Tranquility (17 page)

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One Friday, Eszter brought home from the library a Remington typewriter and about five hundred sheets of Sirály paper with a batch of carbons and plenty of biscuits, and then put two pitchers full of iced tea on the table.

“I don't want to see your face,” she said, and placed two chairs back to back.

“But it's like I'll be reading to the wall,” I said.

“That's right,” she said, and I started to read my stories to the white wall.

From the tapping of the typewriter I knew where the word order was changed, an adjective left out, and immediately felt that particular adjective was unnecessary, and continued reading
The Story of the Hired Dreamer
and
The Story of Freight Transport
and
The Story of the Violin Thief
. The walls grew gray in the late afternoon and sometimes I had to close my eyes because the lines were becoming entangled. Instead of words,
The Story of Pediatrics
seemed to be made of a bunch of black wriggling worms, and then I got desperate because I realized I could read even with my eyes closed, that I could recall more accurately sentences I had written years earlier than the taste of the biscuit I'd just dipped in the tea. I told Eszter
we should stop, because it made no sense to continue. There is nothing sadder than mistaking the foul emissions of one's brains for freedom. But she didn't even respond, only took two fresh sheets, put carbon paper between them, tapped all of it against the table and then fit it under the roller of the typewriter and waited. I took another sip of tea and continued the
Story of Dramatic Arts
, but when I finished that, she couldn't take any more either. She had to tie a wet handkerchief around her wrists, and her fingertips began to ache from the typing. I brought the Nivea cream from the bathroom and rubbed it on her hands, and then the length of her arms. She turned so I could reach her shoulder blades and her waist.

“A little lower. It's your favorite vertebra that aches most,” she said and crumpled a pillow to shove under her belly. “I should get a normal chair. By the time your book is finished you can take me to the hospital again.”

“I don't want the book,” I said.

“Don't talk back to me. Go on, rub it all over me,” she said, and slowly I rubbed the cream all over her body, starting at her neck, along the hips, all the way to the toes, and then between the spread thighs I found my way back to the area of the pearling labia but took care not to touch them.

“Everywhere,” she said from under her spread-out hair, but I grazed her pulsing clitoris only with my breath because I wanted to enjoy pleasure in its pure form. She felt for the tube, and with a dab of cream, she rubbed circles around her sphincter muscles. “Here also,” she whispered, while her finger slipped farther and farther in, and the pinkish muscle began slowly to give; my own finger also penetrated alongside hers to break the seal of fear that had been only cracked a few times in the past.

“Oh my God, this hurts,” she moaned when I tried to enter her, and I would have given up, even though I lost all sensation and only some voice
from a remote nook of my brain was asking me to be merciful. But she grasped my hip with both her hands and would not let me out of the grip of her anus. “I want it. Like this,” she panted, her ten fingers sunk in my flesh, and then she yanked me inside her as if stabbing herself with a spear, and after the wounded animal's whimpering I felt that pain was forced to share her with pleasure; that pleasure was but ennobled pain.

.   .   .

Like the Pompeians, of whom only a hollow remained at the bottom of the lava, she lay on the bed, still half-conscious, the pillow pressed to her loins, the strip of half-dried semen on her thigh and half-dried tears on her face. Reflecting from the house opposite, the sun painted the room red, and then either a cloud must have passed or someone opened a window across the way, because everything suddenly grew dark. I lay on my back, nestled my head in the valley of her hips, and stared at the ecru water stains of the ceiling.

“You slept with her, didn't you?” she asked, and for a second I didn't understand what she was talking about. And then I lied, saying that I did not.

.   .   .

