Parallel Stories: A Novel (49 page)

In the dim hallway, Mrs. Szemz
ő
discovered that for months she hadn’t put away her winter gloves.

As if to say, that’s the limit. As if profoundly upset by her own carelessness.

She found herself alone in the unventilated hallway crammed with furniture, and this felt like a slap in the face that could not have been avoided or mitigated. And the walls were indeed not so thick that she couldn’t have heard them, but she kept to the recent compromise. Those two inside didn’t want to make a sound, so she wouldn’t hear them. If she left right away, she’d be breaching the compromise she had made. And their bodies went on working whether they liked it or not, they did it several times, in succession, the bed creaking under them. It was becoming uncomfortable. If they hadn’t been making selfish little moves the bodies simply couldn’t have endured it.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
did not hear much of all this because she was busy with her anger, but her anger had painful fissures in it. She loved her gloves. It was not a question, not for a moment, whether or not she knew what her soul was or wasn’t doing to her. She needed to avoid unnecessary dramas, yet she was in them up to her neck, and she could not deny that perhaps she wanted to be in them.

It would be ridiculous to think she was unaware of all this since for two decades, until her practice ended, she had been one of the most celebrated and best-paid psychoanalysts in Budapest.

Her gloves had to be finely lined, the kind that cling snugly to the fingers. To feel the root of the fingers in them was an exceptional, almost insolent, pleasure.

Impossible, this forgetfulness really makes things impossible, she said to herself; she was unfazed by these alleged impossibilities of hers, though she was keenly aware of them too.

Her forgetfulness was her only refuge.

She was so upset about having left her gloves for months on various pieces of furniture in the hallway that she blushed in the darkness. Which managed to surprise her. She felt hot in her two-piece pearl-colored dress patterned with blue stripes. She tried to dismiss the feeling with a wave of her hand: she was not about to deceive herself with blushing and hot flashes. She was outnumbered by these subtle bodily actions, though, and she had to repeat for the third time what she had said to curb her upset self and satisfy the controlling one. Her head was nodding vigorously; in her excitement, this otherwise hardly noticeable and cleverly hidden little tic grew stronger. It’s really impossible the way I’ve been leaving things all over the place and then forgetting them. And all the time, she observed disinterestedly, she was regaining her composure.

The truth was that everything existed simultaneously in her mind, and she couldn’t forget anything, because she purposefully did not remind herself of anything. And in fact she brought about her forgetfulness artificially.

Yes, she was now going to put away those miserable winter gloves. Her famous glove collection had survived the devastation. She did not remember how handy a pair of gloves could be in certain situations. She had been taken away, along with her two sons, in the middle of summer. Instead of real objects, she invented objects and filled her memory with them, or she smuggled objects out of her memory and pretended they’d never existed; she freed her memory of everything depressing. She could not bear this anymore. She had to upset herself with all sorts of meaningless and invented triviality to allow her mind to run on empty. But it should have something to go on. She kept saying things to herself, continually, so as not to allow a single interjection concerning anything she thought improper or incorrect to acknowledge. She did not feign being deaf or blind: she truly did not see or hear what she did not think she should see or hear.

She let her body and soul play tricks on her. She knew how to please both of them, keep them calm.

Not for a moment would she leave herself without strict supervision.

By himself or herself, each human being is a relatively transparent, mechanical system—she firmly believed this. Only when together with others do the systems become complicated, and that’s bad enough. Living together with a subtenant includes several generations of
Sozialgeschichte
; the soul and all its mechanical tricks lie somewhere beyond this. Stories about the soul and about social relations scarcely touch each other; rarely is there a direct connection between them; they are two different categories written side by side. At every moment they must be peeled apart. Which is what everybody does, all the time. This she firmly believed. Mrs. Szemz
ő
always thought very abstractly; if she wished to lighten up, she’d smirk and simper to conform to other people’s tastes. Only after this thought did she slam down her handbag. Right into the drawer. Making a loud thump.

