Parallel Stories: A Novel (93 page)

The nicely arched bow, ending in a long, broad prow adorned in relief with the bifurcated wavy hair of a mad mermaid, was noisily parting the golden yellow silk of the water. Metal sliced water. The rather high-pitched sound of this was steady, yet the water also made smaller, one might say more objective snaps, plops, and splashes around the prow, and these sounds seemed to link the two substances’ interwoven progress with the currents of the depths.

Madzar was going home to Mohács.

The wide paddle wheeler sank comfortably into the water as the river carried it on its murky back.

He could not stop himself from imagining that the woman was coming with him; he was taking with him her stranger’s breath, which reached him even here, at the railing of the upper deck; he carried the image farther, imagining they were going together back to his childhood. To share something that was close and unique and dear to him, something the woman did not know what to do with. They had not seen each other for days, did not want to, no, no, and the will remained mutual, and it hurt them both. Madzar had expected not to have hurt feelings himself because he considered jealousy or longing to be senseless, pointless, its complications old-fashioned.

So many things that should simply be eliminated from the modern world.

No psychic illness or emotional misery should darken the doorstep of his consciousness.

Since their talk about furnishing the clinic, however, a shadow had fallen on the demands he made of himself, and he was surprised to discover that despite his encyclopedic efforts and Gnostic passion, he had been unaware of it. Although the phenomenon of death could not elude his attention, he hardly paid attention to illnesses and ill persons. He himself had never had even a toothache; on occasion a mild head cold.

He was not aware of his own health.

Ill persons should be aware of their ruined fate; that’s the real reason her office must not suggest clinical sterility—so as not to strengthen this awareness of their illness.

As if the demands Mrs. Szemz
ő
made were at odds with every system his imagination had ever concocted, dangling incongruously from them, as it were. As if he were saying that one cannot see one’s fate for knowledge of one’s own illness. Or awareness of one’s own health. And in that case wasn’t everything other than direct personal experience missing from one’s thinking. I might be pathologically healthy. It gave him pause to think that perception of futile and unreasonable things might be missing from his consciousness because it did not fit with his strict empiricism.

I may be headed for big trouble, there is something I haven’t understood or keep misunderstanding.

He began to be afraid.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
, however, protested vehemently against his word usage.

I beg of you, she laughed, showing her frightening gums above her strong teeth, please stop talking to me about illness. What I deal with is not illness; it is not
maladie
but, at worst,
malaise
. We must keep the concept strictly in its social context; I insist on that, if you don’t mind. Each soul has its given nature and characteristics just as the body does. The people who come to see me, and this is what has to be considered, my dear architect, do not behave in conformity with conventions.

But that is not illness.

Or it may be exactly the other way around: they cling so strictly to conventions that they become ill. And then it’s clear that the illness has to be considered the consequence, not the cause.

Making himself even more ridiculous, he awkwardly protested against Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s protest, childishly repeating that he understood, of course he did, he had read enough psychoanalytical literature.

Mrs. Szemz
ő
interrupted the sentence she had begun.

With a glance she grasped that what he had said was partly true; he must have heard or read something on the subject. Then she flooded him again with her full-throated laughter, because she liked to hear the man stretching the facts a little, and under the weight of her glance Madzar once again showed his weak side, blushing deeply.

He watched the woman, envied her for her keen glance, wanted to avenge himself.

He imagined that a woman as self-possessed as she felt none of the pain or embarrassment he did but, head held high, went impassively about her daily tasks.

He couldn’t imagine this completely. After all, he was unfamiliar with the life and daily routine of a well-to-do, pampered Jewish woman of Budapest.

Instinctively he knew that she felt the pain, he could not have been so far off the mark; of course she did, she had to.

Still, he asked himself, why would anybody miss me. Because he was not thinking of a single woman in the cool twilight, but, parallel with Mrs. Szemz
ő
, he thought also of the rich Dutch woman from whom he had fled when he left Rotterdam behind. He was very familiar with that woman’s daily routine and deduced from it what Mrs. Szemz
ő
’s might be. He imagined the moment when the piano teacher says good-bye but would like his monthly payment before going, which these people always forget, and just then the other Szemz
ő
boy rings the bell, having returned from his language lesson. Mrs. Szemz
ő
feels that everything is in hopeless disarray again in the old downtown apartment from which, in a few months’ time, they will move to their brand-new house in the great green outdoors. Her husband, on the telephone with someone, is pointing at her and gesticulating about something, but she must change her clothes. And before leaving for the opera with her women friends, she must talk to the maid about next week’s menus and she didn’t want that discussion to make her late for Margit Huber and Mária Szapáry.

To hell with the piano teacher’s monthly fee.

Couldn’t we please do this next week, she asks peremptorily. Although the young man gives her a desperate look, she considers the matter closed. There, you see.

But in this series of pictures she resembles the slightly hysterical Dutch woman more than herself.

The breath of their indifference reached him from their fulfilled lives.

In the badly insulated, unheated street-front room of his parental home, in its pervasive mustiness, he will return to his illusions; he would still prefer to spend the night with the Dutch woman rather than with this one, whom he does not yet know and has already abandoned.

He did not understand anything.

Occasionally a dark object from the depths of the river surfaced.

He did not see how his life would settle down at the side of another person.

Which is usually referred to as resignation or calming down; perhaps he was waiting for America.

