“Beneath the ground, in the old river basins, the water continues to flow. It brings the sand into the well, the current . . .” says my father, but he can’t finish his sentence.
“And the steppe mice,” my mother teases him.
“Beneath the ground, there are great rivers,” says my father, “that swallow up houses and sweep them away.”
“Don’t paint the devil on the wall,” says my mother. “The boy is already so terrified that he can hardly sleep. You can’t even fit an oat flake in his ass because of these idiotic witch stories. If you don’t know any better, then keep quiet.”
MY MOTHER LEAVES THE LITTLE LAMP BURNING AT NIGHT so I won’t be afraid. It’s in the shape of a duck. The light socket grows out of the duck’s head. Recently, I haven’t been able to fall asleep. There’s a sewn fabric lamp shade on the incandescent wire frame. The lamp shade is pink, but the duck is rainbow colored. In the evenings I draw, sitting next to the lamp. Everyone else is asleep already.
“You can draw by the lamplight,” she says. I like to stay up in the evenings. But my mother won’t let me. I’m not allowed to put any wood on the fire, even though the room quickly grows cold. The duck lamp burns on the table, and I draw. I try to draw the lamp. I have a pencil with six colors. I have to be very careful with it, because I won’t get another. I’m not allowed to do anything with the fire. I can’t put anything else on it. The stove quickly grows cold. I begin to feel cold. I draw pictures of us. My father is far away and little. He isn’t at home. On one side, my older sister stands with my mother. I am the smallest. My mother is huge, she has a big belly, because she is expecting our little brother. The trees are green; in the small garden, the tulips are poking out already. We sit outside on the bench. We sit outside sometimes, but our mother’s legs hurt. We go places less often now.
When our mother was expecting my little brother, my older sister never went anywhere with us. If we were going somewhere, she never left with us. She would walk either behind us or in front of us. She pretended not to know us. If we were going to my grandfather’s, she would walk on the other side of the street. She keeps an eye on us from afar. My mother asks her why she’s doing this.
“Because everyone can see what you and our father have done,” she says.
“What did we do?” asks my mother.
My older sister says nothing, just makes a poking gesture toward my mother’s stomach.
“A kid,” she says.
My mother turns red. She doesn’t answer. My older sister sulks.
“She’s like a fucked fox,” says Máli.
Nowadays she’s always like that. I don’t know how to draw that.
My older sister presses her lips together, not answering.
“Your mouth looks like a hen’s ass,” Máli mocks her. My older sister’s mouth turns down.
“Don’t make your mouth crooked, or I’ll give you a crooked,” says Máli and guffaws. She really likes this phrase. Crooked means shit.
“Because whatever comes out of a person is never straight,” people say. Because nothing is ever perfect on this earth.
I like to be left alone. But they never leave me alone. We say lief alone. That’s why I draw at night, when everyone else is asleep already.
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” ASKS ONE OF THE OLD MEN.
“Beyond the river. To help gather the hay,” I answer. But I don’t know if I’m allowed to speak to this person. My mother didn’t say.
“Beyond what river?” the old man insists.
“Beyond the Kidron,” I say.
“The Kidron? Where did you get that from?”
“At home we call it the Kidron,” I answer.
“You live here, in this village?”
“Yes. I was born here,” I say. Although I was born in the hospital. Then, it was still new. I was the seventeenth. Seventeen cannot be divided. My sister taught me how to count. Now I know how to multiply and divide. My father said that there are numbers that are indivisible. They can’t be divided by anything, only by themselves and one. Since he told me that, I’ve tried to break down every number. I like the numbers that can’t be divided. The ones that are like us in this village. The ones that stick out from the others. Like five, seven, eleven. I already know them up to one hundred. That is, up to one hundred and one.
I realized that multiplication is, in reality, addition. Accelerated addition. I love numbers. Division is difficult, so I’m constantly practicing it. I walk down the street and I recite the multiplication tables to myself. I add the numbers together so as not to think. I take apart the numbers within myself. This way it’s not so boring to hoe, to husk corn, to take out the dung. The boring tasks are not boring if I count in my head while I’m doing them. I also love the number sixteen, because it is four times four. That is the easiest to remember. And then five times five. The number eighteen is three times six or two times nine. Seventeen, however, cannot be divided. It is a solitary number. Indivisible.
