Tranquility (8 page)

I thought I'd better phone ahead, and I already took out a two-forint coin, but it occurred to me that the Krémers might ask me about my mother. How we are, what news from Judit, things like that. I still had to invent all that, I thought. I can't tell them that my mother's gone crazy, I thought. I simply can't say that to anyone, ever, I thought. One cannot say of one's mother that she is mad, I thought, and tried to come up with some story; when it started to rain I took shelter under the eaves of a newsstand. From
there I kept watching the passing streetcars but still had no idea what to say if anybody asked me about my mother. When the tenth streetcar went by, I knew I'd never ever be able to talk to anyone about my mother. Then the vendor stuck his head out the tiny window between the daily news and the crossword puzzles and asked what I wanted, and I said, excuse me, I'm only waiting for someone, and let me have a
Film Theater Music
. And when he shoved the journal and the change into my hand, I realized I really had no place to go. To be more exact, I was free to go anywhere, from Kamchatka to Tierra del Fuego, and everywhere, whenever a news vendor scared me, I'd ask for
Film Theater Music
. Something like the way conscripted country boys on the front would grab a handful of earth while digging trenches, crumble the soil between their fingers and look at it to determine whether it would be better for wheat or barley.

.   .   .

A fiftyish, barefoot, half-drunken woman, wearing a red jersey dress, stumbled across the roadway. Horns were honking, some drivers were swearing; she spat in their direction and yelled back at them, I'mahookerrrr. The rain had washed the perm out of her thinning hair, and the raindrops rolled down her finger-thick makeup as on a piece of oilcloth. She held a vodka bottle and her shoes in one hand and a crow in the other. I'mahookerrrr, she kept saying, even while crossing the road, but not squawking as before, just for herself, with the impassivity of a rosary. She threw the bird on the sidewalk and tried to put on her shoes, but stumbled and leaned against the lamppost. Finally, she sat down on the curb, the crow flapping next to her on the asphalt.

By the time she managed to buckle the shoe straps on her ankles, the bird had expired. The broken wings clung motionless to the wet asphalt, as if
stuck in the tar, and she didn't even notice it until she finished with her shoes. “Rebeka is waking up,” she said and picked up the soaked pile of feathers and didn't want to believe that it was all over. Then she tried to pour vodka into the dead bird's beak; when she wasted all of the booze and had no more doubts, she grabbed the crow by the head and began to knock it against the curb and to scream, Rebeka is flying! Rebeka is flying! and the sidewalk was all bloody because the bird's head came halfway off the body.

At the streetcar stop a woman quickly covered the eyes of her child, don't look, she said, hideous woman, she said, but the child wanted to see everything, and got a slap in the face and then the mother dragged him to the far end of the center island. And the vendor yelled out from his stall, if you don't get the hell out of here, I'll kick you under the streetcar, but the woman did not let up, so the man ran out of his stall and grabbed her by the hair.

“Let go of her, right now,” I said, even though I had never interfered in street altercations before.

“Shut up or you'll get yours, too,” he said.

“I said let her go,” I said again, but a lot more quietly.

“Then
you
clear her out of here, and her fucking bird, too,” he said angrily and went back to his stall, still cursing, and slammed the door behind him.

The woman hugged my legs like some tree trunk, and I didn't know what to say. All that came to mind were phrases like cut it out already, or calm down already, and after a while, I felt as if I would have to spend the rest of my life standing at the corner of József Boulevard and Bérkocsis Street with this whore kneeling next to me in a puddle. I would have liked to flee; I should have left the whole thing to the news vendor, and then I got hold of the woman's arm at least to free myself from her embrace.

“Pick me up,” she said and I helped her get up on her feet; she waited, leaning on the lamppost, while I wrapped the dead crow in the
Film Theater Music
. She shoved the little bundle under her armpit, locked her arm into mine and we crossed over to the square. I picked out a bench whose seat hadn't been kicked to hell, but she didn't want to sit down.

“Here it's no good,” she said.

