Parallel Stories: A Novel (58 page)

This sounds familiar to me, this Budweis, maybe from Schweik.
*

With this remark they were virtually submerged in a shared smile shining and spreading across both their faces, evoked by and paying homage to the hero of the book they’d read before the war; they even laughed briefly.

Later, that’s where the Czech doctors came from to see us, from Aussig, continued Irma with a cheerfulness left over from the laughter. But I’d really like to know why you’re asking about this.

Mária kept swaying her head.

Actually, I don’t know why I came home, she went on evasively. Of course, that’s a whole different thing, I know, the two things can’t be compared. I can’t give you an honest answer. In the final analysis, historically, we’re both in the place where we belong. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. Some kind of instinct to escape. Raging in me. As though accepting the premise that whatever happens is what should happen, natural the way it is—I can’t accept that.

Maybe that’s what I can’t assimilate—because it isn’t like that.

But she felt it would be useless to insist. Mária would not answer her sincerely, and that hurt.

She relented, let her go.

I’m only asking, she said softly, because I have two kinds of answer.

Well then, tell me the first one and then the second.

No, don’t laugh. I also have a third one, yes, I do.

And when she said this, for the first time the wry smile she had sustained for Mária disappeared from her lips.

And this made her lips tremble painfully.

Those Swedish nurses were not very nice, you know. Or maybe I just didn’t like my shitty life being so dependent on others. They would have taken me in exactly the opposite direction. That bothered me too. It was nothing but a primitive kind of resistance, that’s all. In your big new freedom you realize you have a will of your own, which means you are again your own master, and you don’t want to see the Swedish nurses anymore. You lash out, make repeated accusations because you can’t even stand up. Now I should drop dead, now, because of them, just when I’d almost managed to get through everything.

In retrospect, though, I must add that they were tackling an impossible job, that’s true. There were so many cases of gangrene, purulence, necrosis, whole limbs rotting away on live people. They just had too much to do, much too much. The warmer the weather, the more unbearable the stench became, there was never any water, no surgeon for I don’t know how long, maybe weeks, and no supplies or equipment. Sometimes they got hold of some soldiers to cut firewood, the nights were frightfully cold, or prisoners of war, among whom there were some Hungarians, but most of the time the nurses had to chop the wood. Decent middle-class Swedish women, you know, and they had not the slightest notion what they were up against. And there was some cold fury in them. Maybe that was the way the ordeal affected them, I don’t know. In my barracks we had a very small window opposite where I lay, and I could see from the darkness how hopelessly the sun was shining outside.

But how can you say that, it was spring then, wasn’t it.

It shone despondently. You keep waking up, going to sleep, waking up.

It shone even during the night, but that was the moon.

I don’t know if you ever paid any attention to it, but spring sunshine in our country, and that’s what I know about, is always so stark, so bare, just bare.

You’ll understand in a minute why I want to tell you about this.

But there are these weeks, these spring weeks that don’t exist in other places.

It’s a little incoherent, the way I’m speaking, you’ll forgive me, but all I want to tell you, if we’re already talking about it, is that in other places, from the very first moment it starts, spring is pure brilliance.

In our part of the world it isn’t. There’s something hazy in our spring.

When I was first able to go outdoors and realized we were in the mountains, I saw that it wasn’t so there. The barracks window was dusty, maybe you understand, she said hesitantly. But not a single muscle in Mária’s face responded.

Then how could she explain it to her.

I’m thinking of early spring, she said, close to desperation, before budding time. And just imagine, the first thing I did was clean the window.

It was also like that in Vienna, tired and hopeless, you can see there, too, that winter destroys everything. This is probably not so in places that don’t have such long, dry freezing periods. I thought—and this is going to be my third answer, though it is strange, very strange, that it’s only the third one. One recovers slowly. The two boys—I must find them somehow. As if they were lying about there, in front of the building, and they should be told to get up, the ground is too cold. As if I couldn’t remember anything.

Believe me, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else, because one shouldn’t say things like this for others to hear.

I knew very well they were no more.

The big difference is that mountain grass doesn’t give out in the winter, on the contrary. I’d say that was a kind of fixed and certain bit of knowledge about the essence of the world. I may be absurd, and it’s risky to say, but the moment a single person goes missing, the essence of the world changes. But it was not completely unimaginable that I might find Andor back home.

Because until then I myself wouldn’t have believed, and I didn’t, that they were no more.

I understand.

But that’s only the logic of things.

Now I do. I’ve never understood it completely.

Probably not completely, but maybe you understand some of it. Don’t imagine it as if you remembered either one or both of them, or anyone else. If anyone, I’d remember Andor more because he caused me more grief, and that has a shadow, or leaves long shadows behind, the grief and pain. Let’s be clear: lovers’ pain. But there is this: my sons, these two naked words, the possessive and the plural noun, together comprised all one’s knowledge. Or rather, it’s a place that has not remained empty, though you feel its emptiness. But there is no memory, and this must be very strange for you to hear from my mouth, but there isn’t, one does not remember. That is the big stinking truth.

Damn this rotten life, I beg you, please give it a little time. Of course I understand, it would be so good to understand.

Everything I had done earlier was nothing but hubris, crude maneuvers. Only my perfect lack of guile could excuse it, and we were all guileless. Anyway, it had a lot more to do with brute force than with consciousness. And while she seemed relaxed and impassive as she went on talking, she recognized that Mária was growing restless and resistant, a response that might have been intensified by the noise of the two tugboats passing each other, and she realized that she had to finish up, bring things to a close. No, memory is something entirely different, I had to discover that, she said, defying Mária’s restlessness, impolite but not unjustified—after all, it was Mária who had wanted to hear, who had asked to be told—and that was the reason that after a while I would have given up my practice even if they hadn’t shut it down. That is why I couldn’t do it properly anymore. The work can be done only if one believes there is memory, but not only is there no memory, it’s also better that way. It seems that in the overall scheme of Creation it was decided not to include memory. But now I also think we should drop this whole subject.

