Parallel Stories
Péter Nádas








In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans — Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies — across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary’s Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Péter Nádas’s magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.This is Péter Nádas’s masterpiece — eighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. Parallel Stories is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author’s greatest work.






Péter Nádas




Parallel Stories


It is all one to me

Where I am to begin, for there I shall return.

    

— Parmenides








AUTHOR’S NOTE


I hasten to state that the book in the reader’s hand is not a historical work but a novel; all the names, characters, events, and situations, however real they may seem, are nothing but the product of the author’s imagination.

My gratitude to the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin, with special thanks to the excellent librarians of that institution, Gudrun Rein and Gesine Bottomley, for their helpful suggestions and selfless support of my work.




VOLUME I: The Mute Realm





Patricide


In that memorable year when the famous Berlin wall came down, a corpse was discovered in the Tiergarten not far from the graying marble statue of Queen Louise. This happened a few days before Christmas.

The corpse was that of a well-groomed man of about fifty, and everything he wore or had on him appeared to be of better quality. At first glance a gentleman of some consequence, a banker or a senior manager. Snow was falling slowly, but it was not very cold, so the flakes melted on the paths of the park; only the blades of grass retained a white edge. The investigators did everything by the book and, because of the weather conditions, worked quickly. They closed off the area and proceeding clockwise in a narrowing spiral course searched it thoroughly so they could record and secure all existing clues. Behind an improvised screen of black plastic sheets, they carefully undressed the corpse but found no signs indicating suicide.

A young man who ran in the park every dawn had discovered the body. He was the only one the investigators could question. It had been completely dark when he set out, and he ran almost every day on the same path at the same time.

Had it not been so, had not everything been routine and habit, had not every stone and shadow been engraved in his mind’s eye, he most probably would not have discovered the body. The light of distant streetlamps barely reached this far. The reason he noticed the body, lying on and half dangling off a bench, was, he explained excitedly to the policemen, because on the dark coat the snow had not melted at all. And as he was running at a steady pace, he related a bit too loudly, the whiteness flashed into his eyes from the side.

While he was talking, several men busied themselves inside the roped-off area. They were working, one might say, in ideal conditions; there was not a soul in the park besides them, no nosy curiosity seekers. Using a flashbulb, one of the men photographed something on the bare, wet ground that two forensic technicians had already labeled with a number.

As he began his story for the third time, the young man noticed nervously that every clue had been numbered and the sight made him very anxious. He felt as if he had been not the one who discovered the corpse or reported it but, rather, the culprit instantly confronted with physical evidence of his crime.

He was like a blade, though he could not tell of what, perhaps of a razor or an icy thought, but of that he said nothing.

In fact, his first thought was that he had murdered his own father. He could not understand why he had such a thought, why he would wish the death of this man, but of that too he said nothing to the police officers.

Hardly anything remained of which he could speak aloud.

But they paid little attention to him; both uniformed and plainclothesmen were going about their business, and from time to time they mumbled to one another phrases the young man could not understand.

They would not delay him further. Twice he had given them his personal data, they had registered his willingness to give evidence later in court, and still he could not leave.

Some of the policemen were being relieved by others around him.

When he runs, he repeated excitedly in his report, he does not look at anything or in any specific direction, and he does not think. From a psychological viewpoint, that is the essence of running at an even pace. But when twenty minutes later he again ran past the body on the bench, it occurred to him that the snow could remain intact like that only on a cooled-off corpse.

He had read something like that somewhere. And that’s when he stopped to take a closer look.

In Berlin’s Tiergarten, or game preserve, many things have happened already, or, more correctly, hardly anything can happen here that hasn’t occurred before. The police officers listened to the report impassively. One of them simply moved on with his plastic bags to continue his work. In a little while, another one stopped to listen, and the rest of them promptly left him there alone. However, the young man could not calm down. He told his story to this new man as if every detail had another hundred details and every sentence needed a further explanation, as if with every explanation he were revealing earthshaking secrets while keeping silent about his own.

He was not cold, yet his whole body was shivering. The plainclothes officer offered him a blanket, go on, wrap it around yourself, but he rejected it with an irritated gesture, as if the condition of his body, an impending cold or the awkward and embarrassing shivering, did not interest him in the least. He probably had some kind of nervous fever, a phenomenon not unfamiliar to law-enforcement people. Neither could he be certain of the impression he was making. He felt he was not making a good one, which in turn compelled him to present everything in ever greater detail. This last policeman, however, regarded him with delight, with an enthusiasm bordering on love, as he observed the agitation in the young man’s facial features, body, and individual limbs, and his ceaseless gesticulation, wondering whether to think of him as choleric or ascetic, as someone with above-average intelligence and sensitivity or simply as a city idiot interested only in himself.

As a person so starved for speech that he could not stop before tomorrow. As one to whom nothing ever happened but who now was becoming tangled in a suddenly arrived great adventure; as one entrusted with nothing less than the secrets of the universe.

He elicited pity and some worry. In the end he could talk only to this one police officer, but he completely enthralled him with his feverish words, his vehement but disciplined and therefore fractured gestures, and his mental makeup that defied classification.

After methodically scanning the various surfaces and points of the young man’s body and attire, and because the observed exterior seemed so average that even its social situation would prove hard to determine, this detective asked the young man which university he was attending and what he was studying, slyly adding that he asked not officially but only as a private person. Theoretically he had no right to pose such a question, but he knew from experience that sometimes a few innocent words will stanch sickly and senseless gushing. The death of strangers can cause real hysteria even in the most endomorphic persons. At the same time he did not mean the question to be a formal one; he was interested to see how the young man might be steered by such an innocent query, how far he might be led from his self-admiration, or perhaps how he could be trapped; how tractable he was. Although he was one of those well-trained detectives who usually avoided being misled by an unexpectedly deep impression or a labyrinthine imagination, the plainclothesman could not resist the experiment, at least to the extent of asking the provocative question.

However, whether with this or some other approach, whether in the first hours of an investigation — in police parlance the “loop” questions, or “first foray”—or at its peak, when the results somehow hang together however precariously, it was impossible not to lose some equilibrium. Here and there, he set little traps. Because detectives like him consider their own ideas preferable to the general criminal procedures used by their less daring colleagues. They were more creative, though their methods were sometimes high-handed. In one professional idiom, they preferred heuristic means to syllogistic ones, and, being guided by the former, they sometimes violated the law.

Under the influence of the compassionless investigation, the young man interrupted his report to answer; he is studying philosophy and psychology, he replied, taken aback. And while he answered, he wondered what the police official was observing in him or what conclusions he had reached.

I should have thought, said the detective impassively.

What was he looking at on his neck, or what did he notice on his T-shirt, and now on his sweat suit.

All these thoughts stemmed the flood of words. As if realizing that nobody was interested in what he was reporting. Not only the others, but this detective too was considering the details on a different level, in another dimension. He was not busy with the reporter; he was not listening to the report.

For quite some time, he had gone running in tight pants, yellow or red, and the detective continued his investigation by looking at his thighs and loins.

Which was uncouth, and cut him to the quick, so that he caught himself and finally noticed the person standing before him in this bare park at dawn, snowflakes falling peacefully around them. He noticed the detective’s lips, eyes, the exceptionally thick, highly arched eyebrows, and everything he had been seeing until now: the forehead, the insanely curly hair, the calm disposition. A man who looked at him penetratingly, almost woefully, as if he knew everything about him. As if to take account, individually, retroactively and in advance, of all his most hidden secrets and even to offer empathy. In fact, the amused detective was merely recalling what he had read in some silly magazine, sitting in the dentist’s waiting room a few days earlier, namely that in Germany every year about seventeen thousand students enroll for studies in philosophy and twenty-two thousand in psychology. This would mean that during a whole generation more than a million people would be busy with the mechanics of the spirit and the soul, a big number indeed, though the number of people dealing in commerce, finance, and military matters is several times larger.

Sensing the detective’s disesteem, his underestimation of scientific interest, the young man fell silent, though his wretched body kept shivering in his damp sweat suit.

With which he made himself vulnerable.

And in the sudden silence the policeman, who may have been about ten years older than the young man and had a law degree, quickly asked whether they might drive the young man home and added even more quickly that they’d be happy to do so. Seeing that the young man had refused the blanket, they would not like their only eyewitness to catch cold. He used the plural as a sort of shield; he was not alone in making the offer, it was the entire law-enforcement community. Yet it was he who gazed out so penetratingly at the young man from the shelter of that community. As if scanning areas considered suspicious from a criminal point of view. Or as if glancing out from the protection of his profession, taking a long hard look at this other specimen of the masses.

No wonder the young man refused the offer of a lift home.

Unnoticed, this man had done something to him, appraised him and categorized him, which meant there was no way of knowing what he might do next. He was looking at a clear forehead and curly dark hair that somehow held his gaze, and wide, full, soft lips. He must be on his guard. He declined the offer with a single gesture, in fact quite rudely, while thinking, I must get away from here, though with his voice he was able to control his mood.

He said that if they needed him again — of course not during the holidays but right afterward — he’d be glad to be at their disposal.

This did not interest the detective at all, however, though he would have preferred to hear the young man accept the lift. They had his personal data, along with the deposition, they had recorded his voice as well, but he had no documents to corroborate his identity. In the absence of direct suspicion, they could not even demand them.

Tomorrow he must travel home, the young man added in his confusion.

His ears registered the tiny noises made by his teeth as they knocked together with every word he uttered.

So you live in Berlin, the detective noted, but your home is elsewhere.

He did not understand how one’s own body could abandon and humiliate one.

The detective may have understood something of this; he thanked the student for his comprehensive if circumspect help, and then they mutually nodded to each other.

Berlin is my temporary home, the student added, minding his teeth, as if to express his gratitude for so much understanding.

They seemed unable to part from each other.

My parents live in Pfeilen, that’s where I was born. Well, a little ways from the town.

What is the name of the place, the policeman asked, and for a while they looked at each other suspiciously.

North of it, of Pfeilen, he said, pointing with his finger, Niederrhein.

Never heard of it, which of course is my fault.

We’ve had a farm there for a long time now, but my parents live in town. It’s a very insignificant place, no reason you should know it.

The young man wanted to smile politely, but the smile turned into something closer to a snarl.

It was impossible to know whose hand was extended first. In any case, they shook hands; the handshake threw them both into embarrassed confusion.

The policeman, in the meantime, introduced himself: I’m Dr. Kienast, he said.

The doctoral title was what remained in the air between the two of them. In the contact of their bare hands, in the mutually felt humps and knobs there was something too physical. The doctoral degree had more to do with healing. As if making a promise to that effect. And mentioning it also had to do with the fact that he, the young man, does exist, after all, in the boundless mass of humans of which they are both insignificant parts. But at this degree of personal closeness, the young man froze up completely and did not reciprocate the bashfully hesitant, promising introduction.

And then, convinced that without further ado he could continue his interrupted run, the young man started off. If the other man really wanted to know anything, let him look up the personal data in the notes just taken by his uniformed colleague.

In the end, nothing happened.

After a few steps, he had to realize that again he had failed to gauge the situation and his abilities correctly; again he had presumed more of himself than he could deliver. Because something fatal had happened, something that would be very difficult to put behind him. If indeed he could get away with it at all.

With his stupid loquaciousness he had given himself away; why did he have to blurt out where he was going to, why did he go on and on with his explanations. He slowed down and then, changing pace, applied more force to getting away; but his thighs trembled and his knees shook, his breath could not find its proper rhythm, and most of all he felt in his back the challenging gaze of that damned cop.

Indeed, the policeman’s eyes followed the young man for a long time, and then he instructed his technicians to record the footsteps left behind. In the muscles of his palm, he felt the imprint of the other man’s grip; the other hand’s heat clung to his skin and worked its way into the fibers of his muscles, which was more than pleasant, though the evaluation of the contact belonged strictly to the investigation. Kienast, who had written his doctoral thesis on evidentiary processes in the magical, mythic, and rational periods of history, was considered a great fantast among his colleagues, who followed scientific rationales and adhered to strict professional regulations. They would have scorned him for his method were it not for his all-encompassing attention span and thorough practical knowledge.

