Parallel Stories: A Novel (165 page)

He had to get across it.

Now it was wringing his heart.

He did not know why he should have to get across it or whether that bleakness would even have a far side.

At any rate, he had no strength left to turn the key in the ignition.

And there was the realization that with Lojzi Madzar and Elisa he had indeed tasted and enjoyed the happiness of being privileged, however their story ended or had not even started.

That is the sum of what was; everything else would begin only now.

Leaning across the rim of his consciousness, he managed to comprehend the strangeness of his condition; I wouldn’t have this much strength left, I shouldn’t have even this much strength, but actually, I’m not surprised.

I was still young then, a young man. I could swim across the Danube at Mohács with my young friend, a number of times too, and now I can’t turn the damn key in the ignition.

Back then I also knew I was swimming across my death, which I enjoyed immensely. What I enjoyed was that despite all my misfortunes my muscles and nerves functioned flawlessly in face of the elements.

In the hospital lobby, decorated with tropical plants, palm trees, and giant ficuses, inspired by the fascist spirit of wondrous sterilization and furnished in the style of imperial modernity, whose coffered ceiling was supported by smooth marble columns, and in which at this hour not a soul was to be found, the porter showed Gyöngyvér where the telephone booth was.

This hospital was perhaps the last edifice left in the city that had once dreamed of a Hungarian empire, before everything collapsed.

Follow me as soon as you can, Lady Erna motioned to her from the elevator that was to take her up to the psychiatric ward on the top floor where the professor was being treated for brain softening.
*

Looking out of the spacious glass phone booth while she waited, dialed, and then talked, Gyöngyvér noticed that the pike-gray Pobeda was still parked in front of the hospital.

She spoke to the secretary; none of the boys was in, but she managed to arouse the secretary’s curiosity as well as her willingness to help since they were talking about a matter of life and death, and Ágost Lippay’s father literally had only a few hours left to live. She saw the pike-gray Pobeda make a sharp turn in front of the building, its wheels screeching; it barely missed slamming against the sidewalk across the street. Gyöngyvér almost cried out. And then the cab pulled into the hospital parking lot but stopped as if there were no marked parking spaces or as if the engine had been suddenly throttled.

They hadn’t told him to wait; it was very suspicious, what this Bellardi was doing in the parking lot.

She could not give him her full attention because the secretary on the phone was promising that she’d try to track down the boys right away.

And as if she were saying.

Where.

What are you saying.

Track down the boys where, Gyöngyvér shouted, because there was much noise around her now.

She thinks all three of them are there, the secretary said, involuntarily raising her voice at the other end of the line. They can’t be anywhere else, she shouted. No doubt about it, today they seem to be staying a little longer than usual.

The poor things, sometimes they work at night too.

A bus passed by on Kútvölgyi Street, going uphill, its engine loud, and Gyöngyvér could not hear where the secretary thought Ágost and the boys might now be. She was relieved that he was not with another woman who might take him away from her, so she wouldn’t have to break with him tonight.

You can count on me, shouted the otherwise lazily indifferent woman, I’ll do it right away.

But where are they, for God’s sake, Gyöngyvér insisted, what did you say, I didn’t get it.

That’s the part I didn’t get.

I’ll get to them, Gyöngyvér, leave it to me, don’t worry, I will.

You must have other things to do now.

You don’t have to worry about this.

But despite all her promises, the secretary did not manage to find them. Gyöngyvér put down the receiver, calmed herself, and, with a last glimpse at the cab, headed for the elevator.

As if being able to drive his cab into the lot had been a great accomplishment. Bellardi took off his worn leather cap and did not understand why he was perspiring. In the oppressive dimness he leaned on the steering wheel for a while to rest a little. He was ashamed that one of the wheels had hit the sidewalk, as if his greatest concern now were damage done to the cab, property of the state-owned taxi service. However, not only his forehead was covered with perspiration. As soon as his head touched the steering wheel, he felt that his bare neck was soaking wet, which made him feel cold.

But why am I cold if I’m so hot, which I can’t feel.

I don’t feel anything, I’m becoming numb.

This is the reason that in the darkness descending about his shoulders he had to recall the particular summer night that most likely had accepted his life and absorbed it. How curious, how his shoulders throbbed and how weighty the past proved to be.

When his entire naked body trembled.

