Breathless
Page 17
“I know you can’t forgive me.”
“Forgive?” I say.
He wakes up. “What?” Draws back from my touch, falls asleep again with his face in the pillow, begins to mumble:
“I didn’t want to . . .”
“All right,” I whisper, though I don’t know what he is talking about.
The constantly gnawing worry has given Lukas’s body a boyish frailty, as if he is regressing, like the lake—it has withdrawn too, dried up like a dead eye in the summer heat and left a circle of slippery gray-violet slime that you have to walk over barefoot to reach the water and cool down. But we don’t do that any longer. There’s an invisible line by the steps that we can’t go beyond. We’re anchored here now.
—
Life is like a fairy tale, cruel and cautionary, weee-oo ee ee ee ee ee-oo, sounds the hunting cry of the kites. I follow the steep drop as one of the huge birds of prey angles his forked tail and dives. Where did all the kites suddenly come from? I don’t recall them as a child. They would have been etched in my memory with their long dark shadows. Lukas says that they were almost wiped out for a while. They stopped breeding—too much pesticide in their natural diet—then people started to put out scraps from the abattoirs onto the fields and the species fought back from the brink of extinction.
The vertical dive of a bird of prey is like a falling star: you should wish for something the instant you see it. I shut my eyes and murmur my hope into the sweaty curls on Lukas’s neck.
“What?”
“Nothing. A secret.”
—
Death rocks the chair in the darkness. And on the porch steps we sit and wait. The ad was cheap at any rate and we have at least tried, no harm done, Lukas says.
By the afternoon, the mercury has risen to ninety and all we can speak about is water. Lukas talks about the coolness of the Danube, something he is not likely to remember, while I spin refreshing fantasies for us of mountain streams, fjords, waterfalls, rivers, clear and ice cold. We have to go down to the lake and have a dip. Gábriel has just fallen asleep, and for the first half hour he usually sleeps without anxiety and sweating, so peacefully that he looks as though he will never wake up, and sometimes I almost wish he wouldn’t, for his sake. We don’t have time to look for bathing suits or even make our way to our sheltered bathing place, just rush straight down near the house and plunge in, naked, and forget for a little while.
I try to keep the sensation of cold as we hurry back, but we’re already perspiring when we reach the house. In one way, leaving the house was not in vain. The first thing we see as we enter the kitchen is the flashing red light on the answering machine. I have a sudden feeling of unease. As if the message brings news of his death, as if someone has called to say that now it is over—the fight—Gábriel is dead in the next room and here is a very favorable offer covering all your death-related requirements.
Twice I listen to the message before handing the receiver to Lukas. The voice easygoing to the point of distracted.
“Hi, Yoel Farkas here, saw your ad and . . . yeah, if you still need someone . . . give me a buzz and we’ll have a chat.” There then follows a message of about the same length that according to Lukas is in Hungarian.
One bite in a whole week, so your hand mustn’t shake when you reel it in. Afraid that Lukas will start to hesitate and make a fuss, I make the crucial call myself. The guy’s voice is as smooth as it is on the answering machine, and he says yes without asking me to explain the almost inexplicable. He doesn’t even hesitate when I’m honest and say that we have no money.
“I’m not doing it for the money,” he says, as if he has already realized that this is a particularly deserving case that he can enter on the credit side of his karmic account. “I haven’t done any interpreting for a while, so it’ll be good practice. And besides, I can’t wait to get out into the country. It’s like walking on a hot tin roof in Stockholm.”
When should he come? The sooner the better, I say. The doctors have said that Gábriel only has a few weeks left. They must be able to see that kind of thing. There’s a risk that he will lose consciousness at the end, so we can’t afford to waste any time at all. He has grown so thin that his bones are rubbing at his skin from the inside.
