Parallel Stories: A Novel (154 page)

And I certainly wasn’t going to guard his car.

Not even a bright summer day could chase away the terrible dimness from this lobby. I wanted to find out which floor he was going to, where he kept the woman captive. I already had seen how he did it, and with what. As if I could diminish the extent of humiliation I had inflicted on myself, I clung to this knowledge.

The moment I stepped into the lobby, stinking with cat urine and a musty exhalation from the basement, I froze. As if some vestige of bashfulness was stopping me.

I’ve no right to do this. Or perhaps the memory of an old fear.

With their claws sliding on the stone floor, grating and scratching, two cats disappeared down the steps leading to the basement, a dark and a lighter flash in the semidarkness. In the light of the single naked lightbulb, a black cat was chasing a red angora one.

I could hear that he did not stop on the second floor, but just then the number 5 bus rolled across the cambered cobblestones in front of the building and its noise blasting into the lobby overwhelmed the echoes of his receding footsteps. Over the racket, I could just make out a soft slamming of a door somewhere. It might have been on the third or even the fourth floor. Which again reminded me of the little girl from the fourth floor, Ilonka Weisz, and she in turn reminded me of a room in their apartment, facing the courtyard, its curtain drawn against the bright summer sunshine. Of my shame, which I haven’t been to tell anyone since then, and of the afternoon sunshine’s indifference to my shame. As I was looking at the familiar patterns of these walls in the pale light of the single bulb, I could be sure of one thing, that Uncle Pálóczky was no longer alive; only in his absence could everything become so filthy.

And then there was quiet, the light went out in the stairwell, but above the empty, yellow courtyard glittering in the wetness the wind was making great noises. There was another naked lightbulb in front of me; this one, above the list of tenants, was always lit; otherwise, darkness everywhere. Had old Pálóczky been alive, there would have been order and cleanliness, and a shade for the bulb. And the garbage cans wouldn’t have been standing like this next to the entrance either, uncovered and stuffed to overflowing. I felt as if they could not humiliate me because I wouldn’t fall into their trap. And as if the senselessness of this evening was not happening to me. Or, could I be in a different building, after all. As a child, I hadn’t noticed how seedy and run-down the place was. In the interim, the proportions changed, and the building seemed to resemble another one that was, who knows why, very familiar from a long way back.

Only ten years have gone by since then.

Or it was as if someone had told me the story of his life, from which I’d know that there was a building like this, with a piano teacher in it, where a little girl, with her little red skirt swishing on her buttocks, lured a little boy to the fourth floor, where that terrible thing happened. Just as the present evening was a useless and unavoidable disgrace. Where ten years ago he first had to pass by the foul-smelling entrance to the basement and no matter how carefully and quietly he came through the main gate, he’d still startle the cats stalking each other just as I saw them now. The red cat wasn’t familiar, but the black one was, as if the Pálóczkys’ black cat were still alive.

Strangely enough, I was the one who had these images, which that other someone hadn’t thought about since then, and if he had, he thought it best to forget them quickly.

Now too I had to reach those six steps that led up to the ground floor. In this building, because of those six steps, the ground floor was not called the ground floor. From the list of tenants, I wanted to ascertain whether my piano teacher still lived there. Or I was deceiving myself with this transparent alibi. As if I had some business there. I shouldn’t be doing this, I’ve no right, I’m ridiculous. Still, I won’t go away, I’ve nothing to fear, nothing to lose, whispered my unappeasable imagination.

One could get to the courtyard, paved with insanely yellow ceramics, from between two squat pilasters, and on one of them, on a white enamel plaque in old-fashioned blue letters, there was my childhood’s most mysterious word:
mezzanine
.

No doubt about it now, this was the building. A memory of quiet anxiety filled with anticipation was attached to this place.

