‘Mum!’ exclaimed her son, dishevelled and in his underwear, when he ambled out on hearing a key rattling in the lock, only to find himself face to face with his mother. ‘So early?’ They looked into each other’s eyes as if only into their own. He noticed something different in his mother’s eyes, but he couldn’t have said what it was. No doubt something had happened to his dad or his little sister or his big sister, something terrible that had to be resolved right away – yes, someone had to be saved.
‘Why did you bring that bucket? Jesus.’
The mother just stood there, in the tower block’s sixth-floor hallway, bucket in hand.
‘You have a bucket here?’
‘Beats me.’
‘Well then, that’s why.’
The boy stepped to one side, the cool air from the street entering the flat along with his mother. Mrs Pápai went straight to the kitchen, where days-old leftovers covered the table.
‘What a mess!’ she said disdainfully, with a huge sigh. Not even removing her coat, she sat down on one of the chairs, dropping to the floor a bag that she had held in her other hand, a bag packed full of canned goods and other food.
‘Don’t tell me you want to clean up right now?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’
‘That wouldn’t be a good idea. They’re still asleep back there.’
‘You have guests again?’
‘Gyuri and Maya. Come on, I’ll make you a tea.’
‘I’m in a hurry.’
Mrs Pápai’s mind raced. She tried replaying in her head the whole of her conversation with the case officer.11
‘Your sister is arriving tomorrow. We can’t greet her with this mess.’
The boy vanished into his room and then returned. For a while he watched his mother, who was deep in thought, and then he sat down beside her on the worn green sofabed bought in England twenty years earlier, which should have been thrown away long ago. How modern and stylish it had been at the time! It never ceased to amaze visiting relatives. The back doubled as a bedlinen holder. Sleep was no longer possible on the sagging mattress, the leather cross-straps of which had slackened, but no one had the heart to throw out this family heirloom, and the same went for the two armchairs with threadbare arms that completed the set. When they’d purchased the green sofabed, the boy had still been able to squeeze himself into the space that held the bedlinen, albeit with great effort. Moments before, in his room, he’d donned a blue-and-white-striped terry-towelling dressing-gown that was two sizes too big: its bottom swept the floor, and when he was drawing he had to roll up its sleeves. They’d bought it for their father, back in Pápai’s pudgy days, when, at eighteen stone, as he couldn’t repeat often enough, he’d been a member of the Not-See Nutsies Club, for only by looking in the mirror (drum roll) could he see his own nuts. The club had two members, Pápai and one of his few friends. True, ‘few’ is here a matter of poetic licence. That is to say, the club comprised two members – Pápai and his only friend. It should be noted that while Pápai could not have known this, his friend, whom he’d worked with for a while in the same newsroom, was writing reports about him, too. To be fair, what he had to say about Pápai was favourable. He had had a penchant for jokes and writing them down since childhood, and the Not-See Nutsies Club was central to his repertoire. Everyone found Pápai to be an enormously funny fellow.
The boy tried giving his mum a hug, but he could feel her body tense up.
‘They’re still asleep.’
His mother’s face turned hard with worry. The wrinkles were deep, and the delicately arched nose stuck out like a beak. She clenched her lips. The poor thing has so many worries, thought the boy. Always worried about someone.
‘You should go to the hospital. To exercise him. And wash him. They don’t wash him. I don’t have the strength any more. Ein li koach.’
She said this last phrase under her breath, only to herself. In moments of weakness, exhaustion and despair she switched involuntarily to Hebrew, and she didn’t even notice – just as when, two years later, on her deathbed, in hospital, in a morphine-induced stupor, all at once she sat up in bed and opened her eyes. It was later – by which time Mrs Pápai’s body, swaddled in a sheet, had been taken down to the mortuary – that her roommate cheerfully told the boy, who happened to be retrieving his mother’s belongings from the bedside table, that at night, just for a lark, as a test of sorts, she’d tried shouting over to the unconscious Mrs Pápai, ‘Shema Yisrael!’ and Mrs Pápai’s eyes had opened and she sat up in bed. Though by then she was dead.
The rattling of dishes could be heard from the kitchen, and Mrs Pápai, like a lioness protecting her cubs, shot right out of the living room.
‘Leave it, leave it!’ she shouted at the young woman busy in the kitchen, who turned towards her with a smile.
