Tranquility (28 page)

“Yes, sir. No, five hundred is out of the question. One thousand. Please show it to me, yes. All right, we'll clip it under the lid of the garbage bin, like this, and we are all set to go,” and the client is glad because how can one make such a stupid move as a response to the King's Indian Defense opening? Three games with this bloke and we've earned the monthly telephone bill. What is he doing here anyway? But in the eighth move, black's knight takes pawn on g3, and with that the game is practically over. And the erstwhile aspiring grandmaster simply does not comprehend how this could possibly happen, ignorant that all one needs to succeed is a few mugs of water and three lifers for cellmates.

“Looka here, two thousand-forint bills are sticking out of the bin there,”
says the cop and pockets one of them because he's here to collect the rent. Then he picks out a not-too-rotten tangerine, counts all the cripples in the area, thirteen, that makes it altogether thirteen hundred. We don't collect from the Hungarians; after all, there is honor and decency in this world, but these stinking Romanians are hard to deal with. “Dutéákászö, if you won't pay,” he says, because he has learned a few basic sentences in the railway canteen: go home and a hundred forints and things like that. “I said szutéforint or dutéákászö” and with his nightstick he pokes at the long-obsolescent cardboard sign, “I am the victim of the revolution,” because he is nervous, and because he wasn't alert enough and missed the Gypsies raking it in with their tricky now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. By the time he reached the bottom of the steps, the small sponge ball vanished and the banana crates used as a table had been kicked to pieces. The black marketers simply close their travel bags full of socks and brazenly claim that the fifty pairs of sport socks are all for their personal use since they change socks three times a day, and always put on brand new ones.

“That's how we like it, Officer. Clean socks, clean bedding, and lots of alarm clocks, so we won't miss the train. What do you mean we can stay for a few leather gloves? Do you have any idea how much a pair of gloves like this costs? You can't find one like this under three thousand in the Corvin. A Chinese flashlight, take it or leave it, or we go over to Moszkva Square.”

In short, a thousand plus thirteen hundred makes twenty-three hundred, the tangerine is about two hundred, that's twenty-five hundred; the vibrating flashlight about five hundred, altogether three thousand, and the cop hasn't even hit the pickpockets.

.   .   .

Only in the underpass did I remember that I had left Father Lázár's aid-booklet on the train. I didn't particularly miss it, though it was very nice
looking. I'll continue to use Sirály paper as before. And the blank notebook may wind up in more deserving hands than mine, I thought. Maybe the conductor will write his memoirs in it, I thought,
Touched by the Engine's Smoke
, or something like that, I thought. I fear that God looks more favorably on even a train conductor's memoir, swarming with spelling mistakes, than on anything I will ever write. I also fear that something that's not worth a shit in heaven is likely to be worth the same down here, I thought. Even if the reviews are rather encouraging. Mainly, it's respectable fathers who hide such notebooks in their table or desk drawers, I thought. In just such black leather-bound notebooks they jot down that yesterday they were at a PTA meeting again, and today they told the waiter he had given back five hundred forints too much in change. In fact, nothing untoward had happened throughout the whole dinner, really; it was the most correct working dinner imaginable. Only afterward, in the cloakroom; he helped his coworker into the fake fur coat and then something, somehow; in short, the whole thing is incomprehensible; after all, he is the one who for the last ten years becomes regularly infuriated with Saturday night TV serials that always show working dinners ending up in bed – because life is not like that, darling, that's not the way life works. Excuse me, darling, but this is all fiction, make-believe; I don't know what you see in these soap operas.

Now, however, he makes an inventory of everything, meticulously listing everything from the fake fur coat to the properly long-necked champagne bottle, as if these few pages were the gold reserve of life. Yes, he commits everything to paper, come hell or high water, in the hope that of the entire past decade this one Wednesday should always resist decay – please don't be angry darling, but
this
is the way life works. If the waiter gives me five hundred too much in change, I tell him; I am willing to sit through the most boring PTA meeting, but life is mainly about More, more, give me
more, fuck my brains out! This is what I want to hear panted into my ears every Wednesday evening. Yes, from now on, every Wednesday I will lie that I got drunk with the guys at work and was ashamed to come home. That someone threw himself in front of my car and I sat at the police station until dawn; that I had a false heart attack or found a plastic explosive in the wastepaper basket, but I won't let anybody interfere with my Wednesdays. If I have to, I'll get the money for the new rug and the ski gear for the kids by Christmas; from now on, in the off-season of every year we'll spend two weeks on Ibiza, but don't ask me where I spend my Wednesdays. That's the one thing you should never ask, and if you won't, we will continue to live almost the way we have been until now, my darling.

