Parallel Stories: A Novel Read online

  He despised them for choosing such a measly swimming pool, where one could get from one end to the other in just six strokes; and he seriously thought that Viola might be his last chance. Je m’en passerai bien. However, it would be easier without her. A witty woman of considerable temperament who, on top of it all, had a rather flashy appearance and to whom he was related, though fortunately not by blood. In any case, he did not have much of a chance with her. How could he have believed that Viola had promised them she’d come. The young woman had decidedly rejected him; moreover, she had publicly made him a laughingstock. From which he understood why, in her childhood, she and her younger sister had laughed so much behind his back. For reasons unknown to him, those two were always laughing at him.

  Which, of course, could have meant the opposite of what it did mean. He knew it did not mean anything else, and that hurt him. Still, he could not give up the possibility of a last chance, and that is why he had gullibly taken the bait.

  In such awful weather, there were very few guests in the heated glass corridor on the ground floor. The three men were conversing at the end of the left row of cabins near the telephone booth, in a spacious corner where for some reason the pool’s not necessarily pleasant odor was strongly felt. The man called André, whose first name was originally András and whose family name was Rott, for which many people thought him to be a Jew, did his undressing and dressing every morning in the very last cabin.

  Anybody who was anybody at the Lukács Baths had his own cabin, which of course demanded the appropriate social standing along with an entourage. These were his favorite friends, though he could have called them his subordinates. They had known one another for only six years, but there was no doubt about the depth and strength of their relationship. András Rott’s offensive nudity was part of the threesome’s close and mysterious relationship. Not that they had no secrets from one another, even bodily secrets, for they did. But it was as if Rott had to convince his two friends or keep them captive not only with his pronouncements but also with the sight of his naked, sharp-as-a-blade, dark body. There are secrets weightier than bodily secrets, and this truth well suited the connection among these three.

  Concerning the secrets of their lives, which they could not share with anyone, it seemed more propitious to retreat behind flagrant nakedness. They displayed their unconditional trust in one another with the bareness of their bodies. André especially enjoyed doing this because, coming from a militantly Catholic family, he was no stranger to ceremonial exhibitionism. In addition, he was often on the losing side against his two friends, and the loss had to be made up by the introduction of physical perfection. Not that the other two were not at least as perfect as he was in their own ways; as if every moment they had to cajole the proof of self-denial from one another, though their mutual and common silences always remained weightier than their proofs.

  His two friends regularly conspired against Rott, and since he was an emotional man, he took up the challenge heroically; he either struggled valiantly with them or willingly threw himself on their mercy, but in fact he was more powerful than they and, of the three, surely the most influential.

  He glanced at his body and the sight filled him with contentment; he felt it to be a worthy gift to bestow on his friends.

  Accordingly, he fell silent for a while. Then he let go of his testicles and with one quick movement pulled the foreskin back on his cock. Let it be said in his defense that one has to dry the bare bulb or rounded tip of one’s penis well, or it might easily become mucous and, in a few hours, develop an unpleasantly strong smell.

  Male nakedness has no higher degree than this.

  No women were allowed in this row of cabins. If because of some small but pressing business on the other side, a female cabin attendant had to come through here, she would start by shouting from afar, heads up, gentlemen, I’m coming through, woman on the way, look out; and to emphasize her words she would rattle her keys or slap them on the closed cabin doors, and still she had to take a lot of lip from naked or half-naked men, each in turn, as she went past the open cabins.

  Until the mid-1920s, men and women had bathed separately. And to this day, the lasting reminder of that strict tradition is that men and women are not allowed in the other’s corridors. Yet no signs were posted to this effect. Even people who knew little or nothing of the bath’s past or of the merciless local rules of conduct sensed the invisible borders. An unsuspecting man straying into the corridors between the floors around the courtyard might easily end up in an unpleasant situation. Believing he was still in a shared area, he might suddenly find himself in the company of scantily dressed women who in exceedingly friendly tones would shout for him to come on, don’t be afraid, come on closer, at most we’ll unscrew your thingamajig.

  Or he would find himself face-to-face with a naked woman who without hesitation would throw her wet towel at him.

  Nobody was swimming in the women’s pool, used more and more nowadays by children and uninitiated occasional bathers. The only voices to be heard came from the cloakroom, somewhere in the corridor connecting the two wings of the bath. Except for the three men, there were hardly any guests in this transitional hour. In the men’s shower room, the water ran behind the white canvas curtains, steam rolled outward, but no doddering old men shouted under the hot water. Nobody in the long row of cabins called for an attendant, nor did the attendants chat with anyone. As with everything else, such activities had their order, time, and rhythm.

  Early in the morning came the most important people, and then there was a lull for a while. Well after ten o’clock began a stream of young men about town, ladies, pensioners, various artists and writers, children, mothers, ladies of easy virtue who for no amount of money would ever dip their heads in the water and only floated on the surface with their bathing caps, usually pink or lemon yellow, decorated with rubber flowers or rubber stars. Late in the afternoon, when these people had gone, a new wave came and stayed until closing time—students, lawyers, physicians, and older, high-ranking government officials.

