He must catch her, they explained, before she went in the water or, they suggested, when her old husband disappeared in the showers.
He had overslept, had had to run, but he’d gotten there in time.
It wasn’t that his friends had played a trick on him — it wouldn’t have been the first time, and he understood why they would — but in this instance he could not forgive them. Something, he could not exactly tell just what, had become too much for him. They simply wanted to lure him away from the Sports Baths so that he’d be with them and not alone, and mainly not with that silly goose he had been living with for a while. Viola did not come at six, or later, only the elderly dentist arrived; Viola was nowhere to be seen, which did not put him in a bad humor but, on the contrary, relieved him. And that is how he surrendered to hopelessness, which had been waiting for him with open arms. All three agreed that Viola, although a little loud, was an entrancing woman. His friend swore up and down that she had promised to come, they weren’t lying, he must believe them, but of course she was unpredictable. And he despised this place where every morning the crème de la crème of Budapest came together. He did not believe them. Viola was anything but an entrancing woman.
He despised them for choosing such a measly swimming pool, where one could get from one end to the other in just six strokes; and he seriously thought that Viola might be his last chance. Je m’en passerai bien. However, it would be easier without her. A witty woman of considerable temperament who, on top of it all, had a rather flashy appearance and to whom he was related, though fortunately not by blood. In any case, he did not have much of a chance with her. How could he have believed that Viola had promised them she’d come. The young woman had decidedly rejected him; moreover, she had publicly made him a laughingstock. From which he understood why, in her childhood, she and her younger sister had laughed so much behind his back. For reasons unknown to him, those two were always laughing at him.
Which, of course, could have meant the opposite of what it did mean. He knew it did not mean anything else, and that hurt him. Still, he could not give up the possibility of a last chance, and that is why he had gullibly taken the bait.
In such awful weather, there were very few guests in the heated glass corridor on the ground floor. The three men were conversing at the end of the left row of cabins near the telephone booth, in a spacious corner where for some reason the pool’s not necessarily pleasant odor was strongly felt. The man called André, whose first name was originally András and whose family name was Rott, for which many people thought him to be a Jew, did his undressing and dressing every morning in the very last cabin.
Anybody who was anybody at the Lukács Baths had his own cabin, which of course demanded the appropriate social standing along with an entourage. These were his favorite friends, though he could have called them his subordinates. They had known one another for only six years, but there was no doubt about the depth and strength of their relationship. András Rott’s offensive nudity was part of the threesome’s close and mysterious relationship. Not that they had no secrets from one another, even bodily secrets, for they did. But it was as if Rott had to convince his two friends or keep them captive not only with his pronouncements but also with the sight of his naked, sharp-as-a-blade, dark body. There are secrets weightier than bodily secrets, and this truth well suited the connection among these three.
Concerning the secrets of their lives, which they could not share with anyone, it seemed more propitious to retreat behind flagrant nakedness. They displayed their unconditional trust in one another with the bareness of their bodies. André especially enjoyed doing this because, coming from a militantly Catholic family, he was no stranger to ceremonial exhibitionism. In addition, he was often on the losing side against his two friends, and the loss had to be made up by the introduction of physical perfection. Not that the other two were not at least as perfect as he was in their own ways; as if every moment they had to cajole the proof of self-denial from one another, though their mutual and common silences always remained weightier than their proofs.
His two friends regularly conspired against Rott, and since he was an emotional man, he took up the challenge heroically; he either struggled valiantly with them or willingly threw himself on their mercy, but in fact he was more powerful than they and, of the three, surely the most influential.
He glanced at his body and the sight filled him with contentment; he felt it to be a worthy gift to bestow on his friends.
Accordingly, he fell silent for a while. Then he let go of his testicles and with one quick movement pulled the foreskin back on his cock. Let it be said in his defense that one has to dry the bare bulb or rounded tip of one’s penis well, or it might easily become mucous and, in a few hours, develop an unpleasantly strong smell.
Male nakedness has no higher degree than this.
No women were allowed in this row of cabins. If because of some small but pressing business on the other side, a female cabin attendant had to come through here, she would start by shouting from afar, heads up, gentlemen, I’m coming through, woman on the way, look out; and to emphasize her words she would rattle her keys or slap them on the closed cabin doors, and still she had to take a lot of lip from naked or half-naked men, each in turn, as she went past the open cabins.
Until the mid-1920s, men and women had bathed separately. And to this day, the lasting reminder of that strict tradition is that men and women are not allowed in the other’s corridors. Yet no signs were posted to this effect. Even people who knew little or nothing of the bath’s past or of the merciless local rules of conduct sensed the invisible borders. An unsuspecting man straying into the corridors between the floors around the courtyard might easily end up in an unpleasant situation. Believing he was still in a shared area, he might suddenly find himself in the company of scantily dressed women who in exceedingly friendly tones would shout for him to come on, don’t be afraid, come on closer, at most we’ll unscrew your thingamajig.
Or he would find himself face-to-face with a naked woman who without hesitation would throw her wet towel at him.
Nobody was swimming in the women’s pool, used more and more nowadays by children and uninitiated occasional bathers. The only voices to be heard came from the cloakroom, somewhere in the corridor connecting the two wings of the bath. Except for the three men, there were hardly any guests in this transitional hour. In the men’s shower room, the water ran behind the white canvas curtains, steam rolled outward, but no doddering old men shouted under the hot water. Nobody in the long row of cabins called for an attendant, nor did the attendants chat with anyone. As with everything else, such activities had their order, time, and rhythm.
Early in the morning came the most important people, and then there was a lull for a while. Well after ten o’clock began a stream of young men about town, ladies, pensioners, various artists and writers, children, mothers, ladies of easy virtue who for no amount of money would ever dip their heads in the water and only floated on the surface with their bathing caps, usually pink or lemon yellow, decorated with rubber flowers or rubber stars. Late in the afternoon, when these people had gone, a new wave came and stayed until closing time — students, lawyers, physicians, and older, high-ranking government officials.
The cabin attendant who also doubled as a lifeguard sat idly in his booth, at long intervals getting up to look out dutifully at the empty pool, over the two men sprawled on the bench. The other, obviously bored attendant went on mopping the ribbed yellow floor in the corridor; the early morning stampede, though not as overwhelming as on other days, had left many footprints. The cross-eyed chief attendant was signaling to the improbably obese, utterly unattractive ticket taker, who, with her multitudinous costume jewelry and towering hairdo, was enthroned and sparkling at the drafty elevated place near the entrance, a tribal queen.