I don’t feel anything, I’m becoming numb.
This is the reason that in the darkness descending about his shoulders he had to recall the particular summer night that most likely had accepted his life and absorbed it. How curious, how his shoulders throbbed and how weighty the past proved to be.
When his entire naked body trembled.
As if, at the sight of the unknown future, he were trembling for life, fearful of what was ahead because of his abandoned life. The life he would have gladly given, all his life, to Elisa, and had feared — he now at last realized — giving to Madzar. He saw how helplessly Madzar’s naked body was trembling only an arm’s length away; Madzar could not control his either. And perhaps it had been in his power to stop or relieve the trembling.
But his armpits and chest became drenched under the ice-cold shirt, his loins and, oddly, the crook of his knees too; he could feel sweat dripping down his calves.
The secretary could not reach the boys because at the end of the glass-covered corridor of the Lukács Baths, nobody bothered with the telephone ringing in the cabin attendant’s booth. It rang insistently and long and then it ceased for a short while only to begin anew a little farther away in the public phone booth.
The bench, on which a little while ago and under the indignant gaze of the new attendant the three friends had been lying in one another’s laps and arms, was now empty; those attractive men, with their choice rudeness and equally choice gentleness, had been trying to keep Ágost from another attack of despondency. The realization had never reached Gyöngyvér’s awareness that the man she loved, whom she would have to leave during the approaching evening, was a seriously afflicted and endangered melancholic. The thought would have paralyzed her or would have ruined her amorous enthusiasm, which she considered a gift more precious than anything else in the world.
She could not have imagined that with her enthusiasm she had failed to reach, let alone mitigate, the other person’s weltschmerz.
At this moment, André Rott’s cabin stood empty. Unquestionably the most envied cabin even among the most privileged bathing guests, it was the very last in the row of cabins, next to the bathing master’s booth and the stairs going up to the sun terrace. In front of it was the famous bench on which one could lounge, sunbathe from spring to fall, receive guests and chat with them, not to mention the public phone at hand on which, in contrast with all other public telephones in Budapest, one could receive calls. A short while ago, Rott had had only enough time to throw off all his clothes and, with a certain physical repugnance, put on his wet bathing trunk before dashing off.
Events, running on various tracks, now followed at fever-pitch speed.
When a few moments earlier, as the ambulance people had put the young man slightly injured during his epileptic fit on a stretcher and taken him away, the prime minister’s private secretary appeared in the corridor, having come from the steam bath; he was still red and perspiring. A rapidly balding, not very tall man with a slight limp, who, according to his official title, was head of the prime minister’s secretariat with the rank of cabinet minister, had arrived through the secret side door, which invisible hands closed behind him.
He went about the world as unimpeded as if he could walk through walls.
As he passed, he motioned to André Rott, who was just putting on his socks, to follow him, go for a swim with him, and with his thumb pointed upward, signaling that celestial persons had ordered something very important.
And Rott knew very well who the celestial ones were in this instance.
The young man’s protestations were in vain, he begged them not to take him to the hospital, he had had this problem many times before, in the Gellért nobody paid attention to it, and in a little while everything would be all right.
Of course everything would be all right.
He should not worry.
Just a little dizziness, that’s all he feels.
His head nearly split with pain; that was the truth, a sharp throbbing pain that sometimes remained stuck in his brain for days, making him vomit a lot of the time, but he kept quiet about this because the doctors could not help him anyway.
See, he can stand up already.
Whenever this happened to him, all he wanted to do was walk out on the world or hide at the bottom of abandoned mouse holes and shut out every bit of light. But Rózsika, the ticket taker, with her blood-red beads, her thick neck layered with rings of fat, pushed him back down, did not let him sit up; she had the same kind of blood-red beads on her massive wrists and in her small ears.
They rattled softly with her every movement.
You, now listen to me, my child, you may have a concussion. Don’t ever forget that, my sweet Jani.
And that means you must not move.
Everybody knows that.
I’m just telling you so you won’t forget it. You’re lucky you didn’t split your head on the faucet. I can hardly believe it; you missed it by a hairsbreadth when you fell, my God.
She followed them, she walked with them across the inner courtyard with the plane trees, and when they stopped for a moment she would stroke the young man’s limp hands, arms, and shoulders, his marble-pale forehead. The stretcher bearers stopped and changed direction several times under the storm-beaten wet trees, discussing loudly to which building the physician on duty had asked them to take the patient. All the while Rózsika whispered in a voice sweet as honey that he should not be afraid because she would not leave him, she would go everywhere with him, she will take care of everything but absolutely everything.
In the ice-cold wind she gathered the thick hand-knitted sweater about her, and the strangest thing was that in the following years she kept her promise. To the general indignation of her friends, colleagues, and relatives, she did not leave the young man, and they learned that the young man clung to her no less ardently once he left his little fiancée for Rózsika.
For a few steps the cross-eyed chief attendant also followed the stretcher in his white short-sleeved shirt and his white trousers tight as a drum on his paunch and buttocks. His wooden-soled slippers clapped along as they walked. He was turned back by the security people streaming in from the steam bath to take up their observation posts around the pool, in the corridors, and at other important points of the building as required by the presence of a high-ranking visitor.
Of course Wolkenstein, known here by his Hungarian name, János Kovách, could not see any of this because a moment earlier he had finally had the chance to take his chilled limbs and disappear behind the sailcloth curtains, where hot, unadulterated medicinal water gushed freely from the shower heads in great spurts, smelling like rotten eggs, just as it burst forth from the thermal spring. He shampooed his gray head, rubbing it pleasurably, and then did the same to his substantial limbs, which over time had grown a little heavy; he worked up a foam, his strong hands gliding as he massaged himself while over the gurgling water he sang at the top of his voice.
Ágost, however, did hear from the other end of the corridor the relentless ringing of the telephone call looking for him. He was quickly getting dressed in his cabin. He thought the Lukács cabins were disgusting, smelling of various bodily exhalations and of the insecticide scattered everywhere against cockroaches. He had no intention of waiting for the others; he wanted to decamp alone. He had had enough of them and of this morning. He’d had it up to here with their insipid political arguments. He did not understand why these men, so full of hostile sentiments, could be his friends. He felt anxious, though he knew he could not afford to. Their opinions did not differ, really, yet they could not be reconciled. He could not imagine what he would do with his unhappy life, which was probably unsuited for happiness. They should spare one another all this awkward strutting about. Waste of time. He was bored with everybody always having to have a different opinion, why does the world need different views. He had no sensible answer. And the wind was knocking about outside. They never got anywhere with their opinions. The wind raised the mist and blew it about; gusts of air continually lifted, perturbed, slid across, and bared the surface of the water.