  The cabin attendant who also doubled as a lifeguard sat idly in his booth, at long intervals getting up to look out dutifully at the empty pool, over the two men sprawled on the bench. The other, obviously bored attendant went on mopping the ribbed yellow floor in the corridor; the early morning stampede, though not as overwhelming as on other days, had left many footprints. The cross-eyed chief attendant was signaling to the improbably obese, utterly unattractive ticket taker, who, with her multitudinous costume jewelry and towering hairdo, was enthroned and sparkling at the drafty elevated place near the entrance, a tribal queen.

  The chief’s signal meant that no matter what might happen, come whoever may, he was going to disappear for some time.

  Go on, have a good shit, Józsi my dear, shouted the fat woman.

  A barely noticeable side door instantly swallowed him up. This door led to the steam bath, and using it was the prerogative of only the most privileged members of the bathing public.

  Important and dangerous people in whose company somehow everyone is overcome by well-mannered speechlessness.

  The erstwhile green, worn, narrow door had no doorknob.

  The windbreaks, swollen by constant vapors from the pool and in the corridors, were not making their customary dull slams, the windows were not rattling, and no new guests had arrived for a long time. Pleasant warmth pervaded the bright glass-enclosed corridors; intimate silence prevailed everywhere except for the water running in the showers; outside the wind roared above the water and in the bare crowns of the huge plane trees leaning over the water. The new attendant, who from his booth and with considerable alarm had listened for a while to the three strange men, later nodded off in his chair. Actually, he did so out of fear, so he would not have to hear their nonsense. He listened but did not understand. He did not want to see anything, either. From their words, he couldn’t even figure out what sort of men they were. This new attendant had been transf
erred here from the Gellért Baths, and no matter how much he had heard of the Lukács, he could see that this was a completely different world. And these three did not even try to keep their voices down. They didn’t mean to blab to people about anything, but they clearly didn’t want to keep anything secret, either, which is what struck the new attendant as strange. He was very young, barely more than a boy, from the Kispest district of the city, and he could not have known the meaning of their diversionary gestures and their sentences traveling on circuitous byways. He was not familiar with this sort of sentence, this coy sort of smirking. What he was trying to figure out was whether these men were famous fairies. He did not remember seeing them in the Gellért, and they did not look gay; hard as he looked or listened, they did not lisp. Maybe they were foreigners. The bathrobe of the graying one, and the conspicuously and indecently small plum-blue bathing suit of the other one seemed to point in that direction. And the man who kept drying himself, with his lean-to-the-bones, hairy black body looked anything but Hungarian.

  Or they pretended to have forgotten their mother tongue.

  He couldn’t have observed them more attentively; in his nervousness, the dropping of his head woke him occasionally, and then he’d think he had missed something.

  Nothing was unambiguous here, as it had been in the Gellért. But from the chief attendant’s cheerful grin as he walked by, from the sugary tones with which he demurely engaged the men and at the same time winked in his direction with his awful crossed eyes, the new attendant could see that no matter how stupidly they might behave, these three men were big shots of some kind. In fact, it seemed that the chief attendant was trying to send him specific instructions—that he should stay away from them, be neither kindly nor rude, have no contact; don’t try to find fault with them, don’t pick on them; to point out their trespasses, if any, is simply forbidden.

  The Lukács was a hard case, because people’s varying behavior was determined daily, rather like the daily fluctuation of a stock exchange. There were rules of etiquette determining what might be the subject of public discussion, what must remain a secret, and, most important, what was forbidden, recommended, or allowed for whom. The cabin attendant, if he wished to keep his new job, had to learn all this very quickly.

  It was as if his hand, for a long period, had forgotten what it should do with his bared prick and, while he continued to talk, that is what he would be thinking about.

  Of course, it doesn’t interest me, either, he went on listlessly, because again he decided not to take offense, which made him stutter more than usual. Out of the goodness of my heart, Uncle Hansi, I am telling you what your favorite comrades are busy with, he said, and although he was talking to him, he evaded the other man’s penetrating gaze. Even you cannot know exactly what’s happening around you, he said, and they do what they do out of sheer instinct, like animals. Like animals, he repeated with great pleasure.

  The pleasure André Rott thus gained with his words at the expense of the two other men was not without risk, risk both political and personal.

  At the same time, he looked over his body again, at the shiny deep-purple bulb of his penis, rimmed more strongly than most, which he held with three fingers as he was drying with a zeal reserved exclusively for this excitable organ, blotting up the wetness carefully and quickly pulling into place the wrinkled, almost black foreskin. He not only did not stop talking while doing this, as other men would have done, but, stimulated by the small sly pleasure spreading in his body and by the involuntary disclosure of the same pleasure, was impelled to ever more enraptured oratory.

