Parallel Stories: A Novel (192 page)

When he walked into the apartment, the throng, sunk in smoke and noise, accepted him, him with his heavy heart. But even years and decades later he was unable to piece together all the things that did or didn’t happen that night.

It seemed to him that he didn’t spend the whole night in the apartment but, along with others, might have gone out on the street several times.

Standing in the wind without his coat on, this he remembered, as well as the bare storm-battered trees, and standing alone among the buildings, staring up at the dark sky.

Perhaps they went over to the Gourmand Restaurant to buy more drinks, or only to have one there, who knows. The bar at the Gourmand stayed open until four in the morning. They wanted him to pay; all right, he paid, but he didn’t remember what he paid for and whom he treated. It definitely was not a place for redeeming bottle deposits.

He took account of these things only in the early afternoon of the next day, when he finally managed to wake up and get dressed.

He was literally startled into wakefulness; he wanted to leave and find Klára, no matter where she was, and that’s when he saw he didn’t have a penny to his name.

Either the people at the party had robbed him or the bartender hadn’t given him his change.

But he did not remember how much he was supposed to pay or for what, or how he got back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard.

He remembered wanting to wake up while he was still asleep, so he could get going, but he did not know where to look for her, where to begin looking.

One thing was sure: he was lying in his own bed with his own nausea, he could see he was stark naked and without a cover, and if he wanted to avoid vomiting on the bedding he should sit up.

He heard no sounds from the adjacent rooms, everything around him was silent.

The Gourmand, for example, with its rich white tablecloths and gigantic damask napkins, was one of the Francophile places in the city not only because of its furnishings but also because of its unusually short but exquisite menu.

When he had first walked into the unfamiliar apartment and stood lost among the many strangers, he imagined that the space must have been not a hallway but some sort of reception room back in the heyday of the tailoring firm. He had never seen anything like it in this his own native city. And Klára, with a happy smile on her face, was pushing her way out of an inner room and coming toward him, indicating that he should find a secure place to put the mink coat she had borrowed from Andria Lüttwitz, a place where she could also find it; after all, she couldn’t spend the whole evening wearing the coat.

Not a coat rack anywhere.

It was so surprising to see her, to meet her again as if for the first time, even though he already knew what that felt like. What he wouldn’t give for a feeling such as he had for her. He was happy because of her; she filled his entire view so completely that he was positively grateful to himself for it. That is how infinitely laughable his happiness was. And as they went looking for a safe place for the coat the crowd kept pressing them together. It was the kind of thing neither of them had counted on. There was a chance to make contact again; they touched and grabbed each other, felt and cautiously patted and squeezed each other, they kissed and pawed each other quite roughly; they were forced to press forward across each other, and they laughed loud and hard. As if they were supposed to deny all this to themselves. Even if with their every little move they were making progress in this bashfully guarded nothingness, which had neither temporal nor spatial dimensions and therefore remained unfamiliar to them.

They did everything quickly and briefly, making use of strange shoulders and backs, restraining themselves so that it would not occur in front of the others.

They did not know what.

Klára jabbed at the air above their heads, pointing in the direction they should follow.

Kristóf had to admit, she yelled, that it was really stupid to borrow this fucking mink coat.

He admits it, but it wasn’t he who suggested it.

What’s the point of admitting that she did it for him.

Why would she have done it for him.

All right, don’t believe me, but that’s your own stupidity.

