A Book of Memories (47 page)

He was yelling something but I couldn't understand what; I heard him yelling words but couldn't make them out.

The sow squealed, slid farther on her rump, gasped for air, her feet stuck out, stiff, and she squealed again, so shrilly, so long, and so loud it sounded like a human scream; she writhed, then stiffened again, but somehow her body preserved
—more precisely, it refined—the rhythm the two of them had found before; and not for a second did she take her eyes off Kálmán, she remained fully alert, and his eyes were also glued to hers, even as he raised his soaked, gooey arm, illuminated by the lamp, and held it before him as if it were some strange object, and just as abruptly as he had started yelling moments before, he now fell silent; if I were to say the sow's eyes were pleading for help, if I said she was begging him to do something and was also guiding him toward that goal, if I said she was grateful to him and urging him on, with her willingness reassuring him that Yes! Yes, we're on the right track, let's keep going! then with my sentimental human notions I'd be defiling that direct raw but by no means brute sensual power that I suppose only an animal's eyes can convey.

The pig responded to his screams with squeals of her own, and he answered her silence with silence.

In spite of being apart now, they stayed together.

The depth of the open vaginal orifice was frothing and bubbling with spasms and thrusts whose rhythmic repetition was like breathing or the beating of a heart.

He reached in again, back to the very spot that had made him recoil before, but this time matter-of-factly, the way we return to familiar places when necessity compels us.

Simultaneously he turned his head away from the sow in my direction, but he closed his eyes.

The animal was quiet now, as if to oblige him by holding her breath.

It seemed he kept his eyes closed because he was doing something inside and did not want to see anything, the better to feel what he was supposed to do.

And then he pulled out his hand, slowly, wearily, got on his knees; his head slumped forward and I couldn't see his face.

It was still quiet, the animal lay motionless, but then, as a delayed response to his manipulation, her side began to undulate, then her whole body was moving in waves from the pressure and the gasping, and at the end of each spasm she let out an alarming squeal that died away in the stifling stench of the narrow pen.

She won't make it, he said, she can't do it, he said quietly, as one who could not be moved even by this undulating suffering because he already saw what lay ahead, he could see all the way to death; and though he did not move away, he stayed put, there was nothing for him to do.

But whatever was happening in the animal's body was far from over.

For in the next instant something red appeared in the heaving folds of that slit, and he, shrieking and wailing like the pig, jumped to grab it; immediately he fell silent, because that something, as if a strange bone had gotten into the sow's flesh, slipped out of his fingers; he grabbed it again, and again it slipped out.

The rag, he screamed, and this was meant for me, yet I felt that a very long time, important and precious time, went by until I grasped that there must be a rag here somewhere.

A sudden paralysis, a grievous failing at this moment, might keep me from finding the rag.

There was no rag.

It was as if suddenly I had no idea what a rag was, had lost the meaning of the word, in my own language! and in the meantime that thing
—Get me a rag!—slipped out of his hand again.

He was howling at me.

And then the lamp's glass cover almost tipped over; I was going to look outside, and the lamp accidentally knocked against the door beam, and in fact the rag was there, I could see it, the dog was beating it with his tail, but I had to catch the glass first.

It didn't break
—what an accomplishment! a victory I haven't experienced since!—and I could make a grab for the rag, too.

Two tiny cloven hooves were sticking out.

He wrapped the rag around them and pulled; he slowly backed away, still squatting, while the pig pushed and squealed.

It's the struggle that is long, the event itself unnoticed.

The little body slipped out so smoothly that Kálmán, still squatting, couldn't retreat fast enough; he plopped down on his butt, and between his spread legs there it was: the palely glistening lifeless body of the newborn, inside the glassy sac resting on the filthy floor.

I think all three of us stopped breathing.

The mother was the first to move, I think; she lifted her head as if wanting to see for herself, to make sure the thing had indeed happened, but she sank back from sheer exhaustion, though just as her head hit the floor some new excitement of elemental force coursed through her body, a happy force, because it made her nimble, adroit, quick, resilient, and inventive
—which one would never have expected from such a large ungainly animal; she managed to shift her weight and turn over slightly, the long umbilical cord allowing for the movement, so that the piglet still between Kálmán's legs hardly stirred; grunting and snorting jubilantly, she leaned closer, sniffed her baby, trembled with joy at recognizing its smell, and then with two sharp snaps bit through the cord; while Kálmán maneuvered his way out of the pen, sliding clumsily on the seat of his pants, the sow got up, sprang up really, and began licking and prancing around the little body, grunting as she impatiently prodded it, poked it, lapped it up almost, until it finally began to breathe.

When about an hour later we shut the pigpen door and the wooden bolt slid quietly home, there were four piglets sucking on their mother's hot, milk-filled, purple-red teats.

The summer night was silent, dark, and full of stars.

The dog followed us.

Kálmán went to the back, dropped his pants, and took a long leak.

I was alone in the middle of the yard, with only the dog standing next to me.

There, in the manure pile, Kálmán also buried the afterbirth.

There was nothing left for us to say, and I felt that we would never need to say anything to each other again.

It was more than enough that I could stand there while he relieved himself, listening to the long, cascading sounds of his rich stream.

Because when the first of the litter was already out and he quickly got out of the stall, and I stepped aside, raising the lamp high, there was a single moment when our eyes locked, and while our movements crossed, our looks were caught up in the sameness of pure bliss, and that moment grew so long, became so intense, that real time seemed to have slipped away, as if everything that had still remained trapped in us from the struggle could break free only in our sudden oneness; it was the insanity of a grin that the lamp was illuminating: our faces were very close, his eyes vanished in the grin, I could see only his mouth and teeth, his sharply protruding jaw, his drenched hair matted on his forehead, and the sudden appearance of his face so close to mine made me realize that this face was a double of my own, because I was also grinning to myself with the same eager, insane grin, and it seemed that the only way we could break out of the frozen time of our grin and truly enter our oneness was if we were to fall on each other.

