Breathless (22 page)

Yoel and I went off and recovered the car at the Loan Shark Garage, as Lukas called it. The dark blue Taunus that I had been in so many times with him—Yoel just pulled out a credit card and paid the bill and the car was his. The debt, which for Lukas was insurmountable, was settled in a quarter of an hour.

I traveled without luggage, didn't want to go home and pack, just to leave and phone home when I was out of reach. If my things were still at home perhaps Mama would think that I had only gone away for a while rather than moved for good. I didn't know how long this was going to last. Yoel had warned me that he was an unreliable, fickle type. It didn't scare me, quite the reverse; with Lukas everything had been in earnest and forever.

I rose to my feet and shook everything off. Went with him. Left a gaping hole behind me. Didn't look back.

Yoel's seed was still inside me. The one who sows, he shall reap, Lukas. God helps those who help themselves—it could have been you . . .

The relief when I left without saying goodbye was so great that it outweighed the shame. Lukas in the rearview mirror, carrying Gábriel's things out into the yard, the gas can on the steps, work gloves, the flames leaping up behind his body, stripped to the waist—he had grown so thin. The body I had always had so close to me that I never really regarded it as a separate part of reality, more an extension or duplication of myself.

Don't play with fire, Lo, Mama said all the time. It was Lukas who was the fire. The first one, when we met, was an accident. It must have been. A spark in the grass where it was extra dry along the railway embankment, a gust of wind that made it flare up. That spark was like a first meeting—you need to keep it alive or it will soon burn out. The one that was burning now, outside Gábriel and Lukas's house . . . Even if it was his papa's belongings he was setting fire to, I knew it was to do with me. He was burning what we had and what we didn't have. He was burning everything. Mattresses, bedclothes, blankets, chairs, shoes, books, piles of
Népszabadság
newspapers. Started a fire and walked right into it. I saw his frenzied movements in the mirror—a scene I had witnessed before, a circle that was closing.

Had Lukas not always had a dangerous combination of fire and madness to some degree? Throwing things into the blaze, everything he didn't know what to do with—it is possible to burn them and carry on. The relief in being powerless.

I saw that he could see that I was looking at him. And yet he didn't even lift his hand. Nor did I, paralyzed by a mixture of relief and shame. Lukas's hands were busy bringing out the last of Gábriel's things, all that had been his life, throwing it onto the fire and pouring gas over it all. And in my hands there was only lead, weighing down on my thighs while Yoel's fingers found their way up there in such a natural caress I couldn't stop him. With one hand on the wheel and the other in pursuit of pleasure, he pulled out onto the highway and put his foot down. It went like clockwork now, Lukas's car, money lavished on it and oiled. To me it would always be Lukas's car, whether Yoel had bought it or not.

—

It is the strong who remain behind, the weak who leave. I deserted, forced to go away to become myself. Hadn't I always said I wanted to see the Atlantic, Lukas? You could have taken me there, we could have gone there together, everything could have been different. I will never leave you; I am leaving you now.

You never lose the one you loved.

It takes two to tango, but only one to let go.

Words, words, words.

See you in hell, Lo.

His last line, never uttered.

Y
oel is in the sun, cooling himself down with a beer, looking at the view and from time to time at me. Now and then he shouts out something that must be an instruction, but his voice is drowned by the music from the car radio. It is going well all the same. I must have a natural talent. Around and around over the tacky late-summer asphalt, wider, hotter, faster circles. You need to be able to drive a car to feel truly free. Halfway up to Stockholm he'd thought it was time to stop and practice, at a rest area with a fantastic view over the highway and a sparkling stretch of water.

I want to slip out of the parking space without him. It isn't Yoel's car, it will always be Lukas's car, and the two of us never distinguished between yours and mine. When Yoel thinks my circles look perfect, he asks if I want to drive properly, nods in the direction of the highway—there are two hundred miles left and he's tired of sitting behind the wheel, wants to sleep the last stretch.

—

I focus on the road. When thoughts of Lukas intrude, I accelerate.

“You're a natural.”

“I know.” I put my foot down.

“Just take it easy. Stay in the inside lane until I say.” Reluctantly I ease up on the accelerator. “You've got my life in your hands now, how does it feel?” It feels good. Better than it has in a long time, in fact. I want to pass. He laughs. “Not yet. When I say. You couldn't wait to get away, it's obvious.”