For long seconds, as they arranged the delicate proportions of fairness and politeness between themselves, they stood silently in the light of the opaque lampshades, their eyes wandering over each other’s features.

Two figures of almost equal height only an arm’s length apart, but without the expectation of touching each other. No empathy, no murderous impulse, neither such love nor such understanding. Everything they felt was either more or less than necessary. One woman was strong and solid, with a weighty body; the other was delicate, extremely thin, down to her bones and tendons, yet not with the air of someone whom the next gust of wind would blow away.

One lamp hung from the ceiling, the other was above the sink; their bleak light was fractured by the unusually large white wall tiles and aging surfaces of the mirrors.

Now let’s take a deep breath, said Mária, her words accompanied by one of her loveliest smiles, forget that I asked you, or what I asked, as if nothing had happened, don’t be angry with me. And now we’ll go in to see Elisa. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, believe me I don’t, Irma, but I feel such hate.

For what.

Myself.

I feel it.

If you feel like seeing her at all.

Why wouldn’t I, Mária, answered Irma lightly, even though what she wanted to say was, why harbor so much hatred, there’s no reason for it. It’s hard to hear something like that. She really couldn’t have had a good reason, at least no personal reason, or maybe only a little. Still, Irma couldn’t say this out loud. She could not absolve Mária because of the dead ones, though her sons were not on her mind now. No. She couldn’t. Just as Mária could not go farther than she had.

This was the last word that could be uttered.

And we’ll drop the story, at least for today, she continued, well disciplined and composed, because she understood correctly the stubborn silence emanating from the other woman. If I may say so, we’re going to forget it.

They both laughed a little at this, and found it mutually enjoyable to intertwine their laughter.

It’s correct, that’s right, it is, Irma replied. If there is no remembering, how can there be forgetting. There is no forgetting either.

One of them had to continue with her loveliest, most attractive laugh suffused with suffering, the other with the pleasure provided by the workings of the mind, both of them neutral toward each other.

In truth, they both felt bad about this brief conversation and impulsively concealed their bad feelings from each other.

With your permission, I’ll go first.

Of course.

And while she unsparingly reproached herself, she could not help being happy about Irma’s coming with her. She treated her friends cautiously; she did not burden them overmuch with the sick woman. Irma was the only one to whom she had entrusted, albeit under pressure, the story of her and Elisa. Which, for quite a time in the late 1930s was the topic of avid, excited gossip in upper-crust circles.

Irma did not follow her in right away; politeness and consideration demanded that she hang back a little in the bathroom doorway. Which was useful, because she needed time to forbid herself to think of her sons. Although she would witness the scene, she should leave some time to be shared by just the two of them.

But her hesitation had another, no less delicate reason.

According to the rules of her profession, she couldn’t feel repugnance for anything or anyone in theory, because repugnance, again in theory and in the parlance of her profession, would indicate that she’d been unable to analyze something, that there was something in that other person or in herself she could not see or perhaps deliberately tried to avoid. No matter how often she rehearsed these reasons and arguments, she had to admit that from the moment she laid eyes on her, as they say, she felt a most profound physical aversion to Elisa Koháry, whom she had known slightly when the younger woman was still healthy.

By the time Irma returned from Vienna, this woman was simply there, belonging to Mária, and there was no way to get around her or to separate her from Mária.

Mária had been taken away from her.

There were hardly any opportunities for brief, private conversations, and for this reason she simply loathed Elisa.

Although with her mind she comprehended the real reasons for her aversion and fear, she could not change her emotions with her intellect.

The moment the door opened, she could see the hapless woman; she sat at the edge of a swan-necked divan in the brightly lit room wearing a faded, floral-patterned print dress. She was whimpering, evenly and persistently, swaying her head to the rhythm of her sounds, to the right, to the left, frighteningly, untiringly, while she kept hitting her paralyzed knees with a fist.

This was the only decently furnished room in the large apartment, or more correctly, Mária had made sure that no valuable object in this room was sold, even in periods of great privation. The room was just as it had been when they set it up, according to Elisa’s taste, during the first, not exactly blissful weeks of their living together.

The repeated gesture was understandable at first sight. She must have been doing it for a long time. It was easy to see she was punishing herself, was passionately dissatisfied with herself, her miserable knees not moving and she being unable to get up from where she was sitting. And it was impossible to forget how well proportioned and shapely these legs had been in their fine silk stockings, with fashionably graceful, thin-soled, indecently high-heeled shoes showing off her ankles, calves, and thighs. Now her swollen feet were forced into two down-at-heel, checkered felt slippers. Her downy blond, naturally wavy hair, richly interlaced with gray, which made her blondness even more exciting, fell into her face because of her continuous, practiced gesture of passionate self-punishment. She looked like a lunatic, but this exaggeration was a part of that particular language of gestures with which she could still express her will and feelings, and for which she mobilized incredible reserves of strength.

Her left shoulder and arm were partially and her lower body completely paralyzed as a result of hereditary arteriosclerosis, which can afflict young people. This diagnosis was well supported by the facts that her grandfather, Baron Dénes Koháry, chief counselor for hunting matters to the minister of agriculture, had died following an unsuccessful treatment of his syphilis, and her father had had a long bout with serious circulatory problems. Elisa’s anus and vagina retained their full sensitivity, however; she felt her needs and could to a certain extent take care of them herself. She could no longer formulate intelligible sentences except for one, though with great effort she could produce sounds that for practiced ears were not completely indecipherable.