Tranquility (2 page)

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I decided that, having accepted the invitation, I would endure everything that might happen at the reading. If there are questions, I will answer them. After all, people invite you to a village library so they can ask questions: Why do you write, what are you working on now, and are you satisfied with your accomplishments so far or did you expect more? I even jotted down a few ready-made answers so I wouldn't have to rack my brain on the spot, because I'm pretty slow and my improvised responses are generally screwed up. Once, I almost dropped dead of shame when I agreed to take part in a live TV talk show whose hostess bombarded three writers with her questions. When she got to me and asked why I wrote, all I could think of was my mother who at that moment must have been sitting in front of the TV set, sipping her mint tea and who, when I got home, would ask me, where have you been son? And I said that writing was the suicide of cowards, but the instant the words were out I felt I shouldn't have said that; and sure enough, the hostess pounced on it immediately, saying she could easily come up with a slew of writers for whom suicide still meant something like a rope or a moving train. From then on, she conversed only with the two other writers, who undoubtedly gave her more considered answers, while I continued to sit in the glare of spotlights for a whole half hour, as if on a dunce's bench, all because of a bungled sentence. And when I got home, my mother did ask me, where have you been son, you leave me here for half the day and the TV doesn't work; but I knew there was nothing wrong with the TV, that after the program I appeared in she simply changed channels so she could pretend she hadn't seen the show.

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I got used to arming myself with prepared, ready-made answers, and after a while I asked journalists to submit written questions in advance; it would take me two or three nights' work to come up with acceptable responses to those few whys the readers of literary journals or ladies' magazines seemed to be curious about. Not that these answers were exhaustive; in fact, they were farther from the truth than a muddled I don't know myself or I'd like to know that myself, but at least they were comprehensible and witty, and I didn't have to be ashamed of them. Anyway, I planned to measure up to the expectations that, by the way, are quite reasonable. If there is stuffed cabbage to be eaten and brandy to be guzzled after the reading, I will guzzle some brandy and won't feign indisposition, as I did six months ago when I wanted to skip dinner with the town's mayor and his cronies. My simulated illness turned so real I couldn't snap out of it even in the pub of the train station.

The night watchman there took me to his house where I spent the night. Every time he left to move the switch bar, his wife changed the cold compress on my forehead.

“This is the midnight express,” she said, and laid the kerchief dipped in well water on my face.

“This is the 1:20 passenger train,” she said, and dipped the rag in the bucket again. While the 3:15 freight train chugged by, I yelled that your tits are salty, you slut, and the woman broke down and begged her husband to get on his bike and fetch the doctor, but the man said there was no need for a doctor, because my behavior concerned nobody but me and the person at whom I was yelling.

When I awoke to the rumbling of the 10:45, I was as good as new. Leaning against the geranium-laden windowsill, the night watchman was
dozing in his chair; his cap, slid down the back of his head, protected his neck from the sun. The woman put scrambled eggs with onions and a mug of tea in front of me, sat at the far end of the table and silently watched me eat while she podded some peas or beans. For minutes, there was only the soft snoring of the night watchman, the patter of peas or beans in the washbowl, and the utensils clinking against my plate, as if these three sounds had filled the universe since the beginning of time. And the fork always clinked against the earthenware bowl when another pod had popped in the woman's hand. That's how the three of us played our music, filling the universe, until the switch bell began to ring, or until I finished my omelet or the washbowl filled with beans, but I don't really remember, and it makes no difference.

“You got any cigarettes?” asked the woman.

“I'll buy some in the dining car,” I said.

“There is no dining car,” she said and took three Symphonys from her husband's pocket.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Put this away too,” she said and poured some instant coffee into a small flask.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, and the 12: 10 passenger train was already carrying me back toward Budapest, though for a moment I imagined that it never would, that somewhere, along one of its junctions, and just for me, the Hungarian National Railroad must have another service apartment like this with a small garden around it.

When I got home, Mother refused to say hello because I was half a day late. She kept sitting in front of the murky TV screen, noisily stirring her
mint tea. Then she took her Valerian drops, arranged her silk robe before the mirror she had stolen from her former dressing room in the theater, and then clattered the two security chains in the foyer before finally coming to a halt before my door. For several minutes I listened to her panting, smelled the almond fragrance of her perspiration, and knew she was preparing to deliver what she had on her mind. I also stopped what I was doing, put my pen down to prepare my own text in the anticipated dialogue – that was our customary routine – and then she finally rapped on the door.

Where have you been son? she asked, though she knew well where I had been.

I had a reading, in the country, Mother.

I forbid you to read aloud all this trash.

Why trash, Mother?

You know why. Don't write any more obituaries about me.

These are short stories, Mother.

Disgusting, the things you write. Trash. Atrocious trash. It's all the product of your degenerate imagination.

Could be, Mother. Maybe you're right, but it's time for you to go to bed, it's after three, I said. And from her own viewpoint she was right, because most of my own acquaintances also thought she had been dead for years. The memorial erected for her had been overgrown by creepers of favorable reviews; pale, one-night-stand lovers were groping after her, while I, by way of replying, would get dressed and ask where I could find the nearest bus stop because it would have made no sense to relate, between two acts of coitus, that my mother was very well, thank you, only she hadn't set foot out of the apartment for years – not even to go out on the gallery overlooking the courtyard.