He lets me drive until we arrive at the outskirts of town. We mustn't tempt fate. If anything were to happen he's the one who would be held to blame. He has both an American and a Hungarian driver's license. I have had a taste of driving and would prefer not to hand back the wheel, but the fun is over now.

“You're not even old enough, you're underage, aren't you? Not that you look as though you're not smart, but . . . inexperienced. Inevitable, growing up like that.” In the shadow of the factories. That's what he calls it. He grew up in Stockholm, Berlin, and Budapest, studied in New York. He's the same age as Lukas, but so much more sophisticated and confident, and that adds years to his age. He's been everywhere, done everything. He looks good in neon and looks good without. We glide into a tunnel. I've never been in a car underground before, but I read
Alice in Wonderland
from cover to cover, and this is a darker version of the same thing.

When we have emerged above ground I roll down the window. The smell of the city is the smell of exhaust fumes, new asphalt, frying from the restaurants. This is the best present I could have had, I say, with my hair streaming in the wind and my eyes watering with the cold night air.

“What? Is it your birthday?” he asks, surprised, as he zigzags through the traffic.

Yes. Seventeen.

His apartment is in the Kasernberget district. A concrete block built in the seventies with windows the size of portholes. As we carry in his luggage I think that the ugliest house is the best location—that way you don't have to look at it. The street sign. I stare at it. Too much . . .

“What?” he asks.

“Strindbergsgatan? Did Strindberg live here? Really?”

He must have. At some time. He lived in lots of different places in the city, but it would hardly have been in this Berlin bunker, Yoel says, displeased. In his presence you are always reminded that the English word “spoiled” has two meanings.

If Lukas could see us now—thank the good Lord that he can't—he would be beside himself.

“Don't think about him now,” Yoel whispers. His stomach smells of ylang-ylang, sandalwood, a drop of semen. He slows the pace—to lead and to follow is a simple logic. Sex is about not thinking, he says, as if he knew it's the only thing I long for now.

It's so easy for him, not just in bed. Everything was so easy from the moment he opened the passenger door of the car, which a little while ago had been Lukas's prize possession, and asked me to jump in. Took my virginity in passing, then he took it again and again, before we had time to unload the car, unpack his things, before I even had time to draw back the curtains and look at the view.

Afterward: “Don't tell me that I was the first? But for God's sake, Lo, how could I have known? You should have said something, then I would have taken it a bit more . . .”

“What? Steady?”

“Maybe. At least I would like to have known. It's a . . .”

“Big responsibility?”

“No, but cool, like. Special.” He looks at me doubtfully. “Do you mean to say that you and that Lukas never, not once, he didn't even try?” Now we are talking about him again and I don't want to.

Lukas would soon be twenty-four and I had thought that obviously he must do it sometimes. I couldn't imagine him with anyone else, but there must have been someone, sometime. Who could it have been? Someone at the factory? He never spoke about work when he was off, as if it didn't exist, other than a slight ache in his shoulders and hands. Perhaps that was why he was so secretive? Because he had someone there? I knew well enough that this wasn't so, but it was too sad to think that he had never had anything more than he had with me.

Stockholm the first morning: I release myself from Yoel's hold and launch myself at the window, tear the heavy white curtains apart. There it is. Sparkling like a glass of water in the sun. Stunningly clean and water everywhere with a perfect silhouette against the cyanide-blue late-summer sky.

While I slept I really must have landed on my backside in another world. The city is a forest of light and sound and motion. I can't remember when I last felt so small, perhaps the time Papa carried me in his arms over the field in the worst thunderstorm of the summer. He didn't dare carry me on his shoulders in case a flash of sheet lightning were to seek out the top of my wet head. Scared and with my eyes shut, I had rushed straight out into the field of grain—too small to be seen as I raced around in a vicious circle of panic. The movement in the grain revealed where I was. Papa caught me, comforted, scolded, saved, and carried me in a rough grip through the nightmarish thundering light.

Whether it is the world that has grown while I slept or I who has shrunk in my sleep—it has all taken my breath away. He laughs and kisses me between the eyes, a typical Yoel gesture. My fascination for Stockholm is clearly very moving, like a mole who sticks her head up for the first time and sees the light. He shows me the view from Söders Höjder. Just that I call it “Söders Höjder” makes him kiss me again between the eyes.

“It's just the most fantastic thing I've ever seen,” I whisper.

“But you've never seen anything, honey: railway, lake, same old countryside, same old . . . what's his name now? Lukas?”

I lay my fingers on his lips. I can't rid myself of the feeling that I am a deserter, a heartless, heartless traitor.