If for the sake of this oneness we would love each other.

And it still wouldn't have been enough; even with that we couldn't have measured up to the pig's victory.

Instead, we broke into a dialogue.

Into the laughter of words.

I almost broke the glass, I said; the little thing must have been lying in the wrong position, he said; and I asked him why he started yelling like that, what the hell was he yelling about; his father couldn't have done it better, he said; first I thought the pig was only sick, I said, and it was lucky about the umbilical cord, and I didn't know where the rag was; that was one smart pig, he said.

The dog was running about the yard, yelping and running, round and round it kept running in ever widening circles, which was also part of the same kind of conversation.

The porch lamp shed a sober light on us.

In a daze, exhausted, we made our way slowly up the steps.

Water was still steaming in a pot; while waiting for the afterbirth to come out, I had put it on so he could wash the pig's teats in warm water.

He went to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

First I looked at the things in the kitchen: the white enamel stove, the apple-green cabinets, and the pink eiderdown on a narrow cot, then I put the kerosene lamp on the table; because we left the door behind us open, there was a slight draft and the lamp was giving out more smoke than light; then I also sat down.

There we were, just sitting and staring into space.

God's prick, he said quietly after a while.

We weren't looking at each other, but I felt he didn't want me to go yet, and I didn't want to leave.

And his swearing, sounding like someone making quiet amends, was addressed to me.

Kálmán seldom cursed and, unlike the other boys, rarely used foul language; I can recall only two other instances
—when he talked about Maja, saying what he would do to her, and the thing he'd told me in the school bathroom.

That I could eat Prém's prick for lunch.

That last one remained with me like a stinging insult, like a wound that wouldn't heal; I forgot it, but could not forgive it.

By blurting out that seemingly harmless obscenity, he joined forces with Krisztián and Prém, but could he have done otherwise? no matter how much it hurt, I couldn't really blame him, for I sensed in his act the permanent and in many ways exciting uncertainty inherent in all human relationships; for it seemed to be the way of the world, or maybe the spirit of our times, that you could never tell your friends and foes apart, and in the final analysis everybody had to be considered an enemy; it was enough to recall the fear and hatred I felt while passing by the fence of that restricted area with the dogs to make me realize I had no idea where I myself belonged; and there was the pain of knowing that because of my father's position the other boys labeled me a stool pigeon even though I had never betrayed anyone; but Kálmán, by allowing himself to join the other boys with that statement, betrayed the deepest secret of our friendship
—even if the others could not have known what he meant when he'd said I could eat Prém's for lunch, couldn't have known what he was alluding to, but still! as if he had said in front of all of them, which was more than shameless betrayal, that I'd once held his in my hand; he said it as though I had no other wish in the world than to eat it for lunch! as though what had happened between us hadn't been by mutual consent, as though he hadn't himself initiated it.

He got up, kicked the chair out from under him, and took a bottle of brandy and two glasses from the kitchen cabinet.

He denied the act with the same unthinking courage that he'd displayed when his hand had reached toward me that time.

To avoid embarrassing himself in front of the others, he renounced his own most intimate gesture; but now, as if trying to make up for his betrayal by those swear words, he seemed to be thanking me for being here.

Which released such a flood of emotion that the less said about it the better.

And I could not tell any of this to Maja, just as I could not talk about girls while resting my head on my mother's arm.

Without a word, the two of us got drunk on the brandy.

If one could learn the most important things in life, one would still have to learn how to keep quiet about them.

We sat there for a very long time, staring drunkenly at the kitchen table, and for some reason, after his swearing, we didn't look into each other's eyes anymore.

Even though those words cleared up everything, for a lifetime; above all, they spoke of ultimate loyalty, of how no one could ever forget anything.

He started fidgeting with the lamp, trying to put it out, but though he lowered the wick the flame would not go out, it only started smoking even more; and then he took off the glass cover so he could blow out the flame, and while he was blowing it
—he had to make several attempts and he started laughing because he couldn't hit the flame, always blowing next to it—the hot, smoke-darkened glass slipped out of his hand, fell, and broke on the kitchen floor.

He didn't even look down.

It felt good to hear the sound of breaking glass shattering into a thousand pieces.

Later, it seemed to me I was quite alert as I drifted into this pleasant state of feeling good, or as I simply got lost among my own thoughts, though I couldn't have said what I was thinking about or whether I was thinking at all; the feeling of sensations dulled by drunkenness had become this state of thinking without thoughts, and I didn't notice that at one point he got up, put a large wash bucket on the floor, and poured the leftover hot water into it.

The image wasn't blurred, only distant and uninteresting.

And he simply kept pouring the water.

I'd have liked to tell him to stop pouring, enough.

Because I didn't notice that he was now pouring some other water into the bucket.

From a pail.

And I also failed to notice when he threw off his long johns and stood stark naked in the wash bucket; the wet soap slipped out of his hand and scooted under the kitchen cabinet.

He asked me for the soap.

I could hear in his voice that he was also drunk, which should have made me laugh, except I couldn't get up.

The water splashed and sloshed, and by the time I managed to get up he was already scrubbing himself.

His wasn't nearly as large as a horse's, but rather small, solid, and thick; it always stuck out, overlapping his balls, pushing out his pants; he was busy soaping it now.

I was already on my feet, and realized it hurt, really hurt, that I'd never know whose friend I really was.

I don't know how I made it from the table to the wash bucket, the decision must have carried me unnoticed over the time necessary for the trip; I was standing before him, motioning to him to give me the soap.