To catch it at least with a handkerchief.
Even after the inevitable moment, he didn’t have the self-control to tear himself away from the giant. All he could do was follow him with the handkerchief. He was no longer in his right mind, and given the nature of the thing, this should not be understood metaphorically. And the reason he and Ilona could not talk about anything was not that their sense of decency forbade it, but because everything was right as it had happened. Which he also attributed to the giant’s strength. This made him feel so strong and powerful that he expected he’d be the one who at the right moment would block the giant’s way in his frightening and cheerful urge to run amok.
For that he would have to find him first, to go back to him from his imagination, as it were.
That is how the heroic tale might have been realized, their terrible happiness.
It did not occur to him that the giant might have another life, small children who were his spitting image, but that the giant daydreamed about him he felt on his skin, in his aching frontal lobe or in his unavoidably erect penis, in the temperature of his body and the rhythmic tempo of his breathing. Or that the giant might be making love to someone else in his stead, doing it very seriously and, along with this stranger, might be looking for him, Kristóf, in the universe. He saw how they filled him with themselves, with their parts, but he was not envious of them, he had no reason to be jealous. In his imagination the giant had to remain as free as an outlaw. This was the basic condition in the functioning of his imagination, and it would have been senseless to cancel it with jealousy. Neither his body nor his soul was tied to anyone but the giant; that was the big truth; he had become the giant’s prisoner, his slave. Impartial curiosity and imagination had set him loose from everyone else; there was no one left to whom he’d earlier been bound or belonged; put another way, impartiality would not let him get close to anyone. He observed impartially even those to whom he was close. He had to distract Klára’s attention from all this so they could more thoroughly observe each other. And while flitting among his various stories about the city and its architectural styles, explaining things loudly and pragmatically as they drove along, he felt how immoderate a man he was, what an evader, a rambler who made himself laughable with his awkward, pitiful life, and no matter how hard he tried, his story was never nice and round, and there was no way back.
Only forward, deeper into the thick of things.
When it comes to sharing one’s story with someone else, the storyteller tries to retailor the story to fit the measurements of the listener, as it were. Then many things come to mind that cannot be told or shared with anyone, which slows down the telling; and with the constant jabbering the storyteller never gets to the end of anything or never returns to the beginning. Either another story joins the storyteller’s own censored tale, or the storyteller trails some silly fairy tale behind the original story.
It’s not necessarily modesty that keeps him from the story of the other person; of course, that too.
But he wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Which makes him think he should strictly separate the stories so that they won’t ever again make contact so dangerously and unguardedly. To separate the secret story from the acceptable one; they mustn’t dribble into each other. But how could things have turned out differently from the way they did. The mere question tortured him. Or what might have happened if he’d managed to make them turn out differently. After all, when telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself. He keeps telling the legend until he too is taken in by the credible presentation, according to which his life has a nicely rounded conclusion, a brief clever punch line, an epilogue, and a lesson to give some meaning to it even beyond death. And it occurred to him again how many things he and the giant should have done differently to arrive at a different fate, one that might have led him not only to the shuddering happiness of presentiment, intuition, and imagination, but also to the other man’s ordinary, boring, everyday life story.
No matter how he looked at things and events, this other possibility, this should-have-done-it-differently, planted itself before him, constantly, demandingly. The way things did not happen and wouldn’t have been decent if they had. To achieve another story, he most likely would have had to do things about which, without information concerning the giant or himself, he could not know. How many things they had missed. One after the other they’d mishandled every illusion. Perhaps they missed another story. But lacking the necessary information, how could he describe his misses, or how and to whom could he complain about the lost illusions. His body had revealed much more of the giant than he could factually be aware of; his palms, his thighs, everything, the scent of his hair revealed him, and for that Kristóf did not even have to know his name. Perhaps he had come to possess knowledge of his soul. But he remained unfamiliar with his ordinary weekdays and couldn’t share his own with him. And what if he could. Did fate’s plan, if fate had a plan and if there was human fate at all, include impetuosity, profligacy, and enormous omissions.
And if these latter were taken into account and his fate could not be imagined without them — because the Creator, let’s say, built them into the plans as a gaping lack — is it worth talking about misses and omissions.
Why would it be.
Is it worth trying to make up for his omissions and to pursue his pleasure to the point of exhaustion. Or, to put it the other way around, one should ask how the giant could have known him well enough to hit all the right keys on the keyboard of his guts and take possession of him just as he wished. How could there be such congruence in nature. He did not understand this. Perhaps there are no differences between men because they are nothing but stupid mirror images, which is why they immediately recognize themselves in one another. And in that case, men’s life stories are nothing but repetitions and empty experiences. Any intelligent mind can foresee everything that might happen to them. Sometimes primitive things are harder to understand than complicated ones. And how can he hope to make up for his omissions with a person whom he’ll never meet again, no matter how hard he searches day and night all over the city.
He had the same difficulty imagining this never-again as he had with infinity, or with space, or the complete emptiness at the original place of creation: the Beginning. He made several attempts but did not succeed, because he saw that the vessel of space might be infinite, and then what sort of a beginning would it have, would it have a limit, could it fit into a larger vessel; he could not imagine that there was nothing before the beginning and therefore there wasn’t a beginning either. Or it happened that suddenly the giant was there, standing before him in his corporeal reality, even though he hadn’t found him in the city. As if he knew his name, János, his name was János Tuba. And if not the man’s corporeal self, then his memory stood before him, a picture, the memory of a gesture or an odor, the giant’s thinking emerging as his own.
And as if in the darkness he were blinded by the dazzling of days, he buried his face in his hands.