Slowly it was growing lighter, though falling snowflakes were still visible in the beams of distant streetlights. As if in the young man’s grip he had felt both a terrific strength and an insane trembling that the hand’s owner could not reconcile. He had to think that the young man might be a drug addict, his periodically recurring need accounting for why his facial features were so nervously, prematurely old and used up.

He could still see the thin figure in the snowfall among the trees.

Hopeless, he said to himself, though he couldn’t have said to whom or what he was referring.

As if his fate had been to have this hopelessness added to another hopeless case. For this he could thank the coincidence that he had not been relieved on his shift. And as if the approaching Christmas holiday served only as a means to deepen the complications. Yet in fact, in this new case, Kienast needed only to deal with two primitive matters: to determine the unknown person’s identity, and to exclude the possibility that the death was a suicide. He could see that the case would be simple, yet that he wouldn’t be able to solve it to his own satisfaction. This boy would somehow mess him up. His other hopeless case was more exciting; he had been at it for more than two months — a patricide in which the wife took the blame for the child who had been regularly having intercourse with the father.

After his night shifts, Kienast often felt dejection followed by a justified anxiety. His natural laziness sought this sort of excuse or explanation. He was like a large canine that loves softness, warmth, and comfort.

It took a long time to identify the corpse, especially since no one came looking for it, not even after the holidays.

Before it was put on ice, it went through only the first, most necessary coroner’s examination. The forensic technicians searched through the corpse’s belongings. They found nothing on the body or in the clothing to indicate violence. Most likely a heart attack had finished him off on that park bench.

Kienast noted, however, that no article of the corpse’s clothes had labels. In cases where personal identification is difficult, these labels can be very helpful. One should look for them almost automatically. Overcoats and jackets are to be turned inside out; the labels are there, sewn into the lining. In shirts and sweaters, they are on the collars, in pants on the inside of the belt band. In socks and underwear they may be embroidered or woven; in cheaper merchandise they are printed in bright colors. Often these labels are of more use than the so-called bertillonage, those eleven items of physical measurement and characteristics that must be recorded to make a positive identification but that are useless for anything else and find themselves at the bottom of desk drawers or in unused databases. This dead man did not wear cheap clothing. Dr. Kienast, examining the third or fourth item, with gloved hands lifted them carefully out of their marked plastic bags. When he found no trace of any labels, in his surprise he hissed involuntarily.

He was alone in the large room; his lonely hissing echoed within the empty tiled walls.

Well, all right, it’s possible that a person finds these labels offensively colorful, or they irritate the skin, or one simply does not feel like being labeled and one removes them. It’s also acceptable to get rid of them on one’s shirt and pullover because, let’s say, they irritate one’s neck; but why in hell would anyone peel them off the inside of the pants’ waistband, where they can’t be seen or felt. A mania; but what could be the sense or significance of such a mania. As if he were angry at the living person whose corpse was lying before him.

What maniac would get rid of every possible mark on his clothing that might be used for identification. Other people do not even notice labels, or they like them because they are proud of the brands they wear. His mind automatically supplied the answer: persecution mania, compulsive self-concealment, justified or unjustified anxiety, a desire to leave no traces behind. He gazed at the corpse, he gazed at its belongings.

At the shockingly small underpants, made of translucent, shiny, almost glittering material, where he found a large stain of sperm. Whatever else, he had been a man who liked the color blue; everything he wore was blue — light blue or dark blue.

A man who only in the blue of his shirt allowed some white stripes.

There was too much blue here, much too much.

Must have been a boring man.

He must have been a man who used this boring stylishness as a disguise but in fact was some kind of compulsive or a maniac. That’s characteristic of a fastidious man: while his passions rage within him, he maintains his self-respecting exterior; must have been an unbearable person. He found no labels on the diaphanous dark blue woolen socks either. The label had been cut off at the seam of the glittering silvery blue underpants, but a tiny sliver of it, frayed by frequent laundering, remained. The underpants: an exceptional piece. Hardcore fetishistic gentlemen wear such items. He glanced at the corpse and then with his naked eye measured the place of the substantial sperm stain on the unusual underpants. The result of prolonged erection, prolonged seepage or a minor emission. There will be something to look for on the pants too. He could almost see the sharp leather-cutting scissors with which the small label had been removed with a single snip.

This man must have behaved most mysteriously and was probably prepared for the end at any hour.

On his thin bony wrist, there was no visible sign to indicate he wore a watch; neither did he wear a ring. Still, the detective thought he’d been married. If unmarried, he would have been more daring in his passion and probably would have worn not this sort of brief but rather a jock strap of red or white satin under his conservatively tailored clothes. In his soft, black wallet they found a surprisingly large amount of money but no trace of personal identification. This also showed he was after quickly purchasable intercourse and that he managed to get it cheaper than expected. Finally, his black-laced low quarter shoes were items that revealed something if not of their owner then of themselves: Italian shoes of a most reliable brand. Such sturdy Italian shoes one can purchase only in London. And there was something else Dr. Kienast did not know what to do with: the bare body’s pungent smell. It was not an unpleasant odor, in fact rather pleasant. Something like an enticing female fragrance that somewhere, not so long ago, the detective had encountered close up or even enjoyed.

Or he had been exposed to a waft of it and found it not repellent.

Perhaps it reminded him of another fragrance, and that is why he thought it was familiar though he could not recall the original. He thought it must be a feminine fragrance because he found it sweeter and somewhat heavier than the deodorants, colognes, or aftershaves used by men, and it emanated not only from the corpse’s clothes and other belongings but also from his body.

The body had at least another half hour before cooling off completely; its scent would live that long. Dr. Kienast felt a strong urge to sniff the entire body as a police dog would. Although he did not dare do it, in his professional eagerness he could not fend off the attraction of the dead body. He sniffed the air, he sensed the bitter smell of stale tobacco piercing the affected fragrance of the body. As if he were wary of such a perfume. In fact, he was amused by his temporary cowardice.

No doubt about it, yellowish brown spots of discoloration were there on the corpse’s fingers, testifying to the habit of an inveterate smoker.

Still, no cigarettes, lighter, or matches were found on the body. Under the bench, in a black leather case, they had found a bunch of keys.

The body itself was clean and untouched. Untouched, that was the first word that came to mind when, still outside, they had first undressed the body for him and he in the beam of searchlights began to examine the carefully removed articles of clothing. This also made the body’s odor so surprising. The body laid out before him was that of a man who had probably been reluctant to touch anyone or anything. Not a rare thing among fetishists. They bow only to their strongest compulsions or most powerful attractions. They establish contact not with each other, not with the other person, but with symbolic objects touching the other’s body. In this sense, they truly and wholly deviate from ordinary urban egoists who, even in the presence of the other, pay attention exclusively to themselves.

As he looked at the almost hairless, smooth, and well-proportioned corpse, it occurred to Kienast that this was a dry man. He had first come across concepts of bodily dryness or moistness when he had studied ancient investigating techniques for his dissertation, reading original texts on Greek healing methods. This manner of death was not appropriate to dry persons. According to Galen, death by heart attack is most characteristic of damp or moist people.

Nor could he dismiss the notion that this odor was not the man’s own, was not caused by a scent he had used, but was an odor that he had received during his last hours from another body and that clung to him.

After a misstep, one always takes home a strange, unfit fragrance. Shower, soap, or thorough scrubbing notwithstanding, these strange fragrances, be they repulsive or sweet, are incredibly loyal.

Sometimes, on the morrow, one feels that such a fragrance is as pervasive as if it had settled in the fine hairs of one’s nostrils, and one cannot but yield to the guilty attraction and return to the source of it. Dr. Kienast had married when very young and was divorced soon afterward because of his continued missteps. While in the presence of the corpse and aided by undoubtedly pleasant memories, he was daydreaming of the sweet occasions of making up, he was recalling the hoarse, intelligent woman whom no one suspected was conducting a clandestine, insane, passionate, and desperate struggle against her ugliness, who on her wide bathroom shelves, which she could lock, had amassed an unprecedented arsenal of perfumes, creams, facial ointments, bubble baths, lipsticks, and powders, even though by profession she was an evaluator of fragrances and should have been wise about using cosmetics moderately, should have known that she could not achieve much with their help. That woman could probably have told, she could probably have identified the heavy scent with its deep-seated acrid undertone, he thought, and from his pressing thoughts it followed that he should lift the dead man’s dark blue woolen pullover to his nose. Perhaps he could recognize the smell by himself.

Perhaps that woman occurred to him only because he knew this smell from her body.

He seemed to feel the tension in his tendons, the fine and disciplined trembling of his muscles.

The body does not forget.

This woman reached her climax gaping mutely, she screamed only seconds later, once past the peak of her pleasure, and even then she did it as if she had hoped to swallow it all back into herself. But no, he could hardly smell the perfume on the dark blue pullover; it smelled more strongly of tobacco smoke.

The perfume’s scent issued only from the body.

From the large room illuminated by fluorescent lights, two swing doors led to the corridor. Corpses were trundled in through one; through the other they were taken to the refrigerated room and from there to the official autopsy. The wings of one door kept flapping quietly because somewhere someone had left a window open.

Dr. Kienast heard no steps in the corridor. While he listened, the telephone rang next to him on the desk; he started a little; the phone rang again but he didn’t pick it up.

It wasn’t the first time that professional curiosity had swept him into a critical situation, and sometimes he had to cross the boundaries of his own good taste or even those of the law. If it had not been so, he probably could not have followed the thinking of criminals and would not have chosen this profession. He put down the pullover, picked up the blue-and-white-striped shirt and could tell with absolute certainty that the unknown man had not spent the last day of his life in this shirt and most probably not in this pullover, but had changed clothes in the afternoon or, he quickly corrected himself, in the early evening. These are rather simple matters. One could still smell the laundry detergent and the rinse on these articles, or even the deodorizer in the clothes closet. And his last hours the man must have spent in a place full of tobacco smoke, in an inn or bar, a cheap restaurant, a place unworthy of his social standing.

The perfume was detectable only on the lower third of the shirt and on the underpants. On the latter, the quickly perishing sperm was also sensed as an odor. The telephone kept ringing, but otherwise no action was heard anywhere. He stepped up to the legs of the corpse and, as if begging the indulgence of a fellow human’s mortal remains for what he was about to do, he touched the man’s foot and leaned over his loins. That is when the telephone finally stopped ringing, and in the still existing draft one could hear again the wings of the swing door flapping. He closed his eyes, perhaps involuntarily, because he did not want to see the dead man’s genitals from so close up while he took a whiff of them. He was immediately assailed by the strong smell of the penis. Otherwise, everything was as he had expected it would be. This penis could have been involved only in oral intercourse, not in a vaginal or anal one; the secretion tests would provide exact details. The odorous perfume had been smeared on the thick rich pubic hair and on the graying thinner hair running in a wedge shape up on the abdomen; from there it permeated the air in the large room. He did not want to lose a moment. He heard steps approaching in the corridor and he wanted to check his observation before the coroner returned. There was no smell on the chest, around the armpits or behind the ears, the last questionable locations. And now he felt he had done everything that had to be done and found out what he wanted to find out: the perfume was not the dead man’s own but a freshly applied strange one that was later smeared over his body. The swing door’s wings flapped open just as he raised his head.

As if he had been kissing the corpse.

At the noise of the door he quickly turned around and said he had finished doing what he needed to do.

Have you found anything encouraging, asked the coroner pleasantly.

He was the Pathological Institute’s physician on duty, with whom the detective had a daily and very cordial relationship. That meant that they had their unavoidable smaller or larger frictions but, as they say, could live with them.

I’ll leave that to you, Kienast replied politely, but I’d be very grateful, he added without the slightest trace of embarrassment, if you also smelled his stomach and pubic hair. There’s some kind of perfume, scented soap, who knows what.

Maybe you’ll recognize it, he added.

