Chapter 9
Shifter
BUDAPEST
You exhaust me, Zoran says. I want to say something witty like, you mean, in that Central European way, but instead tell him that I’m hungry. I am ferociously hungry. Hungry in Hungary, especially in those moments when, lightly covered in sweat, Zoran and I lie side by side on the bed in the guest house where we’re staying. Not a hotel but a room in a woman’s apartment that she rents to visitors like us. I don’t mind being a visitor in the abstract but in someone’s home it’s different, though Zoran scoffs at my compunctions. Mrs. Kovacs is different from a hotel manager as we are her only guests and she watches our comings and goings with something approaching concern. Her business, Zoran says, looking tired. My father once said, You exhaust me. I remember that it was very cold out. We were driving somewhere. He didn’t have the defroster on and the windshield was fogged. He said, looking tired, You don’t have to entertain me.
There’s no physical evidence but it was about thirty years ago that the Soviets entered Budapest, in 1956, something that didn’t happen to Yugoslavia under Tito. Zoran says, Tito was a great leader, like Martin Luther King, he adds. We talk about King. Zoran was born just after World War II and remembers hearing about American troops marching into Little Rock, Arkansas, to desegregate the schools. We discuss states’ rights and federalism, Alexander Hamilton, the Civil War, Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court, Rosa Parks and Brown v. the Board of Education. A “landmark decision,” I quote, like an anchor on the nightly news. Zoran’s convinced that America’s racism will mean its demise. We don’t have racism in Yugoslavia; we have national, ethnic minorities, and it’s very bad, he says. Economically, who knows. But things change. Sometimes he’s hopeful. He quotes Gramsci: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. I might easily reverse the two, I say, hoping that he’ll enjoy the irony. He lights a cigar and peers at me as if we were sifting at different tables. “A joke?” he asks. “Sure,” I say. Not mentioning paralysis of the will, the division of the intellect. “In Haiti,” I tell him, “there’s a saying: When the anthropologists come, the gods leave.” “That is too anti-intellectual for me,” Zoran says, “but interesting. Anthropology is anyway a nineteenth-century problem.” “l can’t think of one problem that isn’t technological that doesn’t go back at least to the nineteenth century.” “Touché ,” he says.
Sitting in a cafe, everyone enacting to perfection my expectation of this reality, this place, where newspapers hang from wooden sticks and the aroma of pastry is palpable, I wonder if Zoran feels the hilarious intensity to our political discussions, both of us trying to display understanding like fan dancers. That is, when we’re not engaged in that other kind of heated discussion meant to stupefy ideology or, at least, deny it.
I can feel entirely indifferent to the content of what I say. A great postindustrial capitalist ennui engulfs me and sweeps away vestiges of involvement. Leaves me passionless and dissatisfied and incapable of movement. I’m threatened by this constantly. In unfamiliar surroundings the point is to shift voices. I like shifting voices. Love affairs permit those shifts, and when the lover is shifty, as Zoran might be, the ride is bumpy. But if he is a shifter, so am I’ Shifting to the right or left, shifty, shiftless. American women wore shifts in the fifties, my mother wore them. I have pictures of her looking shapeless but triumphant. These days her only child is shifting. Or shiftless. Many Hungarians wear jeans and walk tall, their faces sculpted with great high cheekbones which make them appear noble and anguished. I write Ann on the back of a postcard of the Hotel Gellert: I’m in Budapest with Zoran. I met him in Venice. The personal is shiftless and political. Gabors all over the city. I tear up the card.
I wish we were staying in the Hotel Gellert, more of that Old World charm I’ve been prepared for’ Instead Zoran and I have soup in its restaurant. His appreciation of this finer side of life is circumvented by a cynicism that he tells me is common to Eastern Europeans. I sip at statements like these but am unable to swallow them whole. Zoran’s cynicism, which he considers a national trait, mixes with a heady idealism and produces a roller coaster personality that accounts, maybe, for his impassioned speeches and intense lovemaking. I would never go on a roller coaster, that is consciously, I might be forced, maybe drugged and blindfolded and kidnapped, and could be thrown on one and end up screaming, my lace a mask of fear as in movies where so many characters seal their fates in love-or-death scenarios on that mechanical ride.
