by Peter Nadas
Pack your bag, dearie, and get out of here. I give you five minutes to get your things together. Where could I go now, sweet madam, in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, and she had the nerve to call me sweet and say it was the middle of the night. Please let me stay until I find a new place. Go, stay under a bridge for all I care, my angel, anywhere you want to, but make yourself scarce, get lost.
Grandmother quietly asked Irén whether she had really sent the maid away like that or upset herself like this only afterward.
If only she could be trusted.
Grandmother had come to take me home with her and now here she was, confronted with this story that visibly shocked her.
You don’t think I could possibly have stayed another minute under the same roof with such a creature.
Her voice receded from me on the balcony, along with the sound of the band tuning up, as twilight slowly approached. Then it became completely dark and although I heard the drums, trumpet, saxophone, and piano as they were looking for their correct positions in the ensemble, I was on my way to somewhere where things were not so musical.
Luckily they never found out why I fainted on the balcony.
They said the little fool must have stood in the sun for hours again and they shouldn’t let me do that in the future. I was too sensitive a child, which of course was understandable. Dampened cloths were put on my forehead and chest, and for a while longer I lay there at their feet on the warm stones. He always waits for Hedda Hiller, would you believe, and for some reason they all laughed at this remark. They always laughed at my enthusiasm for the singer. Then they lugged me inside, I let them, though I felt I had nothing wrong with me, I could have made it on my own two feet. They laid me on the sofa, everyone stood around me and I could see on their faces that they felt they had to do something with me or for me. Szilvia and Viola took turns running into the bathroom; they were in charge of changing the compresses. Grandmother fanned me with a newspaper; my aunt Irén took my pulse. The only unpleasant thing was that this sunny summer afternoon was pouring in through the many floor-to-ceiling windows, together with the jazz band music.
Hedda Hiller was crooning something about love into the microphone, then said a few words that made the men and women in the Moszkva Garden laugh, and then the saxophone kept wailing.
They asked if I felt better, because now my color was coming back.
I said I felt really good, though I had no idea how I felt.
They asked if I hadn’t eaten something on the sly that might have upset my stomach.
I said I thought there was too much light in the room.
Did I understand what Irén had asked me. She asked me if I’d nibbled on something.
I said I understood, but still there was too much light in the room.
But they were asking if I had eaten anything before lunch that they didn’t know about, whether I could remember what it was.
I said I hadn’t eaten anything before lunch, I remembered very well, and I didn’t take any pastry from the serving table.
That calmed them down but I was afraid I might faint again; I was afraid of myself.
I kept insisting—not that the air was filling up with something—but that the light was becoming unusually dense. My grandmother drew me to her, as if she’d sensed what was happening to me, and said, no problem, darling, the girls will darken the room right away, and with that, she may have kept me from fainting again.
It felt good when they finally shut off the light.
Let’s leave him alone for a while, Grandmother whispered, he’ll sleep now.
And I did feel as if I had to fall asleep.
But the moment they left the room on tiptoe and stopped making the floor creak, I opened my eyes. They had closed the double door leading to the dining room; the room became dark. That reminded me again of the night, the bridge and that girl, who was me, having to sleep under the bridge.
But why did they lie to us the next morning, saying she had left of her own will.
I felt that I was born to be a girl.
There was always a truth that later turned out to be a lie.
The feeling that I was not who I imagined myself to be, and not who others thought I was, always tormented me. Actually nobody is what he or she appears to be, and I’m not the only one who doesn’t know who he is or to whom he belongs. I observed the torments of others; I wanted to understand how they decided when they had to lie and about what, or what it was they could consider the truth for a while. That was the reason why I later so obsessively followed the half-man trundling himself down Teréz Boulevard on his board with casters, since no one knew where he came from or where he was going every day, or the woman with her big hats and no face left, nothing but a walking burn.
As if by watching them I could crack their secrets.
Since these two were so obviously not what they appeared to be, it never occurred to me that they might not have any secrets. And since I could never shake the thought that my father surely couldn’t have disappeared without a trace as claimed, and our mother couldn’t have just left us—that too had to be a lie, and something entirely different must have happened—it followed that these two, the man on the rolling wooden board and the burned woman, were my father and mother. My mother had survived the war, though she’d suffered terrible burns during the siege of Budapest. And my father had heroically stuck to his truth, and when they saw they were getting nowhere with him and were unable to force false testimony from him about anyone, they simply threw him out of a speeding car.
He was like a living piece of flesh. He could just barely crawl away from where they dumped him.
A stranger took him in, with whom he’d been living ever since, somewhere around Hunyadi Square. It would be nice if Hedda Hiller were that stranger. Since I couldn’t decide what would be better for me, sometimes I imagined that the kind stranger was a man—a more convincing version of my story, since a woman couldn’t have carried the wounded man to her place.
His legs could not be saved. The truth was that in their condition neither of my parents wanted to be a burden to us.