‘We got back really late last night. Sorry for leaving it like this. I’ll be finished in a minute.’
The young woman’s disarming smile weakened Mrs Pápai’s resolve. She kept working noiselessly and quickly in the kitchen, which was so narrow that Mrs Pápai couldn’t get past her to the sink.
‘I’ll make some Coffee in a minute,’ said the young woman.
‘There’s no need,’ said Mrs Pápai.
‘It’s fucking snowing again!’ came a hoarse voice from a distance. Having slipped on only his trousers, the poet emerged from the third room barefoot, scratching his beard, his upper body naked. He was short, slightly pigeon-chested and hunched. His collarbones protruded conspicuously above his thin, hairy chest, but his shoulders were muscular. Scratching away at his back, he stopped by the door between the back room and the living room.
‘If you don’t object,’ said the poet, ‘I was thinking I’d make some venison spine soup. Not here, I mean, but in the house out in Adyliget. Where is that ugly bitch?’ He reached over his right shoulder with his left hand to scratch his shoulder blade in way that was familiar to everyone who knew him. He kept scratching, which he clearly found pleasurable. ‘She’s got the money.’
‘Yes?’ asked the boy, his mouth watering. ‘Venison spine soup?’
‘The butcher at the market on Batthyány Square agreed to put aside a bit of venison spine for me. We need to be there by four. And to follow I’ll fry up some pork chops, mashed potatoes with nutmeg, with butter-fried peas on the side and fresh parsley. That’s as far as I got. The girls can conjure up something to go with it. I don’t know a thing about pastries. That’s high art.’
‘But how?’
‘Not here, in Adyliget. At least there’s a real stove there. But first we’ll drop in for a drink at the Swan. Then we’ll climb up to the house in Adyliget. Where is that bag of bones?’
The weekly editorial meeting was, to the poet, sacrosanct. He arrived days or weeks late to other meetings, or else he never showed up at all, but of course without ever telling anyone he wouldn’t be there. But when the day came for the editorial meeting for the samizdat Beszélő, he was there exactly on time, like Big Ben, and he marked up the manuscripts entrusted to him to the last comma in precise, feminine handwriting.
In Adyliget, in the hills of Buda, for the last six months, there had stood a caravan belonging to the Road Repair Company, from where, through a tiny window, employees of the Interior Ministry took pictures of those arriving at the house where Beszélő was edited. They made no secret of their presence. Indeed, visitors to the house sometimes even waved at them. The secret service men cramped into the far from palatial caravan were the constant butt of jokes. For the sake of appearances they even tore up a stretch of the bumpy road in order to have something to repair.
‘Where are my cigarettes? And the little monkey?’
‘Maya? In the kitchen. With my mother.’
‘Then I’ll get dressed properly.’
‘We’ll have a white Christmas. Aren’t you happy?’
The poet looked at the boy.
‘Oh no we won’t. You don’t have a
clue.’ And he vanished once more into the back room, in which the boy had witnessed so many family scenes – when Pápai and Mrs Pápai had fights, or, more precisely, when his mother pummelled his father because he wouldn’t let her administer an enema, and the oily water flowed out of the bag and onto the bed. Hearing this, the boy would run into the room and hold down his father, who writhed about on the damp bedsheets like a wounded beast.
The poet – despite appearances – liked to dress well. A black jacket, an ironed white shirt and a grey tie: this was his favourite outfit. Now, amid hushed cursing, he sought his purple-striped grey tie in one of his travel bags on the floor.
Mrs Pápai watched helplessly and yet in awe as, at the hands of the young woman, everything was cleaned and put in order. A sort of paralysis took hold of her that she could not get the better of. The mocha pot was hissing on the cooker as Maya, in one fell swoop, wiped down the plastic table, swept up and shouted from the kitchen:
‘One of you guys take out the rubbish!’
The boy, who had meanwhile sat himself in front of the typewriter, to record the previous day’s events, sprang up obligingly, grabbed hold of the bin, went out to the big rubbish chute on the far side of the stairwell, poured in the bin’s contents, and returned. By then, in the living room, four cups of steaming hot coffee were on the small table, and the poet was in the kitchen paying compliments to the boy’s mother, who was laughing heartily.