In a bookstore that caters to non-Hungarian-speaking travelers, another identity I can assume, I find an English translation of a story by Mihaly Babits. It’s the story of a wealthy boy who every night dreams that he’s desperately poor. By day he s served by footmen and butlers, treated like a storied prince’ But at night he’s the servant, barefoot, hungry and miserable. His dreams become more real to him than his waking life, a familiar sensation. Zoran has no interest in dreams, insists he doesn’t remember them and that if he did they wouldn’t mean anything. He thinks I’m superstitious. Babits must have read The Interpretation of Dreams, I declare, ready to argue about everyday life and the unconscious, but Zoran merely opens his newspaper.
We walk along the Danube. I glance at Buda from Pest or Pest from Buda. lt wouldn’t be bad to know I was in a well-plotted movie or novel, where every incident and coincidence has meaning. To be part of a mystery that would be solved. With clues strewn here and there. A mystery that I’d be able to solve. With Zoran I’d like to maneuver cleverly or make an opening that was as subtle as one by a chess master like Boris Spassky. Whatever happened to Bobby Fischer?
They say Budapest is the Paris of the East with its massive nineteenth-century buildings, cafés and large mirrors. I look furtively at the reflections of Zoran and me. We appear composed and regular. We walk in step. We walk quickly. We seem determined. His chin juts out. Mine does too. He pushes his hair back from his face. Mine falls into my eyes. I take his arm or he takes mine. He opens doors for me, I open doors for him. I wear black, he wears black. We’re best when we’re in motion.
Which is probably why we fuck most of the time. In this we’ve both become compulsive. His hand is on my lap or on my thigh no matter where we are. At a movie he throws his coat over me so that he can hold my breast and then slip his finger into my vagina. We rush back to the guest house, and fuck till we fall asleep. In the morning it begins again. Zoran is as good a lover as he was a sightseer in Venice. Here, with me, he doesn’t sightsee. He says, with a deep sigh, I am too involved to think. I’m supposed to be flattered.
Our Mrs. Kovacs makes herself scarce. She doesn’t go in for jokes, the way Signor Mancini did. That fascist Mancini, I can hear Claudia say, then see Claudia spit into the sink of the coffee shop on the Moscow Road. Mrs. Kovacs didn’t introduce herself as “Kovacs, not related to Ernie.” She just makes herself invisible or squirrels around the apartment. Maybe she’s standing behind a door. Or in the shadow in the hallway, standing in the shadow of love. I hear doors closing and opening, thin squeaky noises. She puts on bedroom slippers when she comes indoors and pads around the living room. She may be listening to our moans and grunts. I clap my hand over Zoran’s mouth, he grabs my arm and twists it behind my back. I bite him hard on his shoulder, he pins my other arm down. He won’t come unless I come. His insistence, which was at first a sign of sexual compassion and urgency, has become the tactics of a cold war warrior meant to win a wordless battle.
I’m on a roller coaster with Zoran, whose light blue eyes are encircled by coffee-colored rings. “Because of you,” he says. “l can’t sleep. I can’t even smell you anymore,” he complains. “We have the same smell. You and I. We are the same.” Perhaps that’s why we fight so much more these days, gripped by the sense we’re falling into a time before words and mirrors surfaced to key us to our separate identities. I can smell myself, I tell him. I can smell my cunt all the time. Even reading or drinking coffee in a café, I can smell it. When Zoran is at the gues
t house or walking near the Danube, I know he’s not with me. Perhaps I have been kidnapped and thrown into a story I’d never read or want to see on the screen’ Or maybe I would want to see it. I like romance at a distance.
