Parallel Stories: A Novel (101 page)

If you didn’t understand German, you couldn’t understand anything of the chaos, of the German commands echoing through the huge station.

The little ones were bawling, did not want to be taken from their families, did not want the language of this other chaotic world. Parents and relatives tried to explain things to the children, waved good-bye to them, and implored the shouting, impassive women who were urging the children on and trying to calm them, but no matter what they said or explained, the way the nurses stuck to their orders seemed ominous and incomprehensible in this emptied-out railway station.

From the railway people one could learn at least that the three long trains had arrived the night before from Dresden and would probably return, as they put it, to their home base. And there something would happen, they explained patiently, because passenger trains of this length usually did not run on domestic routes—they would be rearranged, we’d be transferred to other trains, some of the cars would be detached—and then we’d continue our journey. The adults were running around discussing things, showing their papers to one another; maybe somebody else could find some secret and decipherable sign or cull something intelligible from them, something promising. The excitement was understandable, given that the adults were being asked to relinquish small children in their care without knowing where the children were headed or for how long.

The echoing German words probably also contributed to the general excitement: that something like this was being done again by Germans, that Germans were once again free to do anything they pleased.

When we’d been given our participant’s tickets at school, they’d told us we’d learn all the necessary details at the train station. But the German nurses and sisters pretended not to hear the questions or did not understand what was being asked in this stupid foreign language. At best, one could presume they had good intentions toward the children; one certainly could not see it. And most people were rather afraid of asking the Hungarian policemen; when someone did, the policemen merely shrugged their shoulders, they didn’t know any more than the questioners. The trains were taking orphans and bombed-out children somewhere, though the official language no longer permitted these innocent words, just as it had been forbidden, since March, to utter, even by accident, the word
revolution
. Jails and internment camps were full, reprisals against the uprising of the previous autumn had entered their most vicious stage, and people were determined not to let their mouths betray them; if they had managed to survive until now, they weren’t going to make a wrong move and risk everything. Anyone talking to a policeman had to invent a whole other language, taking into account that the very act might be considered suspicious by people standing around. Everyone was still afraid that a misunderstanding might result in a lynching, as had happened to some secret policemen on the street in the last days of October and to anyone whom the riffraff declared was a secret policeman.

Newspapers were reporting that our sister countries, as part of their summer vacation campaign, had offered to take children who “live in broken families” or “whose housing problem is not solved.” What a laugh. Although one could appreciate that they were trying with these unnatural formulas to avoid certain locutions. The official version decreed that it was hostile propaganda and punishable slander to make any statement or allegation that the Russians had conducted air attacks against Budapest and had helped their troops fighting in Budapest’s streets with bombs. The mere suggestion that the Russians might have bombed the city would suggest that not only had they smoked out the rebels from their hiding places but, in complete disregard of international rules of warfare, had not spared the civilian population. Yet the high number of dead and seriously injured, or of destroyed apartments, couldn’t be denied, and the numbers passed by word of mouth could not be explained as having been caused by street fighting, the dimensions of which were known. This is why normal words could not be used when speaking aloud.

Nevertheless, when we children talked to one another, the first question we’d ask was always whether the other one was an orphan or one whose family had been bombed out of its home.

That way, one knew right away who had had help getting into the vacation program.

I said I was an orphan so that at least here I wouldn’t be looked on as a privileged child. I couldn’t tell anybody that my mother had abandoned me for a woman and my father had been done away with by his comrades.

While I was going around looking for information, I noticed a boy who seemed familiar to me, though I had no idea where in hell I’d known him from, picking up his suitcase.

It was similar to my yellow suitcase.

He started off as if resigned to throw himself into the crowd bunched up in front of the platforms. I saw why he did this. Earlier he had seemed determined not to; no, he would not cross the police cordon. As if that meant walking voluntarily into a trap. He’d rather not go on this vacation. Then he decided that in the end it was best to put the whole thing behind him as soon as possible. Nobody went with him. He hadn’t noticed me then, and I had no way of knowing what he was afraid of, or why he thought it better to get on the train. It was as though on his face and in his bearing I could follow all my feelings, all my disgust, all my fears and anxieties. Perhaps my relatives had insisted on my going on this vacation so they could at last be rid of me. I suspected that I’d wind up in an institution from which there would be no return. They’d take my name away again and this time I’d be given a German name. I did not understand what was waiting for me or why the grown-ups were so unsuspecting.

Maybe they were not unsuspecting but, rather, party to this lousy show.

Then it meant that we were being taken away the way the Turks used to take away rounded-up children to raise them to become janissaries. I so surprised myself with this association of ideas that I suddenly had to look up at Ágost, who was barely taller than I was, which I always forgot. For some time then, I had been made to wear his used clothes. His gaze passed absentmindedly over my face. I wanted to attract his attention with something, to say something quickly so I would see on his face whether there was a conspiracy or we were actually going on vacation, in which case I could get over my persistent anxiety. The station was reverberating with the insane hubbub of the children and their families, and an impassive female voice on the public address system went on repeating, probably for hours, the same few sentences.

Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks, outside the departure hall. Departure hall. Parents and relatives, relatives of children participating in the vacation operation, operation, are requested to leave the departure hall, departure hall, as soon as the children have reported in with the officials, officials. Cials. Your attention, please. Please. Ease. From tracks 3, 5, and 7, special trains are departing, trains are departing. Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks. Outer tracks. Racks. Acks.

I was racking my brain, where could I have known this boy from and from where could he have gotten a yellow suitcase just like mine. But I did not remember where I knew him from. Nothing came to mind. My suitcase might have been used more; its yellow cowhide had darkened more than his had. More precisely, even my suitcase wasn’t mine, or anyway I had nothing of my own. I had nothing and nobody, and that is why I didn’t feel I had something from which I could be torn away.

