Tranquility (29 page)

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She wrote she would probably come back only in two or three weeks, and the only reason she didn't tell me in advance about her leaving was that she didn't know it herself until the last minute; she decided on the spur of the moment; and I shouldn't be angry with her. I kept standing in front of her
door for a while, until the old lady from across the gallery asked me who I was looking for; as if she didn't know, as if a few years ago it hadn't been her who denounced me as an illegal subtenant; and I replied that I wasn't looking for anyone, Auntie Kóródi, enjoy the fresh air; and then I started for home. I told myself this wasn't necessarily a bad development. On the contrary, it was probably a good thing that she'd finally gone home; at the time, the doctor had suggested it several times. And she must have gone by herself. If it took a scuffle and an abortion for me to find out something of her past, it must be out of the question that she'd take a total stranger with her on this trip. To return home after half of one's lifetime is very different from going to the Planetarium with someone. Actually, it is better that she went alone, I thought. At times like this, one needs no audience, I thought. And I couldn't leave my mother alone for such a long time, I thought. Though leaving her for a while would solve a whole lot of things, I thought. It's a different question whether she would be the only one who might die in the process, I thought. Which is not necessarily a problem, I thought. Compared to Judit, Mother and I have been plugging away for a pretty long time, I thought. Even though the two of us bore the brunt of everything, I thought. But that's rubbish, I thought. I have no way of knowing what her share of the burden has been, I thought. And that man in the recording business could have sent at least a postcard, I thought. Instead of the monthly rent, he could have written us that the working heart of his little girl had stopped, I thought. In fact, it would behoove me to tell Mother that her daughter has been dead for ten years, I thought. Well, yes, she has been corresponding with me all that time; it wasn't too bad, was it, I thought. And that I use my father's money to buy her skin creams, I thought. Who knows, she may even be glad to hear this news, I thought.
Maybe she is not even mad, only withdrawn, I thought. And being glad, she might surprise her audience, I thought. By going down to the food shop, for example, I thought. Even if the saleswoman wouldn't, I certainly would be surprised, I thought. After all, for fifteen years I have been her audience, I thought. The problem is that I'm fed up with it, I thought. By the way, it's been like a flawless folk play, still, for some reason I'm sick and tired of it, sick to death of it, I thought. If there had been an ounce of humanity in that conductor today, he would have found something wrong with my ticket and simply thrown me out of the train, I thought. Right into the Great Hungarian Plain, I thought. Then you'd have to really economize with that half a kilo of bread, Mother, I thought. Because the Good Lord won't run down to the food shop, I thought. Then you either put on the moth-eaten little suit and show your face at the food shop, or starve to death, I thought. But you won't continue doing this to me, I thought. No more where have you been son, I thought. Because you'd be bouncing off the walls, I thought. Don't think I wouldn't dare hit you, I thought. I'll throw you out on the street by your discolored hair, I thought. By your little suit I'll drag you to the Eastern Carpathians and you will kiss Eszter's foot, I thought. On all fours, you will thank her for not letting me put you in an insane asylum, I thought. And I promise that if I start writing with your blood, the critical reactions will be even more favorable, I thought. So don't ever again say, take her to a flophouse, like all the others. Don't you dare throw your wormy apple at me when I ask who Évajordán is. And never, never again in this fucking life ask me, what is this racket son! Don't you dare pretend you don't know, because I'll knock your head into the speakers, Mother! I'm not interested in the pains around your heart! Yes, you'll listen to this record until you go deaf!

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“Good day,” Mrs. Berényi greeted me.

“Good day,” I said.

“Are you coming in?” she asked and held the gate open.

“No,” I said, and suddenly felt as if with a pair of scissors I had cut myself off from everything and everybody.

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Whatever I know of freedom, I learned when I parted with Mrs. Berényi and headed for Kálvin Square. If, by freedom we don't mean the euphoria of test pilots or the right to vote or that we may judge and decide according to our moral standards, and our decision happens to coincide with our most secret desires and emotions. If freedom is not white paper with black ink on it; if it is not four taut strings or ten thousand organ pipes; if it is not a hermit's cave and it isn't the moment when God's prop alarm clock stops and something bursts the ribcage. In short, it's best if we imagine that freedom is the kind of condition in which nothing ties us to the world around us. We have no desires, passions, or fears, we might say neither aims nor aimlessness, and we even fail to register that this vacuum no longer bothers us. Freedom is an odd, mainly characterless condition. It has nothing to do with indifference, which is inevitably cynical, and it has nothing to do with a state of it-all-comes-to-the-same-thing because behind that state still lurks some shame or hope. If everything comes to the same thing, that's still very human. I might put it this way: freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans.

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When it started to rain, I took cover under the eaves of a newsstand. The vendor called out to ask if I wanted anything; I said no. On the center
island opposite me, a mother was tugging and pulling her child because he didn't want to put on his hood, and in the meantime the streetcar arrived. A few people ran to catch it; an elderly woman, holding her pocketbook over her head, was waddling against the red light, to the honking of cars and yelled, “You wanna die, fucking nut?” On the blank stretch of a nearby wall, suspended industrial alpinists were installing a new electric billboard. One of them thrust himself away and like a pendulum, describing a huge semicircle in the air, handed his mate some tools and then with the same momentum returned to his point of takeoff. I couldn't remember what had been advertised here originally, Totolotto or Fabulon, even though I passed by the spot at least twice a day. That irritated me because I don't like to forget things. Finally, I asked the vendor, he told me it was Fabulon.

