Breathless (20 page)

—

To flies we're just another surface area. Salty humid dried flat curved bare fields of flesh. Open to invasion. So tired. No, much worse than tired—spent.

When Yoel arrives it's like a window flung open in a room that has been shut up for too long. A cold blast of oxygen rushes in and wakes us out of the torpor that has filled the house. He smells of summer, not damp and musty like us—no, he smells of bonfire and dry grass, brackish water, fresh air, aftershave. The house becomes more bearable when he is in it.

The outcome from the first session is meager, but it is at least a start. According to Yoel most of the time was spent explaining why he was there at all. You could have prepared this better, he gives us to understand. But how? That is precisely the problem, an almost insurmountable obstacle to communication. Otherwise we wouldn't have needed him to come.

“Do you think that we're . . . strange?” I ask when Lukas has gone out, indicating clearly that he wants to be left alone.

“Do
you
think that you're strange?”

“Yes. Or no. Maybe . . . but we're only doing what we've got to do.”

“Well,” Yoel says, “it's not that strange—to do what you've got to do I would say is quite normal.”

Gábriel is not in fact as reluctant as I had feared. But it's a strain to speak and even more of a strain to remember. He answers in one or two words the questions Yoel puts to him from Lukas. I have the feeling that what Lukas gains from it is not worth the battle. Stop torturing him, I want to say. But what right have I to interfere?

They begin with what is important but not dangerous: places, names, family details. Gábriel comes from a village outside Kecskemét. In the middle of the Puszta, in the Great Hungarian Plain. From an area with many fruit farms and the apricot brandy they are famous for, Yoel relates between rounds, seeming to put twice as much into Gábriel's short replies each time. There's a special shine in Gábriel's eyes when he hears Yoel mention barack pálinka. Yoel can't help but laugh.

“It's really awful, barack pálinka . . . you need to have grown up with it to like it,” he whispers to us. There is a moment's levity in the room, as if the pressure suddenly drops and everyone becomes a little giddy. Gábriel smiles, Yoel laughs, and Lukas and I laugh as well even though we have no idea what about.

—

Yoel seems to know most things. Has studied history at university, traveled all over. Gives us complimentary mini-lectures between Gábriel's brief and hesitating answers. About the Puszta, how the people were driven out under Turkish rule, how the ground, when no one was cultivating it, was reduced to a wilderness and for centuries was just pastureland for cattle. From Gábriel he has learned that his older brothers, Lukas's uncles, worked as
czikós,
cattle drivers, when they were young. Gábriel was the only one in the family they could afford to do without so that he could continue his education. He had a head for books and got as far as studying medicine, even though his studies were prolonged for financial reasons. He was obliged to work at the same time, married and had children, and then . . . Yoel pauses, searching for the best way to say it, the gentlest way. But there is no such way.

Then—before he had passed his final exams—Lukas's mama died.

That was what happened.

A few years later Gábriel left the country with his son.

The conversation ends there. Gábriel indicates that he needs to rest. It's frustrating for Lukas to break off, but there's no choice.

—

Lukas has always imagined that his mama died shortly after he was born. That has been his explanation for having no memories of her, not the slightest little tone in her voice, no blurred snapshot. That he was five years old and still can't remember her affects him deeply. He raises objections. Yoel must be wrong . . . But the next time Yoel asks, he receives the same answer from Gábriel, so Lukas has to concede.

Stop tormenting him, I want to beg him. But Lukas has a look in his eye that says,
You owe me this
. I have to hold him back now, instead of urging him on. And his papa is no longer capable of defending himself. If he speaks he knows that he will be left in peace afterward—so he speaks. What life gives with one hand, it soon takes back with the other. We learn that Gábriel finally succeeds in catching his teenage love, Lukas's mama, after several years of waiting while she was married to someone else. Mara worked as a nurse in a Budapest suburb and one day a week as a volunteer in a prison. Gábriel's greatest fear was that she would catch tuberculosis, as the infection often spread among inmates. But it wasn't tuberculosis that took her, it was fire. In a summer cottage they had borrowed from some friends, the last day of their holiday there, the fire that took hold in a pile of clothes on the bed. It happened so quickly. Gábriel had gone out into the woods to empty some partridge traps. He had actually gone off because they'd fallen out. They who argued so seldom had disagreed about some small thing, something to do with the children, the two sons. She, Mara, thought that he was too easy on them, would always smooth things over when she had reprimanded them. That meant it had all been to no avail and she was made to feel ashamed that she'd been too hard. They started to argue. After a short quarrel he went out. As he was returning he could see from far away that the little wooden house was engulfed in flames.