That was probably the time she should have screamed into my face, Don't you lie to me! Yes, that's when I should have told her that when Cleopatra, in the costume of a third-class music hall dancer ran through the downtown area and Antony wiped the filth and the almond-smelling sweat off her, then the demoted Miss Weér hurried to the bathroom just a little too late. Barely a few movements too late, something one can overlook in a Czechoslovak tragicomedy, but these few movements were enough to make us avoid each other's eyes for weeks. Enough to make Cleopatra
decline to read her first minor role ever at the breakfast table and rather take a pitcher of mint tea into her room and do her cramming behind a closed door. When I think about it, Mother, in our most inhuman days we behaved most humanely. At the time, when at our mere touch the bread dried out and muddy water flowed from the faucets. Then finally, a letter arrived from Judit and somehow we found our way back to the safe sentences:

Actually, the Metropolitan is not such a bad place. But it's really appalling that you still can't read fluently, son. No wonder you didn't graduate from high school.

I flunked algebra, Mother.

A-ha. But you could have tried again.

I'll try again next year, Mother, but I didn't because in a privately owned flat that had been turned into a crypt for two there was not the slightest need for a high school diploma. Yes, Mother, burying your daughter was also superfluous. Actually, you had already assigned the places of the security chains with the same movement you steered Antony's hand from your belly to grieving Cleopatra's mucous vagina.

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“No cross-examination. That's all I'm asking you, no questions,” Eszter said, and in the last years with Judit, I had indeed learned well not to ask too many questions. Judit and I would walk long miles from a pier in Pest to some lookout point in Buda without me asking anything. I'd watch cars with Western license plates at night, and in the morning I wouldn't ask anything. From the mailbox, I'd bring up for her letters without stamps or return addresses, and still I wouldn't ask her anything. Only before the Belgrade competition I asked her why she was crying. At night, she
practiced in the theater because the acoustics were better there than in the Music Academy's rehearsal hall. After the rhythmic applause, the crew would strike Rome and go home; the two of us would stay. She was on the stage, in the dimness of a bare sixty-watt bulb, I in the auditorium with the violin case cum Ark of the Covenant, in which, for almost a decade I kept my stone tablets and the whip-wielding Moses with his two left feet. In the space left empty for Thou Shalt Not Kill, there was a hole because Judit a few times filled the space with the word BUT, which she then erased, and after a while, the former notebook page could not bear the repeated vacillation.

Judit was thirteen when she had to resort to erasing for the first time, when our mother took her for a routine examination and after the tonsillectomy she was out of school for a week. Then she erased having taken two boxes of Eunochtin, which she vomited out when she got frightened. She erased three years of silence and then a gay ballet dancer. She erased Mr. Réthy along with his family, a cancer researcher, a high school teacher, and a fighter pilot together with his plane that exploded during a military exercise. And then she erased Mr. Réthy again, but this time not with his family, but with our mother, and after that she had to erase our mother exactly four more times. By then mother and daughter were addressing each other in the familiar form, only I never heard them do it. When Miss Weér told her daughter that she positively loved ménages à trois, the paper ripped, and the portrait the sculptress Ágnes Raimann began as Judit's but completed as Rebeka's, Judit had to erase not from the paper but from the plywood of the violin case. Our mother, known not to like women, made an exception that time; one might say she totally surrendered to the passion of the game. After Judit's stomach was pumped in the hospital, Mother
brought her Sappho's fragments as a present, “Mother dear, the spinning wheel wouldn't spin.” And all along I thought Judit was away for three days at the Sopron Music Festival, as if we didn't even live under the same roof. Only when I came across Judit's letter, written on sheet music, did I finally understand exactly the meaning of the sentence, Don't you ever dare compare me to our mother.

Until the trip to Belgrade, I thought it best not to ask any questions. It was better that at least to me she didn't have to lie. Then I took a seat in the third row, watched her standing in the dimness of the sixty-watt bulb, and listened to Paganini's violin concerto in B minor; and in the middle of the second movement, her tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“I'm sure you'll win,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“And still, you're scared,” I said.

“Very,” she said.

“You will come back, won't you?” I asked.

“Be quiet,” she said, and just stood there, so alone on that stage as if God had forgotten to create a world around her.