There were two large cardboard boxes in the drawer, one for winter gloves, the other for summer ones.

The ceiling lamp’s gray light filtered through the panes of the glass door.

Hallways in Budapest apartments are usually pitifully shapeless. As though Hungarian architects had said, it makes no difference how you enter or what you find when you do. And in this apartment, the hallway was jam-packed with pieces of furniture much too large for the space. One could barely get past them, and they cast chaotic shadows, which made it worse. As if everything was temporary when in fact nothing had changed in ten years.

Just as the movers had put them down.

She kept deferring, pushing the task before her from day to day like a lifeless object, as though the one who’d do the job in her stead were still alive. One spring morning, ten years earlier, in the sunny bathroom of their house on Orbán Mountain, Dr. Szemz
ő
, a reputable dermatologist, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Which event, since then, had claimed for itself an eternal yesterday.

Szemz
ő
collapsed, letting out a single surprised shout. In those years, many of those who had survived the earlier devastation died like this, suddenly. With his death he displaced every last little tomorrow.

He had managed to slink out of the marching column at the corner of Személynök and Balaton streets.

He learned much later where they had shot the rest of them into the Danube.

After her husband’s funeral, for a token sum Mrs. Szemz
ő
turned over the rental rights of their already nationalized villa to a high-ranking national security officer, a timid blond man, father of several children, whose family had been hastily moved to the capital and whom the authorities would have foisted on her as a co-tenant no matter what. Had she insisted on staying in the villa on Orbán Mountain, she’d have had to move down to the basement, and she wasn’t willing to do that. She moved into the apartment on Pozsonyi Road that she was no longer allowed to use as her office. This was the essential part of the transaction, which the ÁVH officer arranged for her, allowing her as a favor to hold on to the right of ownership in the villa in exchange for moving out of it. That is when the furniture was crammed into the apartment, along with many meaningless objects she could not bring herself to throw out, even though she was not expecting or waiting for anything. The crammed furniture was something she permitted, and not unconsciously, one of her selves to have. If she could not create in her apartment a new order like the old one, at least she could more easily conceal from others how much this existence humiliated her.

Not from this one or that one, but from everyone she had been dragging along with her.

She felt as if all her pores suddenly opened up.

What will happen now.

Ágost barely breathed his words on the other side of the wall, whispering like a low fire.

Eyes wide open, they stared into each other’s face, grinning like children after a prank gone awry, hiding to avoid the dreaded consequences.

I don’t know, Gyöngyvér breathed her reply.

Skin shone in the dark, eyes were on fire. They were beautiful, wild, and strong. And they had been waiting for an entirely different storm than the one that now caught them.

I’m afraid you’ll get in big trouble for this.

I don’t think so, maybe she didn’t notice.

Why does she need the light.

Scared. I don’t know.

What is she scared of.

Of you. I don’t know what she’s scared of. Maybe burglars.

Then where the hell is she going.

She plays bridge with her girlfriends.

I see. What time is it anyway.

I think nine thirty, I’m pretty sure.

How do you know.

She leaves before the main entrance gate is locked, before they lock the gate there. The old girls can’t sleep.

They laughed at this remark.

You’re kidding.

Why would I, they play into the wee hours, sometimes she comes home the next morning. But shut up already. They stay awake together. Can’t you hear her, she’s still dawdling in the hallway.

Of course I can hear her.

A movement that took place only inside their bodies followed this. And they laughed happily.

Why, who died.

How should I know. Everybody. Nobody.

Laughter would have overtaken them if they hadn’t stopped up each other’s mouth.

Get a hold of yourself, until she leaves.

Their tongues glided inside each other’s mouth and they thrust them in deep. In place of one forcible pleasure, they found themselves another. There was nothing to fear, they could trust themselves because they were intertwined, they could not be torn away from each other, and this seemed to be an unexpected, unhoped-for, very pleasant bonus. They could not be tamed. Their tongues linked, embraced and danced, each very considerate of the other. They were retching at this depth and sank lower, becoming aware of things turning into sharp pain as they trembled, freely, unashamedly, rhythmically, as the bed bounced, creaking, under them.

