Parallel Stories: A Novel (84 page)

Unguarded contacts, of course, always have their peculiar hazards.

Maybe you’re right, said the architect, as a person with long experience in avoiding potential friction by being agreeable. I don’t like walking into an unknown. But even that doesn’t signify much, since I sense no danger.

Oh, go on, belittle it, continued the woman insistently. But don’t misunderstand me: you may walk away from the task as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to force you to do anything. I probably wouldn’t have the talent to do so in any case.

Which made the man blush.

Still, he could not completely disregard the woman’s brazen manner.

Perhaps you’ll understand, he said more coolly, that this is not my egoism. I just can’t clarify other people’s extremely unclear situations.

But I do. Of course I understand.

I can’t poke around in it now, after the fact. The building is a finished thing, I can’t fix it. What I work with is only matter, nothing else, cold and indifferent matter, but it’s not like a hat or dress that one can alter according to one’s needs. What’s in a building—its organizational concept, Zeitgeist, and so on—isn’t as flexible as the soul.

He turned red in his anger.

What right has this pampered woman to make her pointed remarks.

His plebeian conscience was protesting. His exceptionally smooth white skin had a reddish tint that made him prone to blushing. Perhaps this was the only trait that showed his strong personality as vulnerable. Not only could he not stop himself from blushing, but he had no idea how to hide it. Which, unfortunately, he attributed to his low origins. The blushing would unexpectedly gnaw at his sense of security, ambush him, and then in successive waves thrust him deeper and deeper into embarrassment.

This is the first generation of architects since classicism, he said more loudly than was necessary, that does not define itself by representation or decoration. Architecture is not a style, but its practitioners here live in that delusion. The church and the aristocracy no longer stand in their way. This is tremendous, an irrevocable change for the better. The twentieth-century way of formulating and expressing itself is in systems and structures, a functioning system of interdependent parts like a living creature, an organism itself—which architecture must organize according to some concept, of course. The unfortunate bunglers who built this place, to use an historical example, should have solved the problem that the March Youth didn’t solve in 1848
*
: how to create personal proportions, how to complete the bourgeois revolution. For me, what was done here instead, please forgive me, is very heterogeneous and unclear.

Also impure. And I hope you understand that I’m not thinking primarily of moral conditions. I don’t accept your historical explanation either, because I’m interested not in history but in the substance and condition of things.

He pretended to be raising his voice against the wind, but in fact he was trying to suppress his anger. Once again, he had come up against a patrician woman, just as he had in Rotterdam. Who in her completed personality had indeed completed the revolution.

He was struggling against his blushing and broke out in a sweat, realizing that once again he had fished out for himself the same kind of woman.

If I understand you correctly, you draw a strict distinction between individuality and personality, or the person’s egoism. You hit the nail on the head. This is indeed a risky undertaking. You say that you must separate your own egoism even from your personal needs.

Absolutely.

You don’t consider any collectivism as valid.

I wouldn’t even ask whether I do.

Not the collectivism of egoism, then. For you, only personal agreements are valid.

Exclusively, replied the man, and this time he blushed in joy.

This woman understands him, after all; he’ll give it a try.

That is the only principle I can follow, this is the spirit of our time, I believe, the organizing principle. I must make it fit between the communal and the private, as much as possible with the help of the cleanest and clearest agreement between the concerned parties. In other words, I’d be satisfied with an offer. I propose a possible contract or agreement.

Luckily for him, another strong gust of wind blew in their direction, catching his heavy, full head of hair. Which gave him a reason not to twirl and crumple his hat, but to do something else with his suppressed joy and enthusiasm.

He grabbed at his hair.

Simultaneously Mrs. Szemz
ő
grabbed her hat, though the wind wouldn’t have swept it off. As if she were copying the other person’s diversionary gesture because she too had something to conceal. But this made her blush deeply.

Mainly because first came the gesture and only after that her realization of why she’d made it.

In each other’s eyes, they could not have been more exposed.

I think you go too far with psychology. I find it provocative but admit it’s on the right track, continued the man, smiling. His voice was warm and strong. But I may be thinking of these things that concern us both in a more simple, objective, and if I may say so primitive way.

This remark managed to arouse Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s anger.

No, no, she said, indignantly and almost harshly, when it comes to thinking, I tell you, everyone thinks the same way. At most, some people prefer their simpler thoughts, others their more refined ones when it comes to saying them aloud. But this has nothing to do with whether they think objectively or subjectively.

Now suddenly and mutually they were angry at each other for what they saw as the other’s lack of comprehension.

But they could not rid themselves of the pleasant feeling that they did not have to vent or experience their anger as enemies. It was as if they had to carry out the command of a strange power, but not with anything like the same conviction. Madzar obeyed as a courtesy to the strange power; Mrs. Szemz
ő
was guided by a sense of professional responsibility.

At the same time they also realized it made no difference that they were expressing themselves so politely, circumstantially, and very intellectually. The pleasure had grown so great that words could not stand in its way or curb it. They did not understand what was happening between them. In other words, they had to acknowledge that what was happening under the overcast sky in the spring wind was very different from what they had had in mind earlier in the morning, and also very different from what they were talking about.

As if they were slipping between mental and physical pleasure.

After all, thought the man, who hadn’t yet noticed that he was attracted to this woman. His lightly starched, carefully ironed white silk poplin underpants that came halfway down his thighs did restrain, though could not prevent, an erection. He had to admit that he found the woman quite ugly, though unusually intelligent and independent. But precisely for these reasons, a woman like this was not his type, or at least this is what he wanted to believe about himself. The underpants pressed his erect cock against his thigh, drawing the foreskin back from the tip. It will get caught like that. I won’t pay attention to it. I must not pay attention to this now, he thought.