Lukas is circling around me as I speak, makes a sign that I don’t know the meaning of, something about being careful, or maybe about money. I explain the unconventional remuneration we have thought of. Not sure that he understands at the other end. He’s not listening very carefully, just says yes, seems pleased to be getting away from the city, just has one or two things to finish off, then he will pack and take the train down from Stockholm.
You know a newcomer has arrived in town when he steps down from the train in slow motion and suddenly has that look of exhaustion in his eyes. Him over there. No doubt. White shirt and kind of . . . optimistically large bags. What does he have with him? No one has asked him to stay for long. Have I gotten this right? What am I doing here? He appears to be thinking: should I really have come, am I going to regret this, when is the next train back? He has come to the end of the line and alighted there; no, it is not even the end of the line, the end of the line is something—this is a few stations before. An insignificant place where most trains don’t even stop.
He’s dressed as if he expected to land in another climate zone. The mercury is certainly as high here as in Stockholm, the asphalt is just as hot, he’ll probably soon discover. Yes, look, he is already undoing a button at his neck. And another one. Rolls up the white shirtsleeves, wipes the palms of his hands helplessly over his face, as if the blazing heat were a bad dream he’s trying to wake himself out of. At least it’s the same for everyone. Except animals: it’s worse for them. Two cats have already been caught like nightmare fish in the valves at the power station dam. No one has ever heard of cats drowning before. Desperate to quench their thirst in the devastating heat.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, as I go to meet him and stretch out my hand. “I mean . . . sorry . . . hi . . . Yoel. How many degrees is it here? One-ten?”
Lukas doesn’t take his hand, as if he doesn’t understand what the gesture means. “We have stopped wondering,” he answers tersely. It is true, we have. This is a heat that has to be ignored, like any other evil, in the hope that it might disappear. It will be better next week, the stranger says he’s heard.
“They said that last week too, but it just got worse,” Lukas says. But now it has reached the limit, it has to change, the stranger thinks.
“What limit? There is no limit,” says Lukas. He has neither shaken Yoel’s hand nor introduced himself.
“Of course. If you say so. Here in the country you forecast your own weather.” The one who says he is called Yoel smiles.
I am relieved that Lukas doesn’t hear the last remark, because he is clearly not in the right mood. Begins to fasten the luggage onto the old Yamaha that is his only vehicle now that the car is in for repairs. Once he has secured the bags and kick-started it he turns to hand it over to me.
“Are you riding with me?” I hiss. I’m usually always nagging about driving the old monster, without ever being allowed. It’s not me he’s worried about, he always assures me, but the motorcycle. Now he sneaks a glance at the stranger and I immediately guess what’s going on. He wants to change our plan so that I drive the heavy luggage back to the house while he acts as guide. He hadn’t reckoned on the interpreter who answered our ad being young and handsome with a captivating smile. I refuse to take the motorcycle when he passes it to me. A little while ago I had fallen off and nearly injured myself, and that was just in testing the seat. Now we’re going to stick to our plan, and that’s all we have. Without it everything will get out of hand.
He gives in, but makes his point by behaving like a lout and not picking up on the polite small talk on the platform. Just takes care of the luggage as if he was the anon
ymous footman. Halfheartedly he pulls off the accelerator and sets off for home.
“And that was . . . ?” asks our interpreter, who by now if not before must be regretting his decision to come here at all.
“Lukas. It’s for his sake that you’re here.” I have no desire to apologize for him—I never do normally—but Yoel is someone we really need. Nothing should ruin that, not even Lukas.
—
All that Lukas and I used to need, to believe in the impossible, was each other. That we now had a plan too gave us a sense that what we were doing was feasible. “A long stay in a charming lakeside cottage,” was what I offered the guy on the telephone in exchange for his services. Lukas had stood in front of me and rolled his eyes. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, was my thinking. Now I almost feel sorry for him as he walks beside me, full of expectation, as if he’s really looking forward to it all. He doesn’t yet know that the person he will be interpreting for is high on morphine most of the time and for the last few days has been more dead than alive.
