Breathless (11 page)

When we arrived at his isolated retreat in daylight, I hadn't noticed any other inhabited houses nearby, only a few derelict buildings. We'd taken a bus and then walked a long way through the countryside, peaceful and deserted, to reach his remote summer residence.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after a long silence. I scarcely knew where I was anymore, or if I would have any chance of finding my way back to town by myself. He sounded wary, perhaps supposing that I disliked this neglected area that made the prosperity of Budapest seem very far away. But in my eyes this scene was grudgingly beautiful, a childhood landscape I hadn't encountered for a long time.

He walked down the middle of the gravel track. No car passed, no person. We were alone with each other and a hawk soaring over the field, the mangled hand between us a reminder of everything I didn't yet know about him.

He regretted his decision. It was obvious in the way he didn't look at me. He could have tried to hide it, but he didn't. From the moment we got off the bus he had been silent, maybe thinking how foolishly impulsive it was for the two of us to come out here to his summer cottage together, as if we had both forgotten where we were supposed to be going that day. We knew nothing about each other and could only communicate after a fashion. Not that language was a problem—he had worked on construction sites in Berlin and Nuremberg, so his German was better than mine and English filled in the gaps for us both. But we had no idea at all what we should talk to each other about.

He hadn't asked a single question about who I was, wanted to know nothing about me other than my name. And what did I really want to know about him, besides how his deformed hand would feel on my skin?

—

His cheekbone reminded me of Lukas's: a face that could instantly change from hard to tender. I loved the way the light affected Lukas's face, but he wouldn't have liked to hear me say that. Compliments were always an exaggeration, and exaggeration made him embarrassed.

“You're pretty,” he said.

I remember it, because he said it only once.

—

After leaving the bus a long way out of town, I hadn't heard so much as a dog barking, not even from afar, no sign of life anywhere. As if this area had been evacuated and left to the birds of prey. Just as I was growing accustomed to the impenetrable silence between us, it was shattered by his question. What was I thinking about? Women with faces translucent with age, how my throat was sticky with dust from the road, that somewhere around here Lukas had been born, that there was a strong smell of wild rosemary along these roads, his injured hand, smooth with a new layer of skin, right next to my hand as we walked. But mostly I was thinking about snakes—that we were walking through typical snake terrain, that I've never liked snakes, neither before nor after I was bitten as a child, that they are the only thing I cannot disguise my fear of.

My limited German was not adequate to explain all of that, so instead I asked him what he was thinking.

“That I've forgotten your name,” he said, without looking at me. I followed his gaze and caught sight of the hawk again. It was gliding nearer. Characteristic buzzard movements, slowly circling high up, the very behavior that usually indicates the presence of snakes. The hawk might mean that the place was teeming with suitable food, or that the situation was under control, that somebody was doing his best to hold the reptile population in check. But my fear needed no proof, just one buzzard circling over fields in this way, the summerlike April warmth bringing them out of the holes where they've kept themselves alive all winter with the heat of one another. I often saw them down by the lake when I was a child, black adders, where did they go? When I was a teenager they had disappeared. Or had I lost my eye for snakes?

Lukas maintained that they gave birth to their young. I could visualize it: a nightmare of unrestrained adders reproducing fully formed new adders. It was some hybrid thing, according to Lukas, producing eggs that they hatched inside their own bodies. Most of all I was frightened of snakes underwater. Both adders and grass snakes were excellent swimmers and often went out into the lake to catch small fish. You had to be faster than your own shadow to avert that threat. You needed the right amount of fear to be as fast as that. I was paralyzed.

—

“Are we there yet?” I let my eye sweep along the gravel track to discern any suspicious twisting and slithering movements, aware of a sudden cold wind blowing in toward town.

“There,” Miklós said. I gave a start, but it wasn't a snake. It was the house. A peeling turquoise summer cottage with shutters closed, partly hidden by shrubs and soapwort growing wild all over the yard. “Come on,” he said and vaulted over the rusty gate. I hurried after him, relieved to be close to safety.

At the bottom of the steps he stopped. In the sharp midday light a snake was lying on the top step, warmed by the sun. A type I did not recognize, but evidently he did, because his bearing changed in an instant. He was moving so slowly that he appeared to be standing still. The snake lay coiled up, amassing heat, waiting. He took hold of a fallen branch—had clearly done this before. With the skill of an expert he caught the creature and flung it at lightning speed in a high arc into the thorny bushes by the gable, then unlocked the door and showed me in.

