Breathless

by Anne Sward

  I travel without an aim, but I’ve read somewhere that all journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is not aware. In April, the cruelest of months, there are no sunglasses dark enough for the spring light on the streets of Kazimierz. I look straight into the sun and don’t care if someone is sucked into my eye and burned to ash.

  There are as many dogs roaming loose here as there are domestic ones. The tame ones prowl around with their tails rigid, constantly on their guard. The wild ones are placid, taking no notice of humans. The dogs doze in the afternoon sun. It’s a beautiful day. Time is running out, somebody or something is approaching, a breeze stirs along the ground, the dogs’ eyes roll in their sleep. The stray mongrels are just one incidental piece of the street scene. They could rise to their feet at any time and move somewhere else, quick to react to impulses of need and flight.

  Fall asleep forgetting who I am, wake up as someone else, with another face—go out to buy a new pair of boots and throw away the old ones—I do this on the third day. Dark red with brightly colored flowers embroidered on the leg. A tingling in the tip of my tongue, like a secret message. A good day. I can feel it. A good day, a good spring.

  With every step I am reminded of my new footwear. The hard leather is gripping my calves tightly, but it’s not uncomfortable. Sense a new level of awareness, unnerving and at the same time arousing, as I follow the river downstream, the morning still young.

  The faces of the women in this town have so many aspects. Most beautiful of all are their early morning faces, closed and serene like sleeping birds, walking along the river, ready for the drones who have to fix new boundaries between themselves every day. Traces of the night’s love encounters are on their bare necks, oval blue blotches that can’t be washed away but have to be covered with makeup before they can climb aboard the trolley buses and the trams on their way to work. I wanted to be one of them and now I am. Learn to keep pace with the gentle flow of the water, adjust to the women’s ways and movements, blend in. The only thing distinguishing us is language, but during the silent morning walks along the riverbank, nobody notices. I can feel the change in me this town is causing, the light, the men, the women.

  —

  Sit for a while by the river and rest my feet, aching from the new boots. See a man at the edge of the water doling out food from a plastic bag to some of the stray dogs. A performance, how he tries to direct the group to prevent the pushy ones from taking everything and leaving nothing for the lowest ranks. He shouts something to me and smiles. I smile back and indicate that I don’t understand, and that just makes him repeat the sentence, louder, as if that would help me. Then he tries to drive away his four-legged friends and approaches me with half the troop still circling around his legs.

  I stand up. There are a lot of them and they appear more wild than tame.

  “Nie mówie po polsku,” I say.

  “That was perfect Polish,” he says. Of course, but I don’t speak Polish is the only thing in Polish I can say.

  “English is okay.” He smiles. “And I really like your boots.”

  The psychopath is often charming, generally has success with the opposite sex. I cast around in my memory. Dogs . . . do they like dogs? Do they like to feed abandoned animals? To give them a feeling of power . . . No, I don’t remember. He comes nearer, walking as if he owns the diminishing distance between us. When he extends his hand and notices that I hesitate, he wipes off bits of the dogs’ food on his trouser leg and offers it again. The psychopath often has children with several women. The psychopath seldom takes his own life, because he does not have strong feelings of regret or failure. Why must the psychopath always be a man? And why must he always come up to me? What is it about me and maniacs? Where is the power of my attraction in their eyes? I want to know . . . so that I can do something about it. Is it the color of my lipstick, or my habit of watching people too unashamedly, averting my gaze a fatal second too late? “I’m Jiri,” he says, shooing away the dogs.

  “Lo.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Wildcat,” I reply.

  “Wildcat . . . In what language?”

  “Mine.”

  “Ah, in your language. You’ve got your own language? Wildcat language?”

  He himself looks rather wolflike. Predatory teeth, amber eyes, gray suit. The suit, is it ironic? It must be. He is wearing it with sneakers. Perhaps he belongs to the category of intelligent lunatics, attractive psychopaths, treacherous high-risk projects.

  “You’re popular,” I say, nodding toward the dogs strutting around his feet.

  “Yes, I’ve spoiled them, or rather . . . bought their love. I bet yours can’t be bought, eh?” he says and shakes out a cigarette.

  —

  Indiscretion is the order of the evening. Too much vodka in a dingy bar by the river. Too much darkness, too much river, too many of Jiri’s friends, too many strangers, too many men. Too many languages—English, German, Russian—which in drunkenness merge into Polish, Swedish, Slovak. In the end people can’t even speak their own language. We just laugh, and in so doing we understand each other for the first time that night.

  When I try to slow the pace he smiles at me. He says his name is Jiri, but his friends call him something else. You can always drink three glasses, he says, three before, three during, three after. I can trust him because he has a hell of a long list of academic qualifications.

  “Before, during, and after what?”

  “No idea, it’s just a saying.” He laughs. I’ve heard that in these parts they use vodka as a contraceptive . . . not before, during, or after, but instead. He doesn’t laugh at that. Alcohol can be the subject of jokes almost all over, but not religion and not sex, and definitely not at the same time. Why do I never learn? I know his type, who take themselves very seriously under the thin mask of intelligent irony. I have a certain weakness for them and that irritates me. A sophisticated layabout, sexy but graced with ironic taste in clothes and a soft spot for hungry abandoned dogs. What promise does that hold? For all I know, we may well sleep together before the night is over, but one thing is certain—we won’t joke about it.