The coffee machine worked in the underpass; I had an espresso and went over the names of people with whom I might stay. With one I'd have to talk about the terrorism of the literary journals, with another about that of the art galleries, “cause if you're not part of the clique, old boy, a journal like
2000
wouldn't publish you even as a small ad, and the National Gallery wouldn't let you exhibit anything, not even yourself, not even as a guard.” With the third one, I would have had to talk also about us, how we're doing, and so on, “I'm only saying this because the way things are, well, this must be terrible for both of you, so it might be better to put an end to it, or to make a child.” And then it occurred to me that I still had the key to the Nap Street apartment, and now I could stay there for quite a while.

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I thought these few days might be enough to get one of those major tomes under my belt, like
The Magic Mountain
or
The Man Without Qualities
, because I had been struggling with them for years, as I would with math
homework, but could never get past page fifty. The letters would become tangled, my head would ache; it was like reading sheet music, that's the only thing that can be just as awful, with those countless ants crawling on five black lines. It was no use begging Judit to teach me; we tried it a few times but it didn't work. She said I probably found a bag of lentils strewn on the floor more comprehensible than anything that's arranged in an orderly system; to which I replied that was rubbish, because when taken separately, I knew what notes should be written on each line, and what was the function of flats and sharps; I was just incapable of paying attention to all of the notes all at once; and she said that was exactly what she was talking about.

It would be hard to tell what my problem really was with these books. Naturally, it wasn't their size, because I read
The Brothers Karamazov
from cover to cover – not exactly a brief tale – to the kitchen credenza when I decided to learn how to read aloud. No other kitchen credenza in the world has heard so much Johann Sebastian and Fyodor Mikhaylovich. Mommy was learning the role of Desdemona, the little girl was playing the violin, and the little boy was reading out loud; and then, with
Les Liaisons dangereuses
I sat down to rest in Mother's cooled-off bath water. It was very nice, actually. In short, what I can most clearly say about the two books mentioned is that they simply did not interest me. The poor author hadn't said half of what he thought of botany or of the weather or of tuberculosis and I was already bored. I don't want to listen for fifty pages to anyone talking to a nurse about the curve of his temperature graph, and not because there is no such thing, but because if I had been that nurse I would have sent him back into his mother's cunt. Incidentally, this is also pure rubbish because the Reverend Albert Mohos, before he went mad, had listened
for sixteen pages to today I hit the woman again, and I ate meat on fast day, and stories about stealing chickens. Yes, I was the one who wrote that. And, yes, I was advised to vanish in someone's cunt. That woman at the reading left the hall as if it were a contagious ward. Nevertheless, she was right.

Finally, I tried
The Magic Mountain
, mainly because in the spring a woman reporter had asked me if there was a deliberate parallel between
The Story of the Terminal Ward
and
The Magic Mountain
, but please, I shouldn't misunderstand her, to which I responded that of course it was deliberate, after all, one knows what one writes, where the proper place of his work is within a certain cultural context; and this “cultural context” had its effect and the woman asked no more wise questions. In short, I started again with the first volume, and was glad that Eszter had the same edition I did, the one with the brown cover, because at least I was used to it. To tell the truth, I saw no parallels. In the
Terminal Ward
, very different kinds of people drop dead and for very different reasons, and nobody is in any damn mood to sit around and chat – well, never mind that.

By the way, for four or five days I was doing pretty well in Davos-Dorf, only I failed to find out whether there was a place by that name at all, because Eszter did not have an atlas at home. Although Herr Writer was a meticulous person, he wouldn't have taken it to heart if his readers had to pore over maps for nothing. I think he even picked out the name Hans Castorp from a classified directory or from an obituary column, to be sure, because what would happen if a name like that didn't even exist? This sort of thing, of course, is understandable. I always took care that Judit should write only from places that could be found somewhere on the world's map. Not that during the years I hadn't thought of other places like some Lethe-shore spa, or something like that, but then Mother would
have looked for it for nothing. If little Judit wrote from the Antarctic, that would have been perfectly all right, that is right there on the bottom; true, it's fucking blinding white, but it is there. As for the obituaries, well, I did forget to check them out.

In short, this Davos-Dorf is not a bad place at all, though until now what I liked best was when the tubercular women begged the tubercular Mr. Albin on the roof terrace to put away his revolver and not to chase away the bath attendant again who only wants to give him an alcohol rubdown. I'd like to know though whether the little Adonis puts a bullet in his brain in the end. Somehow, that interests me more than Hans Castorp's amazement at the nature of time. Come to think of it, Mr. Füzesi is also amazed at how strangely time passes when a tied soccer game goes into an extended period, not to mention the series of penalty kicks; and there is a woman, Erzsi, who every week promises Jolika that she'd hang herself, or maybe she'll try it with gas, because then, with a little bit of luck the whole fourth floor would go along with her; and the truth is I was always more interested in this Erzsi than in Füzesi's reasoning about the ignoble nature of time.

Occasionally, I played chess on the board Eszter had given me for Christmas. I managed to play some good games. One would think that this sort of playing is meaningless, but that's not true. Once the board is turned around, all our former plans and ideas are gone within seconds if, I suppose, one knows only as much about chess as I do. A better kibitz or an experienced inmate would not be confused if he had to look at the same thing from the other side, but in the last few years I played only with Eszter and then that petered out, too. As a child, I liked to play with Judit, not only for the play itself, but also because for a long time I perceived and comprehended the chessboard much better than, say, a bagful of strewn
lentils. An ability that, oddly, began to change exactly as the secondary sex characteristics grew more pronounced. So much so that when Judit came home from the hospital after her tonsillectomy there was no longer any point in our playing chess. And I managed to beat Eszter, too, only a few times; though later it turned out that for years she had played every Sunday with the horse doctor who later helped put her grandfather to sleep.