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One-way only, I said to the cashier at the Keleti station because she wanted to sell me a return ticket; I have never bought a return ticket. On top of it all, I misread the schedule and discovered that I'd have to change trains somewhere in the middle of the Alföld and for a moment I considered calling or sending a telegram to say that because of an unexpected illness I had to cancel the reading; for me, a forty-minute layover in the Great Hungarian Plain would be tantamount to waiting for forty days. I would prefer the most barren desert to this breadbasket of Europe. In fact, I loathe the undulating wheat fields, though I have no special reason for it; that's just the way it is. Some people hate the mountains, some the sea; I hate the plains, that's all. As I was saying, I discovered I had to change trains and, if I could, I would have turned back, but then I thought of the shameful yelling of the previous night. I told the cashier I wanted the ticket after all, and consoled myself that I could probably use those forty minutes to look over my text for the reading. Then I remembered that Judit, at the time, left for Belgrade from the very same track, and that happened fifteen years ago, almost to the day. That for fifteen years I've been getting the vitamins, the Valerian drops, lipsticks, nail polish and hair dyes for my mother and for fifteen years she's been sitting in the flickering gray light of the TV or standing in front of the blind spots of her mirror. Considered in this way, she's been dead for years. An ordinary corpse, its stench concealed by the smell of mint tea and its skin rubbed human-colored with vanishing cream; a cadaver that plays solitaire with long-expired death notices; a dead body that has collected fifteen years' worth of
Radio TV News, Apothecary Courier
and
Life And Science
. She collected those crappy papers in the maid's room, along with the we could still use this for something phials and
the pity to throw it out candy boxes. That's how she lived: collecting junk and corresponding with my older sister, without realizing that she was in fact corresponding with me or that even experts couldn't have distinguished my left-handed writing from my sister's right-handed sharp and merciless letters or that my acquaintances mailed those letters from Antwerp, Bombay, or New York, because I lied to them that I collected envelopes with stamps canceled abroad.

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Judit's last postcard arrived fifteen years ago: Esteemed Mother, if you wish to see me, please don't let them close your eyes, she wrote from Caracas. Since then, only the checks kept coming from a bank in Zurich, on the seventh day of each month, with the punctuality of a Swiss clock and the discretion of Swiss bank secrets, because even the most contemptible mothers deserve five hundred francs a month. Since Caracas, I have been writing Judit's letters, with my left hand, taking care to avoid both forgiveness and calling to account, I want them to be only signs of life from a daughter buried alive to a living mother who was as good as dead. Esteemed Mother, this month I'll have three appearances in Stockholm, I will write again around Christmas, greetings to my kid brother and of course to you too, wrote my left hand – because the next day somebody I knew was leaving for Stockholm – while my right hand squashed to smithereens the cigarette butt in the ashtray.

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A few weeks after my sister's disgraceful burial, it became evident not only that my mother's migraines kept her in the apartment, but also that she would probably never leave it again. That she would spend the rest of her life inside this eighty-two-square-meter crypt with a northerly exposure,
furnished with stolen bits from stage sets; the armchair had once belonged to Lady Macbeth, the bed to Laura Lenbach, and the chest of drawers to Anna Karenina. Even the toilet seat came from a flopped play, and the golden pompom, now at the end of the flush-chain, from the rope of the iron curtain. I thought a few letters from my sister might help; the one thing I did not count on was that Mother might answer them. That she would begin to correspond with her daughter whom she had declared dead and buried so disgracefully. This would never have occurred to me, it wasn't logical, and in those days I counted on logic as I would on a seeing-eye dog, or rather on a well-maintained wheelchair that would never let me down. I would have sworn that logic drove our deeds, I even made a drawing of the cause-and-effect chain of our lives until that time, illustrating what action would follow a particular sentence, what preceded a certain gesture; I did this because I obsessively believed in such things. I kept drawing my figures and writing my notes, taking into account everything from my sister's emigration to her last postcard from Caracas; from the night nineteen-year-old Judit, taking only her violin with her, left her hotel in Belgrade and then two days later the whole continent, to the day Mother declared her daughter dead and arranged for the funeral in the far corner of the Kerepesi cemetery, among the children's graves overgrown with creepers.

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Then suddenly I found I could not write that I'd have an appearence in the Cologne Cathedral, and not because I didn't have an appearance in the Cologne Cathedral but because after my third or fourth letter Mother began to reply to Judit.

Please mail this letter for me, Son, she said.

Sure, Mother, I'm going that way anyway, I said, and the blood froze in
my veins, and from then on, her unopened replies kept collecting in my desk drawer, because there was no reason for me to mail the envelopes addressed to nonexistent hotels and never-existed concert halls. I also knew I mustn't read these letters, lest I find in them things I could not pass over without some response, and then Mother would learn that for months she had been corresponding with me, instead of the daughter she had buried alive.

Once, on the way to the food store, I threw the letters addressed to Paris, Venice, and Cairo into the garbage can and was already turning the corner when I heard the garbage truck from behind the Museum Garden, and I ran back to rescue the letters from the rubbish.

“Wait!” I screamed at the man in the phosphorescent vest because he was about to hook the plastic garbage can on the hydraulic arm of the truck. He wasn't too surprised; it probably happened often that someone tried to wrest from the maw of the crusher what only a few minutes earlier he or she had consigned to the rubbish.

“You got 'em all?” the man asked when I retrieved the envelopes covered with coffee grounds.

“Yes, I've got them all,” I said, realizing not only that I was unable to read my mother's answers, but that I couldn't even throw them away. I knew I had to stop the whole thing, it just didn't make any sense; what does it matter that Judit writes almost every month if Mother doesn't even open the window shutters.