If they take me away, well, they’ll take me away.

I told Ágost he could leave me there, he could go, no point in waiting longer. He should go and change the water in his car radiator. I’d manage by myself. I meant this as some kind of bold, manly gesture but, in fact, the boy I knew from somewhere made me do it. Because of the earsplitting noise Ágost did not understand what I had said, and he answered something I didn’t understand. I was impatient, eager to take off after the boy.

Ágost was shouting that as a going-away present he wanted to give me his pen.

This stopped my breath. His offer strengthened my suspicion that I was facing a final farewell. The pen was an expensive one; he was searching for it in the inner pocket of his light summer jacket.

He wore incredibly fine things, the kind of clothes that in those years perhaps nobody else did.

But nobody had ever received anything from him.

Or he had always manipulated things so that whatever he might have bought for someone else or given as a gift would eventually always return to him or at least bring him some benefit. Ágost was not wicked but, rather, weak, insatiably greedy, and cruelly selfish. I felt ashamed, even to myself, of my contempt for his weaknesses. Perhaps my grandmother was the one who had instilled in me that bit of life’s wisdom according to which nothing is worth making a gift of except things we cling to with all our hearts. Ágost was rather far from such wisdom, yet now he was ready to make just such a gift. He was rummaging so energetically for the expensive pen that I had a feeling he wouldn’t have the strength to carry out his generous intention.

Not that he couldn’t find the pen; he was enacting for himself an entire scene created by himself about having to look for it.

Although he possessed exceptional mental abilities, Ágost was not taken quite seriously in the family. Probably Szilvia and Viola were the ones who began calling him Gézuka—
Gay-zhoo-ka
, they would say—which he vehemently protested. He was a very good-looking young man who with his sheer presence made the two girls very excited and threw them into no small confusion. He was also a highly skilled diplomat residing in some mysterious place abroad. But it was impossible to exchange three sentences with him without the infantile traits of his character rising to the surface. Because they were attracted to him, the two cheeky girls quickly took appropriate revenge. Renaming him, picking a particularly soft-sounding name and ending it with the diminutive given to a child, helped them to maintain a distance from him and consider him below their rank. They pumped him with questions, set traps for him, spied on him, ferreted out his weaknesses so that they could pick on him; they made fun of him and imitated him; and no sooner did he turn away from them than they’d mimic and ridicule him.

He had made his decision, but I could see that every moment that he could still possess the cherished object, every moment the expensive pen was still in his pocket, was precious to him.

Or he had gone mad.

I did not understand, I stammered and giggled like the girls that no, please, really. I wouldn’t dare dream of owning such a valuable thing; please, don’t embarrass me with it.

But he, mellowed by his own generosity, insisted, though he went on not being able to find it.

I’d look upon it as something borrowed, I said; he would merely deposit it with me for safekeeping.

I was given new clothes only if and when my aunt Irén tired of the family’s miserliness.

We’d go from store to store. Sometimes her anger was so great that she would dress me from head to toe and I was the one who’d have to insist on some balance, since in her fury she could pile all sorts of superfluous nonsense on me. Aunt Irén was an exceedingly careless woman, things dribbled through her fingers, she loved to spend extravagantly; sometimes she was simply gripped by an urge to splurge; but buying clothes for me also meant a chance to compete with Erna, which she obviously enjoyed doing. Erna hated unnecessary expenses and very strictly determined what was necessary and what was superfluous. In a mildly reproving voice, she would claim that Irén was weirdly similar to my mother in all her traits; I heard this with great alarm. And that the relationship between my mother and Irén had been exactly as intimate as that between my two cousins Viola and Szilvia, who were inseparable. I watched the girls as one who looks not only into his corporeal past but also into his possible future. With these insidious assertions, Nínó cautioned me that I would grow up in the world as irresponsibly as this nice set of females had, both of whom were probably lesbians. If I wasn’t on guard, if I didn’t resist the temptation of squandering and extravagance, inherited through the maternal branch of the family, I would wind up a big good-for-nothing.

However, she justified her son’s expensive tastes by saying that Ágost was a diplomat and having an elegant, smart wardrobe was part of his profession.

But Gézuka had no profession.

Ever since he’d been recalled from his position abroad, he had been working as an interpreter in an ordinary government office, and in his free time he translated stupid, boring political speeches and all kinds of strictly confidential diplomatic papers into foreign languages. I myself had no interest in this man or in his doings. I don’t know why, but my impression was that, compared with his father, he was an inferior mutation, and I found the old Hungarian Nazi more interesting. Irén called the lecherous old man, straight to his face, an old fascist or evil Arrow Cross man. She liked him, and he often slapped her behind; she drank much red wine with him; and because of Erna’s pettiness, she had only contempt for her. Her view was that, Jewish or not Jewish, what she looked for in a person was character. My husband is a Jew, so I can afford to hate the flaws in their character.

Believe me, I know everything about them, inside and out.

Still, I felt that everything was the other way around.

Because of her ruined marriage, Irén took her revenge on unknown people. In Nínó’s character flaws, she was looking for acceptable explanations for her own unbridled emotions. When we walked around the city, I had a chance to observe her close up, yet I failed to develop any liking for this strange trait of hers that was so intimately familiar to me, even though I sensed that my mother must have had the same trait if, as Nínó claimed, Irén and Mother had lived in a symbiosis like the one between Irén’s daughters.

Perhaps she abandoned me so heartlessly because I’m half-Jewish on account of Father’s side of the family. But then, why did both she and Irén choose to marry Jews.