That’s why my mother kept hiding from us, that’s why she pretended when looking out from under her large hat that she didn’t recognize me. I also tended to avoid her because I could not imagine the moment when she’d give up the playacting, take me back, and press me to herself for the first time. I was scared that I might push her away because she had become repugnant, because she had left me, and because I really hated her.
Of course I suspected that this woman, whom I sometimes imagined was my mother, was among those who were crushed when the marquee of the Duna Cinema crashed down. Probably not one of those whom the rescuers scraped out alive from under the rubble after the dust settled and everyone was sobbing, fleeing, helping, or only helplessly screaming and watching the incredible. That would mean I’d lost my mother for the second time. Later some good people carried the corpses to the corner of Antal Nagy Street in Buda, and then, at the cost of subdued altercations on top of the rubble, the line for bread re-formed itself.
They lay side by side where the tank had appeared earlier.
People in the line slowly kicked the rubble off the curb.
The chaos was too great, and I never saw her again on the boulevard or anywhere else.
Somebody said that the marquee was made of cinder blocks, which is why not more people died, since it’s much lighter than regular concrete.
I preferred to continue weaving the story for myself. In my story she was taken away with light injuries by a Russian military ambulance that showed up for the injured. She recovered in a few days but had no doubts that I’d recognized her, and that’s why she left the country in the last days of December, along with other refugees.
My imagination protected me from the pain somewhat, although the more cleverly it worked, the more doubts accumulated in my mind.
I stood there on the landing above the second floor
, leaning against the wall, bent forward a little, my legs slightly apart, like someone preparing to throw up but hoping not to soil his suit with his vomit; I was waiting for my imagination to calm down, so that jealousy and senseless physical desire would not drive me mad. I held my unbuttoned coat together with my fists sunk in my pockets. As if afraid that someone on the dark staircase might see what was happening inside my pants. I was clenching one fist hard to keep my fingers from stretching out, from crawling onto my painfully rearing hot cock, to keep my warm palm from closing around it.
But I could not deactivate my imagination. For that I would have had to scrape the pictures off my brain cells. And since I couldn’t do that, there I was all alone with my cock. And they were doing it in their warm bedroom. I saw not her eyes but a single flash of her eyes, a single flash of your eyes, the sadness of her closed lashes, your sadness, her thinly arched eyebrows and naked shoulders. But I had never seen her shoulders. I was not the one who had seen them, but, together with me, this hateful man had. I wanted nothing more than to open my fly in the cold staircase of this familiar building so I could come together with them.
The pain was somewhat mitigated by my imagination, but only gratification could have expelled the tormenting pictures.
If I could do that, I’d be ready for any disgraceful act, that’s what I felt.
And why should fate save me from disgrace.
What I have done until now, along with my stupid scurrying around and my stupid enthusiasm, has been disgraceful enough.
But one can neither deflect oneself nor hold oneself back with self-inflicted moral judgments.
No humiliation can frighten one away from committing ever-worse disgraceful acts. As if a raw desire for pleasure was saying, no matter what you do, your disgrace can still be increased, only make sure you don’t drown in it.
I knew they were not going to come down again.
Maybe Ilonka Weisz would come, said my imagination.
Nobody came.
I opened my fly, not hurrying at all. The way one prepares for a premeditated revenge.
Potential danger always sharpens the sensation of pleasure, I don’t know why that is. With the booming of the wind in my ears, blood pulsing through the cracking and snapping of the gutters. This was the voice of fear, desire, and trembling. In the pulsing of blood, I expected to hear the opening of the door on the third floor, the sound of their light footsteps on the patterned stone floor of the staircase, their chatter, their wrangling, their sensual banter, anything, even their amorous cooing. I was sure they weren’t coming, but I could do nothing but keep on waiting for them. And now waiting not only for Klára but, though I didn’t notice this significant and involuntary change, for Simon too. And if they were to come, I’d surely have enough time to flee silently from them, out of the house.
I’d go to City Park, that’s how I imagined my escape.
Out there, in the storm, I’d betake myself among the wet trees.
Until then, however, it was as if I were cowering at the bottom of a dark lair, waiting for my prey and ready to pounce.
I was cold and I was hot, but I did not dare execute the last movement on my open pants. Another bus went by; the empty courtyard echoed the rough sound of wheels dancing on cobblestones for a long time. My hand kept pawing the slit in my pants, perhaps to move on, perhaps to be ready to button it up again. The yellowish sky was shining above the roofs. There was no light at all in the Weiszes’ three windows on the fourth floor. I thought that Ilonka Weisz must have grown into a beautiful girl in the meantime. The first was the kitchen window, the other two those of the one room.
By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one’s expectations crashing down. There was some noise from the second floor, followed by a laughing female voice. I paid little attention, the usual sounds filtered out from a kitchen, but I quickly buttoned my fly. Then I heard the piano teacher’s door open, but it was immediately closed, very quietly.
I didn’t understand that.