As the days passed he was continually occupied with looking for solutions to minor architectural problems, but this brought him no closer to an overall solution. Already in Rotterdam, the question of what his future should be, with whom he might share it, had become an insoluble problem. While the work-filled weeks rushed by he failed to give proper attention to this more general and clearly more significant question, and he could see that the weeks would grow into months and whole long seasons. He reluctantly acknowledged that, judging by his behavior, he put a certain amount of passion into his work, a need for emotional fulfillment that could be neither avoided nor dissolved or even annihilated by the joy of a job well done. He should share it with someone, but not just anyone. The crater of an absence grew deeper in his consciousness. And if he found the someone with whom to share his passion, then he foresaw life-organizing problems that one couldn’t solve with this person, maybe with someone else.

If he did not want to step into chaos, he had to step back, along with his passion, or move on.

How could he tell the wife of a Dutch industrialist to pack her things, dress her children, call a cab, and let’s be on our way. He had to step back—to his work and to nothing else. If he were to maintain the living standard to which these people were accustomed, within a week he’d have been unable to pay the hotel bills. Yet they had been planning earnestly, because they passionately wanted to escape from that doll’s house. In the midst of their fervent daydreaming about their future, Madzar realized the woman had no idea of the dimensions of poverty. She dreamed of ways to rescue her dowry from her husband’s business, but the distrustful look on her face showed that she wouldn’t like to entrust her money to a nobody like Madzar.

She didn’t dare reveal how much money she had.

As if Madzar were looking into a sanctuary of guileless honesty where petty and scheming dishonesty ruled.

Because hard as she tried, she could not imagine things in any other way but that a man would take care of her; after all, that was their obligation.

And with Mrs. Szemz
ő
, the whole misery would start all over again.

He had decent colleagues with whom he saw eye to eye on nearly every important professional question—structural engineers, mechanics, and civil engineers, many of whom supported his professional career because they shared his ideas about modernizing the technical and spiritual aspects of architecture—but he had no friends. They’d hardly get to the end of an exciting discussion when these men would hurry off; they had secret nets that supported their personal lives. He had no insight as to how others had managed to acquire a safety net; he seemed unable to do so. If only he had some friends. Or if he could give up his desires, his emotional preferences, which kept sending him into the arms of women who were complete strangers and whose unsolved life problems he was then obliged to take on. The only obvious solution would be asceticism. After all, it was all about the purity of lines drawn on a sheet of white paper, and for that he had to see his place and function in the entire human world of strangers.

And if this was not possible, then he should, at least in his personal life and in the interest of clear-sightedness, step out of the vicious circle of passions.

The water brought an object to the surface, spun it rapidly around, brought it closer, moved it farther away, let it drift with the current.

Sometimes the object showed more clearly, was fully exposed; at other times it plunged back into the water, perhaps to vanish forever. It was hard to guess what might happen next. He always feared that instead of a waterlogged tree stump, board, or spinning tree trunk, he’d get hold of a bloated corpse or blackened carrion, a pig or cow, or, worse, that his grapnel would not hold the target but would grasp something that would pop, squirt, tear, rip open, and spill guts everywhere. This fear, part of the risk in anything he undertook, accompanied him throughout his childhood.

Even in the summer after his last school year in Pécs, he continued with this insane sort of fishing, though he missed the great spring spate.

To have spending money, so he wouldn’t have to play poor boy next to the young gentlemen who, in fact, were poorer than he yet had to behave as though they were richer to comply with the demands of their social class.

He also did it out of some obsession.

When the water was high, they went in a flatboat or punt; at other times they would swim to get a tree stump or trunk, occupy it, steer it, ride on it. The struggle among the competing gangs was brutal. To possess a more valuable tree trunk they were willing to tear at one another’s flesh with their grappling irons. The higher and colder the water, the richer the catch was. They hit one another with shovels. He began as a member of the German-speaking gang, given his mother tongue, but on Sundays he would go to the Hungarian church, which in Mohács was what they called the Protestant church, located behind a stone wall on Calvin Street, so he wound up in the Hungarian gang.

He had never been forgiven for that.

And what he did could not be done alone; he had to betray someone, either his mother or his father.

And he was unable to repair this rift.

There was always need for an observer at the top of the willows; that’s where the smallest boys began their careers. There was also need for a boy who’d push off the flatboat or punt the moment the others were in, and another small boy who, though not yet proficient in rowing or steering, would unhesitatingly throw himself in to catch the floating prey, defying rain, wind, or ice-cold water. He did everything to make the Hungarians accept him. A floating trunk or stump could not always be caught with the grapnel; it would turn over and spin out of reach, slip away. The others were suspicious of him; after all, he had already betrayed the Germans. It made no difference that he had betrayed the Germans because of and for the Hungarians; the Hungarians did not want to understand the logic of betrayal, and the joy of betrayal remained a well-guarded secret. Someone had to sit by the fire night after night and guard the loot until the timber merchants came to pick it up and ship it away. In this, he had to agree with his mother, who always said that Hungarians were the biggest lamebrains in the world. Driftwood was a valuable commodity: the heavier trunks and the ones not yet water slogged were bought by the Serbian merchant Gojko Drogo; stump wood, assorted chunks, and less valuable pieces they sold to the Jew with a lumberyard below the pier on Halász Street.

Suddenly he could not remember the Jew’s full name, but he did recall that his first name was Ármin.

He did not have much time to think about the Jew because the ship’s bell was sounded, and shortly the captain sent for him with an invitation to dinner.

Look at that, Mayer, he called to the cabin boy who had come to fetch him, and leaning out over the rail pointed to the surfacing and disappearing object in the water, part yellow from the clayey silt and part gray with mud churned up by the wheels.

It was like a drowned woman in a short red coat.

The water kept spinning it; when it turned from its back to its stomach it became a tree trunk again.