Parallel Stories: A Novel Page 5

  She shouted back with a beastlike instinct, as if wishing to charm him with her shouting, stun him, anesthetize him and render him helpless, to tether the other animal to its place.

  You’re not going anywhere, do you understand? You’re staying right where you are, do you understand? Don’t you move from there, you understand? Without me, you make no confession to anyone, do you understand?

  She was shouting from her chest, from her stomach, did not form her sounds in her throat or head, and that’s why they came out strong, deep, thundering; they boomed and reverberated.

  Even while she was shouting, she felt that there was a coolness in her soul or that her shouting lacked empathy or any kind of passion.

  Something was fatally missing.

  No doubt she was doing the right thing, yet her heart was not in the shouting. As if she were filling in for another person, a stranger. After all, she had not shouted at anyone for who knows how long. Perhaps she had never before shouted quite like this; her shouting was alien to her. And this quite confused her because she felt that neither her nephew’s muddled and ominous confession nor her own determined shouting could touch the quintessence of her being.

  She noticed something, some sort of change that cut her to the quick, of a kind she had never experienced before, some lack that now made itself felt as an aching wound.

  Which made her shouting somewhat desperate; she became scared of herself.

  And now I want to tell you something, she shouted, and you’d better listen hard, she yelled.

  But at that very moment they were disconnected.

  From the depths of the huge apartment, across the empty communicating rooms, the sound of a woman’s running footsteps were heard.

  Inés, yelled the aunt, the telephone still in her hand, though she heard clearly the approaching steps of the Portuguese cleaning woman who until now had been peacefully ironing somewhere in the rear of the large apartment.

  She could not leave the window.

  She expected the door of the phone booth to fly open and Carlino to run away across the park.

  Inés, she shouted again.

  And then she would have to catch him in the park, at the railway station, she’d catch him somewhere, but for that to happen she could not leave her post at the window.

  And the door of the phone booth still did not fly open.

  Because Döhring stayed there for a while, just as he was, head bowed, humiliated many times over. His hand on the receiver, in the position where he had carefully and mercilessly replaced it a moment ago when he no longer wanted to hear his aunt’s voice.

  He was staring, as if discovering something frightening, at his own foot; he was wearing expensive English shoes. His aunt’s voice had indeed bewitched him, just as his unpleasantly hard erection had stunned him.

  He didn’t know what to do about either.

  In such a state, he wouldn’t dare call Dr. Kienast.

  His short coat was open, but fortunately what he felt happening inside his undershorts could hardly be seen on his pants. He was waiting for it to be over, which meant he should pay attention to everything but this. It cost him no small effort to tear himself away from his aunt, not to listen to, not to acknowledge what she would require of him. Yet no effort seemed sufficient to cope with what was happening in his loins. The most he could do was wait until his body came to its senses by itself.

  This was also risky because if his aunt decided to grab her coat and come after him, he wouldn’t have much time.

  Döhring was not a smart or careful dresser. The two finer articles of his outfit, the hand-sewn, somewhat awkward but very comfortable and wear-and-tear-proof shoes and the checkered, dark green, wool-lined Scottish windbreaker, were both gifts from his aunt. Otherwise he wore jeans and an unironed shirt over a white undershirt, like an American movie hero, and it had to be very cold before he would put on a sweater. Sometimes he’d put on his sweaters only because his stepmother had knitted them.

  But he did have one secret indulgence: his underpants, swimming trunks, and running shorts. The briefs were quite small, red ones, sulphur yellows, purples, and all of them extremely thin. Wearing them was a discovery and a challenge, though for a long time he had no idea what he was discovering and no clue as to how he would challenge his fate by wearing them.

  The moment he entered the big city, somehow everything flowed naturally from everything else.

  At home, he might have avoided for a lifetime what he unavoidably encountered every day in Berlin.

  When he returned from his first early morning run, the super was washing the sidewalk in front of the house. Late-summer sun shone bright on the trees’ foliage, though at this hour the air remained icy. The aunt’s apartment was in Fasanen Street, so that he could just run straight ahead along it to reach the Tiergarten.

  He was not fond of changing his route.

  And the super, who according to his own admission was also a student, studying law, though he was at least forty with two children, for some reason liked that the new tenant went running every dawn.

  He asked him why he didn’t bicycle.

  Here everyone rides bikes, or rather, many people do, he explained, at least those who on principle reject going by car.

  Our kind of people, he added with a small laugh, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear the young man’s response.

  Döhring was standing before him on the wet sidewalk, still panting. Being from the country, he was not fond of such challenges. He understood that the man expected to hear a political view, the very thing Döhring disliked.

  Water was streaming hard from the super’s hose.

  In the sharp air, Döhring’s sweat cooled quickly on his shoulders, a fine film settling on his face.

  He said he liked riding but he didn’t have his bike with him; frankly, he hadn’t thought to bring it along.

  The super was glad that he could use every question, reply, and suggestion as an excuse to prolong the conversation.

  He said there were three bicycles in the garage left by a former tenant, a Hungarian engineer.