“That cannae be. Because I’ve never seen you,” says the old man. While he’s talking, he scrutinizes my face, his eyebrows furrowed. He suspects that maybe I’m not telling the truth. Kids always lie, but they also always give themselves away because they don’t know how to lie. He searches for familiar traits on me, to figure out who I look like. But he doesn’t find anything familiar.
“I was born in the hospital,” I say. “But my father was born here. We live here. We’ve never lived anywhere else.”
“Have you seen me before?”
“Yes,” I say. “But grown-ups are all the same.” Especially old people. But I just think that part. They wear black and they’re wrinkled. And they have no teeth.
“What you mean by that, all the same?”
“They yell, they argue loudly,” I say.
“Whose son are you?” the other one inquires.
I say my father’s name, but that tells them nothing.
“Who is your grandfather?” they ask.
“Lame Bobonka,” I say, because that’s how he’s known.
“Now I know. Now I know who your father is,” says one of the men.
“The one the Jew made, that Bobonka?” asks the other.
“That gossip got around. An old wives’ tale . . .” says the other and waves his hand.
“Which Bobonkas?” the other asks.
“The Owl-Bobonkas,” he says. Because the Bobonkas were called “Owls.” That was their nickname. But no one knows anymore why they were called that.
“The Jew made your father for a pot of unsheathed beans,” he says and guffaws.
“What’s an unsheathed bean?”
“You’ll find out when you’re big,” he says, and they guffaw.
“Why can’t I know now?”
“It’s still too soon.”
“Why is it too soon?”
“Aren’t you asking too many questions?”
“Does it seem so?” I say.
“Are you being impudent?”
“Me?” I ask. He is waving his hand already, as if to slap my face. But I am already running toward the river, which we call the Kidron.
MY MOTHER IS SITTING AT THE TABLE, HUSKING A SACK OF beans. In the meantime, she’s talking. My mother is making up memories for me. She wants me to remember the same things as she does. For me to remember what is important to her. She is telling old stories. When something that happened is told again, we call that a fairy tale. We remember the bad that has already passed. Among my mother’s stories are things that really happened and things that didn’t happen.
“You were little. We really needed to get a duck, because of the feathers. And for other reasons, too. In those days we ate duck eggs, because there was nothing else. I collected the feathers that fell into the mud and washed them off to make our down blanket.”
I remember the stories because she’s told them many times. Ever since that time, I remember the story of the duck. My mother remembers the story of the eleven ducks. I only rem
ember what she remembers. Something is always missing from the memories I have that weren’t told to me by my mother. Because all my memories were made up by my mother. But my mother is missing from each one of these memories. In reality, there were twelve ducks, but my mother’s story is about eleven ducks, not about the twelfth. Eleven can be divided only by itself. By itself and by one.
My mother sweeps the bean husks from her skirt and continues to tell stories.
“The twelfth little duck quacked in the cardboard box.” That is how my mother told the story.
She brought them home in the morning. Yesterday I cleaned out the water dispenser, which my mother got last year at the market. It’s still completely new, we haven’t even used it. Last year the polecat killed every duck in the pen. It strangled them all by overnight. There was a little wound on each of their necks. Where it had sucked out their blood. My mother cried a lot. It had chewed across their throats and sucked out their blood. They were already too big for the animal to carry back. Polecats don’t eat meat, they just suck out the blood.
“It could at least have eaten one or two,” says my mother. “It just wasted all of them. May its insides be eaten by cancer,” she says and cries.
My mother brought the shovel and buried the carcasses at the end of the garden.
“I’ll tell the Gypsies. But even they won’t want them, because of the polecat,” she says. She pounds at the top of the mound of earth and then spits once on it. That fall, there is no duck meat.
