Tranquility (36 page)

I told her she didn't remember right, and that someone else may have also had keys to her place, someone who also couldn't tell the right side of the cover from the wrong side, to which she replied that I could relax, nobody else had keys to her apartment except me.

We were quiet for a while, and then I noticed she still had her coat on and I asked if she'd like to take it off.

“I'll make some tea,” I said; she said all right, and we stood by the stove, waiting for the water to boil.

I asked her what she thought of me.

She said that what she thought of me had nothing to do with what she felt now.

I used a handkerchief to hold the teapot; she fetched the cups and the sugar. It crossed my mind that we'd been through an abortion, two stints in the mental ward, and of course other things as well, and still this was her first time in my room. She didn't seem to find her place. Finally, she sat back in the armchair and I sat on the bed, the way we had done before.

“How was it being back home?” I asked, though what I really wanted to ask was whether she had gone there alone or with the astronomer.

“Let's not talk about that now,” she said.

“Sure,” I said and we were silent again. I tried to look at her face as if for the first time and thought that even if she had taken my arm on Szabadság Bridge only this morning, I'd still tell her everything without hesitation, and then at least I wouldn't know why her hair came down only to her shoulders and why her eyes were becoming wrinkled.

“I'm going home,” she said.

“Stay a little longer,” I said.

“I mean I am moving back home.”

“When?” I asked.

“I don't know yet. A thing like that may take half a year. Maybe more.”

“That's good,” I said, and then she told me that the man who had bought the house died three years ago; she spoke to his heirs and for the price of the apartment on Nap Street she could buy back the house.

“I see,” I said, and for a moment I thought that maybe this apartment should be sold and we could keep the one on Nap Street in case we come to Budapest, but then I realized that this made no sense.

“Six hundred kilometers is not that much. One night's journey and you're there.”

“That's right,” I said.

“And I'd be coming pretty frequently too.”

“I know,” I said.

“But for me, this city is hell.”

“I know,” I said.

“Maybe it'll be hell there too, but at least I'll be at home.”

“I know,” I said.

“It would have been really better not to talk about this now.”

“Come on; until now we've always talked about everything when it was too late,” I said.

“Then don't cry.”

“I'm not crying, only the smoke got in my eyes,” I said and by the time she stepped up to me and kissed my forehead, fear had released its grip on my throat. In fact, I was glad she believed my eyes clouded over because she was going home.

“Can I sleep here?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, but when her tongue forced itself between my lips and crawled across the arch of my palate, I began to fear that her pleasure would throw me off balance. That a squeal and a few muscle contractions would simply blow up this concrete block with which I'd been getting along quite well and which, during the past few weeks, neither fear, logical argument nor Dr. Frégel's medicine could dent.

“Don't,” I said.

“Shush,” she said, and unbuttoned my shirt; by the time I reached her loins all my efforts to think of the scenery-grinding garbage truck were in vain, partly because it had been a year since the last time, and partly because of the fear. In short, it didn't matter what I was trying to think about when I arrived between her legs. True, God's heavenly prop of an
alarm clock did not stop ticking either, only the mattress got stained, but she said there was no problem.

With my face on her belly, I tried to get as far as possible from what she was thinking about. I counted the books on the shelf: in the prose section twelve hundred up to the letter M. That's a bit too many. I should have thrown out at least the ones written with rubber-gloved hands, I thought. Then she turned off the light and pulled the cover over us.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and we kept silent again, this time in the dark.

“Then I'll stay in Pest.”

“You've no reason to worry about me. You told me I could make it even at the bottom of the sea.”

“I was wrong,” she said.

“Come on,” I said and hugged her, and her face was all wet but she wasn't crying, at least I couldn't tell by her voice.

“How long will you keep lying to me?” she asked.

“Three weeks. Maybe a month. I'm only at Szabadság Bridge.”

“You've no right to do that,” she said.

“That's the only thing I have a right to do,” I said.

“You didn't kill your mother. It was your mother who killed you. And maybe she killed Judit too.”

“Maybe,” I said, and then we didn't speak any more until morning.

.   .   .

When I awoke, she already had coffee ready. Naked, with my jacket over her shoulders, she was standing by the window looking at the rain and the plane trees in the Museum Garden. I asked her not to be angry because of the night before; even if I had some rights, cowardice holds a powerful sway
over me, she should know that about me by now. The previous weeks had been spent brooding over these things, which is natural enough, and then came her wish to move back home; in short, last night was like making the last adjustment on the noose. And I wouldn't want to live at the bottom of the sea, which is also quite natural. What I would most want is to have a child, of course not in this former crypt, so maybe this is the apartment we should sell; from the price of this one we could not only buy back her grandfather's house but would have money left over to live on, the forint exchange is very favorable nowadays, and then the place on Nap Street would be there for us to use when we come up to Pest, because, well, I would definitely have to come up because of the publisher, only I'd need another three weeks, a month tops, until I finish this book, luckily it's coming along pretty well, which surprises me more than anyone else, at other times I can mess around for months with an adjective, and now it's all moving like a knife through butter, though it may mean I'll have more work with the proofs, but if I can keep up this pace she can begin typing it at the end of October, but this time she shouldn't be the one to look for a publisher, because that didn't work out too well last time, it was a bad joke, but never mind that; in short, I need these few weeks of solitude so at last I'd see clearly all the things I should have seen clearly long ago, so please don't come to see me for a few weeks and let's skip the Monday meetings too, and then I'll put an ad in the
Express
about the apartment, because most agents are swindlers, but it would be best if she wrote to the heirs, already today, that as soon as my father's money arrives we can send them the down payment . . .

