Tranquility (19 page)

“I have to go,” I said.

“Go, then,” she said and kissed my eyes, and her face was as white as a sheet, though sometimes I come up with better similes. Then, in the December slush, I made my way home. There were candle- or Christmas tree lights on in the more populous apartments, in other places candles plus TV, but out on the street only a drunken Gypsy musician and a dog-walking old woman violated the curfew.

.   .   .

Where have you been son?

I had things to do Mother.

This is the time when everybody's at home with their family. That's the custom.

I know. That's why I hurried home, Mother, and then, using the three glass orbs and the desiccated fudge, I decorated the pine branch stuck in a vase, as if they had been here since '44 when little Friciberek had brought them.

You've got a letter from Judit, Mother. She sent it with an acquaintance of mine.

She's never done that before.

Well, she's done it this time. In Nice, she ran into Frici Berek.

Who is that, Son?

You don't know him, Mother, I said, and then she took out the world atlas and the felt pen and while she looked for Nice to mark it with an X, I
lit the candles and brought over the Weér family tree I had drawn up based on notes Eszter had taken in the State Archives, because we thought that Mother's deranged soul would like that best. But my mother's face slowly turned gray, and by then I knew that mad people's hell was reality. That she would never forgive me that we were merely a collateral branch of the family, which meant that half of Greater Hungary would go to some cousin six times removed.

Not even Christmas is holy for you, is it?! I will not let anybody rob me; do you hear? I know you and your whore are planning to clean me out! You screw her and then you show up here with this filth! she screamed and threw the framed family tree at me like a handful of shit. I didn't feel anything, though the glass broke on my forehead. I got a hand broom and dustpan to clean up the splinters so I could go to sleep.

Over my dead body, she said.

Nobody wants to clean you out, Mother.

Hyenas! But don't think I'd let myself!

I don't think that, Mother.

I'll denounce you!

Go ahead, put it in writing, Mother, I'll mail it for you.

I'm not writing anything. I'll report you to Kádár. He'll take care of you.

Kádár is dead, Mother.

Really?! We'll see about that, she said and piece by piece began to throw out of the closet all her clothes, most of them moth-eaten, until she found her black silk suit. Then she began to get dressed. Although the web of nothingness had entangled her body as the spider would the rose chafer, passengers of the number seven bus would still demand not to pass Cleopatra;
mothers coming out of the Pioneer department store would still cover their children's eyes, and wives of actors, sedated wrecks all of them, would still press their husbands' heads against the small window of the oven so that even in their dreams these men would continue to see their silk-suited whore becoming charred.

What are you doing, Mother?

Scared the shit out of you, didn't I? I'll have you locked up. I'll have both you and your slut locked up for forgery, she said and tore the drawing out of the frame and stuffed it into her pocket to prevent me from destroying the evidence. When she put on her fur coat, the dustpan was shaking in my hand and I thought that in a second I'd choke her; that I'd shove down her throat all those thirteen years along with the Weér family tree and the broken glass.

Never! Never, you trollop! I screamed, and grabbing her arm I threw her on the bed.

Never, you understand?! I panted, and while I kept yanking the fur coat off her, she laughed into my face.

.   .   .

Shreds of the moon-globe were scattered on the mattress like a smashed egg from which a wild animal had sucked out the yolk. As I stood in the empty apartment, I realized why she had asked for a baby instead of a full moon, and I was hoping I'd still find both of them.

I began calling the hospitals, found out she was in the Kútvölgyi, but by the time I got there, the nurse said she had been transferred from gynecology to neurology-psychiatry, and there would be no visiting hours until tomorrow. “She's my wife!” I screamed at the nurse in the corridor. “I'll have you fired if you don't let me in! I am a writer, I can have you thrown
out, you shitbrain!” And there she was, lying in Ward number 14, next to the barred window, her limbs strapped down, and she looked through me as through opaque glass.

I had learned from my mother that with booze and cigarettes one could accomplish a lot; I managed to get her into an empty room. I could even take the straps off her, but she didn't move for three days. I could read the word “two” on her lips, but even that she said to somebody else. And then she recovered, more or less, from the drug-induced daze, and on New Year's day she was disconnected from the infusion tubes and we were walking around in the room.

“Let's sit down,” I said, because her legs were shaking.

“Not yet. It feels good,” she said, even though she stayed upright only because I was holding her. We did another round, five steps to the door, five to the window, and then I picked her up and lowered her into the bed.

“Don't let them give me shocks,” she said.

“Of course I won't,” I said.

She kept scraping the peeling paint on the wall. She broke off a tiny piece, put it in her mouth and then spat it out.

“I forgot,” she said. “You know that I only forgot it, don't you?”

“What did you forget?” I asked.

“The medicine. To take the medicine,” she said, and finally broke down.

.   .   .

In coarse woolen clothes, we were standing on the shore of the Danube, in some boggy area. A small boat was floating downstream with a seven- or eight-year-old child in it, also in a coarse woolen shirt and with a blindfold on his eyes. When he reached us, he took off the black kerchief and looked
us over. There was neither calling to account nor reproach in his look. He simply sized us up and then replaced the black kerchief; the flatboat continued floating downstream and it already vanished in the rising vapors when I realized that nobody operated the ores; that a minute earlier the river had come to a halt in front of us.

