Parallel Stories: A Novel (158 page)

It was not enough that she swallow the poison pill, as she had done three times.

And now she was being taken to her husband’s deathbed by a driver whom the professor, true to form, had betrayed or at best left in the lurch for the sake of the great cause. Which fit nicely into the theory of tactical conformity. You have no other choice but to cooperate, to serve the prevailing conqueror willingly, but you must always remain conscious of what you are doing and why.

And when were you freed, if I may ask, she asked a little later, her voice lower than low.

She meant to express compassion and empathy, which had to function as a clear marker, and thus was part of their secret language.

In the spring of ’fifty-five, answered the driver, in the impersonal tones in which it was possible to speak of such matters during the years when prisons were still full of people.

He wanted to reciprocate Lady Erna’s empathy, would have said that it had been six years now, and thus indicate in their secret language that he understood and appreciated her viewpoint, but he had no idea who the young woman was.

Everyone feared informers. And he didn’t want to become too cozy with Jews anyway.

I certainly don’t envy your poor wife for those terrible years, if I may express myself like that, Lady Erna added, filled with genuine empathy and a mite disturbed by his lack of reciprocity.

She caught herself only after she’d said this—that she’d made a mistake, good Lord.

The instant she said it she knew she had committed one of the worst faux pas of her life.

Bellardi did not reply, not because he didn’t know how to respond to such rudeness but as if he hadn’t heard it. Even though from that moment, like a blow to the back of the neck, he was once again afflicted by the scandalous weeks, months, and years he’d spent at the bottom of the well. The state of feverishness and sleeplessness when he could not understand, during either the day or night, how Elisa could have done this to him. And when despite everything sleep managed to overtake him he would shudder and awaken to the question. Why did she do it. There was nothing to understand. How could she have left him. The person to whom he was more devoted than anyone else; he had never, never before or with anyone else; it was no mistake, neither hallucination nor loss of proportion, that actually they had bestowed on each other nothing less than the enjoyment of hell.

It could not have been hallucination, because no trace of happiness was left between them.

But at least the gift of hell’s enjoyment, if his life could provide nothing else.

The situation was intolerable. They both suffered terribly from each other, from their own selves when in the presence of the other. The more they tried not to wound each other, the more infernal the enjoyment became, giving it to each other at the cost of restraining their aversion and suppressing their emotion. They slowed down. As if love’s utmost value, passion, were draining out of their raw desire and pleasure. Mutual tolerance and consideration made it pale and more tender; it slowed down but spread out, flooding everything, and it did not cease or grow calm.

As if in place of passion they had reached the combustible matter slumbering at the very bottom of their minds, as if they had touched the body’s glowing magma.

How could she have left him.

They did torture each other all right, but they would have been hard put to find two other people with the same perseverance, strength, and irrepressible liveliness whom they could have tortured.

Elisa’s new whim seemed to be that she had left him and that was that; now she needed love to cling to, to the end. As if the female called Mária Szapáry did not even exist and Elisa had merely invented her so that she could torture him the more.

He did not understand it, though he did comprehend it.

She had thrown him into an unknown circle of hell so they could live through the very depth of the relationship they were now going to lose forever.

Much as if he had to undergo a final or great test simply in order to fail it.

Earlier on, one of them had to escape, now he, now she, so that both could gather strength and return.

How could he have thought that she’d left him or could have left him.

Or what would have weakened their mutual attachment. Did that terrible female know more about Elisa than he did; what was it that she knew, and what were the two of them doing at this very moment. He could see before him what they were doing. Although he was not curious to know, did not want to see it, could not escape it, with every fiber of his muscles he experienced what they were doing. And he trampled himself so deeply into pain that his loss was greater than death; from lack of pleasure and from pain he grew ill, feverish, shaking with a permanent fever, and his illness so sensitized him that his clear-sightedness was no mere delusion presumably.

Clear-sightedness struck him like lightning.

He had considered it but did not know when it would fell him.

It came upon him, and then he knew what was happening between them, and what the end of everything would be like; he did not have to see it to feel it and experience it. Here he is, sobbing, knocking himself against the floor and howling with his head swaying, so he won’t have to see what he can’t see anyway; won’t have to think about it, look at it with his eyes wide open, sense it in his testicles, in the roots of his hair, on the aching skin of the soles of his feet, in the hollow spaces of his penis, in his tumescence; but whatever happens he must remain silent so that their little boy won’t notice anything and won’t awaken from his sweet dreams.

The pleasure the two women were giving to each other now appeared as a physical sensation.

Because he patterned what he was imagining on what happened between him and his wife only weeks earlier when in their pain and prompted by their pain they had enjoyed each other. What was peculiar was that now he felt it very differently, in a way he couldn’t have imagined before. There was no such reality in his sensual experiences or there could not have been such reserves.

After a while he could not help thinking that he was experiencing not his own nervous fits but the women’s attacks; after all, he wasn’t seeing what he felt. Thrusts were coming from outside like gusts of wind; his ability to experience them was absent from his imagination, and the two women were doing this to him deliberately. Elisa was torturing him from the outside. Indeed, she could have had no greater revenge. With their bodies stuck together and trembling with happiness, they were sending Morse signals, would waken him deliberately when he finally managed to doze off, magnetize him with their mutual bodily reality and irradiate him with their happiness.

He must realize he could expect nothing from Elisa anymore; the two of them had become one, and they used this to torture him because his unhappiness made them enjoy each other even more.