“I didn’t know he was so ill,” is the first thing Yoel says when we arrive at the house and he grasps the situation. “I thought he was on a visit from Hungary. Have you really lived together your whole life without being able to speak to each other . . . I’ve never heard anything like it.” If he hadn’t broken off at that point, I would have been obliged to interrupt. Lukas has not asked for a sweeping analysis of his childhood and adolescence.
“You’d better go in now, while you have the chance. Gábriel sleeps more than he’s awake,” I inform him. This is deadly serious, if he hasn’t realized that yet.
“Okay, so what do you want to know?” I fall silent and Lukas doesn’t seem to know what to say either. We haven’t actually talked about what the important questions are that he has to ask. This is Lukas’s business now, I infer with a gesture.
“I want to know where I come from.” His answer is almost inaudible. “And why we moved here.”
Yoel raises his eyebrows. “Is that all?”
“And about your mama,” I add. I see the effort Lukas is making, somewhere deep inside:
“As much as possible about her. I know nothing.”
“And if you have any relatives left anywhere,” I fill in.
“Yes. I don’t want . . . don’t want to be left alone,” he murmurs. Alone? You’re not alone, Lukas, I want to say. I’m here.
If Yoel thinks the whole thing is extremely strange, he doesn’t show it. Lukas sucks in the last of the cigarette and stubs it out in a juice glass, listening to Yoel’s quiet voice.
“Let me sit alone with him for a while. We’ll try to take the most important questions first. But you’ll have to reduce the morphine if we’re going to get anything sensible out of him. He’s delirious.”
—
Merely by making an appearance and being present, Yoel is like soothing water washing over all the clammy anxiety. Not that he displays a great deal of empathy, but an ease, a sense that this whole thing need not be as impossible as it appeared to Lukas and me. I stand beside him and just breathe in the smell of clean shirt. It smells alive, I think. Fresh. And grown-up.
Lukas has been in the same clothes all summer, worn nylon shorts and a threadbare Bob Marley top. He doesn’t even smell of sweat anymore, just smells of “that long hot summer when Gábriel was dying.” Presumably I smell the same, in my not-so-white top and denim skirt that hangs like a sloughed snakeskin and itches around my hips day and night. I’ve tried taking it off, but it still itches, phantom itching. It’s the heat.
Now and again I’ve taken a shower, washed and changed the bedclothes in the vain hope that some things can still be clean. A machine-load with Gábriel’s sheets that have to be changed often. And so off with Lukas’s T-shirt in passing and toss it in the drum with my snake skirt and a few underclothes, watch it all go around for an hour and then into the tumble drier, as if the wash were a little child that needed supervision. The laundry room has been my only refuge this summer, the coolest room in the house, the only place death doesn’t reach. All is as it should be in here; all that has gone wrong outside is still as usual there—an exceptional state of equilibrium. I sit on the concrete floor until Lukas comes to fetch me with just a look from the door, a silent glance that says: come on, I need you. And I reply:
“Soon . . . just have to do the drier too.” And so I switch the machine on one more time. Steal twenty minutes more of liberating, irresponsible solitude.
When I remove the laundry, it smells just the same as when I shoved it in. Perspiration and lingering panic.
—
To flies we’re just another surface area. Salty humid dried flat curved bare fields of flesh. Open to invasion. So tired. No, much worse than tired—spent.
When Yoel arrives it’s like a window flung open in a room that has been shut up for too long. A cold blast of oxygen rushes in and wakes us out of the torpor that has filled the house. He smells of summer, not damp and musty like us—no, he smells of bonfire and dry grass, brackish water, fresh air, aftershave. The house becomes more bearable when he is in it.
The outcome from the first session is meager, but it is at least a start. According to Yoel most of the time was spent explaining why he was there at all. You could have prepared this better, he gives us to understand. But how? That is precisely the problem, an almost insurmountable obstacle to communication. Otherwise we wouldn’t have needed him to come.
