by Peter Nadas
Who in fact was an old gentleman, this dear old lady colleague of yours, if I’m not mistaken, came Lady Erna’s venomous response.
Immediately she thought she shouldn’t have said this, but the sentence had spilled out of her with elemental force. As if she had said, I know you were nothing but a whore and you still are. And now, with your mawkish sentimentality, you are trying to put one over on my son.
She could see through the young woman, who herself had the feeling she shouldn’t have come up with such a big lie.
And I’m blushing, too, so the old bitch can see how big a lie it was.
They were both slow to say more. The two statements remained hanging in the air. Neither one could be retracted.
But why say such things to me, why, Gyöngyvér whimpered under her breath, as if still moaning and whining about her headache, and as if, above all, she must convince herself that something terribly unfair had taken place. Though she sensed that her childish self-pity led her to an open clearing where there was no shelter. I don’t understand, she whined, I don’t understand at all why you hate me so much.
What are you talking about, may I ask.
I feel it, yes, I feel that you hate me.
Well, if that’s how you feel, one can’t argue with feelings, Lady Erna answered severely. But you constantly prevaricate, my child. And that’s putting it mildly.
Their faces seemed to be glowing in a peculiar light.
They could not acknowledge the source of the light, they could not look aside, and right now neither of them could afford even a flutter of eyelashes without risking the other drawing conclusions. Neither of them had room to move to let the other one pass by. As if they had been trying to avoid this very moment, or rather, as if they had been on the way to it. This is what they both felt. Lady Erna was filled with restrained expectations, Gyöngyvér with light-headedness, with the mature vitality and explosive superiority of youth. As in a game of team handball, when her movements were most intimately her own, dexterity, anticipation, and strength all working together. And these feelings now painted vaguely ironic smiles on their faces, which simultaneously spoke to itself as well as to the other.
At least for a moment, they both laid down their weapons.
Which made Gyöngyvér the more audacious one; Lady Erna’s audacity gave her permission. The way it usually happens on the handball court when she gets the ball, makes a lightning-quick movement with it, feints, steps to the side, takes off, and has already broken through the line of outmaneuvered girls. She seized Lady Erna’s hand, the older woman was ready for anything but this, and did what she should have done minutes earlier but could not without permission: she pressed it, held it in her hand, and kept it there.
The elderly heart-patient friend had indeed been a gentleman who kept her, she admitted, but fortunately he was no less seriously ill than her female colleague might have been. Somehow, there was some truth in all her lies. She apologizes for every one of them, belatedly and in advance. And here I am holding your hand because for a long time I’ve been admiring and envying your beautiful hands, your delicate fingers, your exquisite rings and the fine, thick gold bracelets that slide down your bony wrists. I love it all, love it. Perhaps the way I love every bone in your son’s body, his skin, his hair, his smell, his voice, his breath; to me they are jewels. I’d like to adorn myself with them every night. I love him, love him. There is no part of him I can do without.
Oh, I would die without them.
Now, as at other times, she turned her self-pity into a passionate humiliation. With her slippery subservience she matched the selfishness, rejection, and superiority emanating from Lady Erna—eerily reminiscent of how she treated her son. She rejected him; there was hardly anyone in her life she had not rejected for the sake of some unfulfilled desire. There was no such person. Her daughter had rebelled against her and perished because of her; but her son, nevertheless, followed her loyally and unconsciously. Like a dog. For not only their flesh but also the quality of their selfishness and sense of superiority were alike.
Gyöngyvér went so far as to bend over and kiss the beautiful hand. She usually took men’s cocks into her mouth when she bent over so nicely.
Surrendering to their childlike selfishness.
In this fleeting moment, the silver box in her hand both confused and somewhat hindered Lady Erna. Her hand would have felt good clasping Gyöngyvér’s gloved fingers. The skin of the glove was smooth, tight, and cool. She saw the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck for a moment. She was strongly tempted to kiss the closely shaved female nape, thin as a child’s. Her sense of aesthetic proportions would have demanded as much, as did her desire erupting from the depths, hitting her briefly and bluntly.