* * *
When she was finally on her own in the flat, Mrs Pápai carefully locked the front door, leaving the key in the lock. First she looked around her son’s room. Beside the bed on the floor, next to a pile of books, was an issue of Beszélő. She picked it up and hid it among the books in the glass-fronted bookcase. Then she realized that this wouldn’t do – no, it could still be seen – so she took it into the larder, where, with great difficulty, she pulled one of the time-worn, dented suitcases off the highest shelf. The suitcase was full of odds and ends: a Bedouin saddle ornament; necklaces; copper jugs; loose photographs; old newspapers with Pápai’s articles; pearls; embroidery threads; a large wooden camel that Pápai had brought from Cairo thirty years earlier; and a shattered clay drum. Mrs Pápai quickly slipped the Beszélő into the suitcase, clicked shut the two locks, and, sighing loudly, managed to wrestle the suitcase back up onto the shelf. There she stood, in the stirred-up dust, gasping for air and bitter. She went back into her son’s room and recoiled on seeing, on a slip of paper on the bookshelf, in her own handwriting, an Arab proverb: TIME IS LIKE A SWORD: IF YOU DON’T CUT IT, IT CUTS YOU DOWN.
Stepping over to the Consul typewriter, she noticed that it still held a half-typed sheet of paper with that day’s date at the top – 20 December 1983. She removed it and placed it face-down on the table. She knew her son would be furious when he realized what had happened, but she didn’t care. Suddenly she noticed an open envelope that had been addressed by a stranger’s hand. She hesitated for a moment, but then couldn’t resist, and reached inside. As she pulled out a letter, written in French, a photograph fell out onto the floor. She picked it up and saw it was of a young, curly-haired mulatto boy who seemed to be looking back at her. Shuddering, she quickly put the letter and photograph back into the envelope. She took a few more books off the shelf, before putting them back spine-first so their titles would not be visible. And then she looked around the guests’ room.
When she was done, she sat down on the green sofabed in the living room and placed the telephone on the little table before her. Putting on her glasses, she began paging through her pocket notebook, growing ever more agitated. The notebook was falling apart. The cover had long ago been ripped off and some of the pages were loose, and although at the start she’d taken care to write the names in alphabetical order, later she’d stopped. She’d slipped recipes and business cards in among the pages. Under and above the telephone numbers were exclamation marks, notes, the names of medications, addresses that didn’t belong there at all, Hebrew words and fragments of sentences in English, as well as lines of poetry scribbled down, spelling mistakes and all. Crimson of shame runs through my body / Thousand needles pricking my brain. Mrs Pápai rarely stuck the pages that had fallen out back in their proper place, and now, rebuking herself, she shook her head – how would she ever find anything in this jumble. ‘Ugh!’
An impatient sigh escaped her when she finally stumbled across the name and telephone number she was looking for. She took a deep breath and began to dial.
3
Ten minutes later the entryphone buzzed. Mrs Pápai was ready to spring into action, standing by the front door near the phone, almost tearing the receiver off the wall, as if it were a matter of life or death. Greeted politely by a male voice, she replied with a loud ‘Good afternoon!’ before shouting, ‘Sixth floor, turn right out of the lift.’ ‘We know,’ the polite male voice answered unexpectedly.
Holding the door wide open, Mrs Pápai received the overall-clad men, one wearing a beret and holding a toolbag; and another in a baseball cap; while the third had with him a small black suitcase. They did not come in right away. No, instead they stamped their feet loudly and repeatedly on the non-existent doormat, which is to say, on the lumpy, half-ripped-up linoleum, shaking the snow from their shoes. The one wearing the beret even kicked the oily-green-painted wall a few times to dislodge the muddy snow that stuck to the jagged soles of his boots. ‘Please come in, do come in, it doesn’t matter, I am cleaning up anyway,’ Mrs Pápai called out, again perhaps too loudly, for the truth was she did not want the neighbours to catch a glimpse of her visitors. Gasmen and plumbers came on their own, and there were three of these men. Mrs Pápai looked at these strangers with a mix of trust and distrust, not knowing how friendly she could be or how pushy she seemed.