.   .   .

“That's how it is. Please don't pry,” said Eszter when I asked why she was so afraid of doctors. I put her biopsy referral into my pocket so the waitress wouldn't throw it away, and I decided to wait. Although I had a key to the apartment for nearly a year, all I knew about her was that she was a half-time employee in the Sixth District branch of the Ervin Szabó Municipal Library to whom nothing worthwhile had ever happened until on Szabadság Bridge I said to her, Let's go then.

At first, I thought that if necessary I'd listen to this silence of hers for
years, but fear had almost imperceptibly laid its eggs in my breast, and soon my imagination got all tangled up. A woman whose life is filled with working in the district library doesn't make love as if she wanted to die doing it, I thought; I quickly exchanged the image of the doting father to that of the late evening hubbub of the Anna espresso-bar where high class but
echtehungarischefrauen
drink cognac with class-alien but well-heeled guests. Because this is the first thing that occurs to a mind awash with the mescaline of suspicion. As if, except for a dubious past, a woman could have no reason for keeping her peace. And one morning when I knew she'd be at work, I went to her apartment, closed the shutters and began a thorough search. In my own drawer, I thought to myself, there were lots of little maps drawn on odd bits of paper, and many torn-off little medals, I thought, as I looked over every single bill, one by one. In my drawer, at least, I had all my mother's letters addressed to nonexistent hotels, I thought to myself. And I wouldn't open them, I thought. I had come across Judit's letter only by accident, I thought. Yes, I had a headache and I was looking for a pill, I thought. For one lousy Quarelin, that's all I wanted, I thought. But I never spied on anyone. And I shall never pester anyone with questions, I thought; but all my search turned up was a few movie programs and the already-familiar final report from the hospital; as if there were no cameras for taking family pictures, only passport-photo automats. As if nobody had ever taken those pictures posed in bathing suits or those underexposed semi-nude shots that are there at the bottom of every woman's drawer. I leafed through every book and album, but I couldn't find as much as a pressed flower. Then systematically I went through the shelves of her clothes closet: the undies and the towels, the stockings and the nightgowns. I checked the labels of her summer dresses to see where they had been made, I rifled through all
three bags and the pockets of the only winter coat; growing increasingly furious, I unpacked the boxes from a built-in closet in the foyer. Shoe brush and cream in one, medicine in another, in a wooden box a few tools, hammer, pliers, and a light bulb, but not a single object to indicate what may have happened to a person for almost thirty years. What had filled her life until on the bridge somebody said to her, Let's go then?

Then I heard a door slam somewhere and ran back into the bedroom, lay on the mattress as if I were asleep. I'd tell her that my mother, yes, my mother was screaming all night, I thought. That I've been asleep here since morning, I thought, because at home I can't even sleep, I thought, and then realized it must have been a neighbor with the door because Eszter worked until two, so I'd still have an hour. And I began to search the bathroom, though I was already more familiar with it than with ours at home. I went through everything from the tooth-brushing glass to the tampon box, but without knowing what I was really looking for and if I found something what I would do with it. What could possibly make a difference in the way her fingers clung to my shoulder blades, in the all-night tapping of the typewriter, or the way I grasped the door handle of the operating room from the outside and wanted to run in to tell them to stop what they were doing because I knew she was frightened? That whether the tumor was malignant or benign, they should keep their rubber-gloved hands out of her womb and certainly shouldn't take anything out of it to throw in the garbage can. Nothing I might find would change her panting echoing among the boulders on our outing to Irhás gully, the moral judgment of the old-lady guard in the Fine Arts Museum, or the omelet burnt to a crisp, I thought. Then it occurred to me that I may not have checked thoroughly enough one of her bags and went back to the small room. I took out the black pocketbook again and while I was spilling out wrinkled tissues and
used bus tickets, suddenly I felt a burning in the back of my neck and I thought I'd suffocate with shame.