I know of an Englishman who once attempted invisibility but was not as successful as Mrs. Kovacs. He had a suit made of the same pattern as his wallpaper. He put it on and stood against the wall of his room and called for his landlady. What are you doing up against that wall? she asked. Zoran laughs in a raucous way and I like him again. We get dressed. Mrs. Kovacs hovers near the kitchen as Zoran and I rush to find a cab, to go anywhere. Some kids point at our driver and shout, KGB, KGB. They know you’re American, Zoran says perfunctorily. They tease you.
I don’t know why we’re taking a cab. I suppose we’re both exhausted. I tell Zoran a story, the same one I told Charles in Istanbul. I tell it almost the same way, too, as if it’s already a myth. I once saw a man coming out of an elevator in downtown Manhattan. I didn’t know who he was but his face reminded me of someone, someone I knew. Standing next to me another man said hello to the stranger who just shook his head up and down in return. I asked the man beside me, Who is he? He looks so familiar. That’s Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, the man replied. He’s worked in this building for years. We didn’t speak after that, waiting for the elevator; it was eerie. I look at Zoran. He seems to appreciate the story and puffs hard on his cigar. The Rosenbergs have never, to my knowledge, been defended, I explain to Zoran, the way Blunt and the Cambridge spies were. That’s because, he interrupts, the British are British. I go on, No one, their supporters, I mean, maintains they did it because they were Communists and obeyed their conscience, not country. The taxi driver looks in his back mirror and Zoran shoves my arm and whispers loudly, CIA, CIA. The cabdriver laughs. Zoran sighs, You think too much about betrayal and loyalty. A little later, seated in another café, looking up from his newspaper, he complains, You are like all Americans. There is no way that I can say to him, You are like all Yugoslavians, as I have no idea what all Yugoslavians are like.
To Zoran with his impossibly high standards everything is corrupt but sex. Sex and Renaissance art, the paradisiacal moment he looks back to as if it had escaped the forces of history nothing else does. We mostly agree about America’s images of freedom and the rhetoric that makes America America, constructs it, but Zoran sees evil everywhere, in every bit of American life, which he appreciates for its vulgarity. We argue about popular culture and television. He sees mass culture as something that can only bring the masses down. With our differences brandished we challenge and frustrate each other. When things hold together or fall apart, the forms are familiar. The conventions—as well as the anomalies—control our ability to imagine different arrangements. Zoran and I have become mired in arguments and positions neither of us, I bet, truly supports. But daily what we actually support and what we find ourselves defending grow more ridiculous. I defend Hollywood movies as if their contradictions really were heroic, and he defends censorship or government intervention without a trace of irony.
He’d like to undo me. I’d like to undo him. I’d like to build a Berlin Wall that places me in the East and him in the West. As for American vulgarity he makes small exceptions. He says he loves me, even though I drive him crazy. I never tell him I love him, and he says he knows I do, but I’m too young to appreciate it. One of his newer verdicts about me. I tell him he’s an elitist. He smiles gravely. Perhaps I’ve wounded him. I’d like to. Did you sleep with that invisible Englishman? he asks.
If this were a comedy Zoran might be a cranky but charming Eastern bloc intellectual on vacation. I’d be sort of bumptious and well-intentioned, a well-off, but not really rich, white American, condemned to a circle of hell Dante never wrote—reserved parking for the naive whose naiveté is laced with masochistic hope. And privilege, he always says, don’t forget that. You Americans are hopeless, he also says. History is full of Watergates. Your people are always so surprised at conspiracy. My people. Our comedy will be short-lived. But the comic will be devastatingly apparent, I think, only later when I examine life without Zoran, even though he and I are still determined to go to his country and this seems less likely every day. But Zoran refers to it, a kind of marker or signifier of progress.
There is no progress, there is repetition. John the New Zealander was very fond of saying that, but I wouldn’t tell Zoran because then he’d ask me about John and get possessive and jealous in the most so-called reactionary way.
