It would please Klára to take a secret small revenge on her worshipped father by getting together with a Jew and thereby also inflict a nice wound on the young man. This too belonged to her rebellion; Kristóf himself had nothing to do with the passion with which she would touch him. Then she would really succeed in touching the Jew in him. No one should remain untouched by her universal pain and universal anxiety; this would be Klára’s only satisfaction.
Simon was the one; love was meant exclusively for Simon, not for Kristóf.
To see how much she could torment Kristóf and watch his torment — that is what Klára wanted, not his love.
And she saw clearly that he could be tormented.
Which Kristóf himself did not consider wholly unjustified, since his own father, killed by his comrades, had been a die-hard Stalinist; he did not forget that for a moment. It wasn’t enough for either an excuse or an explanation.
Kristóf and Klára turned their raw self-hatred, their historical perturbation and exasperation, on each other.
Oddly, the mutuality of this somewhat satisfied them.
If Kristóf did not want to lose moral credibility in his own eyes, and why would he want to, he could not object to Klára’s taking her revenge on him for the family insults she had suffered because of her father. Klára listened to Kristóf’s lamentable story with a certain empathy derived from her feelings about her father and from a vaguely delineated historical remorse. Nevertheless, she couldn’t deny that her concern for him was overshadowed by her gloating, raw and unforgiving.
Which, because of Simon, she had to deal with cautiously. She would protest whenever Simon tried to wipe off the alleged sins of his class on her, which she found extremely unfair, and would become sharply indignant.
Where does he get off.
At the top of her voice she would yell, you’re talking to me, not to my mother, not to my father.
But this was not their biggest problem.
In the darkness rhythmically illumined by streetlights, Kristóf could not get used to the woman’s freshly applied perfume. He liked the earlier one better; it had been fuller and more subdued. Also, he was unusually cold and could barely keep from shivering, which was humiliating, not very manly. And this was not only because the soles of his shoes were so thin, but also because their closeness had grown too intimate, hugely increasing his anxiety about the abandoned giant, who, although he was physically far from Budapest, surely was aware of what was going on. He had to be feeling what Kristóf felt and didn’t want to feel toward the woman. A sense of his presence made Kristóf breathe as if he were taking small samples of air into his lungs and then expelling them when he uttered his sudden, unexpected phrases. This behavior had nothing to do with his response to the giant’s unmistakable animal smell. As though he were saying to himself, Well, I’ll be, I can’t get to the bottom of this. The giant initially had no idea what to make of this attitude. Slowly he realized it, jostling among alien sensations, and only then comprehended it.
Indeed, they could not get to the bottom of anything; Klára, Kristóf, and Simon, coming together as they had from three contradictory social environments, either misinterpreted or plain misunderstood one another’s gestures. No two of the three of them could be together, on their own, without the third. This was hard for all of them to grasp. Yet the attitudes that Klára and Kristóf had each absorbed in their strict upbringing were alike in that neither of them felt free to understand certain things that it was more pleasant to misconstrue politely. Kristóf’s bottomless sexual subversion and Klára’s anarchic rebellion actively required them to find each other — now, however way they could, heedlessly.
Klára was on guard, though. She had read every work by Bakunin available in Hungarian and in Russian; she unashamedly used a dictionary when she needed one to understand what she was reading, and understand it well, and she did not hurry. She definitely wanted to be part of the conspiracy.*
And in the darkness Kristóf kept his nose alert and trained on her, inclined as he was to a more sensual and sensory conspiracy, excitedly working his nostrils to absorb everything more and more deeply whenever he pensively fell silent while telling his life story. And what made him pensive was the woman’s insane selfishness — probably the result of having been spoiled as a child — and her aristocratic narcissism, her intellectual affectations, which she balanced and interspersed with obscenities and vulgarities. Kristóf was more at home with sexual pornography; transpositions of anarchistic political pornography were alien to him. The perfume was sweet and heavy, as multicolored as the segments of an open fan, not at all anarchic, and his abdominal wall and his testicles hurt because of the relentless tension of the last few days. Klára could not have known that he was uncircumcised, which in this or similar cases is a disadvantage for the man, how could she know. Her being so spoiled, her directness and proximity, this was all very unusual, unfamiliar, and alarming, and she seemed to be attracted to him. At the same time he had to sense the pervasive proximity of something in her from which he was excluded and in which he could never be involved.
It was not a political movement that Klára imagined, once she acquired some knowledge about the anarchists; such a thing would not have occurred to her, and in the middle of this catastrophe they had to go deeper than that. She had imagined rather that she was preparing by philosophical means for a sensuous and sensory root-canal treatment. She had to get past the personal because she wanted to escape pain, and at the same time, avoiding individual pain, she wanted to share with others the idea of personal freedom so that she would not be bound by that either.
However difficult their life together proved to be, Simon profoundly bewitched Klára with his steadfast admiration, his veneration for her naked childlike body and the prodigious cascades of her hair in which he passionately immersed himself, so that afterward, with him spitting and retching from hairs stuck in the back of his throat, they both could laugh long and loud; laughing at the slyness of the body, as it were, at how some body parts and limbs resist physical pleasure. Although she made imaginative attempts at escaping pain, it never occurred to her that she might free herself of pleasure in the same way.
And it was in this sense that Kristóf had to feel, in their close proximity, the very solid presence of the other man.
This was the constant and traditional object of his sexual subversion, which by now he should have given up for Klára’s sake: the other man.
The unknown person whom he recognizes in his partner and whom, in the very moment of recognition, he disowns. And because of Klára too, the two of them could not be alone. And the third person scarcely ever left them alone for even a moment. Klára would not let him go, just as Kristóf could not let go of the giant or the giant of Kristóf, instead playing along with his mustached assistant as the fourth or fifth participant. Because of this other human being, Kristóf could enter this sort of relationship, neither comprehensible nor transparent yet ineluctable.
Simon undressed this woman as one would a child with a high temperature who has become helpless and must be put to bed promptly.
To get close as soon as possible to her body, in form still childlike; and a few moments of being left to themselves sufficed for this. To rummage around in her skirt a bit, undo the clamps of her garter belt, plant kisses on her forced-open thighs, gobble up the maddening smell of her undergrowth.