Sometimes, out of sheer self-defense, his colleagues pretended not to hear what Dr. Kienast said or requested. And not only those with whom he had rare contacts but also his immediate subordinates. Most of them used the informal address among themselves, yet they tried to keep Kienast, along with his obsession, at a safe distance. He was considered weird, a person who had to be allowed to have his way and be told to stop only if he was about to mix one up in some dark or unclean business. That’s what happened this time. Dr. Kienast waited for a while to see if the other man would do his bidding, but he did not. And not as if expressing disapproval, but as if he hadn’t even heard Kienast’s request.

Typically, Dr. Kienast would be stunned and mumble to himself.

He could not fathom why others were satisfied with so little of the obtainable knowledge, or what they did with their natural human interest or professional curiosity.

When he had finished the requisite tests, the coroner declared that the death of the well-kempt, well-nourished unknown male, about fifty years old, most likely occurred a few minutes before being discovered by that early morning runner.

Though possibly it happened a little later.

What’s more, it might also be possible, Dr. Kienast added somewhat sarcastically, that the corpse is still alive.

This man is a very recent corpse, replied the slightly insulted coroner, go on, look at him, please. He raised the lifeless hand, showed Kienast the fingernails, and then let the hand drop. And as if that had not been sufficient, he pressed his fingers into the corpse’s thigh muscles.

It’s possible, he went on explaining, that he gave up the ghost during the ten minutes it took your men to get to the scene in your cars. If that runner had come across him earlier, or reported him earlier, or if you and your coppers hadn’t fussed around so much, the ambulance people might possibly have revived him.

Dr. Kienast asked whether the body wasn’t in too good shape to have succumbed to a heart attack.

The coroner laughed, relieved, and asked him to stop his stupidities, he was talking like an amateur.

Oh, no, Dr. Kienast pleaded; he merely asked the question in such a silly way because he was wondering whether they should be investigating in an entirely different direction.

If he were fond of hairsplitting, replied the coroner, who did not quite see where Kienast was going with his strange reasoning, he would agree that, at first glance, the heart attack might not have been inevitable, but that is no basis for judgment.

Let’s wait for the autopsy, he added after a brief silence.

Doesn’t look like a used-up body, Dr. Kienast insisted.

Look at his legs, his chest, didn’t have a belly, must have swum or played tennis or who knows what, but he exercised seriously. And we’d better take samples from his abdomen and loins, he added casually, there is a good-size sperm spot on his underpants, and please take a sample from his anus too.

Who knows, the sperm may not be his. We should also know something more concrete about the mode of the intercourse. Judging by the look of his penis, he was not participating in a vaginal or anal pleasure.

He was very sorry, replied the coroner impatiently, but to say anything more or anything else now would be sheer irresponsibility. He must have a more thorough examination. Of course, he would have the sperm looked at especially. He would probably receive Dr. Kienast’s wish list, as usual. As to the corpse’s legs and his exercises, he thought that in his younger days the man bicycled a lot.

Why didn’t I think of that, the detective cried out in surprise.

The swollen veins, of course, the man definitely did bicycle.

And then everything continued on in the usual way.

In those anxious days, by the way, many people died of apoplexy or heart failure unexpectedly, suddenly, but on all the others there were identifying documents.

The weather changed all the time; now it was warm as if spring were coming; now the temperature dropped and it became bitter cold. Dry cold with some snowflakes. As if the weather wanted to contribute to the general upheaval.

The corpse was wheeled out through the other door and pushed into its temporary place. Cooled somewhat, that is where it would wait for its autopsy and the legal permits for samples to be taken from it. There was a small spot on its neck. Someone must have hugged him from behind, surprising him, and clung to him with lips stuck to his neck so vehemently, perhaps even bit him, as to “kiss out” the skin, as Hungarians would say, causing a black-and-blue spot, a love bite or hickey. Someone who had not seen him for a long time. Neither the coroner nor Kienast spoke of this, though both knew that this mark had to be recorded immediately. They’d pour dental wax over it, the negative would be filled with dental plaster, thus gaining an imprint of a stranger’s lips or teeth, which might determine the outcome of a case, because it might be the culprit’s lips or the teeth of the last eyewitness.

Thus far, no one had had a chance to compare the student’s statements with the coroner’s opinion.

Nor had anyone asked what the hell such a seemingly well-situated gentleman was looking for at night or at dawn in the disreputable park, or, if he had not been a corpse for very long, why was it that the snow on his arms and shoulders had not melted. Anyway, the detective still had many other things to take care of in the other case, of the patricidal girl. He also knew there was no point in racking his brain before he had all the forensic evidence in hand. The mother did not take the blame upon herself as an act of self-sacrifice but because it was her only chance for an acquittal. If her daughter admitted her deed, the mother could be punished for continued complicity. Sometimes it was better that Kienast put his cases to sleep in his mind, letting them continue working on a solution by themselves. And when in the afternoon, half-asleep and tired, with barely enough energy to mail some of the completed reports to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and to the Federal Investigation Department very quickly, his glance fell on the young man’s name again: Döhring.

Interesting, how these deeply neurotic characters enroll, if they can, to study psychology and philosophy. Which rather harms than improves their chances. In a few years, they become much smarter, but this does not necessarily make them more aware of their own problems.

He laughed aloud, and when he saw the young man’s address, Fasanen Street, he added several contented nods to his self-contented laughter. The young man has no worries, can go about getting educated with no fear of going to the poorhouse, he thought to himself, and then he quickly put the freshly opened file into an envelope — that is to say, assigned it to his current cases.

And early the following morning, the student, just as he had planned before, took the train out of the city.




The Creator Wanted It This Way


Whenever he left the city, he always felt as if he were giving up something for good, as if he had irretrievably left something behind. He paid little attention to these passing feelings, though he did register them at some level, because they offended his life principles.

He had nothing but contempt for sentimental people; he rejected emotions. Not to mention a kind of involuntary and irrepressible trembling that confused him completely. It reminded him of disorders and agitations he had otherwise carefully ejected from his memory. He had no idea where the trembling came from or how it left his bones and muscles, but he decided that the previous day had been much too emotional for him and he had better forget the whole thing. He didn’t want to bother with the act of forgetting either. To be precise, he was busy trying to forget about forgetting things.

From his present point of view, the city looked like a vast and bleak shunting yard. His train clattered across switches; birch trees were growing between abandoned tracks.

If he had taken his feelings seriously, if he had not rejected them, if he had allowed them to work on him at their own pace, he would have had to let his own bitterness and loneliness come too close, everything that caused his unhappiness and that he could not and would not want to acknowledge.

He had lived in the city for two years but had neither friends nor acquaintances. How else could he explain this except that this was the way he wanted it to be.

He did not say that yes, I am a prematurely embittered, rather sad person and the reason I chose to study these sciences is to steel myself against constant suffering, to give my mind some means to battle my gaping doubts, and perhaps these studies will help me find out what makes me suffer.

Listen, people, he would have shouted, all day long I pretend that everything is all right, but that makes me suffer even more. Help me, somebody, anybody, come, knock on my door, break down my door, anytime. No, he did the exact opposite. He allowed his feelings to come close in his mind only so that his mind would keep lifting the burden of his soul. In this way everything went on its predetermined course in a normal fashion. He told himself that a person was condemned to be solitary from the outset, every person was lonely, and people deceived themselves most when, given their reproductive urge, they looked for an excuse to establish a lasting companionship and then claimed that in the other person they’d found their famed happiness. Let them look to themselves. That would turn into their greatest grief. They know this in advance, still they go ahead. He is the more fortunate for having no inclination toward such self-deception. He can see that others do nothing all day but hate, miss, desire, adore, and possess one another, while he desires no one, misses no one, gets along fine by himself, and therefore has no one to torture or hate. A profitable situation: he can afford to observe dispassionately what those unfortunate ones, defenseless against themselves and everybody else, are doing to one another.

He really did not feel sorry for them.

Döhring’s manners were cool and negative enough to keep people from seeking his company; of his exterior, one could say it had nothing irregular about it, but it was more impassive than exciting or interesting. He had contempt for everyone, including those dead authors whose books he was fond of reading. The lives of these writers were full of all sorts of disgusting and chaotic matters that left their traces on the immortal works. This was an area he would not enter, even though he had no partner to discuss the issues about which he thought often and passionately, because no one had ever asked him his opinion on this or that subject, let alone shown need for his tenderness.

He kept looking out the window until the train pulled away from the city.

As if trying to restrain himself or hoping that these wet gardens, sooty walls, cheerless railway yards, and dreary backyards would detain at least his gaze, would not let go of it. How characteristic of him that all this time he kept open on his lap the book he was about to read. As if sending out involuntary signals saying, please, I’m a busy man, do not bother me needlessly.

He could not turn his head away, he could not let go of the city.

He was afraid that in his absence, while away from the city, they would accuse him of something. He was thinking not about what he had done or failed to do, what his imagination was doing or what was happening to him, but about the possibility that while talking to that detective he might have put some things the wrong way. Not only had he left himself exposed, but with his chattiness he might have unleashed a mass of immeasurable and unpleasant consequences. Yesterday’s nervous fever left no external trace, perhaps a slight cold; he was sniffling a bit. An observer would see a stern, calm, tall young man who was daydreaming, but yesterday’s fever had spread throughout his cells, flooding and infecting an important center of his brain. It had devastated the uniquely constructed, delicately built inner world in which until now he had lived in complete isolation; it had enlarged and inflated certain objects of his memory and imagination, leaving barely any space for the incoming outer world. When he got on the train and opened the door of his compartment, he automatically greeted those sitting inside; when a few hours later he rose, he said good-bye in the same automatic way.

One of his travel companions, a young woman, was fascinated by Döhring’s motionlessness, but he did not even notice her.

He got off in Düsseldorf, where he had to wait for his twin kid sister, coming from Frankfurt, and he had four full hours until then.

Usually, when she finally arrived, the entire station and all its trains would be echoing with the repulsive throng of harried, rushing and pushing people.

They traveled home rarely, but these journeys had their own rhythm, which until now he had never thought of violating. The hours in Düsseldorf were as if the family, the neighborhood, everything familiar was gradually accepting him back. Even though he did not want to be reaccepted anywhere. He feared his twin kid sister — if only she were not a girl — who was much too close to him; he did not want his family. He would have liked to break out, but he could not have said to where. Out of this familial net that forever held him down and pulled him back, out of the circle of women. Under the lenses of the security cameras, people, including him and his sister, were moving among the lockers in the left-luggage section; how laughable they seemed. Everyone was looking for the most secure locker, from which no one could steal anything. Döhring demonstratively threw his things into the first available empty locker. Shards of a broken beer bottle crunched under his feet; in a corner a homeless man was exuding his stink, probably the one who had dropped the beer bottle, and now was snoring drunkenly.

And then, taking the usual route, he headed for his aunt’s apartment; she usually had a sumptuous breakfast awaiting him.

These were their hours together, for which they both mutely prepared.

It was a ten-minute walk, but when he reached her street he did not turn into it.

An act with which he broke the continuity of a long-standing game harkening back to the dimness of unconscious childhood. The essence of the game was to assume that the beautiful aunt was his favorite aunt and, in defiance of their rather primitive and petit bourgeois family, the two of them would ostentatiously adore each other. As if in his effort to preserve his independence, it was his duty to adore not his kid sister but his aunt. The aunt was indeed a spectacular phenomenon: entertaining, cheerful, well off, in her fifties, who had worked for decades in the fashion industry, representing a reputable Italian international firm, and who had lived an almost ascetic, relatively liberated life. She traveled widely all over the continent, where at remote locations she kept many people with unusual skills busy: pearl stringers, linen weavers, lace makers, braid makers, and braid trimmers. The aunt’s need was probably greater for a favorite nephew of whom she could expect a great deal but whose existence did not demand the kind of responsibility she would have had to accept for a child of her own; and since at the time she would not dream of giving birth to a child, she lured her little nephew into this endless game. In fact, she separated him from his twin. She offered him the spiritual and financial aid that would help him leave the family nest, free him of tribal restrictions and take him into the big wide world.

At any rate, they played the dangerous game of such a move being possible.

