He had been daydreaming about those woods.
So he hasn’t seen his mother since then.
How could he have seen her.
They don’t even correspond.
What on earth could she write to him about. My dear son, I think about you a lot, or what. And what could he write to such a mother. Although once in a long while she and his aunt secretly write to each other, they seem to think it best not to show him their letters.
But why doesn’t he read them anyway, why not steal them, why is he such a coward, damn it.
If they don’t want him to see them, why would he.
Why is he so submissive.
He shouldn’t be so tolerant.
He made the excuse that he was merely curious.
Curious, what could you still be curious about.
Kristóf had no answer to this, though the question touched him deeply; indeed, about what could he still be curious.
Anyway, Klára did not believe him about its being curiosity; she thought it was plain cowardice.
He is a coward, doesn’t want to acknowledge his own situation, and prefers to daydream.
It was time to get rid of this great cowardice of his.
It embarrassed them both to have Klára so annoyed with him. She was ready to explode with the anger she felt about him, that is to say on his behalf.
He should rebel, why put up with it. Why doesn’t he rebel against his family. They must be a terrible bunch, at least judging by what he had been telling her. At the very least he should rebel against them, if he does nothing else. Nothing sensible, that is. And why, actually, doesn’t he do something sensible with his life, she kept crying out in a low voice, shaking the steering wheel with her gloved hands.
Kristóf asked her in vain what he could do, against whom and how and what for.
She could not calm herself down.
Let them feel the crack of his whip, why must he suffer everything without saying anything.
He chose to tell her quickly about Ilonka Weisz, about his unspeakable shame, as if mentioning his silent suffering had reminded him of it, and he told her almost everything about what they had done to him on the fourth floor when, because of his pathological curiosity, those Weisz boys had managed to entrap him. He also told her about the mutilated man on the rolling board, in whom he had recognized his hauled-away father, and whom he could not follow on the sidewalk as the man propelled himself forward among the people.
Among their feet.
He could not really tell the story; that is how great his humiliation was.
And really, why does he put up with it all.
That is why he kept babbling instead about his grandmother’s women friends and the autumn weeks spent in the Grand Hotel on Margit Island, so he wouldn’t have to tell this story either, down to its painful marrow, not to let it hurt so much.
When he had followed his father or, who knows, perhaps a total stranger through the bustling city.
And he wanted very much to ask the woman how she saw this pathological curiosity of his; she should tell him, just this once, exactly what she thought about it, honestly. But this too was only a substitute for another question that he wouldn’t have asked of himself. He would have asked it of the woman, except that her silence was so belligerent, so he decided not to risk the question about his curiosity either. Had he gone out of his mind, how else could he do such a thing, keep spying on a total stranger for weeks.
Does she see signs of insanity in him.
What should he do.
Or what does she want from him, from such a madman, and what does her obstinate and reproachful silence mean.
He was not hallucinating, why would anybody hallucinate about such a thing; his curiosity guided him to the right place because that miserable wretch was his father, in his bones he felt identical to him.
What idiocy, how could he feel someone else’s missing limbs.
Yet he did, no matter that he knew it was insanity and he shouldn’t be doing a thing like that.
He only regretted — and he could not possibly talk to the woman about this either — that because of the black dog he hadn’t had the strength to get undressed at the right moment. That he could not throw his clothes, soaked with strangers’ piss and jism, off the bridge and then jump after them into the Danube.
He felt as if he had deprived the universe of a painfully beautiful scene.
In the name of the universe too, he felt sorry for himself.
But though it hadn’t happened then, it might happen tomorrow.
One more thing I have to tell you, he said, surprising himself a little, when he wanted to jump into the Danube from the Árpád Bridge, it was perhaps the devil that held him back.
But why did he want to jump.
His rotten black dog held him back. It had broken out of the garbage bay and come after him. He literally ran him down, literally shoved him against the railing in the joy of finding him and started licking his face with his big tongue.
But what kind of black dog and what garbage bay.
As if he had not heard the woman’s questions, he kept telling her about his disgust, his shameful weakness. When animals get too close to him he begins to choke up, he doesn’t know why. The roof of his mouth begins to blister, he retches, and he has to pull himself away from the animal. He cannot share anything with them, not even with a lizard or a porcupine. So for him to do what he had planned long before, he first had to free himself of the dog. But he could not chase it away. The dog simply wouldn’t acknowledge that it was being chased away. It was happy, it wagged its tail and barked hideously. Throw it over the railing, kill it — he really couldn’t think of anything else. It would have fit between the uprights of the railing, he could have shoved it through, but the dog thought he wanted to play.
Klára listened to him for a while, morose and silent, as though disapproving, but from her face it was impossible to tell what she disapproved of, the entire story, his way of telling the story, or the subjects of his story.
She had lowered her gloved hands from the steering wheel and into her lap some time ago.
What garbage bay, what dog, she asked again. She worried, forlornly and quietly, about her own questions.
Kristóf had not yet told her the whole story, how was she to understand it.
They were standing in the middle of Aréna Road, which hadn’t been called Aréna Road for a long time, just as Queen Vilma Road did not stay Queen Vilma Road and Stefánia Boulevard was no longer Stefánia Boulevard, though decades later people in the city were still referring to them by the old names.
The cambered surfaces of the cobblestones were shining.