As if, at the sight of the unknown future, he were trembling for life, fearful of what was ahead because of his abandoned life. The life he would have gladly given, all his life, to Elisa, and had feared—he now at last realized—giving to Madzar. He saw how helplessly Madzar’s naked body was trembling only an arm’s length away; Madzar could not control his either. And perhaps it had been in his power to stop or relieve the trembling.

But his armpits and chest became drenched under the ice-cold shirt, his loins and, oddly, the crook of his knees too; he could feel sweat dripping down his calves.

The secretary could not reach the boys because at the end of the glass-covered corridor of the Lukács Baths, nobody bothered with the telephone ringing in the cabin attendant’s booth. It rang insistently and long and then it ceased for a short while only to begin anew a little farther away in the public phone booth.

The bench, on which a little while ago and under the indignant gaze of the new attendant the three friends had been lying in one another’s laps and arms, was now empty; those attractive men, with their choice rudeness and equally choice gentleness, had been trying to keep Ágost from another attack of despondency. The realization had never reached Gyöngyvér’s awareness that the man she loved, whom she would have to leave during the approaching evening, was a seriously afflicted and endangered melancholic. The thought would have paralyzed her or would have ruined her amorous enthusiasm, which she considered a gift more precious than anything else in the world.

She could not have imagined that with her enthusiasm she had failed to reach, let alone mitigate, the other person’s weltschmerz.

At this moment, André Rott’s cabin stood empty. Unquestionably the most envied cabin even among the most privileged bathing guests, it was the very last in the row of cabins, next to the bathing master’s booth and the stairs going up to the sun terrace. In front of it was the famous bench on which one could lounge, sunbathe from spring to fall, receive guests and chat with them, not to mention the public phone at hand on which, in contrast with all other public telephones in Budapest, one could receive calls. A short while ago, Rott had had only enough time to throw off all his clothes and, with a certain physical repugnance, put on his wet bathing trunk before dashing off.

Events, running on various tracks, now followed at fever-pitch speed.

When a few moments earlier, as the ambulance people had put the young man slightly injured during his epileptic fit on a stretcher and taken him away, the prime minister’s private secretary appeared in the corridor, having come from the steam bath; he was still red and perspiring. A rapidly balding, not very tall man with a slight limp, who, according to his official title, was head of the prime minister’s secretariat with the rank of cabinet minister, had arrived through the secret side door, which invisible hands closed behind him.

He went about the world as unimpeded as if he could walk through walls.

As he passed, he motioned to André Rott, who was just putting on his socks, to follow him, go for a swim with him, and with his thumb pointed upward, signaling that celestial persons had ordered something very important.

And Rott knew very well who the celestial ones were in this instance.

The young man’s protestations were in vain, he begged them not to take him to the hospital, he had had this problem many times before, in the Gellért nobody paid attention to it, and in a little while everything would be all right.

Of course everything would be all right.

He should not worry.

Just a little dizziness, that’s all he feels.

His head nearly split with pain; that was the truth, a sharp throbbing pain that sometimes remained stuck in his brain for days, making him vomit a lot of the time, but he kept quiet about this because the doctors could not help him anyway.

See, he can stand up already.

Whenever this happened to him, all he wanted to do was walk out on the world or hide at the bottom of abandoned mouse holes and shut out every bit of light. But Rózsika, the ticket taker, with her blood-red beads, her thick neck layered with rings of fat, pushed him back down, did not let him sit up; she had the same kind of blood-red beads on her massive wrists and in her small ears.

They rattled softly with her every movement.

You, now listen to me, my child, you may have a concussion. Don’t ever forget that, my sweet Jani.

And that means you must not move.

Everybody knows that.

I’m just telling you so you won’t forget it. You’re lucky you didn’t split your head on the faucet. I can hardly believe it; you missed it by a hairsbreadth when you fell, my God.

She followed them, she walked with them across the inner courtyard with the plane trees, and when they stopped for a moment she would stroke the young man’s limp hands, arms, and shoulders, his marble-pale forehead. The stretcher bearers stopped and changed direction several times under the storm-beaten wet trees, discussing loudly to which building the physician on duty had asked them to take the patient. All the while Rózsika whispered in a voice sweet as honey that he should not be afraid because she would not leave him, she would go everywhere with him, she will take care of everything but absolutely everything.