She shuddered; she was so moved her body grew damp.
If only Gyöngyvér’s lips had tarried a moment longer on her hand. They were soft, silky, and cool, like the touch of a lizard. But Gyöngyvér quickly sat up.
She could never count on mutuality or reciprocity; Ágost had never pampered her with either.
The dark gray clunky Pobeda reached the entrance to Margit Island and slowed down. Not so much because of the turn but because of the terrific northerly gusts of wind. This is the highest point of the bridge as it rises from the two riverbanks. Arriving from the Pest side, and with nothing else to do, one registers the sight of the hills ahead. But the cabbie could not have seen much of them now. The windshield wipers were working at top speed and the wind pressed the rain’s myriad drops like a robe around the taxi. An opaque curtain was dripping down each window. It was as if nocturnal darkness had descended on them, but with something continually illuminating or flashing in it. The sky turned black and dense over the entire city; but beyond, somewhere in the south, over the flatlands of Csepel, and in the west and north, behind the hills of Buda, the clouds opened up. The rim of the sky was clearing fast in a wide arc and from there a flat, white light shone into the bottom of the darkness. The mass of clouds, gathered and piled up by the strong winds, slowly began to move eastward where flatland, clouds, rain, and city seemed to touch. And the flatly falling light was reflected in the mud-darkened foam on the surface of the Danube, illuminating from below, under the swirling firmament, the faces observing each other. There was something frightening, otherworldly in this phenomenon, though it may have had a simple explanation.
The cabbie correctly sensed that something unusual was happening between the two women behind him.
They were both laughing, but very quietly. It was a vocal confirmation of the knowing twinkle in their eyes.
As if Gyöngyvér were saying, you see, I’m not lying now, I admit it; and Erna were responding, my sweet, as far as I’m concerned you can lie all you want. I understand you even when I pretend not to. And the laughter had nothing to do with the old female colleague in Gyöngyvér’s life who happened to be an old gentleman with heart trouble; they were beyond that already, had forgotten all about it, had brushed it aside. And they were laughing not at the sudden revelation but out of embarrassment, at their mutual state of exposure.
Each sat facing the other as if facing a mirror.
As if they both had drawn in their bellies, thrust out their chests, and with tightly closed thighs pressed themselves to the seat. It was pleasurable to be here together, at each other’s disposal. They were entrusted to each other, and that is very different from the usual, everyday routine, deeper and more carelessly familiar. If this was true, then it was possible to get to Erna through Ágost, and Gyöngyvér hardly even noticed how it happened. Whatever the moment contained had no opposite pole, no charge of attraction or repulsion, and therefore the moment’s space and duration became infinite. And Erna did not even notice that the dying man, who might no longer be alive, had vanished from her life. A burst bubble would leave more of a trace. Their gazes opened wide onto each other, mutually revealed that each was not unacquainted with these lesser-known territories where no males ever enter. Of the two, Gyöngyvé
r was more experienced but also the more cautious and reticent. Lady Erna had always relied more on her imagination and memory, which made her demanding and greedy. But now the cabbie, much as he would have liked to, could not look in the rearview mirror. The wind was pushing the taxi this way and that; the entrance road to the island—still paved with the same smooth yellow ceramic tiles produced in Demén’s brick factory in Budakalász back in 1898 when they began building the ramp off the middle pier of the bridge, resting on the tip of the island—was slippery.
A careless thought or a wrong move while taking the curve would have been enough to send the cab into a spinning waltz.
The two women did not notice.
Their sensation was much more brutal than what is felt by little girls crazy about their female teachers, or by female teachers dazed by their own feelings for their frenzied pupils.