There had been nothing sensational about his face when I first caught sight of him on the tram. Discreet and ordinary. I've always had a weakness for ordinary faces. It wasn't his hand that caused me to notice him, but his smile, unnerving like everything else that breaks the pattern when you are confined with strangers. First the smile, then the hand. I recoiled, unable to conceal my instinct for detecting trouble. It was obvious that he could see how my pupils dilated and how involuntary distaste made me press my back into the plastic seat and in my embarrassment bite off too large a piece of bread. No doubt he was used to all possible insensitive reactions, but can one ever get used to arousing unprovoked repugnance in others? My eye was drawn back to his hand, the fleshy pink tarantula that he pushed through his hair in an attempt to straighten his windblown locks. With a hand like that perhaps you are extra scrupulous about other details.

When I was a child I saw many men who had lost one or more fingers when they got in the way of an ax, the blade of a saw, a roller, chain, or bad-tempered sow, not to mention gangrene and frostbite. But this hand is not slightly maimed—it is mutilated beyond recognition. And yet . . . where there is aversion there is also desire. His hand appealed to something within me that hadn't been stirred before.

—

When I creep back into the house he is asleep. Or perhaps pretends to be sleeping and wakes up, turns over, and calls me to him. Once distaste has merged with desire and mingled together, it is difficult to separate them. I ought to go, leave this place, I'm thinking as I walk toward his bed, and as I crawl between the sheets with him, willing and yet unwilling, and even more as he lays his hand between my shoulder blades. I don't want him to feel the bulge there, the raised back of the reptile that is fear.

Suspicious, he asks me where I have been . . . gone so long. Must have gotten lost, I answer. Impossible to get lost in a yard this size, fenced in as well. Bad sense of direction, I say vaguely, hear how idiotic it sounds and add something about vision being impaired in the dark. Then he feels my muddy feet under the cover.

“There's no mud in my garden. You were out in the fields running away, weren't you?” I shake my head, but he can feel the holes in his shirt from the blackthorn bushes and asks if I was trying to run off. I say I wasn't. “You're lying.” I don't deny it. The scratches hurt when he pulls me toward him. On the wall above his head a quotation has been pinned up:
I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception
. Groucho Marx, I think as he enters me.

Dawn is beginning to break, and a cold mildew-blue light is spreading over the walls of the cottage. He holds my face between his hands, the whole one and the impaired one, bites my neck. His hands have a smell that makes me recoil before I realize what it is, that it is myself I smell the scent of. The smell of me on his hands, from before when we made love.

We're always someone else when we make love. Whenever I meet somebody like him, I have the urge to confront the other in him, andros, the man. The one he becomes when he makes love.

I
liked sleeping with Lukas, our secret sleep. In the middle of the day in the pearl fisher's house we let the hours slip past, float away until darkness fell. We drifted, surrendering, along the verge of wakefulness, half-sleep, sleep, dreams, unconsciousness. He lay on my arm or I lay on his, and I tried to imagine that he'd had that look long before he met me. That actually it had nothing to do with me, that it wasn't my fault he had such a look in his eyes—as though something were missing every time he saw me.

Bodies. Physical contact. In the end it all revolves around this, when you have spent so much time in each other's company that there is nothing left to say. Lukas's nakedness didn't excite me, nor did it bother me. I was as familiar with it as I was with my own. Just a body, no surprises from one day to the next. Some variations according to the season: a little bit more fat beneath the skin in winter and a little thinner and more languid in summer. And then that other change, not cyclical or connected to the time of year but irreversible. From child to teenager through a long-drawn-out adolescence, and for Lukas the change to an adult body. So slowly that you didn't see it until it had already happened.

As long as I remained in the body of a child we could continue to be friends, but when I let it go? It had to happen one day. It was as if Lukas were waiting for that. He looked at my slender hips.

“Haven't you thought about starting to grow yet?” What? Did I need to hurry? I took his hands away.

“You must be the smallest in the class.” I wasn't. There were even some boys who were smaller than I was. Compared with them, Lukas was a skinny giant with hands like horse chestnut leaves and a pack of heaving muscles under his skin. He lifted me up in the water and flung me out of my depth so that I would learn to swim.