  They don’t know Hungarian, that’s for sure, he all but shouted, a statement that sounded especially funny coming from him, given his speech impediment and the fact that on his beautiful lips every vowel remained annoyingly closed. But it’s clear as day that the problem can be solved, he shouted, flushed with his own idea. They have to love what their sense of justice makes them despise. They keep trying to prove to us that they are adherents of progress and, according to the logic of things, they should really know in advance how many washtubs and how many nuclear rockets to manufacture in the next decade. If they can’t do that, gone is the theory of general progress, and if they can’t keep up with the competition, they’ll fail at something they had no intention of achieving in the first place.

  And now listen carefully, this is their big question, he said loudly.

  The other two were indeed all ears, though they looked like people to whom it was impossible to tell anything new, which was indeed the case. In the depth of their souls, they were listening not to what André Rott was saying, but to what he was rather perilously communicating with his words. Rott again knew something and, for the sake of maintaining his prestige, wanted to share the major outlines of the information—but in due measure, rationing it out, drop by drop.

  How might they keep stupid modernization, which they hate from the bottom of their hearts, restricted to military engineering, he continued, with his knowledge from secret sources. And how can they increase consumption when they are trying to hobble private enterprise however they can. That’s what that paper is all about, my sweets, nothing but that. Where should they put limits, saying consumer goods are all right up to here but no further. They have no methods for that, my little doves. Until now, everything’s been decided by the politburo. Whom now can they trust with decision-making. It’s an impossible situation: if the generals are rebelling, they cannot guarantee the security of the empire.

  Rebelling in Moscow, and the generals at that, well, don’t hold your breath, interrupted the gray-haired man sarcastically, and clicked his tongue for emphasis.

  That’s right, everything must change in a way that ensures everything stays the same.

  Pugachev was the last general who rebelled against the tsar, the Little Father, and that was two centuries ago.

  Kovách had spent most of his teenage years in Moscow, smuggled there from Nazi Germany by his father, named Kovách, so he knew exactly what he was talking about. But no comments and interruptions would stop André Rott.

  It’s a very interesting technique, the way they blunt the edge of any statement just as soon as they make it, while sharpening every potential conflict to the extreme—in other words, the way they play off everyone against everyone else.

  As if he were saying to the other two, careful, take a good look at where you stand.

  If you’re right, I’d be the happiest person in the world. The man who had been looking impassively out the steamy rain-swept window spoke sternly, in a rather chilly way, without visible emotion. He turned back and looked hard into the eyes of the man drying himself as if he wanted to petrify him. Then we would still have a few years, maybe we could come up with some ideas, maybe we could square the circle. But it’s not possible, André, you know yourself, my sweet, it’s just not possible, nobody has a patent on modernizing the dictatorship of the proletariat. And nobody ever will. It cannot be improved and it cannot be accelerated; all one can do is draw the sad conclusions.

  Even you can’t square the circle, put in the blue-eyed man.

  By birth, all people are indeed equal, which is a fine thing, but they are also greedy animals, which is in painful contradiction to the basic idea of the dictatorship of the good.

  He spoke quickly, protecting himself from the other’s self-satisfied nakedness, whose effect on him he could not completely ignore. Somehow, he always wanted to speak faster than one can in Hungarian. Hungarian is a slow language, and his consonants kept piling up. Of the three men, he had the strongest accent.

  If there is a shortage of something, their reaction is to collect more of it. The theory of equality has its own shadow.

  The other two would have been ready to laugh at this, but hearing such seriousness, they thought it better to remain cautiously silent. They feared that this might turn out to be a settling of accounts with the entire socialist movement.

  I’d like to remind you of the Harri
man Report.

  What Harriman Report, what are you trying to say, André Rott asked indignantly.

  You know damn well there isn’t any competition and there won’t be any, either; at most, a little hurry-scurry. You won’t make me swallow this dumb text of yours. There will be war. Any other prognosis is empty rhetoric.

  Well, even so, what does the Harriman Report have to do with it. You’ll pardon me, but you’re talking apples and oranges. Unless you’re thinking of the Ethridge Report.* And except for Republican senators, nobody enjoyed reading that. It was the work of a witty journalist, what else would you expect, written with a rhetorical intent. And if I too may express myself rhetorically, I’d advise you not to take on the role of offended oracle.

  Sorry, but I am thinking of the Harriman Report. Competition is possible only between sides of comparable abilities, we can accept this as a realistic axiom, and that is why there will be a war. Obviously, you refuse to acknowledge what Hansi has been trying to tell you so patiently. We are not in Moscow, we are not in London, it is completely irrelevant in this cunt-size country’s cunt-size capital—dans ce trou à rats, in this rathole—what your dear comrades are scheming about. At most we have to suffer them silently. Boredom is what’s killing us. We must admit we have drifted out to the edge of the world. But even from here you can see with your naked eye that war is unavoidable. For you, it’s better to think on this scale, better for everybody, everybody knows it, everybody dreads to admit it, everybody’s looking for appropriate reasons, pretexts, bunkers, and escape hatches for it.