Tranquility (14 page)

I do, Mother, I said.

You don't understand a thing! I taught her how to live! A woman must know how to live! I did the right thing!

It doesn't make any difference anymore, Mother, I said.

At first, it seemed she wouldn't leave the apartment because of her migraine headaches, and then she stayed in for fifteen years. Two weeks ago today was the first time she saw the sky again, because I had her taken out to the courtyard in a coffin with its lid off.

“Aren't you going to close her eyes?” asked one of the men carrying her.

“No,” I said.

“That's the custom.”

“I know,” I said.

“She had beautiful eyes.”

“She still does,” I said, and the neighbors kept standing on the open galleries and wondering where my mother had turned up from; they had already forgotten her.

In the first few months they kept asking about her, how the beloved actress was doing, we haven't seen her for a long time, it isn't some illness, is it; and I reassured them there was no illness. After that, they only pumped Karcsi, who delivered the gas and electric bills, and he put their minds at ease, what are you talking about, what stroke, she's just slammed her bedroom door in my face again, and she's still as beautiful as ever, like last Monday in that old movie of hers. She's retired, that's all. Great actresses usually retire, and then figure out something to surprise their audiences again; they become active in animal protection or something like that.

.   .   .

A few weeks after Judit's funeral, I had a dream. I was atop a mountain; dawn was breaking. That is, while a layer of woolly fog covered the valley down below, up at the top, where the Gypsies lived, the white houses were already blindingly bright. Hurrying along closed doors and windows
darkened with black silk curtains, I was frightened because I knew from one of the cleaning women in the theater that Gypsies tie up all non-Gypsy children in their barns and make them drink horse blood. When horse blood makes them sprout wings, these children take the dead either to heaven or to hell, depending on where they belong – because the Gypsy voivode wouldn't leave even this decision to God.

As I've said, the sky was sparkling bright, but the wind made the pines behind the houses bow low. True, you couldn't hear the fluttering branches or the creaking trunks; it was as if, except for my throbbing heart, nothing could make a sound. I was about to leave behind the pre-awakening cemetery, I could already see the path leading down the mountainside, but in the courtyard of the last house there stood a Gypsy girl. Gold coins woven into her braids that reached her waist, flowery kerchief around her hip, her lips red like autumn cranberries. I would have liked to run away, but her gaze paralyzed me. Lead was crawling in my veins and instead of saliva, tar dripped down my throat. She was holding a whip in her hand and next to her a man-size owl was sleeping on a pine stump. In an incomprehensible language, the girl said something to me; it was a single word. Then she cracked the whip once, the owl began to stir and then with heavy strokes it flew into the house through the window covered with black silk.

The next morning, we received Judit's reply to her own death notice. Esteemed Mother, if you wish to see me, tell them not to close your eyes when the time comes, she wrote, and from the postcard mailed in Caracas a Gypsy girl holding a whip was staring back at me; gold coins were woven into her hair, a flowery kerchief around her hip, and embers of hatred in her countenance. I kept standing in the stairwell, by the mailboxes, unable to move for long minutes; at last, I shoved the letter into my pocket. I knew
that this postcard should never, never get into my mother's hands. That night, I kept looking in the toolbox until I found an old key that would lock my desk drawer. I put the postcard in the drawer and tried to find a place to hide the key, but I found nothing secure enough, not even behind the parquet molding along the wall, so I got a piece of string and hung the key around my neck. It hung there for years like a bizarre, slightly rusty yet effective amulet, reminiscent of some freak constellation.

.   .   .

I sent three or four letters to Judit, but they all came back; wrinkled, in plastic bags, with soggy stamps, as if the mailman had dropped them in the ocean. I didn't even bother to send the rest, I only described to her everything, because I couldn't have told anyone in words the way we lived. One cannot tell another person that one's mother is crazy. That she stares at the TV screen even after the program is over. That she makes me install more and more safety chains on the front door. That she gets up from the table in the middle of lunch as if to get a napkin, but instead smashes the telephone to pieces with the tenderizer and then returns to the table to finish her tomato soup.

In short, I reported everything to Judit, though not in the form of a regular letter, that wouldn't have made any sense anyway, but as if I were writing to people who lie in wait for us and one day will surely break down our door. Once, I forgot to lock up one of these stories in the drawer. When I came home in the evening, my mother looked at me the way she had when she caught me reading one of Judit's hidden letters.

What is this garbage, Son, she asked, and I kept quiet, because I couldn't think of an acceptable answer.

We just kept standing in the foyer, she with the crumpled paper in her
hand, I with my anger and shame, until at last, I said it was a short story, Mother, because I felt that was the only thing she couldn't interfere with. Because if I have to, I could add another twenty security chains to the door, and if necessary I'd lie to the neighbors that thank you, we are just fine, but nobody in this fucking world will tell me what I scribble on my own A-4 sheets of paper.

Even your prefixes are disgusting, she said.

Maybe so, Mother. If you don't like them, don't read them, I said, and from that day on I left all my stories out on the desk, and until Eszter showed up nobody had ever read them except my mother.

.   .   .