After a long silence Gábriel tells them about the other son, that there was another boy, Lukas's older brother. As the cottage was burning, as Gábriel was coming along the dirt road and saw the flames, Lukas had managed to get out. In spite of being the smallest. Or perhaps for that reason, because, unlike the others, he thought of no one other than himself and he ran. His mama and his brother were still inside. Lukas's burns indicated that he had been in the flames, but the only thing he could say was something about a candle in the bed. Afterward, when the burned-out house was examined, it was established that the fire had started in the bedroom. His mama and his brother, András, were found on the floor in the kitchen, presumably trapped in the noxious smoke.

Lukas is suddenly stricken with a splitting headache and goes out. A sudden flash of memory, like a migraine? Perhaps his brother, the memory of someone he shared a bed with, a name or a smell . . . He just pushes me aside and disappears. Yoel persuades me to leave him alone.

—

Gábriel has spoken about the brother as if he were certain that Lukas remembered him, Yoel tells us later.

“Are you sure that you don't—”

“No! I don't remember him. Maybe I knew about him, but if I did, I've forgotten. No one has ever said a word to me about a brother.”

I had noticed something between Lukas and his papa many times without really understanding what it was—the remoteness in their way of looking at each other when one of them came into the room. A hint of disappointment in their eyes. As if they thought,
Oh yes, of course, you're the one who survived. It was you and me. Not the other two. They were left in the flames. It happened to be us . . .
So many years after the fire in the summer house, they still had that look in their eyes.

I
hear the music before I can make Yoel out through the tangled greenery, he merges in so well there on the veranda. As if he has already made the pearl fisher's house his own. He's sitting with his eyes closed, drinking a beer, in the last hazy light of evening, in Lukas's cane rocking chair, wrapped in our blanket with our cassette player on his knee, reggae disco. Lukas would hate this if he saw it, this picture of Yoel in front of our house. How handsome, how laid-back, how natural. How he squints into the sun and smiles at the fact that I am standing there—and the thought of what that might mean and might lead to.

“I was just going to leave this,” I splutter, handing him the bicycle pump, which he accepts in a reflex action without taking his eyes off me. I have to brace myself against that look. Take a step back. That's not why I've come, if that's what he's thinking. He calls himself an interpreter, but I could see long ago that he's not.

He's an amateur who likes playing at being a man.
What's a girl like you doing in a dump like this
 . . . He waits for my next move.

“What's this for?”

“Didn't you say you had a flat tire?”

“I don't even have a bike.” He smiles. I hope that my flushed cheeks can't be seen in the red evening light.

“So what shall I do with this?” he asks again and swirls the pump around in one hand. “Bring a bike with you next time,” he says. I go down one more step. “No, wait, don't go . . .” Yoel gently catches hold of my arm, stops me when I just want to slink away, mortified. “This is the nicest bike pump I've ever had. Truthfully.”

“It's just an ordinary pump,” I mumble, as the redness burns like wildfire from my cheeks to my neck, down between my breasts and farther on.

“I'll keep it as a reminder of you. Come and sit down for a minute,” he says and sweeps his arm over all that he is offering: a leaky wooden veranda, a tattered cane rocking chair, and his own irresistible company. He's inviting me in as if this princely residence were his and not Lukas's and mine. “You're not in a hurry to go anywhere. You need to get out of the house for a while. A beer? No? Okay, I'll just have to switch to wine . . . no-oh . . . what about tea? That's what you'd like, I can see.”

As a reminder of you
 . . . Does that mean he is about to leave? That was what I was afraid of. The job isn't finished yet.

“You're not leaving already?”

“Tomorrow.”

“No!” I say, far too desperate. Yes. He has to go back to Stockholm. This evening is his last.

“Have you ever been to Stockholm?”

“Of course. I've been to Stockholm,” I lie, as he shows me into the house, as if it really were his now. Hugely messy in the three rooms already. When he arrived it was spotlessly clean to hide the shabbiness. On the table by the window Mama's typewriter was sitting in state, waiting for his arrival. On the telephone he'd said something about a dissertation, thought that he might stay here awhile to finish it. The typewriter looked like a trophy, and it was, too, but when Yoel saw it he just said:

“What an old monster, cool! But I've brought my own with me, a new portable typewriter.”