  I begin to think that we’ll never shake off his friends, but suddenly they’re gone. Jiri makes sure that we’re alone, stops a clapped-out car on the street, and pays a young man to take us to his place on the other side of town. We are too drunk, sleep first and have sex later, making us feel less like strangers, as if we had been together before. But no, I would have remembered him. He moves in time with the breeze, the most sensual rhythm.

  No one has to have everything, but everyone has to have something. It might only be a fragrance one has never smelled before. Beautiful Slavic features. Handsome neck. Worn-out shoes that look as though they have walked far. Dark humor. A face exceptionally open. Exceptionally shut. A photo of children next to his heart. A story to tell. A weak point. A flaw. I don’t know if any of this is really him, but the fact that I can’t put my finger on what I find tempting about him—this is the tempting thing.

  “You fire into the blind spot between the eyes,” he says and marks the spot with two fingers against my forehead, as if he wants to anoint me or execute me or both at the same time. “The heavy body falls,” he mumbles, “it’s slack.” I’m not sure what he is talking about. Although his English is good I don’t understand what he means. The walls of the badly lit one-room apartment are dripping with damp, like the inside of a glass jar. It is meager accommodation for someone who works at the university, as he claims to do, devoid of books too. Salt mines, steelworks, I think when I see his hands. He is better looking without the suit, before a world opens up of . . . I wish I knew what it was called in his language: pleasure. I run my hand over the network of small hard muscles in his back. Dung-clearing muscles, he says. He has to go home to work on his parents’ farm as soon as he has some time off, as his father is getting old
and has been blessed with only one son. Five daughters and only one son, and, what’s more, he doesn’t want to take over the farm. A minor catastrophe.

  “I could help them financially instead of going home to toil away in their muddy fields. But it’s not a question of money. Do you understand?” I understand precisely. He rolls onto his back and pulls me down on top of him, alleges that I was murmuring a name in my sleep, could I be married? Without waiting for an answer, as if it is not very important, at least not more important than hunger, he gets up, restless, and disappears into the hallway. Returns from the floor’s communal kitchen with his hands full of bread, lard, pickles, and beer.

  —

  Most people play their best cards first, so why not part then with the illusion intact? An illusion is not exactly a lie, it is its own truth, a short interval while the oxygen lasts in the floating bubble. A man who is pleasant one evening is indeed pleasant in that place and at that time, even if in his normal life he’s despicable, before and after that evening, always has been and always will be despicable. He shows his best side—offers it to me—before the smell of sweat penetrates the smell of aftershave. And now and then I may prefer it that way.

  Sex is sometimes the price you have to pay for the delight of seducing a man. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Make him fall, preferably slowly enough to see it happen. Was Venus ever afraid when she lured men? But she wasn’t a normal woman, wasn’t subject to normal laws. She enticed men up onto her mountain and seduced them. Mound of Venus: the raised, hair-covered part above the pubic bone in a woman. In this perilous place all her men fell victim.

  —

  As soon as Jiri is sleeping soundly I creep away, back to my hotel room.

  The last thing I notice before I drop into bed is a growing dark cloud outside the window, as if an enormous sack of thousands of bats is emptied over the hotel’s pointed roof. Then everything is black. Not a darkness that eyes become accustomed to, no, pitch black like closed-down factories at night, like the lake back home, at its deepest point.

  AX

  “You’ve slept with every one of the men, haven’t you?” Mama says and lifts the ax.

  “Yes,” I reply, “but only once.” She lowers the tool and shades her eyes with her hand. They’re almost white in the bright light. “Apart from with the great love of my life,” I add. She weighs the heavy ax in her right hand, wary.

  “How many times did you sleep with him, then?” She raises the deadly instrument again and swings it over her head with such dexterity that with the first blow the birch log whimpers and splits and leaps away, hitting the wall of the woodshed with a dull thud. My mama with an ax, a scene that always scared me as a child. She was terrifying even without an ax.

  “Don’t come back saying I didn’t warn you,” she mutters. I instinctively flinch as she lifts the hefty ax once more. I wish I could blame her, I really do, but the truth is for the whole of my life she has warned me about love.

  She looks as though she’d like to laugh but has forgotten how. Instead she takes aim again, stretches, and applies her now failing strength. She’s still just as skillful, her technique does not let her down, but she lacks the weight and speed required for the ax to do its job effectively.

  She was chopping wood when her water broke and when Papa left. Chopping. Every time. When someone died, when someone deceived her, when I moved, when she caught Lukas and me in the act, when she and Papa’s father had argued. When she was sad she took the ax and went out. I was used to it. The noise from the woodpile was the beat that accompanied all disasters, large and small, as I was growing up. I knew what a catastrophe sounded like. Heavy, slow, ominous. When I left the village the sound of the ax accompanied me.