“Do you think that we’re . . . strange?” I ask when Lukas has gone out, indicating clearly that he wants to be left alone.
“Do you think that you’re strange?”
“Yes. Or no. Maybe . . . but we’re only doing what we’ve got to do.”
“Well,” Yoel says, “it’s not that strange—to do what you’ve got to do I would say is quite normal.”
Gábriel is not in fact as reluctant as I had feared. But it’s a strain to speak and even more of a strain to remember. He answers in one or two words the questions Yoel puts to him from Lukas. I have the feeling that what Lukas gains from it is not worth the battle. Stop torturing him, I want to say. But what right have I to interfere?
They begin with what is important but not dangerous: places, names, family details. Gábriel comes from a village outside Kecskemét. In the middle of the Puszta, in the Great Hungarian Plain. From an area with many fruit farms and the apricot brandy they are famous for, Yoel relates between rounds, seeming to put twice as much into Gábriel’s short replies each time. There’s a special shine in Gábriel’s eyes when he hears Yoel mention barack pálinka. Yoel can’t help but laugh.
“It’s really awful, barack pálinka . . . you need to have grown up with it to like it,” he whispers to us. There is a moment’s levity in the room, as if the pressure suddenly drops and everyone becomes a little giddy. Gábriel smiles, Yoel laughs, and Lukas and I laugh as well even though we have no idea what about.
—
Yoel seems to know most things. Has studied history at university, traveled all over. Gives us complimentary mini-lectures between Gábriel’s brief and hesitating answers. About the Puszta, how the people were driven out under Turkish rule, how the ground, when no one was cultivating it, was reduced to a wilderness and for centuries was just pastureland for cattle. From Gábriel he has learned that his older brothers, Lukas’s uncles, worked as czikós, cattle drivers, when they were young. Gábriel was the only one in the family they could afford to do without so that he could continue his education. He had a head for books and got as far as studying medicine, even though his studies were prolonged for financial reasons. He was obliged to work at the same time, married and had children, and then . . . Yoel pauses, searching for the best way to say it, the gentlest way. But there is no such way.
Then—before he had passed his final exams—Lukas’s mama died.
That was what happened.
The conversation ends there. Gábriel indicates that he needs to rest. It’s frustrating for Lukas to break off, but there’s no choice.
—
Lukas has always imagined that his mama died shortly after he was born. That has been his explanation for having no memories of her, not the slightest little tone in her voice, no blurred snapshot. That he was five years old and still can’t remember her affects him deeply. He raises objections. Yoel must be wrong . . . But the next time Yoel asks, he receives the same answer from Gábriel, so Lukas has to concede.
Stop tormenting him, I want to beg him. But Lukas has a look in his eye that says, You owe me this. I have to hold him back now, instead of urging him on. And his papa is no longer capable of defending himself. If he speaks he knows that he will be left in peace afterward—so he speaks. What life gives with one hand, it soon takes back with the other. We learn that Gábriel finally succeeds in catching his teenage love, Lukas’s mama, after several years of waiting while she was married to someone else. Mara worked as a nurse in a Budapest suburb and one day a week as a volunteer in a prison. Gábriel’s greatest fear was that she would catch tuberculosis, as the infection often spread among inmates. But it wasn’t tuberculosis that took her, it was fire. In a summer cottage they had borrowed from some friends, the last day of their holiday there, the fire that took hold in a pile of clothes on the bed. It happened so quickly. Gábriel had gone out into the woods to empty some partridge traps. He had actually gone off because they’d fallen out. They who argued so seldom had disagreed about some small thing, something to do with the children, the two sons. She, Mara, thought that he was too easy on them, would always smooth things over when she had reprimanded them. That meant it had all been to no avail and she was made to feel ashamed that she’d been too hard. They started to argue. After a short quarrel he went out. As he was returning he could see from far away that the little wooden house was engulfed in flames.