by Peter Nadas
Had she not been talking to this woman about how, in the absence of physical excitement, she could not give herself to her husband, how she did not even feel the urge to expose herself, how she did not understand why she didn’t; yet now, in its other variation, the urge alarmingly and powerfully made its appearance. It was shaking her knees, and it was impossible to tell whether it was joy or fear. Geerte stood up too, as if to follow Erna in everything, so as not to make her late for brunch at the university, which every month was an important event in the small town’s social life; at least that’s what she thought of her own helpful effort, as she sought, even more desperately than Erna did, to conceal her real intentions. A faint smile appeared on her heavy lips and began to spread, as if to signal the opposite of her thought.
Contempt.
Or something she disliked in Erna’s behavior.
She is rejecting her.
Perhaps the awkward trembling that Erna feels in her body and that is now visible.
What do I care whether it’s visible or not, Erna said to herself. She was definitely angry at Geerte von Groot, now ready to take her leave with that contemptuous smile of hers.
Well, in the end you haven’t told me anything, Geerte. You’ve given me only empty words. You’ve cleverly evaded all my questions, she said, and laughed openly at Geerte.
The laugh was indecent and alluring, because with her lips she broke through her own bashful trembling, even though the lips kept quivering.
Geerte had a good mind to slap her.
Teeth flashing wetly in the mouth are precursors of a bite. She handed over her blouse, and then quickly slipped out of the camisole too.
I did the talking, she said, I always talk too much, and now here I stand before you completely ignorant and defenseless.
But with this reckless little coquetry she was unable to shake the other woman’s seriousness.
Geerte von Groot took the blouse from her and then the camisole, carefully folded one into the other, lifted the mildly starched batiste and the slippery silk, and attentively, slowly, buried her peculiar, flat nose in them as if to seek Erna’s fragrance. Or to kiss the wet spots left by the seeping milk. In the intermingled odors, it was the milk’s fatty bouquet she could not resist.
Not only was it clear what she was looking for but also what boundaries they had crossed.
What are you doing, Geerte, for god’s sake, moaned Erna reproachfully, beseechingly, her modesty deeply insulted; what are you doing, please don’t, yet her entire body, with shuddering waves of hot and cold, showed its approval.
Indignation, beseeching, and reproach emanated from the same pleasure.
In truth she had fallen into another world, and measured against the enormity of this event, the signs she gave of how she was shrieking inside, while everything was ripping, creaking, breaking up around her, were far too faint. Feeble groans and whimpers came from her. As a saw when stuck in knotty wood. She wanted to flee, to protest that what had to happen should not happen, and quite involuntarily her hands flew in front of her breasts.
From the garments raised to her lips, Geerte looked up at her, actually rather surprised. She seemed paler than usual. The curls of her freed, unruly hair were aflame around her gleaming white forehead. Her face turned coarse, grew demanding, aggressive and somber. When she raised her head and began to speak, forcing the sounds up from her chest, when evil appeared in her features—hate, raw terror, a profound desire for revenge—Erna should have turned away; she should have run for her life.
I’d so much like to help you, I can’t tell you, she moaned. I want so much not to hurt you, not in any way.
But I don’t have anything besides my body, nothing, believe me. In what way could I help. I also know so little, nothing really.
And then, in her own language, she screamed.
Oh, nothing, nothing.
The scream, somehow, remained very controlled.
Her face was no longer suffused with the quiet intimacy of a Dutch painting.
Silenced reigned between them.
She saw that this woman was really a criminal. As if the tenderness and kindness she had forced on her had another, hitherto unknown side. This woman is capable of anything. Nevertheless, her desperate scream became stifled in the absolute silence of the house.
She saw the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War on her features. To restrain her, to frighten her away, or to keep her from coming close to her, to steer all events in a different direction, she should have dressed very quickly. Too late, and she knew it. Horses were trotting with her under the elm trees of Jászhanta. Everything is plotted, written in advance. Nothing you can do about it. And none of her things were to hand. She felt cold, her arms and shoulders had goose bumps, her nipples twitched, and she trembled more and more violently.
Why haven’t I noticed how hungry she was. And I’m so starved for her.
No, there was nothing close by she could throw on herself. She was standing in a large cool space; no help anywhere.
There was no god to whom she could pray. A little help came only—at least for a brief moment—from the ability to see herself from the outside, as she stood in this strange, cool, and austerely furnished hall, caught in this truly absurd situation.
And suddenly she hears the baby cooing quietly and contentedly in the adjacent room.
The only object within reach was a wet cloth, lying on a plain silver tray at the edge of a small table. She bent down for it. To use this movement, for lack of anything else, to cover herself. Immediately the hope that she still had a chance to leave this scene gave her some strength. As if an invisible tentacle were reaching over from the adjacent room, a secret power, the binding umbilical cord; then what Geerte had claimed and what Erna had never felt before was true after all.
Her baby was indeed binding her to itself and would hold her back.