The aunt lived near the Hofgarten in a very expensive apartment, and from the three windows of her dining room one could see the giant trees of the ancient park. It was not very cold that day in Düsseldorf, but the sky was dark and the wind screamed among the bare trees. Döhring took himself into this familiar park. He forgot about his twin sister, of whom, because of his own rebellion against the family, he always thought reluctantly; he forgot his aunt, the sumptuous breakfast, his deadlines and commitments; or more precisely, all of these were pushed to the edge of his consciousness where he could barely reach them.

Only one thing interested him: the dead man, the man’s death, or death itself; what he had seen with his own eyes, and how he could make no proper accounting to anyone of what he had witnessed. He kept walking, not caring about anything, and that felt good. He knew where he was, knew what he should do, but was becoming indifferent to everything that moved or lived around him. Or rather, independent of his thoughts, he was preoccupied by one question: whether he was seeing a corpse on the bench, at the bottom of a hedge, among the trees. All he saw was an occasional squirrel and a wild hare here and there. As if the dead man still had a chance and the chance was a direct function of Döhring’s alertness. As if the abandoned parks of the world had been entrusted to his care and he had to search through all of them. He was also interested in knowing how the dead man would find his relatives, or how his relatives would find him. Does he have anyone at all. Would his fate take a better turn in the end, now that he had to perish in a public park in such awful circumstances, and what could he, Döhring, do about it. And what does death mean anyway; how could he put right what he had done. Or what he had failed to do. The possibility that he could still do something both excited and tormented him, something he kept on neglecting every second simply by not being where he was supposed to be, or, more correctly, the opportunity had passed irretrievably and others were acting in his stead, doing the things he should be doing.

He should not have left the corpse.

At the same time, he knew that the questions were so dangerous it would be best to forget them. After all, one does not find a corpse in the park every day. If he had found the corpse in that park, he surely would not find one in this park. A catastrophe is a single occurrence; it cannot happen twice. Though there is no rule that says one catastrophe cannot cause another. He kept hoping he would forget it all, because he wanted to; he had come here to forget it. He wants to. At most, he could find another, completely strange corpse. The wind seemed to be sweeping his creaking steps from under him on the pebbled path, the sensation of his steps. But he noticed that the reason he could not keep his mind on anything but the familiar corpse was that he was busy telling himself to forget it all. He kept turning over in his mind how everything had happened, what he had or hadn’t done, because he wished to recall most accurately the very thing he wanted most to forget and what he should tell the detective. And this thought filled everything with the corpses he would find. He did not understand why he had done what he’d done; he was not even certain it was he who had done what he had, and whether he was the one who every moment was neglecting something that should be done.

He understood nothing, he was merely seeing a movie about himself that got stuck at certain spots and then flickered up and continued at some other location.

And then, in the stormy, booming, bare wintry park an enormous absurdity arose in his mind, bringing him to a halt.

He did not even notice he had stopped, because what he was thinking was that the Creator wanted it this way.

I am his most faithful foxhound.

He had never thought he had a Creator, or that this world had a Creator whom he might or might not know. Nor had it ever occurred to him that the Creator might want something from him. Nobody would do it except me. He saw clearly what he had to do; the thought made him feel very light, relieved, perhaps even a little happy. He also liked the role of the foxhound — the sniffing, the tireless running, the frequent spurts of urination. He felt the smell of the nearby river. Or the nearness of the large body of water, the mighty Rhine river, for some mysterious reason suddenly became significant; he could not see it from the park yet the wind filled his nostrils with the water’s cold scent. Because of it, he could hardly breathe, as if he had too much air. Now at last he reached the end of his brooding and confusion. He realized what he had to do, and that made him feel wonderful; he enjoyed himself as much as he enjoyed all the smells in the air around him.

He has no choice, he cannot leave anything unclear, he must confess everything and he will.

This urge had the strength of a calling.

He could see himself, with the fallen quarry in his chops, running toward his master; he could not tell whether it was a man or a woman because it was the Creator and the Creator has no body. He also estimated that putting his decision into action would require additional strength, and this need had a direct connection to the powerful smell of the river, to all the other scents, to his surging vigor and to a surplus of air.

He must retrieve the prey. As if he had told himself he must acquire the river.

He was standing in the middle of a pebbled path under a sky continually revealed and concealed by swift-moving clouds. He must turn himself in. Although nothing could make him change his mind, the anticipated deed proved a little painful, in advance. To bare his breast. He feared being exposed again to Dr. Kienast’s persistently penetrating, almost melancholic, provocative countenance. Along with all the life-threatening dangers facing him, he also felt a desire for the dead man’s body. He could no more break free of the trusting pair of brown eyes than he could of the figure of the unknown corpse, the gentle, white, bladelike stripes of snow, the magical coolness of the discovery.

He was still breathing, lolling on the bench, his arm dangling, and snow falling on him.

He walked to the river, though he did not cross the wide road, did not go down to the shore, only looked at it from afar. Thus he signaled to himself that all this is not nearly final, he is only gathering strength; now he has to attend to a very different, interim but very important matter. From here he could truly see on what a vast lowland, vanishing into infinity, and under what a vast sky the city had taken roots. As far as the eye could see, low plains everywhere; on the plane of the sky, clouds moving on their way; on the earthly plane, cars speeding in two directions; on the river, heavily laden barges progressing majestically, hulls deep in the water. The river was filled to its brim, the windblown surface spread out thickly and reflected grayly. He stood in the wind for a long time, unaware of time’s passing. The aunt had been waiting for him for an hour and a half while he continued loafing and looking around, thinking that only a few minutes had gone by. He was enjoying the world’s booming, noisy, coolly fluttering fullness, emptiness, denseness, and flatness. The wind that had come up over the river clashed behind his back and rumbled through the park’s trees. But its rhythmic booming was sliced across by the even murmur of the city, punctuated by plaintive horns from tugboats. And they echoed long under the mute clouds rolling over one another; the openings between the clouds left behind a few quick or lazy light spots on the ground. As if beams of spotlights had been turned on or dragged across the landscape; it turned bright, became overcast or unexpectedly darkened as if twilight were approaching; and then glittering across the huge surface for a second, sky, water, and earth throbbed, the armor of vehicles dazzled, and then everything grew dim again. Nothing had ended. Probably his hunger reminded him it was time to put his plan into action. He remembered the set table at his aunt’s, the sumptuous breakfast. He turned around, started back, but did not continue on the promenade, under the trees, but turned into the quiet side street where elegantly reticent windows looked out on the park.

The neighborhood was familiar; he knew where to find a telephone booth. There was nobody around; he met no one.

First he called information, but he had nothing with which to jot down the number of police headquarters and nothing to write on, therefore with his nail he carved it, as a kind of reminder, into the yellow lacquered cover of the telephone book. Neither the 4 nor the 8 came out right; he hesitated for a moment and then punched in another number anyway. To be done with it quickly.

And as usually happened, he did not take into account the very thing he should have really taken into account.

Namely that his aunt could see him from her window.

Driven by the irritation of the long wait, she had been pacing helplessly for at least a half hour and happened to stop by the window exactly when Döhring, headed for the telephone booth, appeared on the other side of the street. In her surprise, her head knocked against the windowpane, leaving behind a tiny trace of her deep-red rouge. She did not understand why he was coming from that direction; if he was coming from the train station, he should have been coming from exactly the opposite direction. Besides, the entrance to her house was not on the park side. And if after such a long delay he was finally here, why in the world was he going into the phone booth. She saw him disappear into the booth but could see nothing else; the angle of her sight line from the third floor was too sharp for that. Remaining by the window, she waited a few seconds for the phone to ring.

Very rarely could anyone afford to make her wait so long.

And when nothing happened, when the redeeming ring did not come, she slowly strolled back to the beautifully set table which by now had become irrelevant.

She controlled herself, but her high heels trod furiously across the floor.

Absentmindedly she sipped the cooled-off tea. One must keep oneself busy at all times. As if she had long forgotten that there were things with which she too could be insulted.

Deadly silence reigned in the room. She held the teacup with both hands, did not put it back on the saucer, did not want to hear the muffled clink just now. All the doors stood wide open; one could see across all the rooms. The tall windows locked out the wind’s noise perfectly, but on the opposite wall the dim wintry shadows of branches kept swinging back and forth.

In those years, well-to-do people had long since heaved out of their apartments the objects accumulated during previous decades. Only pared-down spaces remained. To which the immeasurable wartime destruction must have also contributed, the ruined German cities. Empty walls painted blinding white, glittering wood-plank or parquet floors, a few sources of illumination that emitted harsh clinical beams of light, a few accidentally left-behind pieces of furniture. All the aunt had left in her huge dining room were the long bare table and the unupholstered, unadorned chairs. The newfangled bleakness was certainly not just the fashion. As if people were no longer living in space but in time. As if they were no longer attached deeply or intimately to anything, neither to places nor to objects. A person flew from place to place, had some business everywhere, but it was time that set the pace and the standards; one slept in hotels, had more and more flats and vacation homes at places where one had neither lived nor vacationed.

When she was not giving a dinner party or did not sleep in her apartment, the aunt really did not have much to do here. The rooms retained only their names; their functions practically ceased to exist. For example, between the aunt’s so-called study and so-called dining room there was a pièce de dégagement, a kind of transition room, the erstwhile smoking room, in which she left nothing but an antique Chinese rug on the floor. True, a colossal baroque chandelier hung from the ceiling; the two objects were suited neither to each other nor to the rather small room, and they had no real purpose, yet their effect was not embarrassing. They got along well with each other, gazing at each other from an unbridgeable distance; they had nothing to do with each other; they had differing worldviews. And such an effect was perfectly suited to the style of the age.

Since the aunt had always lived by herself, it must not have seemed unusual when she was finally left alone in the empty flat.

Her steady boyfriend left her a few days after her fortieth birthday, but even before then she had not lived with him here or anywhere else in a common residence. At most, they shared their bed for a few hours, occasionally, whimsically, on weekends. Since then, the aunt has had no partner, as they say, though from time to time she slept with one of her co-workers or her agent in Paris, a habit they kept up for many years. Her deeper and more clandestine passion was not ladies’ fashion, or men’s, but collecting pictures.

She collected the work of only a few painters, exclusively the pictures of living painters.

Whoever died ceased to exist for her because the excitements of the moment were gone along with the dead. And she didn’t collect oil paintings, only temperas, gouaches, tint drawings, and watercolors, nothing else, not even pencil drawings or etchings. In her apartment, she left virtually no visible signs of this passion, which was defined by her sophisticated business sense. Although a few notable oil paintings adorned the apartment, of the works she so passionately collected she would hang only one for herself, and not necessarily the most important one. She would carefully change the chosen picture according to the state of her emotions, but to uninitiated eyes the changes could not have been conspicuous because, independently of their creators, the paintings quite closely resembled one another. She stored her collection in the humidity-controlled safe of a bank in Düsseldorf, and only her lawyer and the agent in charge of preparing her purchases knew this. Her agent was a Parisian, or rather a Belgian Fleming who lived in Paris, because the market was best seen from there, though the aunt dreamed of having agents also in Tokyo and New York. But for that, she needed to be richer or, who knows, maybe a bit more daring.

The cold tea clung in stripes to the inside of the cup. When the telephone on the dining table finally came to life, she let it ring for a long time. She slowly put down the cup; the silver bracelet clanked gently on her wrist.

It must have been a good ten years ago that she decided to dress only in black and wear, summer or winter, only silver. To go with this scheme, she painted her lips and nails a thick, excessively dark red, and gathered and almost completely concealed her hair with a kerchief tightly wrapped around her head. She always looked as if she were preparing to put on makeup. She had hundreds of kerchiefs in all shades of black and white. With their help, she bared her attractively symmetrical face, which reminded one of some extraordinary fruit, and her cambered, smooth, radiant forehead. She wore these black or white kerchiefs wrapped around her head, from under which her dark but obviously dyed hair peeked out a little, like some ornament or label advertising her proud personality. Her fingers were covered with rings, her wrists and arms with silver bracelets up to the elbows. She had a deep, penetrating, throaty voice, used to giving orders, but when speaking to her nephew or her agent in Paris, a handsome bald little man, she made an effort to restrain the power in her voice.

But whatever she tried to do, her personality overrode everything.