“Are you finished?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She returned my jacket to the back of the chair, and I sat down at the table to watch her dress. The nipples were hard and purple and her body trembled exactly the way it did once when she lay in a tubful of ice-cold water. There was neither pity nor hatred in her gaze, and no indifference. In fact, there was nothing in it. She seemed like a person born this second, only God punished her by making her thirty-three right away, and by doing it to her for at least the fifth time already. First, she put on her stockings and shoes, and then her blouse.

“Should I stay?” she asked.

“No. You'd never forgive yourself.”

“It makes no difference which of the two choices I don't forgive myself,” she said and then put on her dress. “Only it would be more bearable than sitting at home and guessing.”

“You won't have to be guessing.”

“Whatever is better for you.”

“It's much better this way,” I said.

“I know,” she said and then I helped her with her coat; she kissed me on the forehead and stepped out the door as if she were only going to buy bread.

.   .   .

A few days ago, the rains finally stopped and I went down to the Museum Garden for half an hour. Next to the drinking fountain I found a torn-up pigeon, a dog must have finished it off. I tried to cobble together the cause and effect chain beginning with Mr. Újhelyi's funeral, when I said angrily to Judit that if she had already used up her portion of lies why didn't she go home and cut her wrist with a violin string, continuing with my mother who, because of a remark about a sensationalist headline, had her
chimney checked a hundred times, all the way to the time when, despite the No Dogs signs, let's say Mr. Schőbel's playful Doberman sneaked into the Museum Garden for a little pigeon hunting, and I am back to struggling with adjectives, the work doesn't move along as it should, no knife through butter, I've no luck guessing the end of the prison story because one possibility is just as true as the other, and then I come down for half an hour, find this dead pigeon before the caretaker would have, and on top of it all I even have a plastic shopping bag in my pocket; in short, I tried to piece together this chain but realized it was the same kind of rubbish as the claim that my mother would have no bread because the foreman stole ball bearings from the factory so he could make a scooter for his child. And it is rubbish not because there is no Good Lord who'd fool around this long with such a house of cards, but because a person who would fool around with such things is somebody who from one side sees things fairly clearly, but from the other side sees only himself standing on the sidewalk again, his hand on the thingamajig of his watch, except it is all in vain, because in fifteen years he fucked up the whole mechanism so bad he can no longer set the hands back where they belong.

Then the caretaker did show up with his nailed stick and black plastic bag and collected the cigarette boxes, chocolate wrappers, and other garbage strewn between the benches. Half the pigeon feathers remained on the ground, after all, they're organic, but he managed to scoop up most of the bird's body, and I thought that although my image of God – despite all my efforts – is infantile, it can still accommodate this figure of the caretaker with the black plastic bag. That Providence does not necessarily have to have white wings; it could walk around in Adidas sneakers and a beige
raincoat. That it's all right for Providence to hawk up phlegm and spit three times, if he doesn't want his hair to fall out when he puts the muddy remains of a pigeon in his black plastic bag. And then I thought that if there is no pigeon, discarded newspapers would serve the same purpose.

.   .   .

If my math is correct, it was thirty-six years ago today that Andor Darvas, Rebeka Weér, and Éva Jordán got in the rear seat of an official Volga so that regrettable events would not upset their romance. I received a photo from Jordán; it was taken in the hunting lodge of the Interior Ministry, roughly in the days when my father's classmates in the Hungarian/History Faculty were making Molotov cocktails out of Kőbányai beer bottles. A postcard-size photo with serrated edges; not a masterpiece but well-composed, and it's not even yellowing. Three people sit at a rough-hewn kitchen table, the glass pitcher in front of them is three-quarters full of wine, some glasses; behind them the dimness of the inner room. My father, wearing a turtleneck sweater, is in the middle, my mother is resting her head on his shoulder, her lips slightly apart. On the right, Éva's elbow on the table, chin in hand, cigarette between her fingers, her other hand on one of my mother's but the pitcher hides some of this. All three of them are looking into the lens of the Zorky camera, waiting for the self-timer to go off. There is nothing artificial in their faces. They are neither smiling nor staring vacantly into nothingness. They are visibly happy. And if I figure it right, at the end of November, when they headed back to Budapest, there were five people sitting on the back seat.

Originally, I thought I'd write a few lines for Eszter in the back of the photo, but I couldn't think of anything. In the end, I only addressed the
card and from the window I watched the wreath-laying ceremony by the Radio building, waiting for it to be over, because that's where the nearest mailbox is.

Naturally, I am afraid. But until the tile stove heats up completely, I'll still have human features. If I were sitting somewhere outdoors, say, in the yard of a lakeshore house, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the Carpathians, even then I could write nothing but that the only thing that fills me with wonder is the starry sky above me. And that is indeed very little.

*
April 4: Hungary's Liberation Day