Parallel Stories: A Novel (169 page)

I wanted to give in, but because of this being I could not.

Maybe that’s why my cousins accused me of being callous.

Yet I could not remove this last obstacle from the path of my goodness.

Because I was already too polite, too quiet, exceedingly considerate, and attentive. It was as if I were mocking them, and that made me feel insincere and wicked.

Even if they were most satisfied with me at times like this. But I knew that no matter how much they praised me, how much they stroked me, I wasn’t like that. And I was often close to the brink: one more glance, one more word and I might have revealed that I couldn’t go on; I felt dizzy, as if I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a long time. Of course they noticed nothing, which made the play I was putting on for myself even sadder. I had no hopes that in the hereafter I would not be such a giddy person, since my fate would be less false; at least I’d be able to understand more of what I couldn’t understand now because of all the falsehoods. I feared the promised great punishment, namely that the only world I knew would one day either slip out from under my feet or come crashing down on my head. They would unveil my dishonesty or suddenly discover that I wasn’t satisfied with anything. Viola and Szilvia could do anything they wanted, and even Ilonka Weisz could go on with her roguery to her heart’s content.

At least she had a mother who defended her when necessary, who lied and raised hell for her and then slapped her around.

I, on the other hand, had to be grateful to my grandparents and other relatives that I could stay with them at all. That they didn’t eject me from their lives. And I had to do my own lying. Occasionally my grandmother saw through me, took pity on me, and helped me lie to the others. But I also saw through her. She helped me with the lies simply to keep me from not loving her, and then she could be even stricter with me.

I barely remember the two years that preceded Grandmother’s final success in reclaiming me from the boarding school on Rózsadomb. Yet the tribulations of those two years determined my so-called good behavior. Because they might always send me back there again—the hour of truth might arrive at any time—and then I’d once again cease to exist. If I don’t behave no one will protect me; I can’t be a burden to people. They’ll take away my name again, the name that my grandmother’s enormous efforts had managed to retrieve in some office where they did not treat her as well as she’d expected they would.

And I remembered this situation clearly; it felt as if I were recuperating, as if the throbbing noise of a high fever had just subsided. The problem was not that my classmates and teachers—all the latter were women—had a hard time acknowledging my new name, but that frequently I myself didn’t know which one was the real name. My old name felt more familiar, felt more like mine, even though I knew it was only a name given to me by those gangsters who had dragged my father away from Aréna Road, my father whom nobody has ever seen again and of whose name they wanted to deprive the world.

I remembered well that day on Aréna Road, because they let me watch from the window as they took him away.

Grandmother got me back from them and retrieved our good name too; she said she’d paid a lot of money for it, a great deal of money, since she had to bribe many crooks and scoundrels. Still, the family name and my real first name lay on me like a curse. It was hard to accept that my new name was, in fact, my old original name, because I no longer remembered that in the boarding school on Rózsadomb they had given me a different one.

I had to learn the old one again, that this was who I was, after all.

I didn’t know how long I’d be allowed to remain as this one, or when it would be my fault that I’d have to be another one.

I mixed up the two names frequently enough.

Instead of my real old-new name, the old one kept popping into my mind, the one that wasn’t my name at all, regardless of how the others in school yelled at me and laughed, saying, this little idiot can’t even remember his own name.

I suspected that besides that name of mine, I might have not remembered the boarding school because they had mixed me up with someone else, and in reality I wasn’t the person they or even I thought I was. By mistake my grandmother may have taken away another child, thinking she was taking me. I tried to feel who I was, whether I was really the person they thought I was. I had the definite suspicion I had been exchanged for someone else, I was someone else. But they mustn’t learn of this, so they won’t be disappointed in me, since they’ve accepted me so nicely. Or at least they pretend to have been taken in by this lie or sham. I must be on guard; I was terribly ashamed of the deliberate, premeditated deceit. Perhaps they knew what an enormous mistake my grandmother had made and they said nothing about it because they wanted to spare her.

I must make myself unobtrusive or at least useful, if I can’t be completely unnoticed and useless.

That’s why I didn’t care about the shooting, I was going to get bread. At last I could prove my usefulness. I saw how my aunt Erna feared my disgusting cousin and her famous husband, so I chose, unlike them, to behave as a grown man should and went to see about getting bread for all of us. They willingly believed that I was brave and self-sacrificing since that was safer and more comfortable for them.

Ultimately, I was as self-seeking as they.

That is why it hurt me whenever, on either Damjanich Street or Teréz Boulevard, either in the midst of huge quarrels or coldly and pitilessly, they dismissed a maid.

They would say the maid had not proved worthy of their confidence.

At times like that I felt it’d be better for me to find a fast-acting poison among the cleaning compounds and do away with myself. Or this was the reason that Grandmother’s words about Róza filled me with hope, since she was the great exception.

I couldn’t imagine where those dismissed, unwanted maids would go.

By the same token, where would I go, where would I find refuge for myself, or find a way to evade my pursuers.

One day the adults were sitting on the balcony of the Damjanich Street apartment, under the white sunshade, and I was staring out among the flower boxes at the trees on Queen Vilma Road bathing in the sun.

It was late afternoon and down in the Moszkva Garden the waiters were busy setting tables, dishes and utensils were clattering, the band was tuning up for the five o’clock tea. Large striped sunshades were lowered over the tables with hand-operated winches; they cranked them exactly as they did on Margit Island in the Grand Hotel or the casino.

Five o’clock tea was a strange expression, because it did not mean that people had tea at five o’clock or that this was a
salon de thé
, as Grandmother and her lady friends called the pastry shop; it meant that dancing started at five o’clock.

That’s what I waited for.