With these two people, however, she always behaved more cautiously than with others; she never risked anything, always speaking to them as if she were afraid of even momentary misunderstandings.

Döhring, she said quietly and firmly, while walking back to the window, carrying the telephone.

And this is the other Döhring, replied the young man at the other end of the line.

His aunt kept quiet, thinking she had better wait before saying anything.

It rang for so long I thought you’d never pick up, added the young man.

Why wouldn’t I pick it up, the aunt asked, cool and measured; she asked what happened.

I was just about to hang up, the young man said excitedly. I thought you might have gone out.

Where would I have gone, replied the aunt — and now the irritation was clear in her voice — after waiting for you for an hour and a half.

I only said that, the young man explained, stammering, because you didn’t pick up for so long.

Perhaps we should stop talking about when I picked up the phone or when I didn’t, and talk instead about what’s going on. I am waiting patiently for your explanation.

Nothing special, answered the young man indignantly. All that happened was that I fell asleep. I’m very sorry I’ve made you wait so long.

Well, that’s nice, said the aunt, a little shocked.

So you fell asleep, she added slowly, as if trying to gain time in which to understand the situation.

You probably didn’t go to bed on time.

As a matter of fact, she could not have said what it was she didn’t understand, but there was something. Mainly she didn’t know what to make of the young man’s unusually dull, unclear intonations, his agitated or forced overtones. While looking out the window to keep an eye on the telephone booth, she again leaned her forehead against the glass. There is a train from Berlin almost every hour. If he had fallen asleep why hadn’t he called her earlier, and how could he have arrived after such a delay from exactly the opposite direction.

She sensed the confused pulsing of madness in the telephone line. And a few sentences sufficed for some of the madness to stick to her.

She had to protest.

Outside, the bare, shiny branches were flying back and forth; while the windows kept out the noise of the cheerless wintry wind, the telephone line transmitted it. It was like a static that could drive one mad. It’s possible he had fallen asleep, but then he’d fallen asleep somewhere else, he’d arrived from somewhere else and not by train at all; someone must have given him a lift and dropped him off at the corner of Insel Street.

He must have some reason to be vague.

Nothing is inconceivable in the busy life of a young man. Except that her nephew had no busy life, he had no kind of life at all.

This is what made everything so worrisome. It was impossible to understand what had been happening with him, or rather what things had not been happening with him.

Carlino, said the aunt, her voice full of anxiety, before her nephew could reply. I do understand a lot, I do accept almost everything, I’m not curious about anything, but please tell me now from where exactly have you come.

You don’t have to give me a full accounting, but I’m interested, if you don’t mind.

The young man, whose full name was Carl Maria Döhring and whom only his aunt addressed with the Italianized diminutive, was concentrating at the moment only on how to cut short the conversation as quickly as possible. And how not to forget the telephone number he had carved with his nail into the yellow cover of the telephone book, and lo, the carving was visibly, slowly and dangerously fading. In his inattention, he unfortunately misunderstood the question.

He answered, of course Berlin, where else would he be, but he sincerely hoped he’d be able to catch the next train.

The next train, asked the nonplussed aunt, who in her surprise let out a shout, what next train, which the young man interpreted at the other end of the line as his aunt’s being familiar with the railway’s entire departure timetable, and he realized the deception was out of the bag.

Provided, he said quickly, hoping to fight his way out of the entanglement, that we immediately put an end to this conversation.

He’d called only to ask her indulgence.

He’d really like to catch the next train, he must run.

He won’t be able to stop by at her place, but the moment he gets home in Pfeilen, he’ll call her.

He hopes to find a way to meet somehow during the holidays.

The aunt replied quietly and solemnly, that he knew perfectly well she would be spending the holidays in Paris, but she was willing to wait patiently and see how her nephew’s comedy would play out. Then, as if she herself had said something very funny, with her mouth open wide she laughed into the telephone. She wanted him to know she was on to him, she knew what was at the bottom of it: a woman. She knew how to laugh with gusto. But unguarded laughter created complete confusion between them. Carlino did not understand what his aunt did not understand, or what more he should tell her to make her understand and accept what she hadn’t yet, not to mention that her saucy laughter irritated and offended him, hitting him at one of his most sensitive points.

He had nobody. He has never had anybody. He has never even been close to having anybody, ever.

But the aunt could not comprehend why her nephew stuck to this impossibility, why he needed to; and if he is already here in the Hofgarten, what does it matter what woman he’s involved with, why does he have to go on lying, why all the fuss.

She did not understand any of it, but of course, she was the more indulgent one.

Carlino, my dear, there are so many things in heaven and on earth that I should understand, and honestly I do try, she shouted softly, still laughing a bit, but if I understand correctly, she continued haltingly, then pouncing on him with all the power of her voice, you are in two places at the same time.

What two places, what do you mean, Döhring asked irritably, and it seemed to his aunt that, judging by his voice, he really did not understand her. I don’t understand you, he said, I have to get going right away.

That’s great, the aunt answered, and she no longer saw any further reason to restrain her voice. While you are making a phone call from a booth under my window, you are also going to catch your train in Berlin.

Very interesting indeed.

What a numbskull you are. You think it’s that easy to fool your aunt.

But to her stentorian good mood she received a quick and determined reply she’d never have expected.

Because Döhring finally realized how carelessly he had been behaving. Which meant that once again he was the weaker one, the loser, the dolt who could never gain the upper hand with anyone. And he began to shout so desperately at the other end of the line, bellowing, really, that his aunt yanked her forehead back from the windowpane and the receiver away from her ear.

He shouted that if she really wanted to know what had happened then he would tell it to her now, no problem. Yesterday he killed somebody.

Yes, he thought to himself at the same time, I lent a hand to my Creator in his daily devastation. He regretted that he did not dare say this aloud.

He found it delightful that here he was, standing in the telephone booth while outside the wind was blowing furiously, and shouting across the world at least one third of his confession that could be made public.

Of course he’d denied it, he yelled, because he thought he’d get away with it. But he wouldn’t, because he didn’t want to get away with it.

One can’t get away with everything.

He was horrified at this sentence, and he shuddered, though not as he had the day before; not his bones, not his flesh, but the roots of his hair, his hair follicles, the entire surface of his skin very finely turned into a field of goose bumps.

He’d never try to get away with it. Yes, exactly, he was going back to Berlin. He’d retract his first confession. And he’d shit on the Christmas holidays. He wouldn’t wait that long. And it wasn’t only that his skin was shivering, but the shivering itself, both fear and pleasure, had done something profound to him.

I can’t wait any longer, I can’t bear it, he shouted, and felt that the mysterious something had, incomprehensibly and quite unexpectedly, reached his spinal cord, and in his underpants his prick was standing erect.

Which humiliated him to the depth of his soul, because it was all a reaction to his aunt’s voice and her shocking behavior. Not only her laughter, but that entire seductive and flirtatious game, assumed or hoped to be innocent, which they had been playing since his earliest childhood and which made him shout so frantically.

Döhring lived in his aunt’s Berlin apartment; she financed his studies. A wounded animal bellows like this when ready, of course, for both defense and attack, and knows neither gratitude nor obligation.

That is also how the aunt at the other end of the line perceived the shouting: as a call for help.

The whole family can go to hell, Döhring yelled, beside himself, as if shouting that his aunt could go to hell, along with her money, apartment, and art collection.

Time has come to confess your crimes.

In time, they will all know what happened to him.

As so often in dangerous situations, these strange sentences — which could not be related to anything, which in the first seconds were completely senseless and even acoustically incomprehensible because too fast, too loud, and too divergent — called forth from the aunt a response quite the opposite of what might have been expected at that moment. It might be assumed that she did not comprehend the meaning of the sentences, since she did not become frightened and helpless; rather, she did not take them at face value, did not believe them because she could not believe her nephew capable of killing anyone, that’s why she wasn’t interested in knowing whom he had killed.

No one.

The uttered sentences did not interest her, yet she fathomed and understood everything, and she knew what she had to do. She comprehended the emotional content of the sentence and, instinctively, immediately, she too began to shout.

She had the stronger voice.

She shouted back with a beastlike instinct, as if wishing to charm him with her shouting, stun him, anesthetize him and render him helpless, to tether the other animal to its place.

You’re not going anywhere, do you understand? You’re staying right where you are, do you understand? Don’t you move from there, you understand? Without me, you make no confession to anyone, do you understand?

She was shouting from her chest, from her stomach, did not form her sounds in her throat or head, and that’s why they came out strong, deep, thundering; they boomed and reverberated.

Even while she was shouting, she felt that there was a coolness in her soul or that her shouting lacked empathy or any kind of passion.

Something was fatally missing.

No doubt she was doing the right thing, yet her heart was not in the shouting. As if she were filling in for another person, a stranger. After all, she had not shouted at anyone for who knows how long. Perhaps she had never before shouted quite like this; her shouting was alien to her. And this quite confused her because she felt that neither her nephew’s muddled and ominous confession nor her own determined shouting could touch the quintessence of her being.

She noticed something, some sort of change that cut her to the quick, of a kind she had never experienced before, some lack that now made itself felt as an aching wound.

Which made her shouting somewhat desperate; she became scared of herself.

And now I want to tell you something, she shouted, and you’d better listen hard, she yelled.

But at that very moment they were disconnected.

From the depths of the huge apartment, across the empty communicating rooms, the sound of a woman’s running footsteps were heard.

Inés, yelled the aunt, the telephone still in her hand, though she heard clearly the approaching steps of the Portuguese cleaning woman who until now had been peacefully ironing somewhere in the rear of the large apartment.

She could not leave the window.

She expected the door of the phone booth to fly open and Carlino to run away across the park.

Inés, she shouted again.

And then she would have to catch him in the park, at the railway station, she’d catch him somewhere, but for that to happen she could not leave her post at the window.

And the door of the phone booth still did not fly open.

Because Döhring stayed there for a while, just as he was, head bowed, humiliated many times over. His hand on the receiver, in the position where he had carefully and mercilessly replaced it a moment ago when he no longer wanted to hear his aunt’s voice.

He was staring, as if discovering something frightening, at his own foot; he was wearing expensive English shoes. His aunt’s voice had indeed bewitched him, just as his unpleasantly hard erection had stunned him.

He didn’t know what to do about either.

In such a state, he wouldn’t dare call Dr. Kienast.

His short coat was open, but fortunately what he felt happening inside his undershorts could hardly be seen on his pants. He was waiting for it to be over, which meant he should pay attention to everything but this. It cost him no small effort to tear himself away from his aunt, not to listen to, not to acknowledge what she would require of him. Yet no effort seemed sufficient to cope with what was happening in his loins. The most he could do was wait until his body came to its senses by itself.

This was also risky because if his aunt decided to grab her coat and come after him, he wouldn’t have much time.

Döhring was not a smart or careful dresser. The two finer articles of his outfit, the hand-sewn, somewhat awkward but very comfortable and wear-and-tear-proof shoes and the checkered, dark green, wool-lined Scottish windbreaker, were both gifts from his aunt. Otherwise he wore jeans and an unironed shirt over a white undershirt, like an American movie hero, and it had to be very cold before he would put on a sweater. Sometimes he’d put on his sweaters only because his stepmother had knitted them.

But he did have one secret indulgence: his underpants, swimming trunks, and running shorts. The briefs were quite small, red ones, sulphur yellows, purples, and all of them extremely thin. Wearing them was a discovery and a challenge, though for a long time he had no idea what he was discovering and no clue as to how he would challenge his fate by wearing them.

The moment he entered the big city, somehow everything flowed naturally from everything else.

At home, he might have avoided for a lifetime what he unavoidably encountered every day in Berlin.

When he returned from his first early morning run, the super was washing the sidewalk in front of the house. Late-summer sun shone bright on the trees’ foliage, though at this hour the air remained icy. The aunt’s apartment was in Fasanen Street, so that he could just run straight ahead along it to reach the Tiergarten.

He was not fond of changing his route.

And the super, who according to his own admission was also a student, studying law, though he was at least forty with two children, for some reason liked that the new tenant went running every dawn.

He asked him why he didn’t bicycle.

Here everyone rides bikes, or rather, many people do, he explained, at least those who on principle reject going by car.