And when he finishes listing everything that could happen to him between ten in the evening and early dawn, when he jots down even the arcs of the nail beds for the second time, when it becomes obvious that there is nothing more to write about until next Wednesday, he tries to find a secure hiding place for the drawer's key, but there is not enough room behind the floor panel of the parquet and the chandelier does get dusted, so in the end he hangs it around his neck because he figures the key could hang there for years without being noticed, and at the same time he tells himself that just because he locks his drawer with a key, he can still have people he calls his loved-ones.

Of course, at breakfast he realizes he doesn't have the nerves for this. Whether life works like this or not, the notebook, along with the fake fur coat and the champagne bottle should be thrown out immediately because, (never mind the wife now, she keeps quiet and goes on eating her fucking oatmeal as if condemned to eat it for the rest of her life), with a key hanging around your neck how in hell can you tell the kid not to mess up the
tablecloth? “What's a plastic explosive, daddy?” “It's like a regular bomb, my sweet little girl, only it's made of synthetic material.” “And there will be one in the office tomorrow too?” “No, sweetie, never again.”

.   .   .

I bought a sandwich, watched two chess games, and it was still only half-past one, so I went to the Pearl of the Balkans. The changes in the area were definitely for the better, but it may have been too hasty to open an Italian restaurant where the Scrap and Byproduct Salvaging Center used to be. To walk four kilometers to the nearest center, lugging huge batches of the free press, would be quite a task, I thought. It is true though that until now only by weight could one distinguish between the
Népszabadság
and
Magyarnemzet
and without a gas stove ring between the pages one would be lighter than the other; still, to pull a little cart full of
Újmagyarország
would still spoil the new streetscape, I thought. But, it's none of my business, I thought. I shouldn't be so oversensitive about social issues. My text wouldn't make that much of a difference, anyway.

“You look like shit again. Why don't you take a vacation?” the barmaid asked.

“It's autumn, Jolika,” I said.

“That shouldn't stop you. A little fresh air would put some color in your face. Go hang gliding on János Mountain.”

“I've been in fresh air. I'm just coming from the country,” I said.

“Inheritance?”

“No. I gave a reading.”

“They pay for that, don't they?”

“They do.”

“See, so what's your problem?” she asked, and I said nothing, actually,
except I was a little tired. I went in the back, to the toilet, to wash my face, and then I sort of lost myself there in front of the cracked mirror. From the top of my skull to my breastbone, the crack was filled with fuzzy grime.

.   .   .

If I hadn't been so bad at physics, I would have been an astronomer too, I thought. And I would know how many cubic centimeters that pile of shit is up there, along with its Andromeda and Alpha Centauri, I thought. And I'd also have free access to all the district libraries, I thought. Nobody would say anything if I had nothing to do there, I thought. I'd show my face every day, as if I wanted to read the newspapers, I thought. Because there isn't a single book on astronomy in the whole fucking Szabóervin library, that's for goddam sure, I thought. Yes, they have
Horoszkóp
and they have the
Búvár
[Diver] handbooks, as well as my stories under W, I thought. So, don't you dare going there again, because I'll have rats chew up your balls, I thought. But this is rubbish, I thought. All they do is talk, that's all, I thought. Yes, talking to somebody is important enough, I thought. It's impossible to talk to the same person for a whole lifetime, I thought. And we hardly ever saw other people, I thought. And I didn't keep seeing that woman because of her ass either, I thought, but because I did not want to know in advance what the next sentence would be. Because after a few years one pretty much knows this sort of thing, I thought. And that is as it should be, I thought. Yes, maybe it would have been better to attend the dead-boring dancing parties thrown by some dead-boring acquaintances, I thought. And to travel, once in a while, I thought. I was five when I was abroad last, I thought. And that was only to a film festival in Moscow, I thought. However, because of my mother I can't be moving around so
freely, I thought. And maybe I should have encouraged Eszter to go home, I thought. After all, for her that is reality. I shouldn't have let her turn off the TV when they broadcast the execution of those two cripples, I thought. Yes, she should internalize finally that it's all over and she can go home now, I thought. I should have got on the first train, right along with her, and taken her back to her fucking mountains, I thought. So she would learn to face reality just as I had to, I thought. I'm not happy that my father was a secret policeman, but I won't put a bullet in my head because of it, I thought. That's not the reason Judit slashed her wrist, either, I thought. And I doubt that our father told her that with a university degree in his pocket he was typing depositions, I thought. She croaked because she couldn't face reality, I thought. In truth, she was exactly like her mother, down to the last inch of her guts, I thought. Werkhard, not a bad name at all, I thought. But with a heart bent only on working one can't last too long; and then somebody began to pound on the door and yell, you constipated in there or what, and I said just a minute, and quickly washed my face.