At ten after five, when they had finished their second number and there were a few people still sitting at the tables, everyone started to clap and shout when Hedda Hiller appeared on the little stage, which was almost completely hidden from me by the leaves of the horse chestnuts. She began to coo, hum, drone, buzz, and purr into the microphone in her deep mellow voice, and occasionally she’d sing out a crude tune with unexpected force, and lots of twists and turns and halftones; and she appeared each time in ever more wondrous dresses.

My aunt Irén was carrying on behind me about the girl she’d fired the day before, as if the scene she’d made the day before, which we had had to live through, was happening again.

Pack your bag, dearie, and get out of here. I give you five minutes to get your things together. Where could I go now, sweet madam, in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, and she had the nerve to call me sweet and say it was the middle of the night. Please let me stay until I find a new place. Go, stay under a bridge for all I care, my angel, anywhere you want to, but make yourself scarce, get lost.

Grandmother quietly asked Irén whether she had really sent the maid away like that or upset herself like this only afterward.

If only she could be trusted.

Grandmother had come to take me home with her and now here she was, confronted with this story that visibly shocked her.

You don’t think I could possibly have stayed another minute under the same roof with such a creature.

Her voice receded from me on the balcony, along with the sound of the band tuning up, as twilight slowly approached. Then it became completely dark and although I heard the drums, trumpet, saxophone, and piano as they were looking for their correct positions in the ensemble, I was on my way to somewhere where things were not so musical.

Luckily they never found out why I fainted on the balcony.

They said the little fool must have stood in the sun for hours again and they shouldn’t let me do that in the future. I was too sensitive a child, which of course was understandable. Dampened cloths were put on my forehead and chest, and for a while longer I lay there at their feet on the warm stones. He always waits for Hedda Hiller, would you believe, and for some reason they all laughed at this remark. They always laughed at my enthusiasm for the singer. Then they lugged me inside, I let them, though I felt I had nothing wrong with me, I could have made it on my own two feet. They laid me on the sofa, everyone stood around me and I could see on their faces that they felt they had to do something with me or for me. Szilvia and Viola took turns running into the bathroom; they were in charge of changing the compresses. Grandmother fanned me with a newspaper; my aunt Irén took my pulse. The only unpleasant thing was that this sunny summer afternoon was pouring in through the many floor-to-ceiling windows, together with the jazz band music.

Hedda Hiller was crooning something about love into the microphone, then said a few words that made the men and women in the Moszkva Garden laugh, and then the saxophone kept wailing.

They asked if I felt better, because now my color was coming back.

I said I felt really good, though I had no idea how I felt.

They asked if I hadn’t eaten something on the sly that might have upset my stomach.

I said I thought there was too much light in the room.

Did I understand what Irén had asked me. She asked me if I’d nibbled on something.

I said I understood, but still there was too much light in the room.

But they were asking if I had eaten anything before lunch that they didn’t know about, whether I could remember what it was.

I said I hadn’t eaten anything before lunch, I remembered very well, and I didn’t take any pastry from the serving table.

That calmed them down but I was afraid I might faint again; I was afraid of myself.

I kept insisting—not that the air was filling up with something—but that the light was becoming unusually dense. My grandmother drew me to her, as if she’d sensed what was happening to me, and said, no problem, darling, the girls will darken the room right away, and with that, she may have kept me from fainting again.

It felt good when they finally shut off the light.

Let’s leave him alone for a while, Grandmother whispered, he’ll sleep now.

And I did feel as if I had to fall asleep.

But the moment they left the room on tiptoe and stopped making the floor creak, I opened my eyes. They had closed the double door leading to the dining room; the room became dark. That reminded me again of the night, the bridge and that girl, who was me, having to sleep under the bridge.

But why did they lie to us the next morning, saying she had left of her own will.

I felt that I was born to be a girl.

There was always a truth that later turned out to be a lie.

The feeling that I was not who I imagined myself to be, and not who others thought I was, always tormented me. Actually nobody is what he or she appears to be, and I’m not the only one who doesn’t know who he is or to whom he belongs. I observed the torments of others; I wanted to understand how they decided when they had to lie and about what, or what it was they could consider the truth for a while. That was the reason why I later so obsessively followed the half-man trundling himself down Teréz Boulevard on his board with casters, since no one knew where he came from or where he was going every day, or the woman with her big hats and no face left, nothing but a walking burn.

As if by watching them I could crack their secrets.

Since these two were so obviously not what they appeared to be, it never occurred to me that they might not have any secrets. And since I could never shake the thought that my father surely couldn’t have disappeared without a trace as claimed, and our mother couldn’t have just left us—that too had to be a lie, and something entirely different must have happened—it followed that these two, the man on the rolling wooden board and the burned woman, were my father and mother. My mother had survived the war, though she’d suffered terrible burns during the siege of Budapest. And my father had heroically stuck to his truth, and when they saw they were getting nowhere with him and were unable to force false testimony from him about anyone, they simply threw him out of a speeding car.

He was like a living piece of flesh. He could just barely crawl away from where they dumped him.

A stranger took him in, with whom he’d been living ever since, somewhere around Hunyadi Square. It would be nice if Hedda Hiller were that stranger. Since I couldn’t decide what would be better for me, sometimes I imagined that the kind stranger was a man—a more convincing version of my story, since a woman couldn’t have carried the wounded man to her place.

His legs could not be saved. The truth was that in their condition neither of my parents wanted to be a burden to us.

That’s why my mother kept hiding from us, that’s why she pretended when looking out from under her large hat that she didn’t recognize me. I also tended to avoid her because I could not imagine the moment when she’d give up the playacting, take me back, and press me to herself for the first time. I was scared that I might push her away because she had become repugnant, because she had left me, and because I really hated her.