And Klára cried out that she had never seen a block party and would really like to.
How well he remembered that warm night, the noisy party on the street, the phenomenal auntie in her glittering dress who danced with his mother, how both women threw back their heads as they laughed and kept on laughing and how both women later disappeared, the auntie and his mother, leaving only the name of a city behind: Paris.
The revelers wouldn’t let the streetcar pass until all the passengers got off and danced with them.
It sounded improbable this evening, too sentimental, but it was from here, from the second floor of this blackened building with its peeling plaster, that they had taken away his father, where now, behind the curtains, a lamp was shining at the far end of the room.
They stopped here for a while, in front of the building, in the middle of the deserted, glimmering roadway. If he could have had his way, he would have taken back every sentence, every word he had uttered about his mother and father. But the question remained in the air, hovering between them, the real question: why a new love if everything ends like this, if everything is so brittle and every story is destruction and devastation.
Wonder if Kristóf has someone else.
They remained gravely distrustful of each other. The thought that perhaps he was in love with someone else began to take root in Klára, as if her jealousy was greater than her desire.
It’s not possible that such a handsome boy didn’t have anyone.
That’s how it is, though.
Then you must be hopelessly in love with someone, she cried in her teasing voice, a voice she deeply disliked. I can see it with my own eyes.
With you.
If Kristóf had had enough presence of mind, which he did not, that is what he would have answered and then drawn her close, taking his chances.
Why didn’t I hug her.
However, he was repelled by her teasing, by her tone — borrowed from the chatty dramas featured in boulevard theaters. If he had wanted to gain her for himself. He looked at her in the dark, and the shining surface of the woman’s large eyes did not reject him. But he did not reply, and he did not want to lie to her; like a little boy, he drew up his shoulders. He did not risk rejection, perhaps on behalf of their future. He did want to gain her for himself, of course he did. Yet he couldn’t think about this openly and unreservedly. And what an impossible notion it was anyway, to gain someone for oneself. And he dreaded the other person’s bodily presence, anticipating what that notion might mean in their lives. Their silent individual efforts to avert or evade their current feelings clashed head-on — and then met, as was vividly registered in their faces, animated by the lights filtering in from outside. This changed their lives. So rapidly that they couldn’t follow it, and the woman somehow had to yank the steering wheel back to its normal position.
It would have been better not to raise, comprehend, or hear these delicate inner questions.
And what’s this about him being a handsome boy.
Where does all this disdain for him come from.
It would have been hard to comply with conventional custom and start talking again in the dark as if nothing had happened between them. He moaned, or rather groaned, under the weight of the presentiment that one might possibly possess another person. The future tense kept marching ahead of them, and at every moment, they realized, belatedly, what they had just said or done. This frightened them, and so they tried to create the illusion that it wasn’t even worth talking about. They had to conquer themselves on their own. As if love’s fear of death had to avoid or overcome a much larger fear.
He thought of Aréna Road as crossing the city like some magical border or no-man’s-land that he could not get across alone — if you try it you become anyone’s prey — but he also wanted to show, right away, that he was completely at home in the two different zones on either side of the border: in the thick of the city, up the rear staircase, or in the precisely apportioned quiet streets by the boringly vast desert of City Park, in the once ransacked and then reconstructed grandiose villas of deceased wholesale merchants or banished industrialists.
But why so much disdain toward him on the woman’s part.
No, his great-grandfather had not built pretentious or grandiose buildings, no, not in that style, no, he wanted to have nothing to do with that sort of architecture. He disdained ostentation; being in proportion, that was his hobbyhorse, always talking about what was and what was not in proportion, what had to be made proportionate to what, and that’s why he was shoved to the periphery of his profession even as a young man. He could say no but not yes. But he was the one who had the idea for those crazy yellow tiles at the Lukács Baths and later for the paving on Pozsonyi Road. He was so headstrong that in the end he preferred to serve others. All his life he was ashamed of not having become a great architect but only a very rich contractor, a nobody to whom money stuck because he worked to please other people’s tastes and quickly squandered everything he earned. He built his brick factory on the outskirts of the city, in Budakalász, and from there he shipped his crazy yellow bricks everywhere, even to Vienna. He had one other great patent, the coke basket, which is used to this day in big construction jobs when they want to dry something very quickly. At a high temperature, the sulfuric content of coke becomes gaseous and engages the hydrogen and oxygen of water, burning one and precipitating the other, thus extracting the water from mortar.
How could it have remained the family’s property. Why does Klára ask such stupid questions. In 1944 there was no longer such a thing as Jewish property.
Leave off with that already.
Why does she think she can provoke him like that.
Lucky for the old man that he did not live to see it.
The last Jewish transports were taken away to their doom from his brick factory.
Anyway, he ruined everything at the right time, when everything was still in its heyday.
At last they could have a laugh at something: that the great-grandfather had managed to ruin things.
There was no inheritance.
As if they were saying that nothing could be more uplifting than penury, when one is free of the dread of ownership. And one has to have a certain talent for ruining things, a sense of rhythm.
They too will become worthy of their own doom, they too will squander and ruin everything in good time.
He has nobody and never has had anybody.
And why does he lie so shamelessly.
Maybe some stupid affairs.
One right after the other, probably.
But he didn’t dare tell her that he didn’t really desire anyone. Didn’t want to. Instead, so as not to bog down in this uncomfortable subject of love and also to keep himself from thinking about the giant, whom he loved, yes, loved, or his mustached assistant, he quickly told her about standing in line at Glázner’s, but the woman had no idea where Glázner’s was or who Glázner was, and he told her he had stayed there after the bombing, how could he have left. The bread was more important. In emergencies one’s conscience narrows down its area of activity. He told her about the unknown lady who in the dust cloud and general chaos around the Duna movie house had disappeared from his life forever, about her injured face, her eccentric hats and cashmere turbans, to show that he understood the secret signals of feminine fashion in the city of his birth and if he had had his way he’d be still searching for his mother, which had become his obsession. Even in his sleep, he knows where she lives. From the Gare de l’Est he’d have to get to Châtelet, there take another métro to Saint-Mandé-Tourelle. Then go past the School for the Blind on République and it’s the first little street on the left, 3 rue du Lac. Looking at it on the map, he figures that the windows, at least on one side of the house, should face the Bois de Vincennes.