It became a star-marked building; my piano teacher had to move out of it. When Budapest was liberated, she could move back in because it was no longer star-marked.
*
I never dared ask anyone what the star mark meant. I sensed from the adults’ voices that this too was part of the profound horror we had just survived and in which many had perished. Just as I didn’t dare ask what
mezzanine
meant. I wanted to be a famous pianist and did not want to reveal my ignorance to the adults; I was also afraid that because of my awkward question I might hear other terrible things. From certain signs, I concluded that
mezzanine
did not mean ground floor. Because sometimes my piano teacher asked me to go down to the Pálóczkys’ before we began the lesson and give him the piece of paper on which she had written what she wanted from the Garay Square market. When I cautiously asked her if she wanted me to take the note to the ground floor, she looked at me incredulously, not understanding what I hadn’t grasped, and asked, where else could you possibly take it, my angel, if not to the ground floor. But other times she didn’t say ground floor and didn’t say what was written on the enamel plaque, but something similar; luckily, though, she didn’t notice how bewildered I was. I wanted to learn what
mezzanine
was but also to be clever about avoiding the great horror.

Before you go, would you drop this key at the Pálóczkys’ on the mezzanine, she asked me once. These Pálóczkys are really angels, just angels. If he’s not there, you’ll be sure to find him in his workshop in the basement, and don’t be afraid of the cats, my angel. This mezzanine sounded almost like what she shouted when she wanted me to play a little stronger, a little softer; listen to me, my angel, this is mezzo forte, listen, this is mezzo piano now, my angel. Or should I have dropped off the key on the pianino. I was constantly looking for some acceptable solution, how to get to know more about the meaning of things without letting the horror—with all its details appearing unexpectedly—touch my skin. Uncle Pálóczky stayed in the star-marked building because concierges had to be real Christians, not converted ones. That I managed to understand from the hints. Another real Christian, my piano teacher, had to move out, but only a real Christian could be concierge, and therefore Uncle Pálóczky had to stay with the Jews. That I didn’t understand. There was this word in the building that almost meant ground floor and yet seemed to refer to the strength of a musical sound or an unknown musical instrument. Uncle Pálóczky, as he himself told it, became a living witness to how the old Weisz couple was taken away. Probably everyone but me understood the connections among these things.

Maybe I thought this building was classy because there was a better chance to see unfamiliar things than in our buildings, and maybe that’s why I didn’t notice how depressingly pathetic a place it was. People living here talked much more than in other buildings, they yelled more freely between floors and in the courtyard. Or perhaps my idea about its being classy was shaky, since I thought
classy
meant exceptional and alien, mysterious, and not linked to wealth or poverty.
Mezzanine
seemed grand to me because there was no such thing in any other building I knew. I also had to consider my piano teacher as very classy because she used a beautiful cane and limped a little. People said it was a congenital hip dislocation; this was no less exceptional than the mezzanine. That is how I thought about things. Probably decades must go by before one manages to free up certain concepts from one’s childhood imaginings. Just as I hadn’t noticed poverty, given the sparkling cleanliness and order, I paid no attention to our prosperity either. I did not know what it fed on or how unstable it was. With my grandparents, we lived on Stefánia Boulevard, where no one mentioned such qualifications, much as one speaks of breathing only when one is breathless. Earlier, my parents’ apartment on Aréna Road was no less spacious, calm, or well cared for, and neither was my maternal aunt’s apartment in Damjanich Street or that of my paternal aunt on Teréz Boulevard. Nobody talked about this, because they all considered spiritual values more important than the material world, and even when looking after their finances the reference points were spiritual ones; such allusions were part of the going bon ton. I did not sense the falsity of this for a long time, since I barely knew another world, which is to say I didn’t notice the differences. And because I had no idea about the criteria of wealth or poverty, it didn’t occur to me for the longest time that a place or neighborhood in a city had any particular meaning. And by the time I might have understood the connections among the various quarters and districts in the city of my birth, their social structure and architecture had been so extensively altered that the traditional labels had lost their meaning. There were no fancy or rich sections, and the concepts designating them sank into oblivion too.