—

Sun, sleep, play. Summer existed just for us, and we existed just for summer. Grasshoppers dipped in wild honey, leftover food smuggled out of the house. Drink out of the rainwater tank, shower in a downpour of rain. Sleep. More than anything else, we slept our secret sleep. Lukas could never sleep enough. I had to learn to like it also, or at least to be patient with him. Lie beside him and study the rhythm of his slow breathing, the sleeping presence of his warm, outstretched body. As time passed I thought he became less and less like a hunted dog. We thought we were safe when we went around, unsuspecting and spontaneous, near to the line without overstepping it. We just pushed it ahead of us, neither neither nor nor.

“What's happening? Where do you get to when you suddenly disappear? What on earth are you doing?” Mama said, in the big sunglasses that made her look like a deadly hornet, especially in that striped top, so baggy at the neck that you could see down between her breasts.

“All sorts. Playing.”

“Just think, the
Communist Manifesto
and
Alice in Wonderland
were written at about the same time,” said Papa's father, who was sitting in front of Mama's bookcase, carefully passing his finger over the spines.

“All sorts. Playing,” she mimicked. “You're not meeting that Lukas, are you?” Her pupils contracted. I avoided her eye.

“That Lukas, is his father's surname really Puskás?” Grandfather's voice sounded almost respectful when he pronounced the name. “What?” Mama asked unkindly. Puskás . . . one of the world's finest soccer players of all time, in the fifties when the Hungarians were the best, the Magnificent Magyars . . . had she never heard about them? Mama shook her head. She didn't like anyone touching her books, and she definitely didn't like talking about Lukas. Her pupils were as tiny and piercing as pinpricks—like Lukas's when he was messing around with whippets—though if anything Mama was about to go up a gear rather than down.

“And what does that have to with anything at all?” she asked maliciously.

“I just thought they might be related.”

“As if that would help,” Mama said.

—

Mama was the only one in the house to have a bookcase, even though the books filled just one shelf. Grandfather had some books in a wooden box under his bed, as if a proper shelf were something alien to him. In the pearl fisher's house Lukas and I found twenty identical moldy black leather volumes, arranged alphabetically. A pattern. The way Lukas's brain worked, every pattern bore a deeper meaning. It
had
to form a whole, the threads of an invisible spiderweb that held the chaos of existence together. He wanted to try to piece together the world around us, to make up a picture that at least made some sort of sense. A picture of what? I asked, but he didn't know yet. My job was to decipher my way through the text, while Lukas explained to me what I'd just read. He was bad at reading, but he knew a lot, mostly what he'd picked up from the television.

Coral, bats, fire, spiders—by the end of the summer he was talking more and more about the spider. At the center of its web it was biding its time. Fate. The great cosmic mother in her most terrifying form. I don't know if it was his own mother he was thinking of. No, hardly, he didn't have one.

—

Large trees of coral, salt-white, like porcelain, meticulously adorned by nature, stood in the windows of the pearl fisher's house, probably smuggled back from his many journeys to Japan. The skeleton of the coral, I read, was attached on the outside, like a protective coating. That is what Lukas should have had. When I stood waiting for him, I heard them arguing, him and his father, each one in his own language. I never understood what it was about, only that it had become worse as Lukas grew older. Before, he never answered back, but now he made cautious attempts not to flee, to stay and take what was coming. Or not take it.

The bruises disappeared and were replaced with new ones. However much love my own family tried to smother me in, what help was it when Lukas's existence was endless prowling around, watching and waiting? Sometimes he stayed the night in our hiding place, waiting for the lights to go out at home. I was setting myself free from the ones I had always belonged to and swimming out to him. What went on between us never ended—it was just sucked down into a new hole, and then another, and on it went.

No matter how long the pearl fisher's house had been left abandoned, we were in point of fact intruders. But no one could call us vandals. Lukas was very particular that we should keep it neat and tidy. He seemed to think that the pearl fisher
would
come back, though he must have been buried long ago. The dust over everything was undeniably fifty years thick. Simple math.

One blustery evening in winter Lukas stopped in the middle of the lifeless forest, listening out over the lake. I heard it as well. The pulse. There is a pulse in everything that lives. As we stood still and just listened, we no longer felt the cold, having become part of it. The waves pounded under the ice, rhythmically, like blood between the atrium and the ventricle.

Later that evening I felt it in him too, how he pulsed. We had crept close together in bed to try to keep warm, barely keep warm, because it was hellishly cold. Lukas was fighting against sleep, unusual for him. It was as if he didn't want to disappear into it. Sleep was sad. It meant that you had to part.

“People say ‘sleep together,' but that's wrong. You're alone when you sleep,” he said and exhaled the smoke slowly through his lips like Jean-Paul Belmondo. I had learned how to sleep so lightly that I was still aware of his presence.