“Where do you live?” I asked, and she nodded toward one of the side streets, and then dumped the crow into a garbage bin. Her room opened from the rear staircase, opposite the filthy toilets, but she had to climb on top of one of the toilet tanks to get to the door handle she used as key, and finally we were inside the home that used to be a laundry room. Since the Hajdú washing machines had become popular, the District Council with great fanfare declared as temporary dwellings all public laundry rooms that saltpeter and decay had left more or less intact and were just big enough to accommodate an unmade bed, a small table, two easy chairs with broken armrests, a closet, and a small gas cooker.

Around the cooker and the sink, color magazines covered the flaking plaster. Some of the thumbtacks had fallen out and stars of the musical theater and models demonstrating the spring cardigans were drooping, the wet bricks penetrated the plunging necklines of the cover girls of
Rocket-Romances
; still, it wasn't mustiness I smelled but something I remembered from the birdhouse in the zoo. Then she opened the closet and suddenly chirping filled the room. Twenty-five small cages lined the shelves; the light awakened the canaries and the parakeets, the little seagulls and finches and turtledoves, but there were plain pigeons, too, Balkan doves, blackbirds, and a whole bunch of sparrows, and every one of them was fluttering at the bottom of its cage because its wings were broken.

“Got any cigarettes?” asked the woman, and I told her I had run out; she
got down on her knees and reached under the bed, coming up with a fruit jar full of change; she grabbed a handful of twenty- and fifty-fillér coins and shoved them in my hand. “Get a pack of Fecske,” she said.

.   .   .

The salesgirl was sweeping up. You have to come earlier, she said, the register is locked up already, and I said, you could ring it up tomorrow morning, but she said she couldn't, because what if I was an inspector, then they'd kick her out of her job, and I said I wasn't an inspector, only my mother couldn't come down to do her shopping because she broke her wing, and that made the girl laugh and she let me in under the half-lowered shutters, even though I said wing instead of foot only by mistake. I also bought four rolls and about eight ounces of baloney. When I got back, the woman was lying on the bed watching the noisy birds in the closet, the way people watch TV or look out the window to see what's happening on the street.

“Hungry?” I asked, and put the food on the small table.

“Go ahead, help yourself, I'm not eating today,” she said. She sat up and lit a cigarette while continuing to watch the birds. Outside, the toilet door slammed, and then a man's loud efforts got mixed in with the chirping of canaries and sparrows. “That's Nyitrai,” she said. “Been constipated for two weeks, struggling with his shit every night,” she said and then in her raspy voice yelled out to Nyitrai that he should take some castor oil, and he yelled back, “Shut your face, you goddamn slut, or I'll report you to the vice squad.”

“He'll never report me,” she said, waving her hand as if to reassure me, and to make me stay and eat in peace; then she put out her cigarette, lit the gas, and put on some water. “Cold water makes them sick,” she said, and from a paper bag, she strewed some seeds into the cages, while repeating to herself the words: “Rebeka is eating.”

“Where did you get the birds?” I asked.

“From here and there. The better ones I got from my clients, as gifts. But they all bring me only the ones with broken wings; they are cheaper or you can get them for nothing. It doesn't matter, here they can't fly anyway.”

“And that crow?”

“I just found it on the square. Some dog must have done it in.”

She checked the water with her pinky, filled the small drinking vessels and lit another cigarette.

“You wanna fuck me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“You're a gentleman. Probably hang out in the Anna-bar, don't you?”

“That's not the reason.”

“Only three hundred forints. I've been to the Anna myself.”

“I haven't.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“You can still want to, just because you're married. Married ones want to more than anybody.”

“Can I sleep here?” I asked.

“That costs you three hundred too. But only tonight, because I've got a customer for tomorrow. The mailman comes every Tuesday.”

“All right,” I said.

“He brought me the canary. But you pay now, in advance.”

“Of course,” I said, and took out three one-hundred forint bills, which she put in the closet behind one of the cages.

“They won't steal it from there. If somebody reaches in there, the noise would wake me up. They're better than a dog.”

“Is that you?” I asked, pointing to the photograph hanging over the bed.

“My mother.”