Perhaps it was even before this that they reached the kitchen. Where people were spreading things on sandwiches while feeding each other on the remnants. A large, dark-skinned girl told them to go back into the room, they would get their sandwiches there. Without keeping some order, everybody would gobble up everything. Ravenously they devoured the remnants the girl pushed in front of them, investing their deflected energies in this activity. Under each other’s eyes they gobbled up everything—bits of cheese rind, heels of bread, ends of salami, carrots and lettuce, which this large dark girl kept handing them with a hearty laugh from the other side of the table. Then from a piece of waxed paper she fed them some skin and fat of ham. They both happened to like these tidbits a lot, and they begrudged each other the individual bites, taking them out of each other’s mouth. The game they played was that they would not only devour everything, but also cast covetous glances at the food in each other’s mouth, but since this happened to be what they really wanted, it was a little risky for a game. Their voracious hunger was real, the rest was a game for predators. They ate out of each other’s mouth, or at least asked for a little bit of the other’s food. They shared a pickle to go with the ham. To the dark girl’s great joy they kept taking bites of cucumber, inching all the way to each other’s mouth, juice dribbling down their necks. By that time they were barmy and drunk, but only on each other. And with each touch, with the half-chewed food being coaxed out of each other’s mouth, they deferred the impending kiss and touch, as if what had to happen would not happen at all, as if to signal that beyond their lighthearted lack of restraint complete unruliness was waiting for them. Or that at least they were trying to put it off, delay it with something else, or substitute for it with some charming little nastiness or offensive commonplace.

But this must have happened later, because in the kitchen Klára was no longer wearing her mink coat.

They must have forced their way back to their original place.

From the shabby antechamber opened another, more spacious room whose door, closed only minutes earlier, was now wide open. The room was located where in other Budapest apartments the kitchen or kitchen and maid’s room would be. Two clothes racks on wheels, once used by tailors to hang suits ready for fitting, had been left in this room. Not only were the hangers full of coats but many others were thrown haphazardly over them and over the top bars of the racks. In this spacious room opening to the courtyard there was also a large platform, and that too had a thick cover of coats. This is where people had thrown their coats when they came in and where they yanked them free as they left.

A single bulb on a short wire provided a very pitiful light.

It was terribly hot because of the crowd; in this room too everyone threw off their jackets or sweaters.

Out on the gallery, arriving and departing guests kicked the empty bottles, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. The bottles made a terrible racket as they rolled or bounced down the stairs until they banged against the wall on the first landing and shattered to pieces.

The entrance door was also being constantly slammed.

He saw all this while falling backward and pulling Klára with him.

He well remembered playing the infantile bottle-kicking game with these strangers. One of whom held him with his arm around his shoulder, while he had his arm around the stranger’s waist, and that is how they held each other up while passing the miserable bottles back and forth to each other with their feet.

Customers of the tailor shop must have stood on the high platform while trying on pencil-thin tailcoats.

While they plopped down on the coats, Klára’s hair became undone and instantly surrounded Kristóf’s face; still, they remained restrained. And the noise of breaking bottles coming from the galleries reminded him that perhaps he should return to the staircase, he couldn’t just leave Pisti there by himself. And no matter how often he looked at the window giving on the courtyard, he always thought, this is how it must have been darkened during the war, during the siege, and it had stayed like this, all the panes daubed with black paint. He did not understand how he could be thinking about something like this when he was so dangerously close to losing his self-control.

Later he probably did not think of anything.

When with some difficulty they stood up to compose themselves, they realized that other people were also lolling about on the coats.

He did not understand how the mind allows itself these parallel connections, it upset him, as if he considered his own way of thinking as dissolute or as if with his compulsive thinking he were questioning his feelings.

Fixing her hair and looking around while readjusting her pins, she saw people slouched on the coats around them behaving in a disgusting, shameless way; let’s get away from here, she whispered, but she was still wearing the mink coat that would be safest on the coat rack next to them.

To get a free hanger they simply took another coat off a hanger and threw it on the platform.

They went looking for a drink, could not find a glass anywhere, did not even see one. But people were more than willing to let them drink from their bottles. They stood in a window recess for a while, holding each other with interlocked knees and thighs; they shared a cigarette while standing like that. They passed the cigarette back and forth, taking the smoke from each other’s mouth. They were insanely careful with the demands of their chests and groins, not to go too far but not to leave each other either, and their bodies readily obeyed both commands.

They also danced, like lunatics, Elvis was singing, their dance turned increasingly vulgar, they deliberately tried to shed their humanity; the pianist in a distant room stopped banging his instrument so as not to compete with Elvis, who was becoming so frenetic that nobody could resist him.