Our kind of people, he added with a small laugh, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear the young man’s response.

Döhring was standing before him on the wet sidewalk, still panting. Being from the country, he was not fond of such challenges. He understood that the man expected to hear a political view, the very thing Döhring disliked.

Water was streaming hard from the super’s hose.

In the sharp air, Döhring’s sweat cooled quickly on his shoulders, a fine film settling on his face.

He said he liked riding but he didn’t have his bike with him; frankly, he hadn’t thought to bring it along.

The super was glad that he could use every question, reply, and suggestion as an excuse to prolong the conversation.

He said there were three bicycles in the garage left by a former tenant, a Hungarian engineer.

He didn’t know why, but Döhring asked what kind of Hungarian engineer. He was surprised to hear that someone would leave three bicycles at a former residence.

With his lips, with his head, the super indicated his agreement that this was suspicious behavior. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head so vehemently that the stream of water shook in his hand. He said he had tried to find out but could not, the Hungarian left no forwarding address, he had talked to the old super too. Also there were no trademarks on the bikes.

The spots left by their removal were still there; two had been simply taken off, the third must have been scraped off. If he felt like it, he should take one, any one of them, at any time, nobody else uses them anyway, occasionally his wife. If he wants, he could show them to him right now.

Although Döhring went down to the garage with the super only to be polite, that very afternoon he took one of the unknown Hungarian’s bikes and with very little effort, to his great surprise, quickly wheeled out into the thick of the city.

On these end-of-summer days, the sky above Berlin opens as if the firmament, this closer one, was going to open into another, farther one. However calm or hot the weather is, cool breezes and occasionally icy squalls arise. On the facades of buildings the shadows lengthen, the street perspectives deepen. Cool are the misty dawns and cold the foggy nights, of which something spills into the day as well.

During these days, Berliners stay on the sunny lakeshores until the last possible moment.

After a short hour’s ride, he did not even know where he was. Except that he was in some woods. He rode fast so he could feel the breeze on his body, but he was in no hurry.

He’d practically run away from his home, and now he had ten full days until the beginning of the first semester, during which he could get to know the city where at last he would be living alone.

Although he left behind the uniform noise of the expressways, no point of the wood’s well-kept orderly sections was out of range of the city’s pulsation. He did not know where he was but he did not care. He didn’t have to worry about getting lost. Or if he did, well, what of it. The highways were now closer, now farther, their proximity sometimes indicated by the smell of gasoline caught among the trees.

Occasionally he would see a solitary person. Someone running with a dog. Or couples strolling dreamily. And he was struck by the way people in the forest looked long and curiously at one another.

The way the super had looked at him that morning.

They were interested not only in his intentions, and they did not seem distrustful. He could not ride by anyone without being looked at. Politeness emanated from their faces, in a kind of advance on the first spoken word.

They also turned to look at him.

True, he also turned to look back because he could not resist the attraction of the glances directed at him, and he expected to be addressed.

Whether he wanted to or not, he had to look back, but he became repeatedly embarrassed because nothing happened.

And then he seemed to be past the area that people from the city reached on foot. A lone person on horseback far away, and then no one for a long time. He was now in a thick pine forest; the slightly wet, soggy dirt road rose insidiously; pedaling was difficult. It was becoming dark among the pines, for the afternoon sun was barely reaching across the ridge. Stifling, thick silence reigned among the tall somber trunks; occasionally a solitary bird warbled into the silence or another one screeched. Riding was hard in this area because horses’ hoofs had torn up the slippery incline. The acrid smell of resin pleasantly permeated the dry and stifling air.

He should have alighted and pushed the bicycle but he did not give up; he preferred to look for patches of solid ground along the roadside to keep under the wheels for each stroke of the pedals.

Döhring came from a tiny town in the plains of the Lower Rhineland. Lots of sand there too.

Not far from the slow-rolling Niers river, outside town, was their old farm, where they spent their summers. His eyes were used to vistas in which hedgerows, groves, and wooded areas punctuated the landscape. Everything uniformly flat. Though the pinewoods at home had a different fragrance. There were depressions in the eternal flatness in which rainwater would collect; springs burst forth and then leaked away into nothingness, and groundwater rose and fell as dictated by the seasons.

Sand everywhere, sand, marshy in the flatland’s depressions. A thin layer of sand, blown by the wind, covered the surface that slowly became hard, and in it, as if to deceive someone, clumps of long-bladed grass grew everywhere.

Not a terrain without perils; one never knew where to step next.

In the puddles of the depressions throve those tall, tangly, coniferous pines more yellowish than green, with which he now involuntarily compared this forest growing in the Berlin sand; site of his childhood adventures, site of horror.

The boggy ground was fragrant.

One frequently remembers what one is breaking away from, or at least feels oneself ready to break away from.




A Genteel Building


Many years earlier, in the spring of 1961, the year when in distant Pfeilen other obscure matters were also coming slowly to light, the celebration of the national holiday* in the Hungarian capital turned out badly.

According to the weather forecast, the next day was to be sunny, warm, decidedly springlike. At times like this, though, one never knew, because forecasts on the eve of official holidays were always falsified. They reported something either better or worse than what was actually expected, though occasionally they kept to the facts, with some cosmetic adjustment. There was hope that this time the report would be different, since the previous days had indeed been sunnier and warmer than average, but whatever the officials did or did not know, at dawn on March 15 turbulent northern winds were raging furiously over the country, a three-day hurricane that hit the capital especially hard. The false forecast, based on a compilation of daily requests about and reports on the general public mood, was prepared in the disinformation department of the secret service, whose submitted recommendation could be accepted or rejected only by authorized party functionaries at the next session of its political committee. At such times, the weather report, traversing strange paths, would not come from the Meteorological Institute, but would be delivered, as top secret, by runners to the editorial offices of every newspaper, where it was the duty of the editors-in-chief to supplant the real report with this one before going to press.

When in March the sun enters the sign of Aries and the exceptional hour of the vernal equinox approaches, the elements of nature often collide.

Suddenly the mercury dropped eight degrees Celsius; it was almost freezing again. Something terrible happened at the site of the official celebration, but no one had the details. Swelling clouds rushed across the sky, it was light and then it was dark, it drizzled, it was wet, closed windows rattled in the icy squalls. Festive flags were soaked and flapping wildly above Budapest’s empty streets, the national flag between two red ones. Tiles fell from the roofs; from broken rain pipes water gushed freely. There were hardly any pedestrians; anyone who braved the wretched weather also risked having something fall on his head. In the general din, the streets seemed to have become abandoned battlefields. Heavy broken branches lay everywhere. Anyone trying to make progress by clinging to the walls of buildings would get rain directly in his face and water pouring down his neck from the leaking gutters. And the noise reached its climax when for a long moment at several distant points in the city fire trucks and police cars blared simultaneously and, their sirens blasting continuously, went speeding toward the center of the city.

Ambulances moved in formation along the dead Grand Boulevard.

Why doesn’t somebody pick it up, was heard at the same time in the depths of a huge apartment on Grand Boulevard, a demanding female voice.

She was shouting from the bathroom, but since her youthful strength had been long diminished, she could hardly overwhelm the wind howling in the airshafts and stove flues, or the squealing of ambulances. Please pick it up, somebody, I never.

Still no one picked up the phone, though there were at least three other persons in the well-kept huge apartment fitted with every bourgeois comfort, a home that somewhat defied its historical time.

The sirens of receding ambulances slowly dissolved in the wind.

From four rooms in the third-floor apartment one could see the alternately illuminated and darkened Oktogon Square, while two other rooms and the maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, which gave on to the inner courtyard, remained dim in all seasons. There was a day in June when around noon a thin stripe of light appeared on the eggshell-colored wall in one room facing the courtyard, and this stripe not only reappeared in the following days but grew longer and wider, came earlier and departed later, until in mid-August it vanished for good. Its disappearance was like an otherworldly signal that few people would understand. But now everything was booming, rumbling, whistling, and crackling in this dark inner courtyard, as if something or someone were drumming on the roof tiles, plucking the wrought-iron railings of the red-marble rounded galleries on the courtyard side of the house, playing a trumpet in the depths. To boot, in this morning hour of housecleaning and lighting of fires, all the huge white double doors in the apartment were wide open and therefore no one could deny hearing the telephone or the old lady’s shouts from the bathtub.

The telephone rang three separate times in the largest room, which members of the household called alternately salon and sitting room. Twice it relented, but the third time it kept on ringing.

Each of the three persons thought one of the others would pick it up because each had personal reasons not to.

A pale, freckle-faced woman in her early thirties, kneeling in one of the back rooms, trying to light the fire in the stove, showed the same reluctance to move as did the other woman, a few years younger than she, who in the dark depths of the adjacent back room was lolling on the wide French bed, among the rumpled bedclothes, and with her thin dark-skinned naked arms desperately pressed a pillow to her head so she would not have to hear anything. Her presence here was not exactly welcome, so she picked up the telephone only in emergencies. She felt like an intruder, and rightly so because that is how the others thought of her, and as time passed her situation had become more and more unclear.

She had no place to go to, or rather she did not have the strength to make the unavoidable decision.

The pale woman busy with the stove did not go to get the phone, and not only because the fire she’d managed to light kept going out in the draft with every new gust of wind, which then would blow out of the tile stove and into the room in billows of thick dark smoke, but mainly because she kept to the rules. When people of the house were at home, she was not allowed, even in the morning hours of cleaning, to appear in the front rooms without being called. Although she knew no one was in the sitting room now, she did not go.

Let them pick it up if they want to, she said to herself, as if answering the old lady’s shout from the bathroom, and shrugged her thin shoulders.

She was not the rebellious kind and had no reason to be dissatisfied with her position here; still, at times she enjoyed being quietly vindictive. In fact, it was her little boy’s situation, which she felt to be injurious and humiliating, that made her like this — that, and of course her own self-respect. They lived in the ever-dark maid’s room, opening from the kitchen, and at her employers’ request she had to forbid the boy to leave the kitchen. This was the magic boundary of their living space: the kitchen walls. The child could comprehend it, but how could he possibly accept it. And not only was she, the mother, unable to overcome the constant border violations, prompted by anger, but the little boy’s rebellions continually exposed her willing servility. It was very difficult to find a place for the two of them, and in the difficult hours it seemed they had to pay too high a price for their security. The lively little boy, barely five years old, as pale as his mother, was not even allowed to play in the dim, musty passageway they called the hall, where, except for mealtimes, no one ever set foot.

They made cutting remarks; they would not suffer the boy. Ilona, why don’t you put that child back in the kitchen, the mistress of the house would say. I’d hate to have him break things here.

The hall was the only space in the apartment, by the way, that revealed the changing times and the unpleasant deterioration of circumstances. Originally its sole function was to be the place from which to reach the bathrooms, the two bedrooms, the dining room, and the kitchen — a kind of inner corridor but much wider than similar passageways found in other apartments. In an earlier interior arrangement of the apartment, this is where large linen closets had stood and it was the place for ironing clothes. For the last few years, however, it has housed an old sideboard of imposing proportions and a matching large dining table with stern-looking chairs. Yet not even by mistake did they refer to the space as a dining room. Necessity and expedience do not necessarily make life friendly, and that is why they couldn’t call it by that name. Although the hall window, kept shut at all times, was concealed by silk drapery and the glass in its panes was opaque, it gave on to a narrow airshaft, and the air was often filled with the stench of sewage or equally offensive smells from strange kitchens, not to mention embarrassing noises emanating from toilets and bathrooms. During meals, the most they could do was to pretend not to notice any of this, to pretend they did not hear, let us say, that somebody on the second floor was groaning, pushing, and evacuating while they went on discussing cultural topics and enjoyably consuming their beefsteaks. It happened once, while they were at dinner, that somebody on the fourth floor heaved a burned and still smoking milk pan out the window and into the airshaft, where the pan unluckily hit the wall, ricocheted, broke through the double glass of the opaque window, and landed at the diners’ feet.

For long minutes no one at the table could speak.