  He didn’t know why, but Döhring asked what kind of Hungarian engineer. He was surprised to hear that someone would leave three bicycles at a former residence.

  With his lips, with his head, the super indicated his agreement that this was suspicious behavior. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head so vehemently that the stream of water shook in his hand. He said he had tried to find out but could not, the Hungarian left no forwarding address, he had talked to the old super too. Also there were no trademarks on the bikes.

  The spots left by their removal were still there; two had been simply taken off, the third must have been scraped off. If he felt like it, he should take one, any one of them, at any time, nobody else uses them anyway, occasionally his wife. If he wants, he could show them to him right now.

  Although Döhring went down to the garage with the super only to be polite, that very afternoon he took one of the unknown Hungarian’s bikes and with very little effort, to his great surprise, quickly wheeled out into the thick of the city.

  On these end-of-summer days, the sky above Berlin opens as if the firmament, this closer one, was going to open into another, farther one. However calm or hot the weather is, cool breezes and occasionally icy squalls arise. On the facades of buildings the shadows lengthen, the street perspectives deepen. Cool are the misty dawns and cold the foggy nights, of which something spills into the day as well.

  During these days, Berliners stay on the sunny lakeshores until the last possible moment.

  After a short hour’s ride, he did not even know where he was. Except that he was in some woods. He rode fast so he could feel the breeze on his body, but he was in no hurry.

  He’d practically run away from his home, and now he had ten full days until the beginning of the first semester, during which he could get to know the city where at last he would be living alone.

  Although he left behind
the uniform noise of the expressways, no point of the wood’s well-kept orderly sections was out of range of the city’s pulsation. He did not know where he was but he did not care. He didn’t have to worry about getting lost. Or if he did, well, what of it. The highways were now closer, now farther, their proximity sometimes indicated by the smell of gasoline caught among the trees.

  Occasionally he would see a solitary person. Someone running with a dog. Or couples strolling dreamily. And he was struck by the way people in the forest looked long and curiously at one another.

  The way the super had looked at him that morning.

  They were interested not only in his intentions, and they did not seem distrustful. He could not ride by anyone without being looked at. Politeness emanated from their faces, in a kind of advance on the first spoken word.

  They also turned to look at him.

  True, he also turned to look back because he could not resist the attraction of the glances directed at him, and he expected to be addressed.

  Whether he wanted to or not, he had to look back, but he became repeatedly embarrassed because nothing happened.

  And then he seemed to be past the area that people from the city reached on foot. A lone person on horseback far away, and then no one for a long time. He was now in a thick pine forest; the slightly wet, soggy dirt road rose insidiously; pedaling was difficult. It was becoming dark among the pines, for the afternoon sun was barely reaching across the ridge. Stifling, thick silence reigned among the tall somber trunks; occasionally a solitary bird warbled into the silence or another one screeched. Riding was hard in this area because horses’ hoofs had torn up the slippery incline. The acrid smell of resin pleasantly permeated the dry and stifling air.

  He should have alighted and pushed the bicycle but he did not give up; he preferred to look for patches of solid ground along the roadside to keep under the wheels for each stroke of the pedals.

  Döhring came from a tiny town in the plains of the Lower Rhineland. Lots of sand there too.

  Not far from the slow-rolling Niers river, outside town, was their old farm, where they spent their summers. His eyes were used to vistas in which hedgerows, groves, and wooded areas punctuated the landscape. Everything uniformly flat. Though the pinewoods at home had a different fragrance. There were depressions in the eternal flatness in which rainwater would collect; springs burst forth and then leaked away into nothingness, and groundwater rose and fell as dictated by the seasons.

  Sand everywhere, sand, marshy in the flatland’s depressions. A thin layer of sand, blown by the wind, covered the surface that slowly became hard, and in it, as if to deceive someone, clumps of long-bladed grass grew everywhere.

  Not a terrain without perils; one never knew where to step next.

  In the puddles of the depressions throve those tall, tangly, coniferous pines more yellowish than green, with which he now involuntarily compared this forest growing in the Berlin sand; site of his childhood adventures, site of horror.

  The boggy ground was fragrant.

  One frequently remembers what one is breaking away from, or at least feels oneself ready to break away from.

  A Genteel Building

  Many years earlier, in the spring of 1961, the year when in distant Pfeilen other obscure matters were also coming slowly to light, the celebration of the national holiday* in the Hungarian capital turned out badly.

  According to the weather forecast, the next day was to be sunny, warm, decidedly springlike. At times like this, though, one never knew, because forecasts on the eve of official holidays were always falsified. They reported something either better or worse than what was actually expected, though occasionally they kept to the facts, with some cosmetic adjustment. There was hope that this time the report would be different, since the previous days had indeed been sunnier and warmer than average, but whatever the officials did or did not know, at dawn on March 15 turbulent northern winds were raging furiously over the country, a three-day hurricane that hit the capital especially hard. The false forecast, based on a compilation of daily requests about and reports on the general public mood, was prepared in the disinformation department of the secret service, whose submitted recommendation could be accepted or rejected only by authorized party functionaries at the next session of its political committee. At such times, the weather report, traversing strange paths, would not come from the Meteorological Institute, but would be delivered, as top secret, by runners to the editorial offices of every newspaper, where it was the duty of the editors-in-chief to supplant the real report with this one before going to press.