“'Bout time,” the man said irritably when I turned over the sink.

“I'm sorry,” I said, though I had no reason to be. Sometimes, at places where there is only one washroom, one has to wait a little; and I don't break the door down on anybody, either. I paid Jolika and before leaving for Eszter's place, I stopped by the counter to listen to the five o'clock news.

.   .   .

They talk, and once they may have gone to the Planetarium, I thought. An astronomer is not likely to think of anything else, I thought. They wouldn't think of looking at the sky without binoculars, I thought. They hate clouds, too, because clouds conceal the view, I thought. They just sit there and figure out how many cubic centimeters that pile of shit is
up there, I thought. If you really think about it, I know more about the fucking firmament than all those astronomers put together, I thought. Going to the Planetarium would have been a good thing to do, though, I thought. And to the Botanical Garden too, I thought. I've been living here for thirty-five years and barely know the city, I thought. I haven't walked on the odd side of Bródy Street for years, I thought. Not that it matters much; that's how one gets used to doing things, that's all, I thought. With Judit, it was still possible to go for walks, and for a while with Eszter, too, I thought. But then she also got used to the even side, I thought, and to getting on the streetcar through the last door. As if there weren't at least another forty doors on that fucking streetcar, I thought; and won't you be disappointed when you realize that astronomers also use the same door when getting on the number six streetcar, I thought. And that they cough up the same lousy old dissertation to all the young librarians, I thought. At least I haven't been to the Planetarium with anyone, I thought. And I was disgusted with my own smell, too, I thought. At least I stuffed myself full of chalk because I didn't have the nerve to show my face to her, I thought. Though, instead of eating chalk, it probably would have been better to tell her the whole story, I thought. Except that things like this are not simple at all, I thought. But now it's all the same, anyway, I thought. The past never has an alternative, I thought. Not that the future had too many, I thought. By and large, one may choose between the violin and the violin string. But that's rubbish, I thought. If not about too many things, but about one or two I
can
decide, I thought. For example, I can at any time cross over to the odd side, I thought. Or that we won't have tea anymore and I won't read my writings out loud; instead I'd buy a bottle of wine and we'd take a walk to Margit Island, I thought. We'd eat supper out somewhere, I thought.
Neither an astronomer nor a psychiatrist can tell me who to have dinner with, I thought. Just as these Monday meetings had evolved by themselves, maybe something else can do the same, I thought. If, for example, I walked by the library at closing time, it would be like a chance meeting, I thought. At first, I'd go by only every two or three days, and then I'd go every day, without hiding that I came to meet her, I thought. Actually, I could probably come up with a pretext to sleep over at her place tonight, I thought. For example, I could tell her a lie, such as I had to take my mother to the hospital and I can't bear staying alone in the empty apartment, I thought. And it wouldn't matter if she knew I was lying, I thought. This is not the kind of lie like the razorblade-adjusted nail-marks on my neck, I thought. Now and then, I could spend a night in the small room of her apartment, I thought. Sooner or later she would come over, anyway, I thought. If not today, tomorrow for sure, I thought. Not long ago she hugged me and was very close to kissing me on the mouth, I thought. Even though the doctor forbade things like that, I thought. True, that was because of Judit, I thought. But if the reason was Judit, then the reason can be something or somebody else too, I thought. After all, desire cannot be weeded out by medical advice, I thought. You can't sprinkle a tranquilizer like Xanax on the love spot, I thought. Yes, I will simply lie to her, tell her I had taken my mother to the hospital, I thought – and then I found the note, taped to her door, telling me she had left for home.