Lukas's winter belly was the same color as the soft foam on the water at the power station, his skin as smooth as catkins, flushed cheeks, hands, lips. I felt his heart . . . how it beat resentfully, as if something trapped inside was trying to force its way out. The whole time it crashed against the bars of his rib cage. It will have to give up in the end, sometime.

When I was small I had once made a hole in the ice with a shovel, so that the migrant birds could come out. Mama's mother had told me that they spent the winter at the bottom of the lake, waiting for spring, and I was quite sure that they wanted to come out. But it was just a fairy tale, I knew that. Lukas listened and then shook his head.

“No, Lo,” he said, “there's no such thing as fairy tales.”

I could float. That was my first achievement. Nothing could drag me down, my childhood was happy, and if it wasn't, I didn't realize. I could soon swim almost as well outside my mother's womb as I had inside. She could never really accept that. “We're all born wild,” she said, “especially you, Lo.” I grew quite tame later, but it was a superficial change.

Surrounded as I was by thirteen adults, I had no need to share their attention with anyone. I had a tough time trying to avoid it. Twenty-six eyes looked around every bend, into every blind spot, through every wall, saw dangers before I detected them myself. After my aunt Katja was injured by a metal splinter from the circular saw, there were still twenty-five eyes keeping track of me.

If I was to be anyone's accomplice, I would be his. When Lukas was shoplifting he just pulled his stomach in and slipped whatever he wanted into the waistband of his skater jeans, huge and khaki-colored, with drawstrings around the ankles. They accommodated however much we needed: food if we were hungry, drink if we were thirsty. I stood behind the shop waiting for him to come out and empty his haul into a backpack that we took back to our hideout.

He experimented with everything he could, cigarettes that he emptied of tobacco and mixed with something; he didn't tell me where it came from. On some occasions he tried canisters of laughing gas while he was smoking, to heighten the effect. Sometimes I took him mixed leftovers from cans and bottles, because his own father didn't drink. Once he got hold of ketamine, an anesthetic for horses he had bought at some less than scrupulous farm nearby. He'd heard that it gave you a high. It left him utterly beyond reach: he lay on the floor next to the bed and was gone. Like being sucked down into a black hole, he explained afterward. A well of deliverance that you wanted to return to. I was terrified he would never come back.

Most of it was innocent, but it soon became second nature to associate pleasure with danger. Once when we were talking about the fire along the railway line, he said that he'd started it. I didn't know what to think. Why? Because otherwise we would never have met?

There was so much we had to fit in that there was no time to go to school, or at least not stay there the whole day. We ran. We passed through our childhood running. Lukas tucked elaborate secrets into me.

His words touched on everything: secrets, promises, devilry. Apart from the shadow of his father, adults scarcely figured in our world, nor did the other children at school, or the factories, freight trains, cold, hunger, tiredness, mealtimes, bedtimes, seasons. We were fast and determined, as if we had a sixth sense that the future was against us.

—

Of all the secrets that bound us together, the hardest one to keep was the one about the rats. It was Lukas's job to empty the traps his father set. The fat river rats would gnaw at the roof beams if you didn't keep a check on them and would go down into the kitchen at night. His father, Gábriel, took great care to keep things clean and filled the attic with the worst sort of traps. Then he showed his son how they should be emptied and gave him to understand that from then on it was his job.

When Gábriel wasn't looking, it was I who brought them down from the attic and stuffed them into the zinc tub behind the house until the cages stopped shaking, while Lukas stood, pressed up against the wall in shame, shame that he'd left the worst to me. He looked as though he was the one about to be drowned. He would rather not have been anywhere in the vicinity, but he was forced to keep watch, so that his father didn't see that it was I who saw to the demise of those rats.

The old metal cages were heavy, especially when the rats had been in the water awhile, and the next step was to empty their lifeless contents into the barrel in which Gábriel used to burn leaves. Not into the compost, because that would just attract more rats. Lukas never got used to it, and he could hardly bear the thought that I did it. They had intelligent eyes, he said. He had tried to do it himself, but in the end he just let them go, which made his father furious, as the rats ran through the high grass and shrieked like rubber ducks someone has stepped on. They shrieked when they were drowning as well, a screech like red-hot barbed wire. Despite our attempts to keep the secret, his father found us out. I'd never seen him so enraged, never seen Lukas get such a beating, though he was always getting them for nothing.