  When in March the sun enters the sign of Aries and the exceptional hour of the vernal equinox approaches, the elements of nature often collide.

  Suddenly the mercury dropped eight degrees Celsius; it was almost freezing again. Something terrible happened at the site of the official celebration, but no one had the details. Swelling clouds rushed across the sky, it was light and then it was dark, it drizzled, it was wet, closed windows rattled in the icy squalls. Festive flags were soaked and flapping wildly above Budapest’s empty streets, the national flag between two red ones. Tiles fell from the roofs; from broken rain pipes water gushed freely. There were hardly any pedestrians; anyone who braved the wretched weather also risked having something fall on his head. In the general din, the streets seemed to have become abandoned battlefields. Heavy broken branches lay everywhere. Anyone trying to make progress by clinging to the walls of buildings would get rain directly in his face and water pouring down his neck from the leaking gutters. And the noise reached its climax when for a long moment at several distant points in the city fire trucks and police cars blared simultaneously and, their sirens blasting continuously, went speeding toward the center of the city.

  Ambulances moved in formation along the dead Grand Boulevard.

  Why doesn’t somebody pick it up, was heard at the same time in the depths of a huge apartment on Grand Boulevard, a demanding female voice.

  She was shouting from the bathroom, but since her youthful strength had been long diminished, she could hardly overwhelm the wind howling in the airshafts and stove flues, or the squealing of ambulances. Please pick it up, somebody, I never.

  Still no one picked up the phone, though there were at least three other persons in the well-kept huge apartment fitted with every bourgeois comfort, a home that somewhat defied its historical time.

  The sirens of receding ambulances slowly dissolved in the wind.

  From four rooms in the third-floor apartment one could see the alternately illuminated and darkened Oktogon Square, while two other rooms and the maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, which gave on to the inner courtyard, remained dim in all seasons. There was a day in June when around noon a thin stripe of light appeared on the eggshell-colored wall in one room facing the courtyard, and this stripe not only reappeared in the following days but grew longer and wider, came earlier and departed later, until in mid-August it vanished for good. Its disappearance was like an otherworldly signal that few people would understand. But now everything was booming, rumbling, whistling, and crackling in this dark inner courtyard, as if something or someone were drumming on the roof tiles, plucking the wrought-iron railings of the red-marble rounded galleries on the courtyard side of the house, playing a trumpet in the depths. To boot, in this morning hour of housecleaning and lighting of fires, all the huge white double doors in the apartment were wide open and therefore no one could deny hearing the telephone or the old lady’s shouts from the bathtub.

  The telephone rang three separate times in the largest room, which members of the household called alternately salon and sitting room. Twice it relented, but the third time it kept on ringing.

  Each of the three persons thought one of the others would pick it up because each had personal reasons not to.

  A pale, freckle-faced woman in her early thirties, kneeling in one of the back rooms, trying to light the fire in the stove, showed the same reluctance to move
as did the other woman, a few years younger than she, who in the dark depths of the adjacent back room was lolling on the wide French bed, among the rumpled bedclothes, and with her thin dark-skinned naked arms desperately pressed a pillow to her head so she would not have to hear anything. Her presence here was not exactly welcome, so she picked up the telephone only in emergencies. She felt like an intruder, and rightly so because that is how the others thought of her, and as time passed her situation had become more and more unclear.

  She had no place to go to, or rather she did not have the strength to make the unavoidable decision.

  The pale woman busy with the stove did not go to get the phone, and not only because the fire she’d managed to light kept going out in the draft with every new gust of wind, which then would blow out of the tile stove and into the room in billows of thick dark smoke, but mainly because she kept to the rules. When people of the house were at home, she was not allowed, even in the morning hours of cleaning, to appear in the front rooms without being called. Although she knew no one was in the sitting room now, she did not go.

  Let them pick it up if they want to, she said to herself, as if answering the old lady’s shout from the bathroom, and shrugged her thin shoulders.

  She was not the rebellious kind and had no reason to be dissatisfied with her position here; still, at times she enjoyed being quietly vindictive. In fact, it was her little boy’s situation, which she felt to be injurious and humiliating, that made her like this—that, and of course her own self-respect. They lived in the ever-dark maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, and at her employers’ request she had to forbid the boy to leave the kitchen. This was the magic boundary of their living space: the kitchen walls. The child could comprehend it, but how could he possibly accept it. And not only was she, the mother, unable to overcome the constant border violations, prompted by anger, but the little boy’s rebellions continually exposed her willing servility. It was very difficult to find a place for the two of them, and in the difficult hours it seemed they had to pay too high a price for their security. The lively little boy, barely five years old, as pale as his mother, was not even allowed to play in the dim, musty passageway they called the hall, where, except for mealtimes, no one ever set foot.