If only he knew what effort was required to bring it here—heavy as a small nuclear power station as I balanced it on the bike rack and carried it the last bit in my outstretched arms. If he only knew what risks I had taken to get it here. Mama would disinherit me when she discovered it had gone. Papa's mother had given it to her. She often repeated the story:

“When my father was seventeen he stopped working in the mine; when I was seventeen I was given a typewriter. When you're seventeen . . . what would you like, Lo?” I didn't know yet. But there were only a few days to go.

Scars are sexy, Yoel says. They mean that you've made a mistake, that you've crossed a line. He runs his finger over the thin white streak above my lip. He has a birthmark himself, a blue spot at the bottom of his back—would I like to see? I shake my head quickly, afraid that he will take off his shirt and that it won't stop there.

“Is it supposed to taste like this?” I ask to distract him and take a gulp of the hot drink. Dust. I take another sip. Yes, dust. The tea he has brewed must be several decades old, something the pearl fisher brought home from one of his many journeys in the East.

Yoel assumes the air of a connoisseur. “Of course. This is green tea, Japanese, have you ever tasted it?” I take the bowl with the strange-smelling chicken soup instead, a mouthful, quite unprepared for the heat that explodes in my mouth, green curry, red curry, I think I'm going to die, my gums feel so much like open wounds.

—

We do it. And before I have time to take in what we've done, we do it again.

This secret will die with me, I'm thinking. Feel his birthmark against my hand, rough like the devil's teeth marks in the curve of his back. Think about Lukas the whole time.

I pulled up my skirt, he pulled down his jeans, it was over quickly. It was a bit awkward, but it didn't hurt, no worse than being scratched by hawthorn bushes on the way here. The whole time I'm thinking about Lukas—not that it's him I'm with, I'm only afraid that he will appear, that I'll catch a glimpse of his face at the window, see him open the door and suddenly be standing there.

“Is it all right if I come inside you?” Yoel breathes in my ear. I don't have a chance to reply. He takes that as a yes. He fills me and it really smells of seed, exactly like grain ripe for harvesting in the fields around the house. I will have to . . . wash the sheets before Lukas comes here. I will have to rinse myself in the lake before I go home. Become pregnant—that doesn't even cross my mind. The least of my problems. A considerably bigger problem is that Lukas will die when he finds out about this.

I try to concentrate on how good it feels when Yoel caresses me. Fluctuate between enjoyment and fear at two-second intervals. I dare not take my eyes off the window. Yoel kisses my neck and around my breast, armpits, stops:

“Don't you shave yourself?”

“What?”

“Under your arms?” I feel his foot along my shin. “Not your legs either?”

“No. Do you?”

He laughs. “I like you. You're feistier than you look.”

In the pearl fisher's house of all places, on the pearl fisher's bed. Afterward I take off my top and wipe away his semen, as naturally as if I had done it many times before.

“How long have you been together?”

“Who?” I ask absently, heavy with heat and tiredness.

“You and that Lukas, of course. You're safe with me, baby, I don't intend to tell him about this, it's best for both of us.” We aren't together, I assure him. We have never been. Why does he think that? Because you act as if you are, he replies.

It seems that the only thirst Yoel focuses on satisfying is his own. He's been thinking about this since he got off the train and saw me—he claims. I'm not accustomed to compliments—if it is a compliment—and I squirm under his weight. Was that maybe what Lukas could feel, the scent of another man's lust over the platform? He lowered his horns at Yoel instantly. Is it really so simple? Laugh or cry . . . I can't decide. Marsupials. That's what Mama calls them when she's in the mood. Yoel lifts aside the quilt, pulls out of me, it hurts a little. He rolls off me, grimacing as he pulls his foreskin back into place, and with great vigor he leaps out of bed.

“Tell you what, we'll go down to the sea and have a dip,” he says with a smile that turns into a laugh.

The sea? Just like that?

Laugh? Just like that?

I haven't laughed since last spring.

And the sea I've only been to a few times in my life. It was a whole-day affair for my family, who so seldom went anywhere.

“Just for a dip, Lo. It won't take more than an hour or so there and back. How far is it?”

“A long way.”

“For God's sake, this is SkÃ¥ne—how far can it be? Nowhere's more than a few miles from the coast? The water's going to be lovely this time of the evening. Come on.”

Yoel just sort of . . . is. Just sort of does. Just takes. For granted. And me? I drift along.