Strictly speaking, it was to a cop that I first confessed I was a writer. And it wasn't even a special event, not March 15th or October 23rd,
*
only a simple, early fall routine identity check. “Good evening, may I see your ID card, please.” He took my wine-red little document and followed closely as I recited the date of my birth, my mother's name, and permanent address. Then he looked for my employer; but it turned out I didn't have one. “In other words, a p.m. guilty of c. i.,” he said, and put the carbon paper between the pages of his notebook, ready to put me on file as a public menace guilty of criminal idleness. And I couldn't think of anything acceptable to say, the way I couldn't when my mother asked me in the foyer, what is this garbage son? And that's when I told the police officer that I was a writer, and he asked me to prove it, because anybody could claim to be a writer. And he was beginning to be fed up with this one being a writer, that one a painter, the third one an acrobat, and none of them able to show a
single corroborating document. “You people always look for ways to clash with the law and then complain that the system is no good, this is not all right and that is not all right. But that won't do, my honored sir, that won't do at all, because what do you think will happen if I open a criminal file on you, right here, right now; what do you think will happen then? I'll tell you what happens then: As of the first of next month, you, honored sir, as an unskilled laborer, will be busy building the housing settlement of Gazdagrét. What I'm saying now is that this time I will look the other way, but if next time we meet and you still haven't done your duty as a citizen and there is still no stamped entry here saying that you are an intellectual freelancer, I will also withdraw my goodwill.”

.   .   .

Esteemed Mother, today I arrived in Rome, I wrote and quickly addressed the envelope so I could be at the Hotel Gellért by three-thirty, because Judit hadn't sent a letter for four months and I finally managed to find somebody I could ask to mail a letter from outside the area of COMECON. Anetta was a woman of humanist orientation who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Trade and who was crazy about profound relationships. She was convinced that if a man preferred to talk about
King Lear
rather than about where he lived, that was a sign of a profound relationship. “What a pity you can't come with me to Rome; you probably have lots of interesting stories to tell. And to be in the Coliseum at night, among the ghosts of the early Christians and gladiators, that could be very decadent,” she said, and I kept lolling on the sheet with the Hundertwasser patterns, staring at the van Gogh prints brought from Holland, and waiting for the opportune moment to get out of the bed in a way that would not be humiliating. After all, it wasn't her fault that after coitus in the Coliseum my breast would be filled with the same emptiness I feel here now, in Béla Bartók Road 4,
lying on the Hundertwasser-patterned sheet. It's not her fault I steer the conversation toward
King Lear
and away from where I live and what I had done yesterday afternoon because I already had a profound relationship:

Where have you been son?

Out for a walk, Mother.

Next time, wash up at least before you come home. You stink of perfume.

I'm sorry, Mother.

I guess it's another cheap little slut. Anybody using that kind of perfume must be a slut.

That doesn't make any sense, Mother.

Don't you tell me what does or doesn't make any sense; just wash the vagina smell off yourself before you come home, do you understand that?

Yes, Mother. And then I said to this Anetta that yes, doing it in the Coliseum would be really decadent, and I went to take a shower and also to sneak a smoke in the bathroom, because it wasn't allowed in the bedroom. Actually, this is not exactly true, if I really wanted to and if I were careful with the Hundertwasser sheet, I could have smoked in the bedroom, too, but I felt that someone who goes to take a shower because he already has a profound relationship, that person has no right to special privileges. Therefore, I even opened the small window above the tub to let out the smoke and while washing up I tried to come up with a believable explanation why I wanted to have a letter sent to Rebeka Weér from Rome to Budapest if in this rotten life I have never been to Rome. I had to come up with something because Judit hadn't written in four months, and when I finished showering, Anetta was eagerly telling me that she was going to mail the letter the very first day in Rome, because playing such a joke on
one's aunt was really very exciting. In short, the delegation leaves tomorrow evening, but she would enjoy another sauna in the Gellért; what would happen if we enjoyed that sauna together? Luckily, she remembered that the sauna in the Gellért had separate sections for men and women, and then we arranged to meet in front of the Gellért at three thirty the next day. In the morning, I took out my Pelikan pen and began, Esteemed Mother, today I arrived in Rome, and then I sealed the envelope and started out on foot across Szabadság Bridge.

.   .   .

A young woman in a gray raincoat was standing by the railing, her hair loose, staring at the drifting ice floes. The sun shone brilliantly among the low clouds, the wind was buffeting the seagulls, and the woman stood there in her fluttering coat like a poplar tree.

Although I was late already, I stopped for a second. At first, I watched not her face but her hand grasping the iron railing. Then I somehow forgot about Judit's letter and my mother and about Anetta with her humanist orientation whom I had seen three times in my life and who must have come out of the sauna by now and is no doubt waiting for me only a few hundred meters away in front of the Hotel Gellért. I forgot about the stage furniture Mother wanted us to believe to be part of the Weér inheritance, about the security chains on the front door, the humiliating grave in the Kerepesi that the creepers had refused to overgrow all these years, as if the ground had been sown with salt. I was looking at the gray-coated young woman and completely forgot about Miss Ivett Bíró who, after a
Seagull
premiere, in the dark cloakroom of a restaurant – and no doubt at my mother's instigation – helped me get over the crisis of my fourteenth year by pretending to have an orgasm as convincingly as if she hadn't seen a cock in a decade. And I forgot about Miss Mezei, who would have liked very much if
I had helped her get over the crisis of her forty-eighth year, but that turned into a fiasco. I forgot about the key hanging around my neck and about the Gypsy girl with the short whip, the piles of newspapers in the Pearl of the Balkans, and about the twenty-five little cages with the twenty-five broken-winged birds in them. I forgot about Comrade Fenyő who spat in my mother's face and about Cleopatra who ran through downtown Budapest in her bra decorated with glass rubies. I kept looking at this woman in the gray raincoat who stood in the March wind like a poplar, while thirty meters below her the river carried along its blinding drift ice, and I didn't know what I would say to her, because I had never approached anyone on the street before. I had always waited for others to speak to me first. Like the better-educated whores, I would signal to someone interested to go ahead, but was also willing to wait for months for something to happen. I didn't know what I was going to say now. In fact, I felt neither empathy nor curiosity. I didn't want to know why she was standing there or why she did not hurl herself into the river, I only feasted my eyes on her.