‘Where is it?’ asked the man with a moustache, who seemed to be in charge, at which Mrs Pápai immediately led the guests into the middle room, the so-called living room, and pointed out the window. ‘On the second floor,’ she said gravely. The men looked at each other for a moment, very nearly forgetting the cover story that had been drummed into them that very morning. ‘Can’t we do it without a witness?’ the man in charge had asked Captain Mercz at the briefing, but Mercz was adamant: ‘It would be too risky to enter the flat uninvited, because we can’t know when the owner will be home, and putting the flat under constant surveillance would be a waste of time and money. Mrs Pápai is perfectly trustworthy. What’s more, she doesn’t know the true purpose of the visit. In any case, take a camera with you. By all means take photographs of the inside of the flat you’re in, too, so we know the layout exactly. Of every space. If you come across illegal publications, photograph them, too. You’ll have about thirty minutes in all. You need to do the installation in all three rooms. These flats are a headache.’ ‘No problem,’ came the weary voice of the man in the beret, who had three similar jobs to do that day.
‘A Coffee?’ Mrs Pápai asked eagerly, not understanding the trembling that shook her body even as she sought to act as naturally as possible, so her face wouldn’t give her away. ‘Or three, that is?’ she corrected herself at once. ‘There, on the second floor, where the curtains are drawn!’ she exclaimed on seeing what seemed to be uncertainty on the faces of the men standing about in the middle of the room. One of them was staring at the large, colourful rug that covered an entire wall of the tiny room. On it, women carrying infants and baskets on their heads were heading towards a spring, while men with scythes and hoes over their shoulders were on their way to till a rock-filled promised land. ‘Gobelin,’ said Mrs Pápai, ‘my mother’s work.’ The man in the beret clicked his tongue approvingly, his eyes glistening amiably as he stepped closer to the rug, which he now touched. ‘Beautiful,’ he declared, his head tipped slightly to one side. Mrs Pápai shuddered, but didn’t know why. It was as if her heart had been ripped out. Meanwhile the mustachioed man set down his toolbag beside the grey radiator, crouched down, and fished out a Nikon camera. With slow, leisure
ly movements he opened the camera and inserted a roll of film, and, from behind the cover of the yellow curtain, began taking pictures of the building across the street. Or at least that’s what he appeared to be doing. Even if it was inadvisable to waste film on such nonsense.
‘I’d like a coffee,’ said the third man, rousing Mrs Pápai from her daydreaming and following her into the kitchen.
‘Well, this isn’t too big,’ he observed, standing in the doorway as Mrs Pápai lit the stove. ‘Unfortunately all we have is instant,’ said Mrs Pápai contritely. ‘That will be perfect,’ the man replied politely while looking about. ‘With milk?’ ‘Without, without, and not even a single cube of sugar!’ he said cheerfully, at which Mrs Pápai, the experienced nurse, looked at his face. The man’s complexion wasn’t good. His skin was swollen and there were purple rings under his eyes. He worked long shifts, sometimes late into the night; he was used to it. ‘It’s not good to have it without milk and sugar on an empty stomach,’ Mrs Pápai cautioned him softly. The man only shook his head impatiently, with a shade of menace, it seemed, as if he didn’t really want to talk, though he broke into a wide, stern grin that froze upon his face. For a while Mrs Pápai stood in front of the stove in the little kitchen, and then she sat on a stool. She tried, as inconspicuously as possible, to listen in on the muted voices from the other room. Soon the face of the man in the beret appeared above the shoulder of the man standing in the doorway.
‘Excuse me, comrade, may I use the phone?’ Mrs Pápai nodded. ‘Where is it?’ ‘In my son’s room.’ ‘Thanks, I’ll cover the cost.’ ‘No, no, there’s no need, please go right ahead. Besides, it’s not as though you’re calling America?’ She was already sorry the word had slipped from her mouth. The water had come to the boil. Mrs Pápai would have liked to peer past the man standing in the kitchen doorway towards the front door. Instead she just stood there, awkwardly, momentarily forgetting what she was doing. ‘The water’s boiling,’ warned the man, who, as Mrs Pápai noticed only now, was chewing on a matchstick, which kept migrating from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘It might be too strong,’ said Mrs Pápai apologetically, at which the man, who was already reaching for the cup, gave a laugh. ‘The main thing is that it’s bad for you, missus, yep, that’s the main thing, that it’s bad for you.’
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