Yesterday she cleaned the water dispenser and put it out in the courtyard to dry in the sun. Sunlight makes everything clean. There are five holes in a circle, the ducks drink out of them. Then there’s one hole in the top, where we pour in the water.
“Let the sun dry it out well, so the ducks won’t get some illness from it,” says my mother. She scrubs it with the scrubbing brush as much as she can.
My mother’s fingers are red like beets, and thick. Her nails are cracked. My mother got up early this morning, at dawn. By the time I woke up, everything was ready. The water dispenser was outside in the sunlight, turned upside down so it would drain out well. She brought the ducks from the hen-seller. Already last week she had discussed ordering twelve ducks.
“Twelve is one dozen. In the old days, everything was counted in dozens,” says my father. My mother put the box into the bicycle basket, and the poultryman helped her fasten it.
The poultryman is one of the Gardas. The day-old chicks from the hatchery are delivered to him. You have to sign up for how many chicks you want. You have to pay for them. In the old days, chicks and ducks were incubated by the brood hen. But not the geese. But now, everything has to be bought. The brood hen’s stomach is bare so her skin will touch the eggs. The feathers take in the warmth. The brood hens sometimes go insane from the heat. They defend their nests recklessly. They lash out and peck. When it’s cold, we keep them inside the house. They are covered with a large screen.
I like to pet the little ducklings. They’re little balls of down. They are in a square carton, with holes on the sides as big as one-forint coins. Not all of the discs fell out of the brown corrugated cardboard in the factory. If I press against them with the tip of my finger, I can push them out. I play at pushing them all out. Then I imagine that they are money. I’m collecting money. I want to give them to my mother so she won’t be sad.
“Stop pestering the ducks,” she yells at me, irritated.
“I’m not pestering them, they always run away. I’m just collecting money,” I say.
The brown box is put together well. It is hard to remove the top. Only grown-ups can do that. I stick my finger into one of the holes, and the ducks waddle off. If I wait long enough, the braver ones dare to come over and start chewing on the tip of my finger. Their beaks are soft, with a little circular edge. They’re grainy to the touch.
“I told you not to bother them,” my mother repeats angrily. Something has made her angry. I didn’t do anything, but she’s still angry. Maybe the ducks were more expensive than they had agreed on. Or she was cheated again. She is always being cheated. It’s useless for her to protest, they just laugh. Maybe she is angry because there were sick ducks in there, or ducks with distemper, already dead by the time she got home. Or she got fewer than she paid for. Or the poultryman didn’t give her the correct change.
The men are always right, they shout down the women. And besides, my mother is a newcomer.
“You be quiet, you’re a newcomer!” they shout at her.
“I hope they spend it at the pharmacy,” my mother says at home.
“YOUR NAME HERE IS ‘BE QUIET!’” MÁLI ALWAYS SAYS THAT, too.
“Your name in the family is ‘Be quiet.’” My mother cries when she is at home. She complains to my father.
“Why don’t you say something? Why do you let them talk to me this way?” she says through her tears.
My father remains silent. Or he defends himself.
“What am I supposed to do? Always fight with them? Just shit on her if she says it,” he says, but his face is bitter.
Once again, my mother has been cheated. She counted the money in the morning because she needed a few forints to get some sour cream in the shop on her way home from getting the ducks. But the poultryman asked for a few more forints than he had when she’d signed up. The extra amount he asked for was supposed to be for the sour cream. And my mother really needs sour cream for the soup. She is angry because she knows that what the poultryman told her wasn’t true. She flails around at home in impotent rage. Maybe he had given someone else incorrect change, and now he was taking the difference off my mother.
“He doesn’t want to lose money on it, it’s understandable,” says my father that evening.
They fight over this: why should it be understandable? Because, says my mother, a cheat is a cheat. My father loses his patience and says that tomorrow he will go to the poultryman and beat him up.
“Don’t make problems,” says my mother, but it is painful to her that she was cheated. She gets cheated everywhere, though: in the shop, at the feed-seller, at the Council, at the dairy. Everywhere.
My father gets cheated, too, and he is incapable of standing up for himself when he is told that the feed isn’t eleven but rather twelve forints.
