Tranquility (32 page)

“Good day,” Mrs. Berényi greeted me.

“Good day,” I said.

“My condolences,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Are you coming in?” she asked, and held the gate open, and I said thank you again, then stopped in the lobby and busied myself with the mailbox so we wouldn't have to go up the stairs together. By mistake, I gave the bell two short rings, as I always did to let my mother know it was me, but then I realized this was only a conditioned reflex, like turning off the light, though it hadn't been turned on.

.   .   .

It was autumn cleaning time and I thought I'd get rid of all the back issues of
Apothecary courier
and
Radio TV News
. Other piles of junk were accumulating in front of the buildings because the next day the Public Sanitation
Department would haul away the vast amount of filth one wasn't supposed to throw in the garbage bins during the year. At times like this, you can see destroyed pianos, canned beans from before World War Two, kitchen sinks and shitty birdcages, bicycle wrecks and cruddy bathtubs, outdated novels for young girls, illustrated colored magazines and black and white TV sets, grandma-smelling sofas and uncensored family photo albums including the more intimate moments of the wedding night. Reluctant inheritors threw out Singer sewing machines by the tons, as well as spools of Lánchíd thread, moth-eaten loden coats and Potemkin baby carriages, sets of aluminum cutlery that were replaced by gilded ones. On the curbs, aluminum food-carriers smelled of decaying vegetables, and abandoned bedpans made the whole district stink of urine. Every year on this day, the grime and filth of three generations were gathered in front of every house, and on the morrow the Sanitation Department's truck ground up all of it, and for a long time I did not understand how a streetful of garbage could fit into that one container truck, but one of the sanitation people told me it was a special mechanism, you see, that can grind even steel, reduce a tub to the size of a chamber pot; if you could put a house inside it, it would become smaller than a garage because hydraulics can not only grind but also flatten everything like a pancake, you see. The method was developed in Germany where this sort of garbage collection has a tradition, you see, he said and offered me a cigarette that was left by American soldiers in some attic, and still tasted all right.

“Better than a Kossuth,” he said.

“It really is,” I said, and then the truck driver yelled they were done and his partner should get on the rear platform because they were on their way to the housing settlement; so the man I'd been talking to stubbed out the
forty-year-old Chesterfield, got on the small steel platform, and grabbed the handle. Three people sat up front in the cabin, while my man, with one of his mates, stood in the rear, next to the maw of the grinder, like an orange-caped guardian statue; from his belt hung a plastic bag full of bits of junk that still had some potential use. After the funeral, I thought I would take out all the newspapers and empty the maid's room, making it into a nursery. I carried outside all the moth-eaten clothes and the bedding that smelled of mint tea and almonds as well as all her towels; I emptied all the drawers, made a sack out of a sheet and swept everything into it from the makeup table: the powders, perfume bottles, and the vitamin-rich skin creams that were not worth a shit, even though she had rubbed on herself an amount that cost more than a trip around the world; nothing helped, the web of nothingness entangled her as the spider does the rose chafer, and I also threw in the sack everything from the fridge, and then I rolled up all the rugs in the apartment.

“It's too bad about that beautiful rug,” said our neighbor from across the way who, with his acned son, was trying to take their old refrigerator down the stairs because they brought a Zanussi from Vienna.

“Mind your own garbage,” I said, and I could hear him from the next landing as he psychoanalyzed me to his son, that these people have never been normal, and who knows how long he had kept his dead mother in the apartment, but I didn't care.

I wanted to clean this crypt of every bit of scenery. I had already thrown out Lady Macbeth's armchair and Laura Lenbach's bed, and still the place was stifling. Then I found the small axe with which I used to whittle down the bottom of the Christmas tree to fit it into its base, and I smashed the kitchen credenza with it as if it were her skull.

“Oh, my God, what are you doing?” asked Mrs. Berényi, stopping dead in her tracks as she reached our doorway, because I was trying to chop up the credenza while also yelling, drop dead already you slut.

“Get out of here!” I yelled at her, but she couldn't move; she just stood there staring as if nailed to the doorstep. “What are you looking at? You want to report me?”

“Oh no, no. Why would I want to report you?” she said, turning pale.

“Don't you lie to me! You saw me at the front gate! You know damn well I wasn't even home!”

“When?” she asked.

“Stop acting like a fool! But I didn't kill her! You want me to show you the doctor's report? Cardiac arrest! Is that clear?! And I wasn't even home! I couldn't have killed her if I wasn't home, could I?”

“Of course you couldn't have,” she said, but her husband was already coming toward us, the man she had been trying to divorce for twenty years.

“How dare you touch her, you scum?” Berényi fell on me, and I thought my collarbone would crack in his hands, but the woman yanked him off me.

“Leave him alone. Can't you see he is delirious?” she said.

“I'll break his kisser for him, anyway! How dare he raise his hand to you?”

“Let him go, you beast, he only put his hand on my arm,” she said and pulled her husband out to the corridor.

.   .   .

I had a good long cry and then I fell into a coma-like sleep. By the time I staggered to my feet near the front door, it had gotten dark. I thought of
going to the Berényi's to apologize, but instead I began to clean up the mess. The crying did me good because I felt no further urge to destroy anything; I only wanted to get rid of everything superfluous. I worked late into the night, hauling out the remaining rubbish, but also took care not to ruin anything that could still be useful. Around eleven, only the yellowed walls with the contours of the removed furniture remained of my mother's room, and only a few small items were left in the kitchen: an enameled coffee mug, utensils, and some pots; the ones that hadn't been smashed. There was still stuff to be thrown out but my hands were full of blisters, so I sat in the window and watched the flashlight-toting scavengers who at this time usually comb the district with backpacks and small carts, and collect things according to pre-determined categories.