Every emotion has a primal state, the seat of instinct. Laughter had thrown them back into this primal state, whence they could continue, arm in arm and led by instinct, down another path. Instincts work the same way in everyone. But primal states, to which everyone always returns, are not the same and may not even resemble one another. In some people, the primal state lives on as a single experience that the person remembers only vaguely or would prefer to forget. Others forget so successfully that a vacuum is created where the experience had been; and the only reason to be aware of deliberate forgetting is that one cannot fill the vacuum with any old thing, for then it becomes a burning lack that can no longer be named. In yet others, the primal state means a chain of rippling interwoven experiences that cannot be untangled, and whether or not a person remembers which sensation produced which subsequent sensation, the primal state reveals itself according to the person’s instinctual needs.
Showing one of its pulsating and throbbing countenances—now this one, now that one.
Lady Erna, from a distance of several decades, looked back to the sole experience she cherished above all others as a sacrament. Gyöngyvér might have looked in several directions but did not want to see her experiences, neither yesterday’s nor yesteryear’s.
Yesterday’s experience filled the place of everything.
Instinct cannot be steered.
Once it stirs in its reeking den, there is nothing can keep it from flashing into view a few unavoidable images from a primal experience, even if it does not show the entire storehouse. One of Gyöngyvér’s primal experiences was that she had no one in the world and therefore felt as though she herself did not exist either. Or the very opposite: she did have somebody somewhere in the world, and the moment she could find this somebody would mark the beginning of her existence. Until then, pitying, cruel, caring, or indifferent girls and women would keep passing her on from hand to hand because they didn’t know what to do with her. She does not even have to look at them; one is just like the other. They are different in every way but similar in that none of them is the woman she belongs to.
Who does not exist.
The stream of others never dried out, however; they kept coming, replacing one another as though there was a magic source somewhere from which women sprang. She had had enough of women.
She’d preferred to look for a man who would supplant the only woman she’d been looking for, would fill the empty space.
Although she had spent her life in unceasing search, she never found what she was looking for, or rather, she always almost found it: a man, after all.
Lady Erna paid attention to only one young woman, one very special creature, in whom once, and only once, she had had a clear glimpse of herself. In her mind, she always returned to the same one and only young woman, whom she had failed to see for many decades though she knew she was still alive, and whom she truly did not want to see in the flesh since she could always see her in other women.
In the stormy half-light, in the taxi saturated with their perfumes and the acrid smell of tobacco, each stared coldly at the other’s strange face. As if the head of the young woman had been cast of bronze. Lady Erna had no use for a living person. But Gyöngyvér could see a double face in place of the single one. One of them wore face powder hastily applied, unevenly painted lipstick, and fatty beads of mascara as superfluous and clumsy armor.
No traces of their little laugh together remained on these faces.
Mother and son looked at her simultaneously, and if the son belonged to her, then she belonged to the mother.
This was terrible. This was no laughing matter. Once again, both women’s lips trembled with emotion. Which could not be taxed further. What is this, fumed Lady Erna to herself, in place of her own infuriated mother. And she fumed for Gyöngyvér too, because she had to be a mother to the younger woman. If the taxi hadn’t swerved a second time, in their embarrassment they probably would have leaned back on the seat and continued their chatter in an entirely different direction; it had strayed into dangerous territories and times.
The cabbie swore quietly to himself; the women heard only his muffled grumbling, not the innocent curse.
The swerve made them fall on each other and they couldn’t have said whether it was by accident or whether their instincts, quickly and almost shamelessly, took advantage of the moment. And once in this situation, they would have liked to touch each other’s face with their lips, lightly and fleetingly, to put an end, as it were, to the painful comedy that could not have been avoided. But this too turned out differently because of the taxi’s slipping and swerving. Lady Erna’s soft, lipstick-covered lips did encounter Gyöngyvér’s firm, perhaps too firm, dry lips—not directly, but as if the edge of one mouth enclosed the corner of the other. And each of them felt the other was the initiator, and deliberately so. That was horrible. Before one mouth could slip over the other completely, they both recoiled and restrained themselves. The swerve, the inevitable pleasure, the jostling, their fitful protestations, the entire turmoil was enough for Gyöngyvér’s hard little forehead to push Lady Erna’s wide-brimmed hat off her head.