Time became endless during those weeks. He could not interrupt it by sleeping; at best a sedative helped a little, but there was no starting anew, he kept shaking with exhaustion, became greatly agitated. His testicles had swollen to worrisome proportions and become ruddy, which he found especially disgusting in himself. He averted his face from the sight as if nature were slapping him in the face with this prank. He was so disgusted with his own corporeality and with his blinded sensual excitements that he stayed dressed even at night to avoid having to see his body; he would not wash up to avoid touching it. Elisa had a bone-handled, gilded pair of scissors in the bathroom. Mesmerized, he looked at it for a long time. But he wanted to save himself from this, if only because of his little boy; not to let blood spurt, not to let the boy find him like that.

He did not go to confession, even though he wanted to be free of the shame and degradation, no matter how high the price.

He felt that he could hardly restrain his own hand. When he writhed on the parquet floor of the living room, glowing in sunshine or lamplight, he saw himself from the outside, silently, as if he were an epileptic.

He had nothing to live for.

Silently, whimpering, occasionally whining.

Yet the next day he might shower normally, wash the bulb of his penis, stinking under the foreskin from the continuous erections, and with nothing woeful in his face he would go to Vienna, knock off another five days of service on the
Carolina
. He pleaded with God but could not pray to him; he called on that goddamn God, though he knew that something else, not the scissors, not self-mutilation, not self-punishment, but only one thing would satisfy him.

Only murder.

He was very cautious, he did not go to confession and did not go near a church. Lest Jesus Christ or the saints or Mary or the Franciscans get involved. He knew there was another, incomprehensibly sober and mendacious life that his church supported. He had fallen out of it, out of this sober and mendacious world, but because of his little boy he would have to force himself back into it. He did not go to his confessor because he did not want to be diverted. To take his coat, not to stay here as they irradiated him with their happiness, that’s what he wanted, to go when they rushed at him with their pleasure, to break down the apartment door on them and bump them off in their great, noisy happiness like two mad dogs.

By the time his muscles tired of the rhythmic spasms, his completely purposeless and disgusting erection had become so strong and painful that he had to free himself of it somehow.

If he had to touch it with his hand, he would have vomited.

But after a while, even without a sedative, his limbs relaxed with fatigue, his enormous arms and thighs as well as his furrowed features. These parts of his body had to rest for a while to preserve the pain. He lay stiffly, like an uprooted tree. He breathed loudly so he wouldn’t shout even more loudly. Actually, he could not hear his own rhythmic howls. His consciousness still had a clean spot in which he could comprehend the lovely entirety of his existence. He was so dehydrated that he had no more saliva, snot, or tears. And still he had no answer to the question why Elisa had done this to him.

But then they irradiated him again; with their bright rapture they alerted his muscles; he thirsted to know what the two of them were doing at that moment, together, against him, as they immersed themselves in each other’s wickedness and milked the last drop of enjoyment from it.

Without me, without me.

He was howling, writhing silently on the floor because they had shut him out of their wickedness, or because he should turn against himself with his own wickedness. The damned parquet floor creaked in his ears with the shared rhythm of their wickedness, their lovemaking—in which he was Mária Szapáry, so he would not have to abandon Elisa. On the floor, he lived through Mária Szapáry’s experience with Elisa, like animals; then he sobbed dryly when he noticed that for some minutes his little boy had been standing in the doorway in his nightshirt, startled awake; he had awakened the boy with his awful condition.

The boy had been watching him with wide-eyed amazement and dread.

If this little boy dares ask again, if he once again opens his mouth and begins his nerve-racking wails, where is his mother, why doesn’t his mother come home, then he’ll kill him. Tear him apart, rip him to pieces with his teeth. It would be best to kill him right away. The little boy knew, his father’s lies notwithstanding. Or it had been useless to tell him the truth, the whole truth, so as not to beat around the bush. The boy did not believe him, did not listen to him, only waited for his mother to return. Just as these horrible women would not let him rest—Szapáry virtually possessed him, dwelt in him—now the two of them had spun him around and his little boy crawled into him, dwelt in his flesh.

He had to see what the little boy would do; he knew, knew everything but also deceived himself.

These days, he and the little boy were like flesh within flesh, like perfect emotional mirror images of each other.

If he stayed a father, he would most certainly kill him, cut him down, so he wouldn’t have to see him and would leave no witness alive, but he had a secret compulsion to metamorphose into a mother for the little boy’s future.

The pleasure that the two women bestowed on each other not only kept his consciousness awake but also alerted his last humane reserves, for their pleasure had grown much larger than his passionate suffering.

He did not know that one could suffer even in a brief, induced slumber.

For that reason alone he had to put an end to this.

He did have a pistol.

But first he would kill them.

And even before that, he wanted to tell Madzar the whole terrible story, from the beginning almost to the very end, leaving out what he was preparing to do lest Lojzi try to hold him back by force; he would not have that.

So that nobody besides him in this fucking world would ever know about it.

He’s the only one I’ve got left.

And this too was not a coincidence; it had to be a secret signal or otherworldly hint that, after so many years and so completely unexpectedly, Madzar was standing before him on the deck of the
Carolina
, exuding confidence. But of course he’s on his way to America. When he is most needed. How can he be stopped. And then he did not tell him, did not even begin to, because he found no connecting path or witty turn of phrase from their own heavy and worrisome present situation, no opening sentence for his story. And on the next occasion, when again Madzar appeared on the deck or they arrived together, when he had the table set in the command salon and they sat opposite each other in the fluttering candlelight, he blessed his former distrust which had made him not tell the story.

Suddenly he realized there was no living language in which he could tell it to this reticent, vigorous, strong man. He had no one left. Every feeling proved to be an illusion. It would have felt great to squeal on Elisa to this bullheaded man. To spill every one of her filthy little secrets, their infernal happiness, the disgust he felt for her, the hatred and contempt. To tell him that already on their honeymoon in Alexandria he had cheated on Elisa. All he had to do was cross the poorly lit Corniche, with the uniform noise of the waves, and grope his way down a dark, urine-smelling set of stairs.