“But last week it was eleven,” he says.
“Then it was,” the feed-seller, the poultryman, the dairyman, the office clerk tells him.
“But when did it get more expensive?” My father tries to save the one forint and thirty fillérs, which my mother will ask him to account for.
“Because with you they can get away with it,” my mother always says to him at home.
My father doesn’t answer. He knows that my mother is right. Just as he knows that the next time, he will be cheated again.
“Bloody red cock of God,” he says finally. He says that when there’s nothing he can do. If he’s in a rage, though, he doesn’t say it. Then he hits. My mother always says something else, as well:
“May God strike the heavens down upon them.” My mother lashes out like that at times. With her hands or with a wooden spoon. Whatever is at hand. With a dishrag. She caresses me only very rarely. When she’s in a good mood.
“DON’T PESTER THE DUCKS,” SAYS MY MOTHER.
I wasn’t pestering them, though; I just like to pet their soft, yellow down.
I like ducklings. Their down is completely new. There are no feathers on their bodies yet. They are fluffy yellow. And they are so soft, like plush. I have a teddy bear. I got it from someone. I’ll certainly have to give it back one day. The plush on the teddy bear’s tummy is a little worn. It’s stuffed with straw. When you touch the plush, it’s like touching the hair on a mole. I know, because once I found a mole in the kitchen garden. A drop of water ran down its velvety black coat. It didn’t absorb it. It didn’t get wet. It was dead already. I buried it, because a mole’s place is beneath the ground.
In the meantime I poke out the ca
rdboard circles from their places. Through the holes, I keep an eye on the ducks. I count them. The inside of the box is divided into four sections. In each section, three ducklings are running around.
“It’s so that the box will be stronger,” says my older sister. “Otherwise the inside would get crushed together, and what was being delivered would be crushed.”
In each section, there are thin wood shavings like pieces of string. This is called wood wool. The ducklings waddle around clumsily in it. Sometimes one is determined to chew through the strands. Another charges off, wanting to run, but it gets entangled in the shavings and falls flat on its stomach. Then, as if nothing had happened, it struggles to get up and runs off again. If some of the bigger ducklings see a fly, they rush after it headlong. They try to catch it. They chase after bees, too.
Once one of our little ducklings caught a bee in flight. Suddenly it flung itself down on the ground. You could see its throat swelling up. Its leg kept convulsing a little. Then it became taut and stiff. It died quickly. I took it by its leg, its head hanging down. Its gullet was full of damp mush. I buried it in the dung pile. My mother told me to bury it there.
“Don’t touch the ducks, I’m taking out the swill for the pig. I’ll be there in a second,” she said. There is always a bucket in the corner of the kitchen, next to the door. That is where we collect the pig swill. It always stinks. Grease sticks to the bucket’s edges in layers. My mother throws rotten eggs in there, too. Sometimes when the cat sneaks in from the yard, it tries to fish something out.
“Shoo, your mother,” we say to it then. In an angry voice, even if no one is angry. Because only then does the cat understand. My mother takes out the bucket. In the kitchen garden she throws in two skillets’ worth of porridge, if the pig swill is really diluted. The pigs can already hear the rattling of the bucket. They squeal and sniff the sty door with their noses. They wait for my mother.
I REALLY LIKE DUCKS. WE CALL THEM DOUKIES. I HAVE A rubber duck. At the bottom of every rubber duck, there is a whistle. If I squeeze hard, the duck makes a whistling sound. The air goes out, and it caves in. If I put the tip of my finger on the whistle, it stays caved in. If I take away my finger, it springs back to its original form. When it whistles, I imagine that it’s quacking. It isn’t quacking, though, it’s whistling. My rubber duck whistles when I want it to. It stays where I put it. It isn’t fluffy but bare. Its color is yellow. Its beak is painted orange. The two points showing its eyes are half worn off already. It can’t see properly. I always tell the rubber duck what it should see. I promised it that if I get a black felt-tip pen, if my father can win one at the shooting range, then I will paint back its eyes completely. So it will be able to see again.
The Dispossessed Page 11