Of course, I had a very clear idea of what was not proper.

The concept of good manners, strangely, lasted much longer than the social qualifications for bourgeois life. I could not judge the nature of bon ton, but I was free to decide what was classy. As if, for lack of a better qualified person, I had been entrusted with the decision, and indeed I behaved as a judge. Propriety, however, was set up with geometrical prescriptions coupled with draconian rulings. One had to avoid certain things at all costs, and one had to obey certain rules come hell or high water.

As to the issue of what was classy, one simply had to weigh things; no one hindered one in making the assessment. My mother’s kid sister, for example, in her infinitely large, airy, and sunny apartment looking out on the inner gardens of the always shady Damjanich Street, did not live in less privileged conditions than we did. Her rooms opened into one another and the windows reached down to the floor—French doors. That they were French was very classy too. Streetcars ran on the streets outside, yet I knew that although I lived with my grandparents on Stefánia Boulevard in a kind of provincial seclusion, if the need arose we could get to the city by taxi, and perhaps that was the reason we were exceptional. But for a long time the yellow streetcar was for me much classier than the taxi, though our secluded provincial life was classier than the noisy city. Which meant that sometimes disadvantages made someone classy and sometimes advantages. Or, put the other way around, it’s not advisable to look for the advantageous in everything if one wants to stay classy. It’s also possible that what is disadvantageous today will be very advantageous tomorrow. This was an important rule; no wonder people did not discuss it in public. You had to be two or three steps ahead of your nose to be able to judge your own position. There was some secret instruction by which not only the mere fact but also the degree or temperature of grandeur was determined. It didn’t have to do with the number of rooms, certain objects, or the condition of a given building.

Intellectually, Nínó on Teréz Boulevard had a very classy position in the family hierarchy while my aunt Irén in Damjanich Street, by dint of her person, as it were, also enjoyed a high position, since her beauty unfortunately swept everybody off their feet; yet because of her husband, she was not considered one of the refined or truly grand members of the family. Her husband was fabulously rich, people never stopped talking about it because somehow he could not get used to being rich or preserve his affluence; he was a common, uncouth man. On his hairy fingers he wore several jeweled rings and one particularly ugly signet ring of which his daughters were very afraid. He would slap them in the mouth with those ringed fingers. And the girls were no less ill-mannered. My grandmother said that my aunt Irén paid no heed to their upbringing. It would have been hard to say exactly what my aunt Irén did pay attention to. She picked the objects of her attention capriciously, making everything around her constantly move and change. The disorder in their apartment was always great; one had the impression that they were about to move out or had just moved in and had had no time to unpack. A radio was always blasting somewhere; they had several of them; they did not disturb the girls listening to the gramophone or whistling or even playing the violin at the same time.

When visiting them, Grandmother preferred to keep her gloves on and always made sure the taxi waited for her; thank you, my dears, but I’m staying only another moment.

I thought my mother was the classiest of them all, because she was the only one among us who dared openly to betray everyone, to just up and leave; she had no problem betraying the entire family, and she abandoned me without a word. I have almost no memories of her. More like a few sentences that others whispered in my presence in a way that I couldn’t understand. Regarding my mother, I can’t separate my real memories from my desires and imagination. Not only did she settle in Paris—this would not have been startling, considering her personality—but she lived in the woods of Vincennes, where the window of her bedroom gave on a lake with the fortified castle of the French kings on the far side. I knew these kings had been beheaded. I also knew that except for her name, Mother had nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing. People spoke of her with trepidation, about how she was impoverished and, save for that certain woman, had nobody and nothing, but absolutely nothing. I imagined her still wearing the same white linen dress with the red leather belt in which she had escaped on the last train. It was in the summer, a very hot summer. I knew her shoes and her bag had been red.

That certain communist woman with whom she left had come to Budapest for the World Youth Festival.