And then they were panting, various odors of perspiration wafting everywhere, Klára looking for her hairpins again, but her extravagant coiffure was gone for good; they went looking for drinks again. But first some water, water; they found it in an empty bathroom, though someone was innocently asleep in the dry tub. At the sink they drank water from each other’s hands. Kristóf was so flushed and overheated that, losing all proportion, he not only slapped water on his own face but, yelping wildly, splashed water into Klára’s open, unprotected face.

Although she liked his buoyant attack, propelled as it was by sheer happiness, she protested hysterically, practically screeching objections.

I’m soaking wet now, my hair.

You’ve ruined my makeup.

How could you do that.

She looked at herself in the mirror, at the water from her face streaking her face powder, running down into her cleavage; she was desperate, and suddenly she looked horrible. Kristóf felt like crying when he saw what he had done.

Forgive me.

No, this can’t be forgiven.

Yes, it can, please forgive me.

After this they had to console themselves with each other’s body and mouth for so long that in the end they could barely extricate themselves from each other. Although in their private darkness thickened by silence, they heard the man in the tub waking up.

They did not spare each other’s tongue or saliva.

Get out, get out of here while I fix my face, but I won’t forgive you.

I’m watching, I want to watch you do it, I won’t get out.

Get out, don’t be a baby, and do it while I’m asking nicely.

I won’t leave you here with this guy.

If he gets fresh, I’ll throw hot water on him.

He waited for her outside the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

During that time, other people went in and he couldn’t stop them; they’d come out again while he stood there foolishly, a laughingstock, lost in this corridor busy with human needs that had to be satisfied. But it was good to be alone a little; people went into the bathroom and also to the adjacent toilet, he heard everything, and then they came out.

He stood there until he remembered that the bathroom had more than one door.

Klára had disappeared, and the tub was ominously empty, no, that can’t be, he thought, but he did not find her anywhere in the crowd. So she hadn’t forgiven him. That cannot be. But luckily he noticed the man, now in the company of other women, on whose account he had endured hell’s torments for so many long minutes.

And from then on he ceased his maniacal search for her.

He’ll punish her.

Why should he look for her, pant for her like a dog.

Instead, he wound up in the midst of a heated discussion among some people, and it didn’t matter about what. They were arguing about art, he only watched from the sideline or shouted his views; they were all drunk as skunks. Well, is Picasso really a fraud, leading everybody by the nose, or a truly great artist, a fucking great artist who loves to bluff, and you, daddy-o, wouldn’t know how to separate his world-class bluffs from his art.

Then define bluff.

Why should I, let some smartass give a definition.

You can’t even define what it’d be like when I send you back to your mother’s cunt, daddy-o.

In the arts, we can’t get anywhere without definitions.

But you still have to know, daddy-o, where you are inside your mother.

He became mixed up in this argument because he happened to recognize one of the participants as someone he knew from the Emmi Pikler children’s home on Rózsadomb. This boy was a few years older than he, and he recognized him immediately. Both of them were surprised that he was not mistaken. He hailed the other one by his old name. They had taken away this boy’s name too for a time; they had a good laugh about that now. After a while, though, he had to resume his search for Klára because he couldn’t stand being without her. Perhaps Klára had gone on to someplace else. People would sometimes just get up and leave parties like this. He was ready to run out on the street and chase after her. And then he found her, leaning against Simon’s shoulder and talking animatedly to some people. Which caught him unprepared. He was almost ready to turn around and go, to get away from here. The people she was talking to suited her well: a bright-blond, wildly gesticulating, heavily freckled fellow and a peaceful-looking round woman with a large pregnant belly. With his free arm, the boyish fellow was hugging his wife as if holding her up. Simon, addressing some other people, thundering across a quieter conversation, as it were, was explaining in his penetrating hoarse voice that everything was fine, there was no reason for anxiety, nobody should worry about the communist movement. Next week the French will skedaddle out of Algeria like a shot.