Chapter 10
Home Sick
TANGIER
A long time ago a young woman from France or Germany or Great Britain arrived here on the start of a journey. She left home to travel when travel was hard and when few women traveled alone. Or at all. I can see her. In a long brown skirt of durable material, a dark jacket, sensible shoes, a broad-brimmed hat and a scarf, she is tall and solid, short and slight, blond, dark. She does not fall in love with anything but adventure. Adventure is to her what Jesus is to nuns—the true marriage partner—and she dedicates her life, her being, to this fascinating mate. Remarkably resilient, carrying a map and compass, and only one leather suitcase, she enters Tangier on the beginning of a journey that will be her life and over many many years she loses touch with everyone she ever knew. Or her father dies, her brother marries, her mother dies, her friends marry, her lover gives up hope of her coming back and marries her cousin, and one girlfriend, who teaches school, lives out her life as a spinster, a woman with a secret, and only she keeps in touch with her. Or, no one reaches her, she breaks off relations completely, and were she to hear that her father died, it would not touch her. She ends in the desert, knowing the ways of the Bedouin, or she ends near the jungle, or she uses her inheritance to buy a large house where she lives simply and learns to fly a plane and becomes a mail carrier. Or she is desperately poor, having given her money away, and exists as an oddity in the village or town that tolerates her eccentricity. Or she trains chimpanzees to follow her as she walks around the grounds of her estate. She is Freya Stark, the writer and traveler, who urges you to “let yourself go on the stream of the unknown.” Or she is Isabelle Eberhardt who dresses like a man, and is hungry for love, for adventure, always hungry. Or she is a character like Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky who goes mad and wanders in the desert forever, forever untethered.
She is eager to begin her trip. The future was the desert, as the future now is outer space, a future that science-fiction writers long ago colonized and have been waiting impatiently for us to enter. Perhaps going into the desert would be going backward since time might be curved, and anything can be the present, past or future. If this is true then my not going into the desert—to lose myself, my mind—is not just a matter of cowardice or lack of adventurousness. I may have already been there or will be going there. Still, I think about it often. Losing myself in the desert. Abandoning everything, being abandoned. Taking up residence in a small town in Iowa where no one would know me. I’d cut off all ties to my past, I’d use the frontier, I’d become a frontier. I’d be known as that woman at the edge of the real last frontier. I’d have a front porch in my frontier version of reality. I’d sit on that front porch and gaze out at limitless skies and pastures. Relativity would be as close as I came to relatives. Not that I have many, just my mother really. I owe her a letter.
From the patio I stare at the azure and pink sky, the sky sipping at the sun the way I sip at my whiskey soda whose two ice cubes have melted. Melted ice cubes under melting suns, days melting into nights, transient often indistinguishable moments, and why Irish Pete, Pete of Amsterdam, should walk into this scene now, walk in from nowhere, why he does and where he’s come from is just one more of those boundaryless moments. I’m glad I’m drinking Irish whiskey, I think, and close my book, Philby’s My Silent War.
Like Sal he recognizes me immediately, and like Charles he is wearing different clothes, a different fashion, which offers a
very different image from the one Pete struck in Amsterdam. A newly coined image, a newly minted stamp. In any case Pete’s got on a linen jacket, baggy trousers and is carrying a small men’s pocketbook. He is, he tells me, here on business but the business is clearly not my business. Import/export, I ask good-humoredly. ‘Course, yeah, Pete answers. The call for prayer sounds and reminds me of Istanbul, of Mr. Yapar and the minarets, of a hailer of images. I ought to send a postcard to Cengiz. I suppose Pete didn’t meet Cengiz, or Charles, but I won’t ask. He and I order more to drink and sink deeper into our chairs. He didn’t go east, to Istanbul, or if he did that’s not what he’s telling me. He went south to Barcelona with some friends, then came here and is staying with people in the Socco. A rich German’s house, he says. Which may account for his new clothes. He doesn’t mention Olivier and neither do I, a lesson I learned from the English brothers. Pete may tell me in time, I content myself with that, leaving him on the veranda or patio, picking up my keys from Mr. Mrabet, the urbane concierge who, I’ve decided, has a developed sense of the ridiculous. I’m not sure why I think this.
Motion Sickness Page 4