In their unpleasant situation, it was no help to them that an oriental rug covered the floor, that the table settings remained more or less intact, and that two exceptionally precious paintings were still hanging on the walls. These paintings, by the way, could hardly be discerned in the dimness. They were old, darkened pictures in heavy gilded frames, and only a single unshaded wall lamp provided some light in the hall. It was kept on day and night to keep people from tripping on the wrinkled rug or from bumping into an out-of-place, stern-looking chair. The many-branched gilded baroque chandelier dangling from the ceiling, with its complicated tendrils appearing as a shapeless shadow capable of endless metamorphoses, was turned on only at mealtimes.

The ringing of the telephone reached all the way into the hall, but now there was no one in it. On the larger painting one could just make out scenes of a battle, the shiny deep-brown haunches of rearing English thoroughbreds, a Hungarian banner as it fell from the standard-bearer’s hand, half-naked human bodies trampled under hoofs. Glimmering vaguely from the recessed gilded frame of the other painting were the rosy cheeks of a young man’s face, painted in glazed colors; he was József Lehr, a captain in the Hungarian army of 1848, who with dreamy eyes looked out from the space in the parted silk drapery into the eternal dimness of the airshaft. From the bathroom one could hear running water and the quick, rapid squelching sounds of soap.

And the person who could have picked up the receiver without any trouble, an attractive, tall young man barely nineteen years old, with nearly ramrodlike posture, was simply not in a position to do so. He saw everything, weighed everything, clearly heard the phone ringing, yet somehow, for quite some time, had not been present anywhere. At any rate, there were many things he could have done but did not do because he was busy with other, much more important matters. As if he had to have a complete overview of his entire future life before, from his imaginary distance, he would consider what he could and could not do.

Who is capable of taking on such a great responsibility; it paralyzed him.

People in his milieu sensed a passing absentmindedness at most, but not his threatened mental state. He had a flawless education, and when he talked to someone he smiled persistently, paid unflagging attention, showed interest, and asked questions without being intrusive — all of which was enough for people to consider him truly endearing. Even his own relatives ignored the unpredictability of his behavior; they thought he was a bit of an eccentric but essentially a fine fellow.

He was now standing at a front-room window looking out at something, while leaning with his hip against the windowsill. He kept his eyes on something; his eyes were submerged in something that no one but he could see; with his eyes he seemed to have grown into this something, but this was revealed only by his unnatural posture, the stiff little half-turns he made. When he leaned forward and felt the pressure of the wood on his loins, he almost touched his temple to the window; simultaneously he had to retract his neck lest his head press the glass from the window. Nobody could have understood what he was doing here. Had he simply stopped at the window without paying special attention to anything, he would have seen the festively deserted square with an occasional yellow streetcar crossing it; or the trees swaying in the wind, their bare, glittering branches knocking together; or perhaps the enormous sky in which cracks of white incandescence had opened up and clouds, heavy with rain yet flying swiftly, were effortlessly chasing one another without piling into a thunderhead.

The vision did have a sort of unpredictable rhythm.

The rain shower did not necessarily batter the windows when the sky grew dark. Up above, the clouds were moving more rapidly than would have seemed possible while also releasing the rain to swoop earthward; so it seemed as if the water were flowing through the white incandescent cracks.

He saw this too, though he wasn’t looking at it, just as he also looked at things that he could not possibly have seen. And one cannot even say that he was thinking about something. He was not thinking. With his body, he responded to the rhythm of the gusting wind, and thus he adjusted his rhythm to match any thought or any other form of sensation that crossed his mind. As if inside him too, the elements had taken control that day, as they had in the entire city. He became gloomy and then cheered up, he found supporting arguments for his mood and in a little while discarded them; they seeped away from him; then suddenly his feelings ran dry, he grew despondent and became hopeful. He had no explanation for the simultaneous diversity. Out of this embarrassing lack, the soul’s chaos was yawning at him, his own. But not a single feature of his face became distorted; on the contrary, self-discipline made his countenance seem frighteningly indifferent.

There was somebody else in him, another being who was not a person but who followed his every thought and movement. Whatever he missed, whatever he did or intended to do, this someone was watching impassively, voicing no opinion but not leaving him alone either. When trouble was grave, it would register in the young man’s face with its neutral countenance. It waited for the moment of action; it did not interfere with anything. As if to claim mutely that every moral command or consideration is secondary because it is always preceded by action or resignation. But with the tenacious carriage of his head and his petulantly pursed lips, the young man showed that he was not just gazing idly out the window, that he wanted something or there was something he could not not want, that he sees something; maniacally he is keeping his eyes on something, he cannot let go of it. And this something is down there on the boulevard, on the opposite side. Occasionally a passing streetcar obscures it. Maybe in the bus stop. When a bus stopped he got on his toes as if to see through the bus. Maybe somebody is supposed to arrive, he is waiting for somebody, that’s why he can’t leave his post.

While he was waiting for this or for something entirely different, and enjoying the windowsill’s rhythmic pressure on his loins, the young woman in bed in the inner back room did make a move. As if impatience, or some protest, or perhaps a sensual bodily excitement had coursed through her naked arms. Her brownish skin twitched but in the opposite direction from which her arm muscles contracted. It was the last beat of her sleep, which included the temptation of the unwanted awakening.

She had been alone in bed since early morning; the telltale signs of the absent person included a hastily turned-up eiderdown and a few scattered articles of clothing, dark socks on the floor near the bed, pajama pants a little distance away, and a pair of white underpants on the rug; a shirt and a cream-colored pajama top on an overstuffed chair at the far end of the room. Since he had left in a hurry, the young woman alternately forced herself back to sleep because she wanted to forget what had happened during the night and dozed off, or was startled to wakefulness again. Not because of the morning noises and not because of the persistently ringing telephone. It was as if she were taking a ferry across a river flowing in a flat landscape and the ferry docked now at this shore, now at the other. It seems she must have really been dreaming; she dreamed of crossing over. She dreamed of shores that did not differ from each other; no bushes or trees, not a single tree anywhere, only farm wagons, jostling cattle, and people wrapped in clouds of dust as they streamed forth from the vast lowlands. The last images of her dream remained glued for a while to the surface of her wakefulness. The river was enormously wide, murky, the surface of its dull, glistening water almost convex. From one shore the other shore could not be seen. But I should see it, she thought half-asleep, remembering the shore she had left, but it’s impossible, this is an impossibility. At the same time, she did not know what she should be seeing. The words clattered hollowly in her head; she did not comprehend their meaning even when awake.

As if to look out from under the pillow, she lifted it slightly from her head and at the same time raised her head. Instead of listening to senseless words, she wanted to hear whether anyone was going to pick up the receiver, or maybe she’d have to after all. Because of her little movement, she suddenly smelled something that was at once strange and familiar. What is going on here anyway. She was happy to register the fact that despite the old lady’s demands, no one was picking up the phone. And neither would she. She had nothing to do with it. After all, Kristóf must be in one of the front rooms. Each time she awoke she would traverse the entire apartment, concentrating her attention on each detail, going from room to room with her awakened senses, as if to palpate the physical and mental situation of the people found in them, and in this activity there was most definitely something blatantly animalistic.

The young man named Kristóf had in time become her obsession.

She spied on him with her imagination, she pursued him with her sensuality, she wanted to know what he was doing, when and where.

Kristóf lived in the adjacent back room, and it was frightening to contemplate that he might know more about them than was proper.

They did not always manage to keep their voices down; mutual pleasure was the only thing that still kept them together. She probably wouldn’t have liked to admit to herself that she was gradually breaking away from Ágost and becoming more attracted to Kristóf, if only because of the men’s strong resemblance. And she wasn’t just eagerly following him in her imagination: sometimes the sounds Ágost elicited from her she deliberately intended for Kristóf. She’d have her orgasm a little for him. She would come a little more loudly than necessary so Kristóf in the adjacent room could have some of it. At the same time, she could not be sure that she had achieved her aim. Ring, go ahead, go on ringing. Somebody was constantly talking inside her head. She wasn’t sure whether the nagging female voice was real or part of her dream. She could catch Kristóf with her desperate imagination but the woman shouting from the bathroom she dreaded both awake and asleep.

The fire was burning, practically roaring, in the tile stove, and from her bed she looked straight into the blazing flames.

As if she were looking at fire for the first time. On this shore, everything was stranger, more distant, than what she had to leave behind on the other, more familiar shore. She was amazed; she did not know where in the world this dream had come from; she could never have seen such a huge river in her life. I couldn’t have seen such a river, never have, this is as big as the Ganges or the Mississippi. Her head was reverberating with her own voice. She should have gotten up a long time ago. She felt her pillow emitting the apartment’s strange smell, which she had never been able to get used to and which urged her out of bed. It wasn’t the bed that held her captive; she saw the day ahead of her as hopeless. All her days were hopeless. And the ferry shuttling between the two shores must mean that she does not, never has had, and never will have a home of her own.

Her mother, of whom only her name has remained, Borbála Mózes, left her in the maternity center of Nagykőrös when she was but a few days old; on her birth certificate the newborn was registered with her mother’s last name and given the first name of Gyöngyvér. She did not know who her father was, whether she looked like him or her mother, or if she resembled them at all. Her mother must have requested the hateful first name. She persistently and darkly hated her unknown unmarried mother because of this name, because of the gyöngy, meaning pearl, and because of the vér, meaning blood. She was raised first in parochial and then in state institutions; she lived with foster parents, in boarding schools and finally in college dormitories. And the words with ambiguous meaning must have rattled in her head, because her forehead was throbbing with pain. But between the two friendly shores of the mighty river all the unpleasant feelings dissolved, the obstinate pain melted into the landscape. The early morning sunshine glowed as if through a fine mist, it was summertime, a summer that she did not recall while awake; a short, soft, early little happiness that still managed, after all these years, to compensate her for the painful headaches. In secret, she sometimes drank a great deal. The only thing that clouded the erstwhile happiness was that she had to wait for other passengers while she wanted to get across quickly. Her hunger and thirst were insatiable, as befits one who always longs for another shore.

But now she could tarry no longer; she had to get up. Her bladder was tight as a drum; she had sharp little stabs in her stomach urging her to make a move.

The room was wrapped in a pleasant dimness that begged her to stay; she pressed her thighs close together. Despite the late morning hour, no one had opened the shutters that kept the room dark. I’ve got the chills again, she declared with evident annoyance. Light came in only through the open door, and on the walls were the long shadows of reddish flames.

She stared at the flames but did not see what she was looking at because she kept reaching out with the feelers of her imagination, casting about in vain; she could not decide of what her dream was reminding her. A memory, this is one of my memories, she repeated to herself, and she almost caught it but then missed it. Before fleeing the rattling words in her head and angrily turning over to make the pain dissolve, to disappear finally in the landscape, she instinctively clutched at wakefulness; she longed not for an empty dream but, perhaps, for the empathy of the other person.

Ilona dearest, she shouted to the other room in a weepy singsong, couldn’t you open the fucking window already. If you keep the stove smoking like that, I’m going to suffocate.

Her plaintive tone did not lighten the brutality of the sentences, of course. She really wasn’t asking for much; still, she always overshot her target, and because of that she was often dissatisfied with herself. Sometimes she thought she was too lenient with others, sometimes too aggressive, pushy, or hostile; she couldn’t find the right proportions. It’s not that she had no standards of proportion; she had too many different standards, which could not be easily reconciled and often clashed, making her emphases and her behavior offensive.

The other woman did not respond for a good long time. Not because she might have been offended; she kept leaning back and then forward, first to escape the flames lashing out of the stove and then to blow on them, with her bare breath, to keep them from dying. To build a fire every day in six different tile stoves and keep them going evenly was no easy task, even without a crazy storm raging outside.

I’ve had this terrible migraine since the crack of dawn, came the words from the other room, my head’s about to split open. I don’t know why it’s happening again. Maybe because of the wind.

The complaint that could possibly pass for an apology hovered helplessly in the air between the two rooms for a few long seconds.

The domestic help, whose full name was Ilona Bondor, understood and to some extent even felt the young woman’s difficult situation; she needed no explanation as to how one winds up with a migraine at the crack of dawn.

Either she’d drunk a lot in secret again, or Ágost had failed to satisfy her again.