It rarely happened to him that because of an erection he’d be confused about his own intentions.

Perhaps, if I were a revolutionary, Bolshevik, syndicalist, anarchist, or something of the sort, I could go on a little adventure like this, he said, laughing. In fact, with his laughter he was begging the woman’s pardon and showing her his strength and desire too, with a display of his full set of teeth. Then I could really get into it, obviously, because I’d want to change or save the world. Or wipe out and repair everything that others have done before me. I’m no communist. That’s not the way I think. I need clear frameworks. And supporting them in the background, of course, there must be unambiguous agreement. There is no urban plan that is not based on thousands of important pacts. What ensures the durability of buildings is not the stone or the concrete but the security of the world order. And if I can’t find these necessities here, or if they turn out not to be clean enough, then I’ll go someplace else.

That is why I decided as I did. I hope you understand.

From a distance, standing by the neo-Baroque fountain they seemed like a couple of those practiced lovers who break up for good at least twice a month. Probably neither of them noticed how unjustifiably close they were to each other. They were obviously trying to keep a distance.

Actually, they both leaned back, away from each other, yet their legs and hips remained too close.

This must have created a certain aura around them; on occasions such as this, the body releases incidental scents. Yet this is not why their situation had become so complicated. Their clothing, whose quality and character were comically similar, also reinforced the feeling of mutuality, which meant not that they were becoming similar but that they were finally realizing how similar they had been from the beginning.

It was preparing to rain on this overcast spring morning, but it did not.

They both wore sand-colored Burberry coats, designed for spring and autumn, which differed only in their cut, and they both had on dark hats; the man held his in his hand.

In those days, women’s hats were often worn low on the forehead, the brim pulled down so that the features of the face were taken into the protection and shadow of the hat. The woman bowed her head slightly and looked up from the shadow of her hat into the man’s pale-green eyes. As a protection, with both hands she pressed her pocketbook to her chest. What was considered fashionable in those days in a female figure was a slender, elongated, and overrefined silhouette. Irma Arnót was not beautiful, not even in her youth, but she had a beautiful silhouette, exactly as fragile and graceful as that era coveted.

The wind now swept away, now intensified the man’s scent. It had in it something of the cigar smoke of the Britannia, that old-fashioned hotel on Teréz Boulevard, also a barber’s shaving cream, along with lavender aftershave, and then among many unfamiliar shades the scent’s heavier, dominant, all-powerful central aroma, in which the skin’s nearness can be deciphered. They were already past the point where they listened to each other’s intentions and the secret signs signaling them. But at this stage it would have been inconvenient for either of them with a careless move to step out from behind their defenses and put their cards on the table. They would find that stupid and irresponsible, no matter which of them might propose it, very brutal and ill mannered. After all, one was not put on earth just to be in heat and to mate. Though they happen to have reached the age when many people might ask what other reason was there; does our life have any other conceivable and worthy goal besides this. Both protested instinctively against the emptiness of life, and therefore they were characterized not so much by what they did with each other but by what they denied themselves, by what they consciously renounced.

This is what made this moment so fulfilling, and they took away its grief and joy with them for the hours of loneliness.

At any rate, the man, younger than Irma, who had fled hastily to Budapest after a complicated love affair, did not ask, what made you sad so suddenly.

And it would never occur to them to address each other informally.

He despised overfamiliar amatory commonplaces, such as, what are you thinking about, what are you laughing at. Yet he was not interested in anything else and so, in his thoughts, began addressing her in the familiar. Why are you so overcast, what sorts of shadow are passing over your clever face. If he had asked and the woman had answered anything at all, his erection would have grown stronger. He did not want that. Although it had been in the air earlier in the day when, before leaving the Britannia, just to be sure, he wanted to gratify himself. To look at his erect cock in his hand, how the pleasure followed his movements. He was satisfied with his cock. Yet he had not done it—actually changed his mind halfway and left off with it. He could not embrace or press the woman to himself. And the woman did not ask the man, younger than she, though the question was on the tip of her tongue, from which of his parents had he inherited this maddening head of hair. What stupidities I’m thinking about. As if it makes any difference to me from whom he inherited it. She would have liked to say your maddening head of hair.

Maddening.

A word that would irrevocably show the wonder and amazement she felt for the other.

Neither of them wanted to go that far. Deep brown tended to appear in this kind of red; it was so rich, and undulating. Even with words, it could not be touched with impunity. Mrs. Szemz
ő
honestly hoped it would not show on her skin that her back, shoulders, and neck were shuddering. As a special armor, of course, he is defending himself against me, wearing a ritual hair helmet. No matter how she assessed it and kept looking at it, in addition to the brown and red she also saw purple, which seemed improbable. Where did you get the color of your hair, this is the way she would have preferred to ask him. While she was trying to talk herself out of it. I have two children, I’m a married woman, I cannot ruin my professional name with love affairs.

Their exertion was so great they could no longer have spoken in normal tones.

In her confusion, Mrs. Szemz
ő
shrugged her shoulders several times. Madzar became like a statue, motionless; even his miraculous eyelashes stopped glittering for a little while.

And then, somehow, they started together on the empty promenade that led along the stretch facing the Pest shore.

And then it became significant and meaningful that they had started out together. And if that wasn’t enough, their steps were in unison.

Which quickly irritated them both.

Some strange power pulverized their independence. It was the other one who did it; the other; there was another one; another one had appeared.