Parallel Stories: A Novel (9 page)

For a long time nothing was heard except the wind whistling and sounding in other ways as it blew through the hollows, cracks, drainpipes, and various openings of the grand old apartment house.

There was no one on the circular galleries or in the courtyard; the spacious stairwell landings remained empty.

At this hour no one would have come anyway, except the German milk woman from Budakeszi or the Slovak woman from Pilisszentkereszt with her eggs or perhaps the mailman. But they all stayed away because of the awful weather. Ilona had taken her little boy to the kindergarten early that morning; he couldn’t be in her way all day. No other school-age children lived in the building, and by this time of the morning nearly everyone was at work.

The last time this building was full of people was on one of those terrible nights in October 1956
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when cannon fire on the boulevard forced total strangers to take shelter anywhere they could. When the limping, hunchbacked, bald concierge opened the heavy oak entrance gate at dawn and looked outside, the wind was already raging on the boulevard. Ever since, people leaving the house would, with no small exertion, carefully close the gate behind them, which a clumsy sign stuck to the oak door asked them to do. The erstwhile elegant carriage entrance still looked like a wind tunnel in hell, with Satan, blowing his horn, about to arrive. The lids of the trash cans were rattling, trembling, knocking ceaselessly. The infernal noise also had a banal explanation. The blast of explosions on that October night in 1956 had knocked out the two panes of glass fitted in the high archway over the gate and since then, the desperate efforts of the concierge notwithstanding, it had been impossible to find such heavy, unbreakable glass anywhere in the capital.

Of course, the eighty-year-old exceptionally eurhythmic building was considered a rarity in the neighborhood because it had survived the ordeals of the last decades almost unscathed. It had done so not only because of good luck. Even in its own day, it was perhaps the neighborhood’s least conspicuous structure. It was meant to be a block of luxury apartments, as were all its ostentatious neighbors, but its modest dimensions gave it the appearance of a private town house, though there was no more substantial building in all of the Terézváros district. It had never taken a direct hit and, since the imperceptible ornaments of its puritan facade also had been made of high-quality material, even air blasts from nearby explosions failed to damage it. A restless, unsociable man from the countryside, or at least someone whose mind did not work on an urban scale, had built this apartment house, which bore no resemblance to the ones around it, and that of course became an advantage. Pundits opined that the style of the almost completely unadorned building might be placed somewhere between classic and eclectic; thus, in the architecture of Budapest, it represented a much needed link; because of an unfortunate development of circumstances, its designer created almost no other freestanding buildings like this thereafter, and the need was still felt in the cityscape.

The architect was the kind of man people referred to as a bad character, even though the areas in which he showed outstanding talents were not few. Perhaps he could not decide whether to be a fighter or an eccentric or whether, to the contrary, to meet every mediocre and foolish demand. In fact, he spent his entire long life struggling with himself; he always found some object that would conceal the raw ravings of his insane egoism. At times he submitted himself to anyone for the asking, as if in sheer self-sacrifice, even lowering himself to the point of outrageously bowing and scraping; at other times, he would play the role of independent, self-willed gentleman. His name was Samu Demén.

He came into the world in the town of Jászberény, the son of a well-to-do Jewish grain merchant, a few years after Hungary’s failed War of Independence in 1848, and he was considered an exceptionally intelligent child. He was the last child in the family after his six sisters; his paternal grandmother and two aunts on his mother’s side, all “poor relations,” also lived with the family. One may imagine how he grew up among all those women, how they must have pampered and spoiled him—and we haven’t even mentioned the girls and women who were household help, or the Misses Le Vau and Papanek, the French and German governesses. The family’s financial situation was secure, its prestige ever more solid, though Jászberény managed to keep out Jewish immigrants for a long time. By the time the boy reached puberty, most of his sisters had been married off, out of town; their father, taking advantage of new real-estate laws concerning Jews, rented an extensive property, which he ran with a firm but also fortuitous hand. This provoked envy and anger among many people in the small town, while others saw the usefulness of his general improvements, though even among the latter only a few could accept that the property belonged to the Jew.

