by Peter Nadas
Three or four people could hide in those closets at the same time. And not only was it possible to move freely from one closet section to the next, but one could easily move the back panel of the last closet aside and, through the steel door behind it, gain the elevator shaft, from which it was easy to escape to the roof. In theory, Varga was unaware of this at the time; more precisely, he pretended to this day that he was.
On the parquet floor, gray and dry with neglect, so many fabric samples were collected in oversize albums and stacked in teetering layered columns, along with art books, manuscripts, and fashion magazines everywhere, that there was barely room to get by them. Narrow paths led from one door to another, from the tables to the ironing boards and from the clothes racks to the sewing machines. Mária wheeled Elisa very carefully along one of these creaking paths to reach the living room. She wheeled her everywhere, which is why there were neither rugs nor door saddles anywhere in the large apartment. When they got there, the drinks in the tall hazed-over glasses were waiting for them on the table, and the two women were again talking together on the terrace.
At last.
Well, finally.
I see you found everything.
They pushed themselves away from the terrace handrail and hurried inside. They kept interrupting each other, as if each was intent only on what she wanted to say.
Elisa, my dove, what wonderful color you have.
Finding things was the least of it. We uncovered all your dark little secrets.
This terrace is a great blessing.
How pretty that print dress is.
But look at Irma’s new two-piece outfit. I think the material is typical Dobrovan.
And there’s a little bolero to go with it too.
You don’t say.
I had to undo some of the stitches because of all things she had to pick a material that’d been washed a million times.
You, on the other hand, haven’t washed anything since Elisa’s birthday, and your refrigerator is full of leftovers gone bad.
Voilà, everyone grab your glasses and be quiet.
It stinks.
As miserly as old Demeter Lapusa. Where, now? In which novel? Oh, of course, Poor Rich People.
No it’s not, you little fool, it’s not in Poor Rich People.*
Now, we shall put the chair over here and if we ask Irmus very nicely she will put the blanket over her knees.
How many times have I asked you to stop finding fault with everything I say.
You’d better believe I know Jókai’s novels.
Where the hell did I put it. If you paid a little more attention to me, I’d like to tell you something.
If you sit like that, you’ll see right into my cards.
Irmuska, this is your glass.
Just a second.
Don’t give any to Elisa.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be coming with Boriska, that’s the decision of the Party. We’ll toe the party line relentlessly.
I really don’t understand why she needs alcohol.
It seems you’ve forgotten that today is the beginning of the first festival of lemon blossoms.
Santé, santé.
Come on, girls, let’s drink, and then it’s really time we sat down.
A ta santé, ma chérie.
But what kind of holiday is that, for heaven’s sake, I’ve never heard of it.
Forget it, at times like this, no one’s paying attention to you.
This holiday is for the Jews what cherry blossoms are for the Japanese.
A pagan jubilee.
I see.
Or like the famous squash-blossom holiday in Slovakia.
That means it has its own time, like Yom Kippur.
Exactly.
The Dobrovans would never have missed celebrating it.
For a change, they ate maize pudding with onion, because it’s such a festive meal.
Ever since they were girls, they had been enthusiastically touching on these delicate points, and now all four were laughing hard.
Elisa looked at them sheepishly, quiet, listening like an animal.
When there was a sudden, finely self-conscious silence, they could hear the soft puffing of the receding tugboats on the river, from farther and farther away, softer and softer with every puff. One of them, to the north, must have been passing the public baths in Dagály Street, the other, to the south, near the Lánc Bridge.
This is how a hog wallows in a sunlit puddle when peace returns to its soul.
They refused to acknowledge that these jesting little remarks no longer had any effect.
Seven flights below, in the dark Szent István Park, crickets were chirring peacefully in the grass among the trees. Occasionally they could also hear the sound of strolling lovers’ footsteps creaking on the pebble paths and echoing on the walls of nearby buildings. They looked at one another, slightly moved by their own embarrassment. Their broadminded liberalism, with all its historical instability, had become like a grandmother’s well-proven recipe for which, in truth, they could not find the ingredients.
They simply pretended that everything could be still set aright; with this pretence, at least, they kept their attitudes.
It was a little empty, but not mendacious.
They raised their glasses, silently, took sips of the sweet-and-sour drink with the fragrance of juniper.
Before we sit down, said Mária Szapáry, inspired by a sudden idea but speaking rather lazily, we should take the time to tell Irmus that, with Médi’s help, the famous Mrs. Lehr, this Erna Demén, is looking to make contact with her.
While she spoke, she looked in front of her rather than at anyone.
Hearing the name, Mrs. Szemző’s heart skipped a beat and then throbbed much faster than before. The quiet creaks of pebbles made her glance down seven floors, and she desired no continuation, she did not want to hear it.