I think, she said moaning and stammering and feeling a little stronger, I think it would be best if first I pumped this breast, it’s so full. But she could already tell by her own voice she was no longer master of herself or of anything else; neither did the cooing bind her. Her baby could not hold her back.
And if this was so, if she was going to betray everything and everyone, then she had better not see what she was doing; she closed her eyes.
But she would not give up, could not accept that there was no way back. When she spoke again, the voice coming from her throat was unpleasant, meant to be used with a disobedient servant.
Geerte, would you mind bringing the pump from the other room.
Their hands met on the wet cloth, and the silver tray rattled slightly at the sudden touch.
Geerte had meant to put the folded garments there because she wanted to free her arms and hands as quickly as she could.
She clasped her arms around Erna’s hips, though she did not immediately draw her close. Her swollen lips, which seemed so strange and out of place in the white face, were quivering.
Please, let me go, said Erna, gasping, feebly.
Her protest would not have been laughable if a man was forcing himself on her. But this was a woman, which made her feel she had no place to run to, no way to escape. Seeing Geerte’s approaching lips, she quickly turned her head aside lest the lips reach her mouth.
As if saying to herself, this won’t do. Which meant that anything was possible.
Something was really breaking through and opening up.
She was standing in such a small space, she had no room to back away. The baby was cooing and perhaps not entirely innocently. She tensed with elemental resistance, but the moment Geerte’s lips touched the skin below her cheekbone, her body went limp. There was no external sign of protest. But it wasn’t the contact of the lips that loosened her—it only turned the feverish shudder into shivering heat and back again—but, rather, feeling each other’s pubic bone strain and pulse through the fabric of their clothes.
But it could not disturb what one might call inner sensation
or sober thinking.
She thought she saw more clearly than ever.
From a distance, she heard the baby cooing, the dim thud of horses’ hooves on the tree-lined path, her carriage flying between patches of light and shadow. One protuberance registered on the throbbing other as if it were within its own rhythmic beating; that was why each felt the other’s body pulsing through their clothes. The earth in Jászhanta is dark, heavy sand that becomes clumpy in the spring rains and condenses in the summer heat. Luckily I haven’t lost my mind yet, she thought to herself. She found some comfort in her alertness. Perhaps it was Geerte’s heartbeat, or her own, that she heard as thudding hoofbeats on the sand.
For the first time they felt each other in a way that was inseparable from their feelings for each other. As though she were observing from afar and would not dare experience her own findings, while the other person could no longer see out of herself. That was the difference between them. Or as though it wasn’t she who was feeling the other woman inside her but her husband, of whom she was constantly and not baselessly jealous. As if in contact with the other woman’s pubic bone she’d have to feel her own, yet as if not she but a man were thrusting against her.
At last she has the chance to feel what her husband feels, this man, these men, and to experience her own desires in their stead.
In her fear, she called him by his name, István, as if summoning him, the only one, asking for his help. She exchanged herself for the only man whom she had come to know through her body and to whose two children she had given birth. Which immediately reassured her that she loved him.
I love him, I love him, he is the one I love, no matter what happens. In reality, it wasn’t the woman she loved, the one she was now clasping more forcibly than the woman was hugging her back. This will turn into a mere episode in her life, she need not take it seriously. However, she hadn’t noticed when she had embraced the woman, so while her consciousness must be functioning well, she might not be aware of her intentions.
And that meant there was another self inside her.
Geerte was the stronger, or her feelings guided her more profoundly and confidently. Almost coarse and very common. The pubic bones thrusting against each other did not come to satisfactory terms. Erna was not certain whether she could want anything this other woman would not want from her. Her search for excuses and her doubts completely occupied her mind, though this did not decrease her pleasure.
At most, she enjoyed the other woman more slyly, enjoyed the way the other woman took pleasure in her.
Geerte had a definite goal.
A fantastic image hovered before her and she was determined to follow it. As if she were trying to force living matter into an ephemeral vision.
Erna pressed her body against Geerte’s, but Geerte thrust back as if to oppose her.
Erna felt clearly that Geerte wanted something. And this aroused a clear image that quickly washed away all other images. Even though the baby was still cooing evenly and by way of warning.
There was only this plump protuberance with its pubic hair when they rolled under each other. Only a kiss was missing to make it all possible; the contact of lips, the full taste and sensation of hollows opening into each other; and it was this lack, all that was missing, which now appeared to her as an image. Precisely what a moment earlier she had denied herself.
No, she shouldn’t deny anything. To open up, like two slow-turning, rippling, muscular snails sticking to each other.
She had long imagined Geerte’s pubic hair as fiery red. If she rolled down, their labia would open and nestle against one another. Her imagination mixed, mingled, and blurred the horizontal with the vertical, lips, kisses, and labia. She saw how Geerte’s opened up at her touch, and how her own opened into the welcoming hollow.
But she could neither move nor roll anywhere, because Geerte’s lips took aim at her tense, resistant neck—a snail, clinging, leaving a shiny film on tree trunks in the dim park; and simultaneously she shoved her back on the chair where she had just finished suckling her baby. The chair wobbled under the double weight, swinging a little on its back legs.