“You know we live in the ugliest building in the whole city,” he says, to bring me back down to earth.

“But I like it.” That, according to Yoel, is because I was born between two factories. Four factories, to be precise. To be exact: four factories, a railway, an industrial park, and a hydropower station.

I don't know if he was a child who had too much love, but he must at any rate have had too much of everything else. Nothing is really good enough for him; the apartment is way beneath his dignity. At the moment he is too broke to live the sort of life he thinks he deserves. If only he hadn't made himself impossible with his papa. That is the risk with fine families—it is easy to be banished from them, he says. Monthly maintenance withdrawn. His father has taken his support away.

—

“What would've become of you if I hadn't come and rescued you?” I hear him say one day when we are eating breakfast in bed, so late in the afternoon that it's beginning to get dark again. The mud-king's daughter? A factory moth spinning an endless thread in the darkness of the wool factory? Eternal virginity? Shriveled up. The croissant in my mouth swells up like a ball of cotton wool the more I chew. I know that he's joking. But all the same.

“I don't come from the country. I come from the outskirts.” It wasn't true countryside, because we had streetlights, but it wasn't true village either, because the road wasn't paved. It had something of a bad reputation, along with those of us who lived there. The houses weren't so well cared for, the gardens not so well tended, like the children. If only the railway hadn't cut through the view of the rolling landscape, if only the sound of the long freight trains hadn't shattered the conversations at the kitchen table. In late winter the lake always overflowed and the fields lay under water and the local flowers had ugly names like bog asphodel, frogbit, waterweed, water plantain, pod grass. The smallness of everything made it more noticeable that we didn't belong there, Lukas and I. If only our family circumstances had been normal, we might have given the illusion that we fitted in. But not even that.

“Factory moth,” Yoel says, or do I just read it in his eyes? He himself is of a nobler species, without necessarily being more sensitive: a spinner of silk and satin, sharp and alluring features. Self-assured, unequivocal. The sophisticated type who has lived and traveled and knows his culinary French. In a restaurant he sends food back if it is not to his taste, and expects to be compensated for his disappointment. Loves everything ending in
confit,
which I eventually gather just means that it is cooked in its own fat. It sounds unappealing, but he maintains that duck confit is as near as you can get to heaven. And
coeur de filet
, the heart of the filet, is the thickest and best part. It is the part of me he will never have, but he doesn't want it anyway.

A playful and relaxed prelude, is that all we are for each other? If we make love early in the evening, he goes out afterward, seems to be hungry for something that isn't available at home. I'm too young to go with him, too young for the only places it is worth going to—he gets in everywhere, people know that he is no pauper, at least not in the pub.

Every time I try to imagine what Lukas is doing just now, I see him by Gábriel's coffin in his black mourning shorts, the only thing he wore at the end. Funeral for close family and friends—what do you do if the close family and friends consist of one person? A very simple ceremony?

It takes some time before I understand what the smell is. Only sense it at night, when I try to sleep and there is nothing to distract me. It is the smell of the summer in the house with Gábriel that has clung to me. Showering and washing my clothes doesn't help. It's embedded far up in my nostrils, inaccessible, until in the end it subsides, like a sorrow you can no longer bear.

The harsh light of summer has changed. Gentler and softer, like Yoel's laugh.
Mañana,
he says, and I try to learn from him. We will do it tomorrow, everything can wait, everything but the moment that must be enjoyed while it lasts. Now, only now.

Playing and caressing and deceiving. I straddle him in the Hiroshima four-poster bed. Promise him eternal fidelity under a cloud of creamy white tulle. We laugh. Make love a bit more in the pale light from the Sodom bedside lamp. Order Chinese food in small white cartons delivered to the door. I have never eaten Chinese food before, never had food delivered to the door, only seen it in films. Yoel opens the door naked, but the Chinese man doesn't let his mask slip. It is called losing face in Chinese, Yoel explains, and he gives him a generous tip, “keep the change” . . . Money burns a hole in Yoel's pocket . . . We are on fire and make love and fuck behind the Gomorrah silk curtain. Love is like lighting a cigarette on a burning curtain, an exaggerated gesture, an excessive risk. Be careful, Lo, I hear Mama say . . . I like the kissing afterward with the taste of sweet-and-sour sauce. Even when I take him in my mouth he tastes of sweet-and-sour sauce. I have started to write down in my oilcloth-covered book the words you need to know when you are with Yoel. Sweet-and-sour. Fellatio.
Mañana
.