So this will not be a party, then, but a storytelling evening, she said in the frozen silence, and the stubborn decision made a wry smile tremble on her lips.
Because I also have something to tell you, she continued. She absentmindedly picked up one of the two packs of cards and then put it down.
I think it would be best, said Mária Szapáry, virtually ignoring what Irma had said, if Médi told you about this. After all, she’s the one who spoke to Mrs. Lehr.
Imagine, said Irma quickly, as if interrupting not only Mária’s but her own words, before I left to come here, I was already near the door, and in the foyer—
She could not finish the sentence because at that moment Margit Huber, at the opposite end of the table, angrily shook her loosely pinned crown of hair and, ignoring Izabella Dobrovan, who tried to stop her with a belated movement and a commanding whisper, stepped closer to them, glass in hand, and in a raw penetrating tone cut in. Médi, Médi.
No, oh no, this, this cannot be. You can’t seriously mean this.
The flesh under the tanned skin on her open chest quivered. With her large hand she slammed her glass on the table so hard that the drink spilled out and lemon pulp stuck to the green felt tablecloth in a small flat opalescent puddle.
You’ve lost your marbles, Mária.
What’s that supposed to mean, snapped Mária Szapáry. Your style is atrocious.
Atrocious style. You think it’s atrocious. You dare mention style. Oh, this will kill me. You, of all people, for whom everything is rotten and always has been.
She would have sent her voice into the safety of hysterical laughter, her helpless limbs in a spasm of rage, but then she decided to end this tactlessness and suppressed her laugh.
You’re telling me this. You have the nerve to tell me a thing like that, she cried frantically. You know what you are, you are a born traitor, and you dare lecture me on style. You. Lecture me. You should be ashamed of yourself. Lecture me. Me. Me.
In her inconceivable excitement, she was casting about helplessly for words.
And then something peculiar happened. S
he suddenly felt unspeakably sorry for herself, for all the things Mária had done to her over their lifetimes, and they weren’t minor. Not only could she not stop saying me, me, me, me, but simultaneously she turned against herself the fire-red nails of three pressed-together fingers; and while, ever more loudly and in ever higher tones, as if gliding upward on an infinite scale, she shouted the one-syllable word reproachfully, unappeasably, and unstoppably, soaring so high that her lungs failed to support the sound with the proper volume of air, she mercilessly lunged those fingernails, to the rhythm of her screaming, into her firmly resisting breastbone.
She seemed to be transforming herself into a giant colorful bird that, in the moment of metamorphosis, was destroying itself with its own beak.
With the tall glasses in their hands, they all stood frozen in place.
Perhaps, in the first moment, with the vain hope or thought that they might somehow stop her.
But they had neither the strength nor the ability to do anything but stare at her with parted lips and eyes wide.
Yet in the next moment they couldn’t have said what they were staring at, or whether there was a next moment, or what might have been the subject of the conflict provoking such a mythically proportioned fury.
Anger died out in Mária too, even though it was she whom Margit Huber’s outburst touched most personally.
They saw her living flesh as she was tearing it off herself, or as if she were ripping her soul off the bones to which it had clung. There was no human experience on the basis of which they could have predicted with certainty that this, and no other, was the nature of their friend.
But when these many self-lacerating utterances of me, me, me reached the top of the scale and her injured self could no longer hope for more self-pity, her voice unexpectedly slumped back to its original register and stopped bleating, cooled off to its normal temperature, jounced back to its usual dimension, which, to the ears of the others, was no more credible than all her former sounds; vision and hallucination.
Didn’t we agree, you miserable creature, said Margit Huber in a sober everyday tone, speaking directly to Mária over the green felt tablecloth, that we wouldn’t say anything about this.
At virtually the same moment Mrs. Szemző dryly asked what wouldn’t you say anything about, for god’s sake, about what.
Something happened that overwhelmed and then completely swept away this reasonable question. Elisa broke into an ugly laugh—harsh, irritating, and vulgar, and not without justification.
For a moment they all looked at her. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be so gloating, so harsh, so unfeeling, they protested to themselves about this interference.
Elisa was laughing at how the women had given Mária what was coming to her; her laugh could not be misunderstood.
Mária must have been ashamed that the other woman’s commonness always managed to show its face through some hole, aperture. And Médi, in whom the struggle between anger and self-pity continued, made sounds as if something had gotten stuck in her throat and then she burst into tears, choking on the unspoken accusations. As if with the last remnant of her strength, she staggered to the bulky leather couch, torn at several places, and fell on it as if on a warm living being, a mother or a friend, hugging the stuffed armrest, which responded with a whiff of the strange, strong odor of cowhide.
You look down at everybody, with no exception, everybody, she bellowed and howled into the brown leather, which was quickly warming under her mouth. Tu me méprises, tu nous méprises, with no mercy, you wipe your feet on everybody.