Geerte had a kind of grip on her, and she, for lack of anything to grasp and because of her fear, held on to Geerte, trying to keep them from falling.
She would have liked to laugh.
Then, in a flash, she saw Geerte’s frighteningly agitated face above her; her rounded lips, the darkening countenance, strands of her mad, reddish, scattered curly hair, and many other things ran across her mind. This is war, then, touched by the whirlwinds of horrible plague and conflagration. And now she will say something, now. And just as Erna wondered whether at moments like this every woman is repugnant, as repugnant as men are, the chair tipped over.
She fell, but not only on her back. The back of the chair hit the floor before her head did, which prevented a hard impact, and the two of them, arms around each other, were hurled from the chair. This happened more or less because of Geerte’s clever maneuvering. With their legs intertwined, they rolled onto the rug. The tipped-over chair remained where it fell.
As if they had been running alongside each other for a long time, they panted together.
Did you hurt yourself, my dear, asked Geerte, fearing her clumsiness might have caused Erna pain; her face returned to its former state, her features cleared.
How laughable the whole thing was.
Last time she had been involved in such horseplay was when she was a little girl, and always with boys. Arms around each other, they were lying lazily on the cool floor. And how pretty she is. As though this were happening to strangers whose warmth she could feel.
No, I’m not hurt, she replied, as if breathing words into the other woman’s breath. But you were about to tell me something, Geerte.
I’ll die, she shouted, keeping her voice down, I’ll die if you don’t tell me.
Geerte, in surprise, held her breath.
How could she possibly know I wanted to tell her something.
And then, along with the next sentence, hoarse with pain and shame she spat the words out.
I wanted to say that I’m hungry, I wanted to say I’m starved, Erna.
I’m thirsty, and I absolutely don’t feel like bringing you your stupid pump from the next room.
That’s what I wanted to tell you.
Silently and perhaps involuntarily they both laughed, which had the effect of a sobering wink, indicating how well they understood each other.
Erna freed herself from the embrace and slowly sat up, but neither of them let go of the other’s eyes.
Geerte, not to be alone, not to be left desperately to herself, reached after her.
She has finally understood; and this filled Erna with great serenity.
She felt enormous, powerful; with her blue-veined, swollen breasts, she ruled over and could have fed all humanity, but she no longer had any weight. They made barely perceptible movements. Even if in their own minds they were addressing themselves to each other, from this moment on they spoke each to herself, and about strange things that had no connection to and very little to do with the situation. Erna said to herself, I must check the dates, the years. She had a great urge to grab her coat, go to the library and look up the years, and she felt it so naturally that Geerte sat up, startled, sensing something of Erna’s strangeness.
However, she was wrong in assuming she was being rudely rejected.
Simultaneously they let go of each other’s gaze and hands.
And as they came off the bridge onto muddy Margit Boulevard, the convex basalt cobblestones began to rattle and toss the heavy taxi, whose springs were too stiff to absorb the shocks. I’ll get it for you in a minute, madam doctor, patience, please, said the cabbie, raising his voice against the noise, almost shouting. Just let me get through this damn section here. Anyway, I’d like to ask you something, madam doctor, if I may.
She didn’t understand where the driver had come up with this stupid madam doctor phrase, and
what did he want from her anyway. She did not like, she could not get used to the idea of the help becoming independent. How could he possibly know that she had earned a doctorate when she never used the title.
The road ahead was clear all the way to Török Street. Gas pipes were being replaced, but now no one was working in the long wet ditch.
Above Geerte’s huge, meaty, heavily ribbed lips, a sharp-edged vertical scar disappeared into the cavity of her wide-winged flat nose. She had come into the world with a cleft lip; labium leporinum is the Latin name of the deformity. At the time she was born, during the last years of the nineteenth century, this condition was far from harmless. A cleft-lipped baby cannot suckle, because the various tissue lobes of its face have failed to join. The upper lip normally gains its shape from the union of a middle and two side apophyses, the lower lip from the union of two side ones; a cleft lip is an abnormal or irregular union of apophyses. It appears mainly on the upper lip, when the union is imperfect; the flesh of the lip is completely rent breadthwise. Moreover, a baby with a cleft lip cannot be operated on immediately but must first gain strength. Feeding it artificially, not suckling it, was not a simple matter in those days; babies easily got infections from the utensils used to feed them. A vicious circle developed. Because of infection, the artificial feeding would be discontinued, which posed the danger of dehydration. Geerte was three weeks old when she was finally operated on, and nobody dared vouch for her surviving the critical phases of the healing. They carefully sliced away the edges of the severely inflamed and suppurating cleft and sewed it together with three stitches. Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip, the natural mark of a proper union of the facial-tissue lobes. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round-looking—at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body’s wholeness or hint of at any threat to it.
It seems, Lady Erna thought, fate always brings me together with these thick-mouthed ones.