In the ice-cold wind she gathered the thick hand-knitted sweater about her, and the strangest thing was that in the following years she kept her promise. To the general indignation of her friends, colleagues, and relatives, she did not leave the young man, and they learned that the young man clung to her no less ardently once he left his little fiancée for Rózsika.

For a few steps the cross-eyed chief attendant also followed the stretcher in his white short-sleeved shirt and his white trousers tight as a drum on his paunch and buttocks. His wooden-soled slippers clapped along as they walked. He was turned back by the security people streaming in from the steam bath to take up their observation posts around the pool, in the corridors, and at other important points of the building as required by the presence of a high-ranking visitor.

Of course Wolkenstein, known here by his Hungarian name, János Kovách, could not see any of this because a moment earlier he had finally had the chance to take his chilled limbs and disappear behind the sailcloth curtains, where hot, unadulterated medicinal water gushed freely from the shower heads in great spurts, smelling like rotten eggs, just as it burst forth from the thermal spring. He shampooed his gray head, rubbing it pleasurably, and then did the same to his substantial limbs, which over time had grown a little heavy; he worked up a foam, his strong hands gliding as he massaged himself while over the gurgling water he sang at the top of his voice.

Ágost, however, did hear from the other end of the corridor the relentless ringing of the telephone call looking for him. He was quickly getting dressed in his cabin. He thought the Lukács cabins were disgusting, smelling of various bodily exhalations and of the insecticide scattered everywhere against cockroaches. He had no intention of waiting for the others; he wanted to decamp alone. He had had enough of them and of this morning. He’d had it up to here with their insipid political arguments. He did not understand why these men, so full of hostile sentiments, could be his friends. He felt anxious, though he knew he could not afford to. Their opinions did not differ, really, yet they could not be reconciled. He could not imagine what he would do with his unhappy life, which was probably unsuited for happiness. They should spare one another all this awkward strutting about. Waste of time. He was bored with everybody always having to have a different opinion, why does the world need different views. He had no sensible answer. And the wind was knocking about outside. They never got anywhere with their opinions. The wind raised the mist and blew it about; gusts of air continually lifted, perturbed, slid across, and bared the surface of the water.

There was now no one in the men’s pool except two closely watched persons.

Ágost was firmly convinced that man was not a political animal, that was too flattering a definition, but a chattering animal. And where politics are not made but only endured, as was the case in this cunt-size country, where only servants and gentry prattle, there’s no point in opening one’s mouth to debate political issues.

How could they have suspended their argument if this conviction of his so infuriated both his two friends, albeit for different reasons.

While the storm raged unabated above the pool André Rott tried to remain one stroke behind Karakas, who spoke to his subordinates only when he reached the end of the pool. On the opposite wall, the big hand of the electric clock impassively kept clicking away on its axis.

Another hour went by; it now showed 11:20.

Any number of people might accompany Karakas on his early- or late-morning wanderings between the steam bath and the pool. He could instruct his underlings as he pleased—to let him have a towel, not that wet one, the other, the dry one, to give him his swimming cap or take away his bathrobe or, after a few years of suspended activity, to renew the construction of the Budapest subway or to start an equally large project. With insiders like André he would discuss strictly confidential matters that in the life of every state belong in the category of destructive secrets. He would also see petitioners, at least those whom his always invisible security men allowed to meet him. And there was always—or there would have been—a procession of famous novelists, well-known radio reporters, eminent scientists, successful actors, and high-ranking officials who sometimes waited for long weeks to see him, here in the Lukács, for the hope-filled moment, for the great opportunity. They hoped to reach the influential man with their irregular requests outside his office, and they always held in reserve a small favor they could do for him in return. They would want a passport; a higher place, reserved for the more privileged, on the list of those permitted to purchase a car or be allocated an apartment; a starring role in a movie or a play; a reprint of their rightfully forgotten novels or a new publication of their selected poems; an appointment as an ambassador or clemency for someone in jail for life. Or they just wanted to gush and brownnose, to buzz around the influential man and fawn. Which is such a wonderful feeling that one could practically faint with joy. The lucky ones would shudder for hours afterward when they thought about what they had said and what the man had said to them, recalling their chance to talk with such a powerful personage. They would boast breathlessly to anyone they could collar, eager to strengthen their position with this exceptional bit of news.