At any rate, the boy chose his way of life and career without any restriction or outside compulsion and by following his own dreams. He studied architecture first in Berlin and then in Vienna; he traveled for a few months in Greece and spent an entire year on a study tour in Italy. According to the logic of his studies, from Italy he should have continued to England, but because he could not acceptably master a single foreign language (a constant cause of uncertainty and anxiety for him), for his last two undergraduate years he reenrolled at the Technical University in Budapest, where he earned his diploma under the tutelage of the already famous and powerful Alajos Hauszmann. The professor thought highly of him, and though one cannot say that he denied his support to this decidedly attractive young man, Demén was not among his favorite students, because these students, despite the professor’s cunning efforts, would not suffer Demén’s company. They found his manners unbearable; at the very least his touchiness and impetuosity seemed strange. He spoke in a thick, irritating dialect he could not shake; he stammered embarrassingly when his peers switched to German, not to mention his bad habit of mixing up the genders of nouns; but mainly they objected to the strident tones in which he frightened off or wore down so many people.

Whenever he turned up in one of the noisy cafés—in the Sas (Eagle) on Újvilág Street, in the Vadászkürt (Hunting Horn), where he read foreign newspapers, in the Kávécsarnok (Coffee Hall), where he would confer with suspicious characters about obscure political matters, or once in a while in the luxurious Angol Királyn
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(Queen of England), because of a scandalous adventure that linked him with a lady of the highest social circles—then, with his dashing figure and impeccable attire he immediately captured and for long moments held the attention of the public. People who knew him made fawning or stinging remarks; people who did not know him wanted very much to know who he was.

At the door, the waiter would courteously, complying with police orders, take his walking cane, while he, pulling at the fingers one by one, with the same ceremoniousness removed his tight-fitting chamois gloves as he absentmindedly and majestically let his gaze sweep over the place. He could have been taken for a famous foreign artist or aristocrat, of whom onlookers would say, what a distinguished-looking man; he is of course not from among us and not like us. He would take off his top hat, hand his gloves and hat to the waiter, who only then would lead him to his table or to the company waiting for him at his table.

His steps were always deliberate, his gestures smooth and pliable. A fastidiously well-bred wild animal passed between the tables.

The magic would last until he lowered himself to a chair or until, leaning out from the depths of an overstuffed chair, he began to speak. Everything on him was finely wrought; everything was long, longoid, bony though not without some flesh, like his fingers; at the same time wild and unruly, like the fine strands of his shiny black hair that spilled out from under his headgear. No less wild were his eyebrows, which with disobedient hairs on the slightly bone-yellow skin grew together above the bridge of his nose; his lips were almost offensively thick and on their upper rim he sported a tiny mustache trimmed to a thin line. With his mere appearance, with a confident and spoiled-child smile playing at the corner of his lips, with his gestures and skin color, with his dark, nervously darting or, alternately, lingering gazes, he could ingratiate himself with anyone. And it would take him an equally short time to pulverize the disconcerting attraction others felt for him and make people wonder where they stood with him.

He was born under the sign of Aquarius, and nature had fatally granted him all the traits associated with his constellation but, alas, nothing else. He was a man of the spectacle, or rather of the spectacle of visual illusions; he knew everything that had to do with spectacle, he knew what he owed to harmony, what to disharmony; he was well versed in the measurement units of symmetry and asymmetry: he preferred symmetry without insisting on it, because he opposed the monotony of proportions. However, these aptitudes did not function in him as acquired engineering skills but reached down to, were in touch with, his viscera; they drew nourishment from his guts. Yet he was not untrained; no one could put his skills to better use. He could also manage colors, shapes, materials, the rhythms of lines, and he instinctively sensed their mutuality and reciprocity, but where the territorial waters of visualization ended, he was considered a lost man.