“Can we borrow Lukas's bike, do you think?” Yoel pulls on his underpants and throws me mine. “I'm sure we can,” he answers his own question.

—

Do you have to be so compulsively nice to him? Lukas had remarked sulkily the very first evening. As if he guessed what was going to happen. Now I'm sitting next to Yoel in Mama's white Volvo and praying to the gods that Lukas won't see us backing out of our house and driving off to goodness knows where.

I explained to him that borrowing Lukas's motorcycle was out of the question, not a chance.

“What do you mean? Are you together or what? But your mama's car, then? Can we take that?” Yoel had already taken enough . . . or that's what Lukas would have thought, at any rate. My virginity, my virtue, whatever you want to call it—my innocence, that word. What was it you were guilty of afterward that you were not guilty of before? Yoel took me in passing like a chocolate in a dish he couldn't help snatching for himself as he walked by. And soon I was sitting by Mama's bed telling her a sickening little lie—the car, we really need it, Mama—while Yoel stood outside in the darkness, leaning against the garage wall, waiting.

“I should really say no,” Mama said as she gave me the keys, “but obviously, if Gábriel's so ill and needs to get to hospital quickly, and Lukas promises to drive carefully.” I couldn't bring myself to look her in the eye. Took the keys without so much as a thank-you.

—

The worst deceit toward Lukas was not that I slept with Yoel, but that I slept beside him. Close, still—so much more intimate than lying under or on top of someone. I lay on his sweaty arm and tried to distinguish constellations in the microscopic flyspecks on the alcove's damp brown wallpaper. My own, the Lynx, should be there somewhere in the swarm of dots, but I couldn't find it. My eyes darted around among the flecks until they started to sting and I had to shut them. Yoel began to caress me again, but soon stopped, already satiated.

Now we're driving to the sea. Perhaps this is also a form of treachery. I have never been to the sea with Lukas. Yoel drives in the middle of the road, as if he owns it. Mama's Volvo usually causes trouble, but it obeys him. Obliging his every whim, fast for once and like putty in his hands.

“Isn't he a bit too old for you? Lukas. Bit too old, huh? How old are you?”

“I'll soon be seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” he says, surprised. “I thought you were younger.” A hundred and eighty degrees of violet sky, curving above us. Yoel drives as if he owns both the road and the sky.

“We're not together. I told you.”

“So you don't sleep together. What do you do, then? There's not much to do around here. Tell me. Catch grasshoppers? Count freight cars? Smoke? That Lukas seems a bit”—we shouldn't be talking about him, but Yoel doesn't notice when I try to interrupt him—“seems a bit stoned. Not just because he goes around in a rasta top wrapped up in his own world, but because he doesn't sleep with you, the sweetest chick in the village—it's obvious you like him. You seem to be prepared to do anything at all for him, at least. What kind of hold has he got over you anyway?”

Lukas is the last thing I want to talk to Yoel about. I have mixed blood with Lukas, with Yoel all the other body fluids, so much more transparent and easily combined.

“Why do you ask so many questions about him? I'm with you and all the time you talk about Lukas.”

“Okay, okay,” he whispers, smiling. “To hell with him.”

I like Yoel because he is everything Lukas is not. I like him because I don't love him. Screw, chat, bathe. All at the same time, on the same day, and before the evening is over, he says:

“What do you say, babe, are you going to come with me to Stockholm? Life's just begun. For you at any rate.” He's the same age as Lukas and is already beginning to feel old, perhaps because he has lived life at such speed, been everywhere, done everything. Stockholm is so far away in my world, he might just as well have asked me to go with him to Ittoqqortoormiit.

That night I hear Yoel's words—this is no place for you, girl—while the river rats scuttle along the floorboards. Nocturnal animals, the most intelligent and sensitive of creatures. For as long as Gábriel was well, they didn't last long here. Why didn't they come down to the pearl fisher's house instead? We would have left them in peace there, like the Indian temple Lukas had seen on the television where rats were holy—free, quiet, well fed, unafraid. Rats aren't just rats, he tried to convince me, they run with the wind in their fur when they are free, scream like red-hot barbed wire when you drown them, hiss and splutter steam like green wood when they burn, have feelings like you and me. And the separation between body and soul doesn't exist. In the womb the skin grows out from the brain, Lukas explained, opening his hand and letting a drip fall, that's why it is so sensitive. It fell right on my back and my skin was so hot that a single drop gave me goose bumps.