coop’s boards until they got to a hen or rooster and they took away the little girl too. That was actually good, taking her away, because then there’d be quiet at last; or maybe it was inside her that something was forever rent asunder, something that could not be mended in her lifetime and it is only her that God punishes like this so cruelly.

The fox did come.

To pick at the bolt from inside wasn’t easy, but she kept at it for a long time and finally got it to move and managed to escape. She threw the bolt into the nettles. So they couldn’t lock the coop door on her again. But they did, they also beat her around the head and locked her up using something other than the bolt, seeing how incorrigible and useless she was.

Not only did she escape, she also drank the chickens’ water, the mean thing.

She’d better talk or answer me before I knock her dead.

With what remained of her senses she understood that the world order was different for other people; they wash up and go to church. She didn’t understand why they stuffed soap in her mouth when she did not know how she should have answered, or what her sin meant to her and why she was so filthy and smelly, and why she had scratched her fleabites again until they were bloody.

Mrs. Bizsók did not do things like this to her but she slapped her face and spanked her bottom mercilessly.

Though she won’t forgive her for beating her with a vine pole.

Don’t yah fret, nobody’s gonna look for yah if I beat yah to death.

She did not lash out at the others whom she wanted to understand, to win over, love or bribe to compensate for the heat of the chicken coop, the constantly fidgeting hens, and the scratched fleabites. She wanted them to accept her, take her in; she’d show them that she too could be useful or that at least she wasn’t useless. This was the reason she paid so much money to Médike. Fifty-seven forints for an hour that was only fifty minutes.

They should not do this to her.

She threw up; in her alarm, she vomited on her little dress when they were taking her to church, but how could they take her wearing something she’d thrown up on.

In the coop, it was also hard for her to learn how to avoid the rooster.

She had the runs because of her fear; they tethered her to a tree because she soiled everything in the summer kitchen.

Or to stick a knife in them, that long-bladed knife her foster mother pulled out from behind the saltbox to slit the throats of the geese and let them thrash between her legs until they bled to death, down to the last drop.

She was quick to flare against those she could not strangle with her hands.