Parallel Stories: A Novel (127 page)

His mission called for the establishment of a nationwide network. He had to entrust the preparation of it to experienced officials who were above suspicion. To avoid any misunderstandings or mistakes in the delicate matter of selecting confidential personnel, he consulted with members of the supreme council of the powerful secret organization Magyar Hadak, or Hungarian Hosts.

He eagerly accepted their personal recommendations to ensure the best possible tailwind helping him to go forward in his work.

But at this first and perhaps most important station, given the central role assigned to Mohács, he realized with some consternation what an infernally difficult project he had taken on. Not because the city lacked good facilities for moving masses of people on a large scale. Mohács had gigantic easy-to-guard storehouses, an empty lime-burning plant, a hospital for infectious diseases that had been state-of-the-art for decades, a comfortable barracks built during the monarchy in which very large combat units could be quartered without difficulty, and, most important, ancillary railway lines that ran from outside the city to the cargo dock where black coal from Pécs was loaded on huge, capacious barges.

But it was very hard to make the rich local aristocrats understand that they should cooperate and proceed in step for a better future when the chief counselor could not inform them in detail what that might mean. They took his straight, manly speech as an insult. The realization hit him as if he were stabbed by a dagger that he could no longer count on the natural sense of hierarchy understood by monarchist aristocrats known for their loyalty. And if he encountered obstacles like this in Mohács, what could he expect in the Alföld
*
zones, where the local nobility’s stubbornness and wrong-headedness truly had no limits. In his eyes, the insidious spread of liberalism and freethinking was frightening. As if the secret institution meant to protect the Hungarian nation had been eaten through by pathological principles it should have already tackled and overcome. Put boldly, perhaps the Hungarian Hosts were no longer ready to act like a mighty army. But the chief counselor did not breathe a word to anyone of this alarming and perhaps overly hasty thought of his.

Lesser aristocrats were active in core cells, called tent units; in families; and in clans of the secret society where an almost freemason-like spirit prevailed. They did not understand why Vay was so secretive about a matter that was, for them, ultimately not a secret but rather the constant subject of their confidential conversations—and had been for many decades. Why shouldn’t they be accustomed to and enjoy the special freedoms granted by their offices, why should they bother to heed any authority. While engaging with these aristocrats, at best one could bolster one’s argument by referring to the authority of His Excellency the regent, but they, positioning themselves behind this same reference, immediately engaged in intrigues designed to help them evade their task or at least interpret it with an eye to the profit they might gain from it.

Vay explained to them the procedure, requiring exceptional and particular circumspection, saying that a pioneering law was in the making, much more severe than the one enacted last May,
*
as he put it, and that is why the interior minister needs this secret inventory. Finding it was but the first step in a grand, long-range plan, he added before falling silent.

At which moment he had a most
unheimlich
feeling that, with this obligatory silence, the lords were looking at him as if he were an agent provocateur.

Now these three men had been invited to the Montenuovo castle, some distance from the city, where the prince, whose sentiments regarding the Hungarian cause were unquestioned, was giving an exclusive luncheon in honor of the chief counselor. It promised to be a pleasant meal, since in the most delicate matters Elemér Vay and the prince held identical views and they both knew this of each other. Vay looked to the prince for a quiet sort of reinforcement against the other grandees who professed radical emotions and liberal views—for a loftier opinion unequivocally pronounced. The prince had been informed of details that, given the nature of the matter, the retired subprefect and the town clerk could not know, so the chief counselor could expect to receive the reinforcement as early as during the aperitif.

Only no
ressentiment
, gentlemen, no
ressentiment
at all, the prince responded severely to the subprefect’s first, rather emotional words.

By which he meant that such a tone, in his princely presence and on this question, was not permitted.

Over his glass the chief counselor shot a grateful glance to the prince. The two of them, unlike the others, did not surrender to emotions and sentiments when this subject came up; they were interested only in what was useful and whether what they considered useful was also plausible. Not only did they think that emotions had no place in the discussion, they had no use for views and opinions about foreign nationals. Which did not mean that they had not done the arithmetic showing the losses and gains of the proposed plan. If Hungarians, given their mental makeup, are more likely to hate Jews than hate subversive revolutionary ideas, even though the world has more to fear from the latter, then we need appropriate movements and arguments to protect them from a major Bolshevik upheaval. Therefore, not only is the inversion of cause and effect not problematic, it is downright fortunate and desirable.

And if others are already saying and doing this, it would be pointless to stand in their way, though it would also be a mistake not to keep this clever maneuver tightly controlled.

The final solution of the Jewish question may be achieved without further ado, for all time and to the complete satisfaction of our radicals.

But by itself, even the most thoroughgoing pogrom would be insufficient, as the prince was wont to say humorously, and it also would be foolish to play into Germany’s hands just to please the crowd.

They both inclined to consider beyond dispute Professor Lehr’s famous thesis regarding tactical accommodation, and regretted that our romantic compatriots tended to forget that today’s German interests differ from those of the much hated and much missed Habsburgs. Subjugating or weakening Hungarians is far from being in the interests of Germany today. We must remember that according to the most advanced genetic studies, only the Hungarians, along with Norwegians, can revitalize the German race. And with these words, Elemér Vay was quoting a foremost authority in the science of genetics, Professor Otmar Baron von der Schuer. From our point of view, of course, this scientific claim is unacceptable, but it does make clear that the survival and vitality of Hungarians is of basic interest to the Germans, not only for their selfish racist reasons but because Hungarian and German plans coincide at several vital points on the political level. And it would be a fatal mistake not to exploit these points in order to strengthen the nation’s position. Our task is to maintain a calm, dignified, self-respecting, resolute, and, mainly, ever-polite attitude toward the German element.
Spiel mit, aber sei Dir dessen stets Bewusst
, he shouted triumphantly.