  —

  She is in her element cutting wood, the steel that cleaves the air that cleaves the tree that cleaves the silence. I have always liked watching her while she chops. There’s something alarming in the sight and at the same time awe-inspiring. If something were to happen, an outward threat of any kind, it would still be she who would protect me, not the other way around. With every stroke I am convinced of this. A mother-goddess in a struggle with her demons, spider woman in her most terrifying form. Mama would like to weave the web of my fate—like the cosmic spider drawing all humans together with umbilical-cord thread, entwining them into the huge pattern.

  “To belong to everyone is to belong to no one,” she reminds me.

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. But that’s how I want it.” Now she lays down the ax and rubs into her aching hands the same mink fat she uses for her woodcutting boots. It’s universal, like everything else in her life; it wouldn’t surprise me if she fried herring in it too. She doesn’t ask who he is, the love of my life, the one who dazzled me so completely. Perhaps she thinks she already knows, in the way that mothers believe they know because we once shared the same bloodstream—they never let us forget.

  “I can’t understand how you manage it. Honestly, girl, what sort of stuff are you made of?”

  “Some kind of hard timber from the north, I imagine.”

  “Silver birch? With titanium screws in that case,” she says sourly. Her eyes: twinkling blue. I try to be truthful with her, even though I know that she doesn’t like it and she doesn’t want to understand.

  “What do you actually want from them? All they’ll bring you is emptiness, that’s what I think. What one gives you, another will take away.” I’m determined not to be provoked, but it’s already too late. “You were given too much love when you were little,” she adds and shoots an impenetrable look in my direction through the yellow lenses of her dark glasses. They look ridiculous. Hope she takes them off if anyone comes, whoever that might be . . . “Too much love. That’s the reason,” she repeats.

  “The reason for what?”

  “The men.”

  —

  Yes, I do sleep with every man, but not with just anybody, only with the ones I have selected, and they are a tiny percentage of all the men who cross my path, and then . . . well, then I leave them before they have a chance to display their less attractive side, which often means right away. What do I want of them? Not faithfulness under a cloud of creamy white tulle, at any rate. Not the Hiroshima four-poster bed, not the padded Alcatraz cell.

  And what do they want of me? “Fascinating,” “special,” I hear more often than not—that means I’m not pretty. I’m not one of the most beautiful of women, and that gives me a broad spectrum of potential men to choose from. Stunningly attractive women often seem so alone; it’s only when they’re tipsy that men dare to approach them. Or when the men themselves are tipsy and looking to offend them in some way.

  Whatever Mama believes, I select them with great care. Of course I have made mistakes, but that can happen in choosing one only—a misjudgment or bad luck can lead to a lifetime of regret. I once met a man who despised all the women he couldn’t have, almost as much as he despised those he could have. But I can’t make all men scapegoats for that.

  “Be careful,” Mama warns in her icy dialect. If she can no longer be my guardian angel, she wants to be my bird of foreboding. “Life’s not a carnival, Lo.” I know. But maybe it can be. A man who smells of Jicky cannot be utterly without hope. Or Eau Sauvage, Équipage, Hypnôse. Ozone perfumes are the ones I rely on most, the brackish, sweet and salty unisex fragrances, water scents. The animal, glandular smells like musk and civet make me more cautious. It has to be very late and only certain sorts of nights.

  “Someday your past’s going to come back to haunt you. Somebody who took it harder than you thought. Men are . . .”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Romantics,” Mama says and fixes me with her eye through the yellow glasses. It has grown cold and we’ve moved into the kitchen, where she fills the pan with water and fumbles for the coffee can in the cool cupboard. “Romanti
cs, Lo. You ought to know that. And yes, that sometimes makes them dangerous.” I know that her loyalty to me is great, but it can’t be sought. Now she suddenly looks hard, turns on the gas, strikes a match. I always hold my breath when she lights the gas stove. She refuses to replace it. If she’s going to die, she’ll go up in flames, not fade away. I have only daughters, God, my God, why have you forsaken me? laments a woman on the radio. Mama is listening.

  “Daughters,” she mutters to herself, “greater happiness and greater sorrow.” That was what her mother always said.

  —

  You can’t just toy with them and quit when you tire yourself, or one day it will turn out badly. Pouched animals . . . that’s what Mama calls them. But she’s a marsupial herself—she carried me. I may have clambered out of her pouch early and taken off, but sometimes I long to be back in her protective presence again.

  THE RED ZONE

  I met him on the streetcar between Buda and Pest that spring when the catalpa trees flowered too early and the month of April was so warm that by summer it would be unbearable to stay in town. He was the last one to squeeze on when it had already started to move. My eye caught the paisley pattern on his shirt. Only madmen go barefoot on a tram, I was thinking when I saw him hanging on, his hip against the chrome post, drinking from a bottle and smiling. What was he smiling at? Nothing in particular . . . just a smile? He lit an imaginary cigarette and suddenly I had a sneaking suspicion that I had provoked the smile. Discreetly I wiped my lips; perhaps a little of the paprika filling had ended up outside my mouth as I ran across the street from the market hall to the streetcar stop with my warm Hungarian bread.