She’s going, I know, she’s going right away.

And again they held themselves back a little.

Though they did not exactly know what they were holding back, they did, along with their breath. One shouldn’t do such a thing. Absolutely not. Except that the brave decision made both of them feel, and they felt the strength of the feeling, that their bodies might become completely independent of their will. This was something neither of them had ever experienced.

Everything is falling and tumbling and pouring and running; running, though they are lying here as quietly as you please, waiting politely for the old woman to leave so they can finally lose their sanity.

Maybe she’s gone already. But she’s not, she’s still fiddling about in the hallway.

Oh heavens, she has no intention of going, the pest is eavesdropping.

No, I know her, she wouldn’t do that.

They kept whispering and listening.

She’s looking for something she can’t find.

Again they laughed.

It would be impossible to tell which of their worlds was more uninviting or more vulgar—the world admitted by their faces, mutually blinded by their wide-eyed proximity, a nearby world that alternately brings the twilight-colored walls closer and moves them farther away; or the world that sternly conjures up, in minute detail from head to toe, the impersonal acts of male-female copulation and mercilessly compels them to perform them.

There is probably no perfect symmetry in the world; it would be insanely utopian, vain, to hope for one, yet they might have come close to it precisely because at this moment, even with the indifferent imaginations, they succeeded in complementing each other harmoniously. No, not quite yet, the last obstacle would be overcome in a moment. They were pushing it before them and rolling along with it.

Their body positions did not change yet did not remain as before.

Cautiously, just a bit, as if he were not doing it at all, the man began to slide, as if he had to keep this little action a secret not only from the old woman making noises in the hallway but also from himself and the woman in bed with him. After a brief pause that was more like a brief surprise, he slid back to his former position, and because of the sharp clash of the two merging sensations, he had to reconsider everything. Which the woman’s countermoves and carelessness did not permit.

He could not resist repeating it.

Again and again.

But exact repetitions didn’t work, because the woman’s challenges grew longer and her almost arbitrary carelessness sharpened the clash of merging sensations. What they were doing made no sound because it could not. They and they alone could hear the dim thuds of their thrusts, the slurps of sucking, the sloshing of slimy secretions, the resounding thumps of their colliding abdominal walls. But the knot that tied to each other what they saw and heard was loosening. Being surprised at themselves seemed to fix their eyes and glue their eyelashes in one position. They saw things from different places.

The sounds around them receded and slid down beneath the horizon.

A face in ecstasy is frightening; the reason one can look at it without aversion and disgust is that in the distortions of another person’s face one can catch a glimpse of what one’s own greediness and selfishness look like. It is like stepping into a hall of mirrors. A person can see his or her own visage even if it is stronger and more violent, or perhaps weaker and gentler, than their own self-image. At the same time, their inner pictures were becoming so powerful that looking at each other steadfastly was to no avail; seeing each other so exposed, so devoid of dignity, beauty, and charm; they couldn’t keep their independent inner pictures from ceasing to refer to—no, almost completely excluding—each other. And there was more. They were both thinking very actively and clearly, and this also seemed to have little to do with their amorous activities, or in any case they could no longer locate and secure the contact points of thoughts and sensations. The redoubled double worlds of sensation and thinking, which otherwise blend, seep, flow, soar, vanish, or absorb each other, so that one can make way for the other or, put another way, so that the stronger may gain ascendancy and the weaker humbly relinquish its position, these worlds were progressing by clambering over each other, making their way forward over and inside each other like a coarse greased cogwheel, or like fine clockwork whose gears and levers unconsciously drive a system much larger than itself, something with no name, something the mind cannot comprehend, whose boundaries are invisible and whose enormous mass cannot be measured.