The second article, ostensibly comic, concerned a minor scandal in one of the old bathhouses – a local government official caught in flagrante delicto at the Király on Fo utca, with one of those anonymous, hollow-eyed young men who go on the prowl in such places. It was a grubby story, somewhat sad, but reading the piece László was drawn irresistibly back to his own adventures in the bathhouses, those softly dripping worlds, relics of Ottoman times that survived into the heart of the People’s Utopia like orchids in a commissar’s lapel. And there he was again! A skinny boy hunched on the slatted bench of a steam room, surrounded by the old men with their sagging balls, their starbursts of purple veins, their damp newspapers…
He used to go with his father or Uncle Erno, sometimes with Péter’s family – a weekend treat – and it was in the bathhouse at the Gellart Hotel, the grandest of them all, that Péter had kissed him for the first time as they changed into their clothes at the end of the session, Péter’s Uncle Miklós dressing in the next cubicle, whistling folk songs. It was a kiss that fell like a splash of rain from a clear sky, breaking on to the back of his shoulder, transfixing him.
Nothing was said. What could be said with Miklós half a metre away, climbing into his flannel suit? But at the apartment that night, while János slept and the moon crossed the window right to left, László had sat up, feverishly trying to pass the moment through the machinery of reason, for already, at sixteen, he was condemned to be an intellectual, possessor of a mind that stared at itself. What had happened to him? He could not think of the moment as sexuaclass="underline" his understanding of such things was too shallow, too schoolboyishly vulgar. The kiss, he decided, must have been an expression of that ideal friendship Comrade Biszku spoke off in the Pioneers, and this soothed him for a while, tamped him down. But his daydreams of intense conversations, of epic chess matches and cross-country bicycle tours, had given way, in flashes, then in long sustained reverie, to the blatantly erotic; to the need for skin and hard breathing and intimacies whose names he trawled for in the pages of his parents’ medical textbooks, and later, more tantalizingly, in the cache of foreign novels they kept in a suitcase under the bed. Zola, Milosz, Thomas Mann…
And Miklós had had a further part to play, for it was in his apartment in District VII, more spacious than László’s or Péter’s, more private, that they at last lay down together, clumsy and furtive as a pair of apprentice house-breakers, unbuttoning each other on a bed with ruined springs and a coverlet of brown corded wool that smelled of the nineteenth century.
How much had old Miklós known? That bachelor and old-style liberal, with his card evenings, his tears at the first notes of Bartok’s ‘Rhapsody’. Did he spy on them? Was he excited by it? Well, he was long since dead, cutting the veins in his legs with a barber’s blade and dying in a bath of rose-red water the winter that followed the uprising in Prague. His housekeeper, Magda, had discovered the body, and László’s mother had telephoned László in Paris, and been surprised at his long silence, the weight of sorrow he could not keep quite secret from her.
After eating, he returned to the hotel.
‘Any messages?’ None. He went to his room, caught the news on TV1, and fell asleep over a book, his head pillowed on his arm, his face quite solemn in repose. Now and then there was an out-breath that seemed to contain the fragment of a word. Then he would frown, grow momentarily tense, and faint back into some more profound level of sleep.
When he woke the room was dim. The arm he had rested his head on was quite insensate. He had to move it with his other hand as though it were a piece of driftwood.
He looked over at the bulb on the telephone, wondering if he might have slept through a call, but there was no flashing light. Was something not ready? Had something gone wrong? Would they warn him? He wondered how many others there were, men and women in rooms like this one perhaps, half bored, half anxious, waiting for a signal, a note under the door, a tap on the shoulder.
He switched on a table light, pulled up his shirt and examined his chest in one of the room’s several mirrors. He could not decide whether his mysterious ‘complaint’ was marginally better or slightly worse, though there was no particular discomfort now, nothing that required him to take a painkiller with his aperitif. All the same, he thought of shadows on the lungs, of emphysema, of gross impediments in the branching of his airways. When he got back to Paris he would see someone about getting an X-ray, and he sat on the end of the bed, recalling the names of all the doctors he knew.
13
The night of the visit to Granny Wilcox’s house, Alec was woken by a noise he could not at first identify. He lay in bed, staring up through the not-quite-dark of the air, listening, but hearing only his heart, his breath, his brother’s breath, and the faint mechanical basso of the water pumping station behind the Joys’ house. Yet whatever it was that had woken him, it had thrust him out of sleep, startled him, so that he knew at some level he had been listening for it all night – for many nights perhaps – monitoring the audible world for a sound that could not be innocently explained.
He sat up and lifted a corner of the curtain. The storm that had broken over their heads on the drive home (striking the windscreen with waves of stone-coloured rain) had passed, leaving in its wake a coolness of clear, moonless air. It felt late – three, four a.m. – but the alarm clock on the table with its luminous hands was turned away from him towards the camp-bed.
‘Larry?’
‘Yeah,’ said Larry, ‘I thought I heard something too.’
‘What?’
‘No idea.’ Larry fumbled for the rocker switch on the cord of the bedside lamp, put the lamp on, and unzipped the sleeping bag.
‘You’re going out?’ asked Alec.
‘I need to piss.’ He yawned until his body shuddered, then pushed a hand through his hair and moved to the door. He was wearing a pair of Felix the Cat boxer shorts. ‘I may be some time,’ he said.