What is it you were going to keep quiet about, if I may ask.
Mrs. Szemző couldn’t possibly outshout these two females behaving so outrageously, but she kept inquiring.
Again behind my back, right behind my back.
Which also turned into a shrill screech.
She regretted that such selfish sounds, recalling bad memories, were bursting from her throat. But it was no longer possible to withdraw from the air her delusion of persecution, for it needed to be in the light of day, and in that case, she too was nothing more, yes, nothing more than a common hysterical woman.
Like them.
Time to admit it.
In a weak voice Bella tried to intervene. Erna Demén claims, at least she had been so informed, that you were together with her daughter, her big girl whom the Gestapo took away from Kerepesi Cemetery, where the poor things were holding a silent demonstration at Pál Teleki’s grave.* We thought there was no need to tell you about such a silly thing.
Yet as you can see it became a matter of contention, whether to tell you or not.
While she was talking, she expected Mária to help her, at least with a few words.
In difficult situations, Mária always remained stubbornly silent.
And Bella did not dare mention the name of the place where they might have been together.
But in fact that’s exactly right, Mrs. Szemző remarked quietly.
For a few weeks, I was indeed together with her, with her big girl.
Which was something none of the women had expected to hear, though no surprise was visible on their faces. They simply looked at her as they might some idol.
Mária Szapáry was going up the steps of a dim rear stairwell. She did not know why she was reminded of this now. She came home not through the main entrance, from the direction of Via della Lungara, but through a side door, from Via dei Riari.
It must have been the third time they got soaked to their bones that afternoon, and again they were running to get inside, away from the soft warm rain, a man was holding Margit Huber’s hand, and then somewhere between rue Réaumur and rue de Vert bois they ran under the striped awning of a café.
She did not know where exactly they were in their lives then.
These human monsters, having shed their erstwhile stature and character, were standing in pale lamplight and looking back at her with the immeasurable indifference of outsiders. She could expect nothing else, least of all from those closest to her.
Their faces clearly showed they understood, after all, they were not stupid, yet were unable to move a hand or foot or single facial feature. Mrs. Szemző also realized they couldn’t do otherwise because it follows from the cult of crime that crimes will be committed.
Which nevertheless caused something profoundly childish to burst from her mouth.
And now what am I supposed to do with this bad behavior, she asked loudly, frightened and frightening. What am I to do with you, with your lack of compassion.
They did not know this side of her.
These were the lonely nights.
During the day she had to overcome and rise above things, but at night she could at least count on the body’s fatigue. Or she might have killed herself. That had remained her most ardent wish. She was vigorously nodding at each of her words; her discipline lapsing, her usually cleverly concealed tic was defeating her. Now they could see something of this too, have a taste of it.
What should they do with their own stories and with those of the others.
They were all carrying their own losses, their total, all-encompassing failures. No human on earth could answer their questions, and they found no god to whom they could entrust them. The nocturnal breeze, the heartwarming chirring of crickets, the puffing of tugboats receding in the distance, and the fragrance of sweet petunias barely grazed their silence.
If that’s really so, began Mária Szapáry a moment later, more curious than reproachful, why haven’t you looked her up before. Or, oh, I don’t know, you might have figured something out, after all, it was her child she had lost.
What, what could I have figured out.
And what exactly could I have said, and where, to whom, and why. That’s the main thing, why would I have said anything.
How should I have known she did not know.
Nobody asked me. When would I have told anyone, yes, when. One cannot just tell it at any old time, and one doesn�
��t think about it all of the time.
They remained silent again, as if contemplating the ways one could get around relating such a story if this entire thing, the situation in which they found themselves, had no time, place, or genre.
But I’d be very happy to tell you, and I shall, said Mrs. Szemző, who with this frivolous turn tried to restrain her tic. She pulled herself back from the opposite shore, bounced back to her usual passionless vocal range.
And you can simply tell Erna Demén to give me a call, period. You don’t have to bother your heads about this. All evening I’ve been trying to tell you that before coming here, by chance, I don’t know, though I’m sure I didn’t do it on purpose, I opened the door on my subtenant, that woman.
You don’t say, responded Mária, her voice filled with muted resentment.
Really, very interesting.
At the same time Margit Huber rose, somewhat indignant.
What are you saying, she asked, elongating her vowels, what do you mean you opened the door on her, what is that supposed to mean.
The leather squeaked under her body, the sofa’s worn-out springs moaned, and as she sat up her huge crown of white hair became unfastened and fell unattractively to her shoulders.
I assume it’s clear she wasn’t alone. It was like watching copulating caterpillars or something like that.
They spoke of such things very rarely and, when they did, very cautiously.
As if she were saying to them, keep out of my experiences.
She excluded them from their common past, punished the dumb goyim who understood nothing of the creation of the world, whose great compassion was also a fiasco.