We must help them as best we can so that they may take up arms against our greatest common enemy, Bolshevism.

Many people say that tactical accommodation demands too much sacrifice, too much self-discipline, and is too risky. But we must play along with them without ever forgetting what we are doing. Our responsibility, said Elemér Vay, with his practical way of thinking rounding out the professor’s abstract argument, is to maintain a sensible balance between cooperation and resistance until the German element arrives at a point where it can carry out its far-reaching grand design.

Et puis il y a toujours la Sainte Vierge
, as the prince said in his inimitable way, to jovial laughter, concluding the dinner-table conversation.

Blushing was becoming permanent on Madzar’s face, it ebbed and flowed on his milk-white skin.

He walked away from the hotel with long strides, stood for some time in the hazy heat but could not calm down outdoors either.

He watched the car receding in clouds of dust, absentmindedly greeted approaching and receding strangers a little way from the hotel, near the blinding white walls of nearby buildings. There was hardly a soul abroad in the stifling midday heat. He felt like breaking and smashing things; only when nearing the parental home did he slow down a bit. If at that moment his mother had appeared, he would have raged at her, he was sure, as his father used to rage. But reason told him he should enter the house quietly, very quietly. He had the urge to scream as he crossed the empty, dead yard. He went the long way around to avoid peeking from the corner of his eye into the workshop, whose doors were wide open for the expected guests, and to keep from rushing in to demolish the ridiculous furniture. He wouldn’t have had to do much to make the pieces fall apart, along with their puritan discipline.

I am ruining my own life.

In the summer midday, motionless silence settled over the city and the river.

An occasional stray fly on the veranda window, shaded by the grapevine bower, provided the only movement. There, in the middle of the veranda, stood the table set for three awaiting Mrs. Szemz
ő
. The plates decorated with a cheap pattern, the vulgarly colorful and barbarically cut glasses, the cheap, polished-to-death cutlery. He took off his jacket, let it slip from his hand, he had no more use for it. Quietly he kicked off his ugly perforated shoes, careful that they made no noise on the stone. He gazed at these shoes made especially for festive summer events, but what he was really looking at were the indentations his father’s feet had created in them. He kicked off his pants, quietly. Last, he literally tore off the short-sleeved shirt, which had become drenched under the jacket. He remained half-dressed like that for a long time, in his father’s long underpants and his own milk-white skin.

He could not sit down because the armchair made of willow twigs would make a loud cracking sound.

Eventually he stopped wanting to sweep the settings off the table, as his father had done more than once at a Sunday lunch, or to smash everything to pieces.

But there was no part of his body unacquainted with the joy of breaking things.

And then his utterly humiliated mother would come and pick up everything from the stone floor and even be glad no one had beaten her. She has spent her life as my father’s servant and she’d be glad to become mine. Which would break his heart, he felt. He heard no noise from the corridor because she was probably waiting on the other side of the yard, in the summer kitchen, with all the food ready to be served.

Would that God, that son of a bitch, might bring the heavens crashing down on this fucked-up world.

As he carefully lifted his neatly folded work clothes from the top of the hope chest, he had to leave off with the cursing.

He managed to cross the corridor silently and close every door of every room, always darkened during the midday hours, without a sound.

No door handle clicked in the stillness.

He lay motionless on the sofa for a long time.

The mute summer sizzled through the cracks of the drawn shutters.

He had spent his nights on this living-room sofa and maybe he slept on it now for a short time. Because suddenly he jumped up, startled, as if someone were about to kill him. He had to go to work, otherwise he would not finish on time, let others have a ball, and he quickly reached for his work clothes, as he did every morning. Both his feet were in the legs of his cotton pants when he remembered the previous night, Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s telegram, his own ridiculousness, and the arrival of all those people. With his pants pulled up only to his knees he sat back on the sofa, took the telegram out of his pocket where he had shoved it, blushing, the night before, and spread it out on his knees. In the dimness he had to lean close down to the paper, which made him look like a child. In his shame he then leaned farther forward, as if he had to vomit. In his shame he buried his face in his hands. He did not understand how he could have sunk so low. Because, although obscured by a convoluted style and labyrinthine phrases, everything was there, spelled out in the telegram.

How could he have misunderstood it so badly.

The previous evening he had seen not what was in the telegram, with the peculiar letters of the telegraph machine, but what he recognized from his ridiculous daydreams in those letters. How could he have made himself so vulnerable to this woman.

So, that’s how low I’ve fallen.

Of course, now he saw clearly how it had all happened. As if, locked in his body, he’d been forced to live simultaneously in several parallel worlds and, given the current tensions, had by accident mixed them up and replaced one with the other. And thus he had indecently revealed to Mrs. Szemz
ő
one of his hidden selves, which she, luckily, not being familiar with his other hidden world, couldn’t have understood.

When he recalled these events long decades later, he sadly acknowledged that despite everything he had never been happier than he was during the next few days which the Szemz
ő
s spent in the city of his birth, and that he had suffered untold agonies in wanting the woman’s body so much.

He could no longer tell himself he was not attracted to her.

On a single occasion, they embraced each other in the afternoon quiet of the workshop, among the pieces of furniture in progress; then they could feel it.

His happiness was brief, the kind one never comprehends except when unexpectedly one remembers it.

Or, if he was happy sometimes, he may have felt it even more deeply and free of dramatics, but never so darkly and so lightheartedly as back then.

Like Fine Clockwork