Often, I had to keep telling my dreams until dawn. She'd lie next to me and, looking at us at such times, a person might have thought this was idyll personified, but there was nothing idyllic about it. Rather, what it reminded me of most was men telling their newfound sweethearts about the old ones, mainly at the woman's urging – because I want to know everything about you – and the man falling for it. If he cannot recall a tiny detail or two, he invents them on the spot, and then suddenly he notices that the woman had already bitten her lips bloody and rubbed her cigarette butts into smithereens in the ashtray. Yes, I think this is what this ritual most resembled. She had never asked me about my former lovers, but she insisted on hearing my dreams, and for years I thought she was jealous of them because of my mother. Then it turned out she wanted to hear them because for years she had been unable to recall any of her own dreams and felt as if this had deprived her half of her life.

“You've hardly dreamt of me at all,” she would say.

“Because I've learned to specialize; I deal only in nightmares,” I said and didn't tell her the one with the flatboat because that wasn't the kind she would have liked to hear.

.   .   .

“When did you have the first one?” I asked.

“Don't pry,” she said

“It's different. Now I have to know.”

“It's not different at all. It's exactly the same, do you understand? Exactly.”

“God, this can drive one mad,” I said.

“Relax, nothing will ever drive you mad,” she said.

“That hurt more than if you'd slapped me in the face.”

“Nothing will drive me mad, either. Is that better now?”

“No, it isn't. I'd rather you hit me, but please don't keep silent, like a grave.”

“Your similes are getting more and more atrocious,” she said. “And now I think you should go, please.”

“I'm not going anywhere. You've never talked to me like this before.”

“Then get used to it, and please leave.”

I walked out the door without saying goodbye, but only got to the main gate.

A man was just lowering a Christmas tree on a rope from the third floor. The dry pine needles were spinning in the slush, and when the tree reached the ground the woman waiting on the sidewalk checked the red tinfoil wrappers for forgotten fudge, and then with a manicuring scissors she cut the strings like an umbilical cord and threw the tree between two parked cars.

“Send the kid down with the broom,” she yelled to the man leaning out of the window.

“Forget it,” said the man.

“I won't forget it. I don't want to hear Mrs. Dorák telling me how I always leave a mess behind.”

“All right, I'll throw it down.”

“Don't throw it, because it'll hit the car.” By the time I turned around, a
child was running down the stairs, the broom between his legs and an oilcloth cowboy hat on his head, probably a gift from Baby Jesus, and I heard his mother say, here, as she shoved the last bit of fudge into his hand.

Eszter was lying on the mattress, her body racked by sobbing.

“I never want to walk out the door like that again,” I said and lay down next to her. She nestled into my winter coat, but even there, with her silence, she remained as alone as if God had forgotten to create a world around her.

*
MÁV: Hungarian State Railways

*
March 15th: Beginning of the failed War of Independence against Austria (1848). October 23rd: Beginning of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union. Both March 15th and October 23rd are Hungarian national holidays.

“wonderful
, it's wonderful! Just make it a bit showier; after all, it's Paganini,” said Professor Vágvölgyi.

“The score is Paganini's, the violin is mine,” Judit said, and the professor asked her to save her witty remarks for later, for the reporters, to which Judit responded by putting the violin on the platform floor. “Go ahead, you play it then. Play it the way I do, and clown around at the same time. Go ahead, I'm listening,” she said, and when she saw that the blood froze in the veins of everyone present, she walked out of the room, but they wouldn't dare expel her because then they couldn't send her to Belgrade. In the last few months, she didn't even go to the Academy, because she practiced twelve hours a day. For her, the score on paper was something like a human-shaped hollow at the bottom of the cooled-off lava, which she had to fill with herself. That's why she covered the score with all kinds of signs and comments, like the 3:30 express at Zugló; Mother in Agony and Ecstasy (Second Act); Greco: Mary Magd. – all her sheet music was full of things like this, weeks before she even picked up the violin.

“This should be enough for now; you'll kill yourself,” I said.

“I'm very far from that,” she said and dipped a cracker in the salted milk, put it on her tongue, rubbed resin on the bow and started all over again. Interestingly, she never thought of slyly breaking a string and waiting for the effect. Someone seeing her only for a few minutes may have thought it boring to watch someone standing on the stage like a poplar but in time this sight grew ever more menacing, and in the end one wished it would disintegrate. Snap her spine, knock her down with an axe, anything but letting her continue standing like that with legs together and eyes closed, because that can drive one mad.

And the more furiously my mother asked me what is this filth son and the harder it was for Eszter to find the letters on the typewriter, the more certain I became that my stories were good or at least good enough for everyone to hear their own silences in this period or in that comma. I also knew that I couldn't expect more than this, because I also hear only my own silence in the pauses of, say, Radnóti's
The Bor Notebook
, and that is as it should be. Still, I dreaded the book, because I imagined it to be like the hollow of a Pompeian corpse with which everyone does whatever he or she wants. One could lie in it, naked, but one could also make a cast of it, using the cheapest plaster, and I would find that hard to accept. It's not that simple to let go of a sentence; and when I received the publisher's letter that not in the spring, because of budget-modification problems, but definitely in the fall, since the various literary readers' reports were excellent, and Éva Jordán, Editor wishes continued good work, I felt that my being buried alive had been postponed. Eszter, however, was furious, as if it were not even my book, and I could barely talk her out of going to the publisher's and asking them what they were thinking.

“You're a bit biased,” I said.