There are those who remove only the switches from washing machines, and there are antique-hunters who sell everything on the flea market the very next day. I also found, on one such night, a waterlogged complete works of Marx and a handle-operated coffee grinder. Judit's brass music stand also came from one of these annual waste piles. She and I scoured the neighborhood exactly the way these scavengers were doing it with their flashlights.

“Put down that chamber pot,” she said.

“Majolica,” I said.

“Yes, and crusted with kidney stone,” she said.

“One just like this is playing in
The Miser
,” I said.

“Then wait until the show closes; nobody pissed in that one,” she said, and I put back the chamber pot where I had taken it from; but five minutes later she had no objection to the warped music stand because that at least made sense. Not that making sense or usefulness was always the deciding
factor; we never reached a stage of specialization, as have those who collect, say, only children's toys or only clothes or only scrap metal. I have even seen one man riding around in a car whose roof rack was full of broken fregolies, the wooden-framed clothes lines usually suspended from kitchen ceilings.

.   .   .

If they do a good job of compacting, all the scenery would fit into a suitcase, I thought, and watched a man downstairs preparing to disassemble our TV set.

“Don't take it apart; there's nothing wrong with it,” I called down from the window, but he just looked at me.

“It works, really; I took it downstairs. The remote control must be there somewhere too.”

“Diddle your own little dong, not mine,” he said, bashing in the screen with a length of pipe and then sashaying on to the next pile.

I found a bit of my mother's kind of mint tea in a teapot, and then watched an altercation between three Gypsy women over the better dresses. Some wanted the bedding, others only the wooden shelves of the kitchen cabinet, but everybody found something to take. The Berényis came home early in the morning; I withdrew from sight but listened to their squabble. No, you won't bring any death-reeking furniture into the apartment, to which the woman retorted; if only you were a theatergoer you'd know who she was. In the end, they lugged upstairs Irina's or Masha's marble-topped night table to be used as a shoe locker. The marble top alone is worth an apology, I thought, and then continued to watch the other scroungers. I'd doze off once in a while, but I wanted to wait for morning, to see the pelican-mouthed machine gobble up all the remains.

.   .   .

The no man's land of awakening is basically like sand blowing in the wrong direction or rather a swamp, a morass working its way upward and outward and from which one may manage to get out but feels no better for having done so. The apartment was more desolate than a barracks. That, at least, did not bother me. The blanket clung to me like seaweed, and at first I thought it was plain sweat, but soon I also smelled the stifling odor of cages. No, this won't work. I won't wait around until, at age thirty-five, I start urinating in bed again, I thought. Outside, everything was also wet; the rain had washed gray the plane trees of the Museum Garden, which is usual in the autumn. It must have been late in the morning, so I must have slept about twenty-eight hours, and I had good reason to. But now I must go over there, immediately, I thought. I took the blanket to the tub; for a while, I didn't know what to do with the mattress. Then I poured some water on it, took it out of the bed and leaned it against the tile stove. Yes, I must go over there now, immediately, I thought. Given my possibilities, I saw everything fairly clearly. I might put it this way: for the first time in a very long while, I saw clearly everything I should have been seeing clearly for a very long time. In general, I had the same fears as before, fear of everything unknown, and in general, I was as confident in myself as I was at the time when, as a boy, I had sent my mother's lover back to his mother's cunt. I'll get five years, maybe eight. Lots of others have endured that much, I thought. They'll probably take into consideration that I am willing to confess, I thought. They must do that, especially since theoretically I could get away with it completely. But I will not wet my bed again, I thought, and I was about to put on clean clothes when the bell rang. For a while, I hesitated in the foyer, then the bell rang again and I decided that
Eszter must know it too. No point continuing the clowning, she'd find out anyway. One cannot explain away a five-year absence as one could possibly deny a lover, I thought, and when I finally opened the door, the priest was standing in the doorway.

.   .   .

“I had things to do in Pest. I thought I'd pay you a visit,” he said, and I didn't even recognize him in those first few seconds. Or rather, I did recognize him but it seemed as if I had seen him many years ago in, say, a train station's waiting room, even though it was only about a week and a half earlier.

“Who gave you my address?” I asked nervously.

“You did. Am I in the way?”

“No. I mean, yes. It's not very convenient just now. I'm cleaning,” I said, and we were still standing by the door.

“I'm in town until this evening. I could come back later, if it's all right with you.”

“No, it's better now. It's just that I'm in a hurry because I'm late already,” I said and stepped aside so he could come in.

“I thought you were cleaning.”

“Of course I am. Except I must hurry. But please, sit down,” I said and led him into my room, because it still had a semblance of a living space. Pulling up his cassock, he stepped over the rubbish piles, left over bits of furniture and shards of plates, and while I threw my clothes off the armchair, I noticed that his gaze halted for a second on the mattress leaning against the tile stove.

“I spilled the water on it while washing the floor,” I said and was already very sorry I had let him in.

“That happens to me, too,” he said, and I felt like asking him what makes
him
pee in bed.

“I'm sorry but I can't offer you anything; at the moment I don't even have soup powder.”

“Never mind. I only popped in for a second, just to ask how you are.”

“I'm fine.”

“Really, please tell me if I'm in the way. I still have things to take care of before my train.”

“All right, I will tell you when your time is up. What happened to your Land Rover, break down?”