Complete tone-deafness is probably as rare as the possession of absolute pitch. The problem was not that he could not distinguish a waltz from a mazurka, though sometimes he couldn’t do that—and that’s nothing to worry about; he proved to be morbidly insensitive to any auditory proportions and perhaps because of that was incapable of listening to others or hearing himself properly.

He had no friends, only admirers and enemies. Samu Demén did not comprehend fine tensions and shades of emphasis or meaning. He did not hear out anyone to the end, could not argue well; he would quickly shout down, interrupt, and pounce on anyone, break into the conversations of others, occasionally talk over another speaker’s words. He felt in his element when he could hold forth in a freewheeling monologue. His refined gestures notwithstanding, few people forgot that at table he ate noisily and smacked his lips. A beautiful body in which probably there was never silence, a body that did not desire silence.

Some people simply avoided him.

Of course, he sensed this, but ever since leaving the family home, he hadn’t understood why things happened so that he wound up being alone in the end.

On his buildings there were no traces of disagreeable extremes. He built not from the outside in but from the inside out. As if he saw the inner courtyard before envisioning the facade, or first saw a single room that would determine the proportions of all the others and not the other way around. He became convinced, nay, obsessed with the notion that a living space is successful only when its ground plan is an elongated rectangle like that of a Greek temple, and its individual rooms almost regular squares. He wanted living spaces to be intimate, gentle, and friendly; they should not stifle desire, but neither should they feed ambition or conceit. The height of the rooms depended on their width and length in the floor plans. From which it followed not only that he would not design overly large rooms, because he couldn’t call for senselessly high ceilings, but that all the rooms had to be about the same size, in the end not much larger than the service spaces.

All his designs might well have been for comfortable, intimate, restful, substantial, and cheerful spaces, but they could not be reconciled to the spirit of the age, and therefore he could not implement them; they usually remained on paper. His ideas did not turn his colleagues against him; they merely smiled at his plans. Samu Demén drafts pretty little country houses, they would say, but hasn’t the vaguest notion what a city apartment building should be like. And his plans scared away potential customers. In buildings that his colleagues designed the interior proportions were indeed different. Rooms in the front—drawing rooms, studies, smoking rooms, and dining rooms—were larger and high-ceilinged, in the rear quarters all the spaces, dark corridors, pantries, dens, recesses, and alcoves became narrower, which made their interior height alarming. As for the apartments on the courtyard, their proportions were even less convenient; everything was crowded, intruding on everything else. Kitchens encroached on rooms, rooms on windowless alcoves and sleeping recesses; there were public toilets on the rear stairwell landings; in short, the city’s dense and impure atmosphere invaded the living space.

As opposed to all this, Demén dealt with space so generously that on any given floor he could put no more than two apartments, which of course found no favor with developers, who balked at the prices of building lots or looked for more profitable deals. And when he might have stood up for his ideas by arguing courteously and cleverly, everyone could see that he nearly exploded with anger when crossed.

Please understand that when you draw a line across the topmost point of the tympanum parallel with the crepidoma—that’s the terraced substructure of an ancient temple—and then connect the two at each end, all right, I see you don’t understand, you’ve probably never seen a Greek temple, well, that would give you an almost regular square, and that’s the essence of the thing. Well then, please note that this is what we call a classical proportion. A virtual square tending toward a flat rectangle. And I would go further, but please understand that I can go only as far as is optically tolerable. I won’t go past that, trust me; I simply won’t. Now then, if we put another floor on this building, or two or three floors, as you would like me to do, then we would stand the world on its head.

Well, look at it, please, as you can see this would give you a bare prism shape that bumps up into the sky. And that, with your permission, is not me. I will not take on a project like that.

Indeed, his witty colleagues saw the facades of his structures, missing only a grand tympanum and Doric colonnade, as some sort of old-fashioned archaizing creation. Yet he never used archaizing elements in his work, just as he stayed away from showy Baroque or Renaissance ornamentation, which his colleagues liked and for which customers paid willingly.