Gyöngyvér reached for it carelessly. She did not catch it but managed to knock the silver box out of Lady Erna’s hand. Both women squealed, one after the other; and the large black hat adorned with a shiny cluster of ribbons landed gracefully on the front seat next to the cabbie, while the silver box snapped open and the blindingly white pills scattered on the ribbed rubber floor mat.
Relieved and squealing, they laughed simultaneously. The cabbie, busy steadying his vehicle, could not help them. They fell silent in almost the same instant.
They were both gripped by the fright they had caused each other.
The residual sensation of the other’s lips clung to their own like a painful mark that brands rather than rewards. But it was not so easy to dismiss the whole thing. To arrive at the bedside of a dying man with one’s loins swelling with blood, squealing and laughing, as they were doing now, was a bit much. Sane persons do not behave like this; they expect better of themselves. In their confusion they froze for a few moments, the silence turning icy between them.
At the same time, she was suckling a baby on an unupholstered Dutch chair.
Gyöngyvér moved first; bending down, she began to collect the pills from the rubber mat.
Oh, I’m so ashamed, she said, switching back to her plaintive tone, I’m so sorry. Don’t be angry with me, I always wind up making trouble.
Come, come, never mind, replied Lady Erna, and she too bent down to look for the etui, which had disappeared under the front seat. She had to be careful not to crumple the documents in her lap. There was also the danger of bumping into each other again.
Oh, leave it, let me, I’m so sorry.
Oh, come on, you silly little thing.
I’ll pick them up.
To do the job, Gyöngyvér had to remove her gloves. The little white pills were stuck between the ribs of the rubber mat. In taking off the gloves she felt as if she had indecently bared herself in front of the wrong person.
She did not understand why she would
feel this way about the mother.
And then, like a huge splash, the mass and loud noise of the wave filled the entire cavity in the rocks. For a second, between the uprights of the bridge railing, she could see the churning, windblown water below.
Would you mind giving me back my hat, said Lady Erna to the cabbie.
Right away, give me a moment, please, replied the cabbie, coolly and readily.
The young men, glittering with perspiration, interrupting their even and until now most powerful strokes, suddenly drew in their oars with a single decisive movement. She could not take her eyes off them. All she could think of was that they too were capable of it, and might have even done it during the night. She saw, and she wanted to shout to them, that in the next instant they’d be smashed against the rock. This sight appeared to be closer than the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck; she was still looking for the pills on the taxi floor. With a loud report, the waves slapped against the side of the boat. It was a light, narrow boat, but much heavier than the dinghies on the Tisza.
Signora, heads down, mind the hats, Signore, your head, down, the young men shouted in their bright voices, in the early sunny hours, as they were tossed by the murmuring gentle waves of the sweetly fragrant sea; then the boat slipped through the narrow, craggy opening of the cave.
They were in nocturnal darkness and silence. She could continue to moan to herself, as she had done all night long, often outdoing the crickets. Nothing separates the different worlds. Impossible to separate pain from pleasure.
She put on her gloves again, adjusting them on her fingers as if that were the most important task in the world. She leaned forward a little, reached across the back of the front seat, but the driver still hadn’t returned her hat.
She had to press her knees close together to keep from feeling in her vagina this rapid little slipping across the seat as the powerful, rhythmic slippings of the night before. It was still sore. Just as it was back then, years later, when with her knees apart she sat on the hard Dutch chair suckling the baby, and the weak wintry light glimmered through the long, tall row of square-grid windows. Barely penetrating the fog and clouds. But under the gaze of the other woman she did press her knees together. To the demanding sound of the little mouth’s sucking, her womb contracted. She had plenty of milk, though. She had to press her bottom to the seat to lessen the pain when her womb’s opening convulsed; she could not help emitting tiny hissing sounds. Which she found pleasurable. The soft, glowing countenance of the other woman pampered, all but caressed her. The other woman knew well what caused those little hissing sounds. Wanted confirmation of her impression. When their eyes met, she knew the woman’s body was hungry. In the meantime, the opening of her womb repeatedly contracted and relaxed and she couldn’t have said, not even to herself, what she was hoping for and what she wanted to devour.