“Looks like you. Your mother was very beautiful,” I said.

“You don't have to suck up to me. For three hundred you can screw, too. And if you become a client, you'll bring me a bird.”

“I wasn't sucking up to you; she is really beautiful.”

“Yes she is. So just let her hang there and watch everything . . . Are you getting undressed or what?”

“All I really want is to sleep.”

“Your wife kicked you out or what?”

“I've got no wife,” I said.

“You don't have to talk about her if you don't want to.”

“Why can't you believe that I don't have a wife?” I asked.

“Doesn't make any difference to me. I can believe it,” she said. “But it's the married ones who play hard to get. But then they get used to coming here anyway, because wives spit out their jism. As if it made any difference what shit is made of.”

She closed the closet door to silence the birds.

“Here, drink this,” she said and handed me a half bottle of vodka she had fished out from behind the gas cooker, yanked the jersey dress off her body, undid the clasp of her bra, letting her enormous breasts spill out of the cups and unfold like crumpled sponges or wilted guelder roses in the rain.

The mailman must come here because of these breasts, I thought. He must have some mental problems, I thought. Cripples love to hide between giant breasts like these, I thought. And that guy in the wheelchair, whom I've been seeing around here every Sunday, he must be a client too, I
thought. He works the crank-arm with one hand, guides the wheels with one foot, and calmly goes through the red light, because he has nothing to lose anymore, I thought. On purpose he rides over the traffic cop's foot and yells at him, fuck your mother, lousy copper, but the policeman only jumps aside; doesn't even ask for the man's ID card; he's no fool, he knows there's no point trifling with someone who no longer has anything to lose, I thought. We'll try this out tomorrow, I thought. Cross in the red, and if they won't ask for our ID card we'll have nothing more to lose, either, I thought, and watched the woman kick off her shoes. Her feet were all muddy, so she took a kerchief from under the pillow, spat on it, wiped her feet and then threw the kerchief under the bed.

“Well, are you coming?” she asked.

“I'd rather sleep here in the easy chair,” I said, and took another slug from the vodka bottle, to fall asleep faster.

“You can take off your clothes, I'm no thief.”

“I know,” I said.

“When you're ready, turn off the light,” she said and pulled the cover over herself.

I pushed the two easy chairs together and took off my clothes; using my hands, I drank some water from the faucet because the vodka was burning my throat.

“Why do you want your mother to see everything?” I asked in the darkness.

“If you don't wanna fuck, go to sleep,” she said.

.   .   .

I was waiting for the train to clatter through the housing projects and the third-class green belt, because I loathe the outskirts of big cities. And
maybe there is nothing wrong with the outskirts. Maybe many people consider Kispest-Garden City a great improvement over the Grand Boulevard of downtown Budapest, but for the have-nots, the awful Havana settlement is an even greater improvement – over nothing. Not for me, though. A long time ago, whenever I awoke in one of these prefab apartments I would panic. I never thought I'd find my way home, and throughout the years I filled a whole drawer with bits of papers on which I drew a million little maps; some I did with burnt matchsticks because in bed there was nothing else to write with. “But it's pretty clear, isn't it my lovely, you keep going on this street here, at the ABC you turn right, and then smartly throw this slip of paper with the address and telephone number into the garbage can, because I don't like it when in the middle of fucking they mix me up with some hotline for psychological support.” And of course, some were written on napkins with heart patterns, or on a notebook page, and some were penned with lipstick on a piece of fabric torn from a dress. “But you'll keep it, won't you, my treasure, here is the address and telephone number. So, you walk straight ahead on this street, turn right at the ABC, and that's where the stop is. And now get a move on, because my father could be here any minute from his night shift, or my husband might be back from Leningrad.” And on that occasion I ran to catch the last streetcar exactly the same way I had when, on another occasion, I mixed up a teacher-cum-model with the psychological hotline, and in the middle of screwing I broke down, weeping right into her face. In short, if we consider that after coitus, one way or another, one feels like fleeing, we can see that it's a pity to waste all those notebook pages and heart-patterned napkins.