Maybe it was closed from the inside.
Then for a long time nothing happened, the wind kept booming. And when I was certain that only my useless waiting would continue, and while I heard the pervasive patter of women’s shoes, someone turned on the pitiful staircase lights. It barely made a difference, but it was a little less dim around me. My first urge was to flee. Like a miserable bug. She called after me; she called me by my name in the echoing staircase.
I wasn’t sure I’d managed to finish buttoning my fly. I froze, as if naked; I looked back and her voice made me happy. I hoped my coat covered everything. Suddenly I had many things to say and to ask. How did she know my name, but in my shame my heart stopped beating. It was as though she could see not only what I had done but also what I would have liked to do. And she was standing there, at the top of the stairs, in a long fine fur coat, shining like silk, and I saw she was nearly bursting with her triumph.
I would have asked her but I didn’t have the courage—or enough air.
She raised her gloved hands lightly above her head as though playfully asking, with a modicum of self-mockery, aren’t I wonderful, and what have you to say about this transformation, and isn’t the fur coat wonderful too; look how nicely it falls when I spread my arms like this. She raised her head as if wearing a crown, and look, what a wonderful hairdo, created all by herself. It surely was wonderful. My wish had come true. The most wonderful thing was that she so easily transformed herself; there was no end to the surprises and transformations. I forgot everything; I forgot all the anger and shame of having had to wait, and they dispelled my presumption about what they had been doing in their bathroom or bedroom; I forgot all my accusations.
Her beauty made me forget my entire meaningless life.
I did notice, though, how unsuspecting she was, how preoccupied with herself or with something I could not have known, and therefore she did not care what was happening to me. As though she weren’t interested in that or not interested in me. I was only some odd decoration on her completed life. But I had to forgive her for this instantly. Nothing could possibly have happened to me that would be of any interest to other people; I realized that right away. I had nothing to complain about and I had to keep my joy on a short leash too, lest I become overexcited by something that might disturb others. I had learned that I could not burden people with my feelings and, having no choice, I made myself believe I was indeed someone who not only wanted to avoid being a burden but who positively tried to please everyone at least a little.
And it seemed that in her own play she had cast me in a role that called for my presence but did not cramp her style.
She was wearing black antelope shoes with incredibly high heels, and under the fur coat a tight-fitting unadorned black dress at once soft and tight, which left her knees and thighs exposed—shockingly so by the prevailing standards of good taste. Her snow-white neck, her legs shining in their stockings, and the power of her knees and thighs were her jewels. Her strength was her most conspicuous feature, showing how strong that body was, carrying the proportions of her strength as some kind of armor. Her maddeningly blond hair, now done up in an utterly new coiffure, was her jewel. The glittering of her eyes, her plump lips painted blood red were her jewels. I wouldn’t have dared touch her lips, though I wanted to take them into my mouth, I ate them, I reveled in them, and they threw me into terrible confusion.
It had been in the air already that women were wearing short dresses, but until then only a few had dared to go this far, and right away I worried about being seen with such a striking woman. Although I had never seen a hairdo like hers, it reminded me of someone, I didn’t know whom. Not knowing somehow felt good. I would have started up the stairs for her, but I took only two steps because of another struggling impulse within me.
She would sweep me off my feet if I touched her.
I was left with words collid
ing into one another, a stammering, which happens usually when one is trying to do something against all odds.
I asked where she was coming from.
And she latched on to this, to the raw words, as though in doing so she could rescind the exaggerated gestures she had made.
She said, what do you mean where from, where could she be coming from.
And how did she know my name, I asked. It’s a pretty insane thing, but actually I had never introduced myself.
How does she know. Well, she knows everything. In other words, she knows what she wants to know or has to know.
She started down the steps like a scheming prima donna. She must have seen someone do this in a movie or something.
Indeed, we hadn’t been introduced, so perhaps she couldn’t talk to me now.
But she was quickly embarrassed by her revealed beauty which she had just shown me. Her temperament proved weightier and more somber, so she was able to ignore the fact that she had already shared it with me.
And where did she leave Simon.
She said, we’re going without him, because suddenly something cropped up that he had to deal with; he was furious, ranting and raving, would probably break everything in the apartment. Can’t do much damage, though, they have hardly anything. This time they had a really terrible row, they weren’t talking. Until tomorrow for sure. If he wants to, he can come after us; if not, he can stay home and then he’ll drink himself under the table.
He’ll throw up; she’ll have to wash everything he’s wearing.
While her words echoed impassively, bouncing dully off the stained, filthy walls decorated with graffiti and bullet holes, she kept coming down the stairs as if to demonstrate that she was granting me the grace of her approach in well-apportioned doses.
She made me feel like a stupid little kid.
I said I’d told Simon that I’d known this house for a long time.
I asked her if she knew the Weisz family, did she know Ilonka Weisz. Because while I waited I had plenty of time to check the list of tenants, and it seems that almost everybody still lives here.