And, perhaps not as the other woman would have liked, but she decidedly felt empathetic toward Gyöngyvér. There was something touchingly awkward and vulnerable in Ilona’s asymmetrical round face, in her dense, pale freckles that nearly met under her eyes and on her nose, in her thin, carefully frizzled red hair and narrow shoulders. She gave the impression of being an undeveloped slip of a girl, perhaps suffering from a mild case of rickets, but she was neither an immature nor an irresolute person. Judging by her exterior, she was more resolute than others expected or were willing to accept her as being. She knew exactly what to expect from everyone. Now, too, she looked up only when the kindling finally caught fire.

I think the healthiest thing would be if Gyöngyike got herself out of bed now, she shouted back over her shoulder. And she could even pick up the phone. Gyöngyike told me yesterday that she’d have to get up early this morning. She meant to go swimming before her singing lesson because she said she’d like to make full use of her days off. And that would be a very nice thing, but how can she do that if she stays in bed. That is not very nice of Gyöngyike. Gyöngyike thinks that her migraine will pass by itself. Well, it won’t. She should get up right away and go out into the fresh air.

She had a strong, penetrating voice and, curiously, she spoke to the other woman as if talking of a third person.

But the other woman did not find this insulting. Like Ilona, who came from a Slovak village near Buda, she had been living in the city for only a few years. When on occasion they fell to talking either in the kitchen or leaning against a door post in one of the rooms, neither of them paid much attention to how the other was speaking or what she was saying, but it would have been entertaining for an outside observer to witness the encounter of the two distant dialects. While Gyöngyvér produced her ő sounds with an open throat, Ilona pronounced her á sounds with puckered lips; to boot, they each used expressions that neither the other woman nor natives of Budapest could possibly understand. Their being from the countryside had a secret undercurrent that alternately brought them together or made them jealous of and even turned them against each other; they listened differently and judged things differently from others, and therefore if anything happened to them they understood each other better than others would understand them, or than they understood other people. For them, there was nothing odd in Ilona Bondor’s talking to Gyöngyvér Mózes as if speaking of a third person. It was Ilona’s artful way to avoid addressing the younger woman formally, which otherwise would have been demanded by the differences between their respective upbringings.

The headache would pass much more easily if Gyöngyike went to the pool.

Stop talking nonsense. The reason I’m not going to the pool is that afterward it’s always worse.

Still, it would be best to get ready, Gyöngyike, because it’s not just opening the window, and I’ll do that for Gyöngyike right away, but I have to start cleaning the apartment. I can’t start anywhere else because the missus hasn’t come out of the bathroom. When she comes out, Gyöngyike can go in. I think that should be the order of things.

And now it was this sentence that remained hovering in the air. As to the daily cleaning, it indeed could not be started anywhere else. Ilona had to begin either in the farthest front room, facing the street, or in the innermost back room, facing the courtyard; this was the basic rule: it could not happen in any other way. No reply came, and no stirring noise either, to indicate that Gyöngyike was finally prepared to crawl out of bed. The telephone, however, stopped ringing.

For a long time nothing was heard except the wind whistling and sounding in other ways as it blew through the hollows, cracks, drainpipes, and various openings of the grand old apartment house.

There was no one on the circular galleries or in the courtyard; the spacious stairwell landings remained empty.

At this hour no one would have come anyway, except the German milk woman from Budakeszi or the Slovak woman from Pilisszentkereszt with her eggs or perhaps the mailman. But they all stayed away because of the awful weather. Ilona had taken her little boy to the kindergarten early that morning; he couldn’t be in her way all day. No other school-age children lived in the building, and by this time of the morning nearly everyone was at work.

The last time this building was full of people was on one of those terrible nights in October 1956* when cannon fire on the boulevard forced total strangers to take shelter anywhere they could. When the limping, hunchbacked, bald concierge opened the heavy oak entrance gate at dawn and looked outside, the wind was already raging on the boulevard. Ever since, people leaving the house would, with no small exertion, carefully close the gate behind them, which a clumsy sign stuck to the oak door asked them to do. The erstwhile elegant carriage entrance still looked like a wind tunnel in hell, with Satan, blowing his horn, about to arrive. The lids of the trash cans were rattling, trembling, knocking ceaselessly. The infernal noise also had a banal explanation. The blast of explosions on that October night in 1956 had knocked out the two panes of glass fitted in the high archway over the gate and since then, the desperate efforts of the concierge notwithstanding, it had been impossible to find such heavy, unbreakable glass anywhere in the capital.

Of course, the eighty-year-old exceptionally eurhythmic building was considered a rarity in the neighborhood because it had survived the ordeals of the last decades almost unscathed. It had done so not only because of good luck. Even in its own day, it was perhaps the neighborhood’s least conspicuous structure. It was meant to be a block of luxury apartments, as were all its ostentatious neighbors, but its modest dimensions gave it the appearance of a private town house, though there was no more substantial building in all of the Terézváros district. It had never taken a direct hit and, since the imperceptible ornaments of its puritan facade also had been made of high-quality material, even air blasts from nearby explosions failed to damage it. A restless, unsociable man from the countryside, or at least someone whose mind did not work on an urban scale, had built this apartment house, which bore no resemblance to the ones around it, and that of course became an advantage. Pundits opined that the style of the almost completely unadorned building might be placed somewhere between classic and eclectic; thus, in the architecture of Budapest, it represented a much needed link; because of an unfortunate development of circumstances, its designer created almost no other freestanding buildings like this thereafter, and the need was still felt in the cityscape.

The architect was the kind of man people referred to as a bad character, even though the areas in which he showed outstanding talents were not few. Perhaps he could not decide whether to be a fighter or an eccentric or whether, to the contrary, to meet every mediocre and foolish demand. In fact, he spent his entire long life struggling with himself; he always found some object that would conceal the raw ravings of his insane egoism. At times he submitted himself to anyone for the asking, as if in sheer self-sacrifice, even lowering himself to the point of outrageously bowing and scraping; at other times, he would play the role of independent, self-willed gentleman. His name was Samu Demén.

He came into the world in the town of Jászberény, the son of a well-to-do Jewish grain merchant, a few years after Hungary’s failed War of Independence in 1848, and he was considered an exceptionally intelligent child. He was the last child in the family after his six sisters; his paternal grandmother and two aunts on his mother’s side, all “poor relations,” also lived with the family. One may imagine how he grew up among all those women, how they must have pampered and spoiled him — and we haven’t even mentioned the girls and women who were household help, or the Misses Le Vau and Papanek, the French and German governesses. The family’s financial situation was secure, its prestige ever more solid, though Jászberény managed to keep out Jewish immigrants for a long time. By the time the boy reached puberty, most of his sisters had been married off, out of town; their father, taking advantage of new real-estate laws concerning Jews, rented an extensive property, which he ran with a firm but also fortuitous hand. This provoked envy and anger among many people in the small town, while others saw the usefulness of his general improvements, though even among the latter only a few could accept that the property belonged to the Jew.

At any rate, the boy chose his way of life and career without any restriction or outside compulsion and by following his own dreams. He studied architecture first in Berlin and then in Vienna; he traveled for a few months in Greece and spent an entire year on a study tour in Italy. According to the logic of his studies, from Italy he should have continued to England, but because he could not acceptably master a single foreign language (a constant cause of uncertainty and anxiety for him), for his last two undergraduate years he reenrolled at the Technical University in Budapest, where he earned his diploma under the tutelage of the already famous and powerful Alajos Hauszmann. The professor thought highly of him, and though one cannot say that he denied his support to this decidedly attractive young man, Demén was not among his favorite students, because these students, despite the professor’s cunning efforts, would not suffer Demén’s company. They found his manners unbearable; at the very least his touchiness and impetuosity seemed strange. He spoke in a thick, irritating dialect he could not shake; he stammered embarrassingly when his peers switched to German, not to mention his bad habit of mixing up the genders of nouns; but mainly they objected to the strident tones in which he frightened off or wore down so many people.

Whenever he turned up in one of the noisy cafés — in the Sas (Eagle) on Újvilág Street, in the Vadászkürt (Hunting Horn), where he read foreign newspapers, in the Kávécsarnok (Coffee Hall), where he would confer with suspicious characters about obscure political matters, or once in a while in the luxurious Angol Királynő (Queen of England), because of a scandalous adventure that linked him with a lady of the highest social circles — then, with his dashing figure and impeccable attire he immediately captured and for long moments held the attention of the public. People who knew him made fawning or stinging remarks; people who did not know him wanted very much to know who he was.

At the door, the waiter would courteously, complying with police orders, take his walking cane, while he, pulling at the fingers one by one, with the same ceremoniousness removed his tight-fitting chamois gloves as he absentmindedly and majestically let his gaze sweep over the place. He could have been taken for a famous foreign artist or aristocrat, of whom onlookers would say, what a distinguished-looking man; he is of course not from among us and not like us. He would take off his top hat, hand his gloves and hat to the waiter, who only then would lead him to his table or to the company waiting for him at his table.

His steps were always deliberate, his gestures smooth and pliable. A fastidiously well-bred wild animal passed between the tables.

The magic would last until he lowered himself to a chair or until, leaning out from the depths of an overstuffed chair, he began to speak. Everything on him was finely wrought; everything was long, longoid, bony though not without some flesh, like his fingers; at the same time wild and unruly, like the fine strands of his shiny black hair that spilled out from under his headgear. No less wild were his eyebrows, which with disobedient hairs on the slightly bone-yellow skin grew together above the bridge of his nose; his lips were almost offensively thick and on their upper rim he sported a tiny mustache trimmed to a thin line. With his mere appearance, with a confident and spoiled-child smile playing at the corner of his lips, with his gestures and skin color, with his dark, nervously darting or, alternately, lingering gazes, he could ingratiate himself with anyone. And it would take him an equally short time to pulverize the disconcerting attraction others felt for him and make people wonder where they stood with him.

He was born under the sign of Aquarius, and nature had fatally granted him all the traits associated with his constellation but, alas, nothing else. He was a man of the spectacle, or rather of the spectacle of visual illusions; he knew everything that had to do with spectacle, he knew what he owed to harmony, what to disharmony; he was well versed in the measurement units of symmetry and asymmetry: he preferred symmetry without insisting on it, because he opposed the monotony of proportions. However, these aptitudes did not function in him as acquired engineering skills but reached down to, were in touch with, his viscera; they drew nourishment from his guts. Yet he was not untrained; no one could put his skills to better use. He could also manage colors, shapes, materials, the rhythms of lines, and he instinctively sensed their mutuality and reciprocity, but where the territorial waters of visualization ended, he was considered a lost man.

Complete tone-deafness is probably as rare as the possession of absolute pitch. The problem was not that he could not distinguish a waltz from a mazurka, though sometimes he couldn’t do that — and that’s nothing to worry about; he proved to be morbidly insensitive to any auditory proportions and perhaps because of that was incapable of listening to others or hearing himself properly.

He had no friends, only admirers and enemies. Samu Demén did not comprehend fine tensions and shades of emphasis or meaning. He did not hear out anyone to the end, could not argue well; he would quickly shout down, interrupt, and pounce on anyone, break into the conversations of others, occasionally talk over another speaker’s words. He felt in his element when he could hold forth in a freewheeling monologue. His refined gestures notwithstanding, few people forgot that at table he ate noisily and smacked his lips. A beautiful body in which probably there was never silence, a body that did not desire silence.

Some people simply avoided him.

Of course, he sensed this, but ever since leaving the family home, he hadn’t understood why things happened so that he wound up being alone in the end.

On his buildings there were no traces of disagreeable extremes. He built not from the outside in but from the inside out. As if he saw the inner courtyard before envisioning the facade, or first saw a single room that would determine the proportions of all the others and not the other way around. He became convinced, nay, obsessed with the notion that a living space is successful only when its ground plan is an elongated rectangle like that of a Greek temple, and its individual rooms almost regular squares. He wanted living spaces to be intimate, gentle, and friendly; they should not stifle desire, but neither should they feed ambition or conceit. The height of the rooms depended on their width and length in the floor plans. From which it followed not only that he would not design overly large rooms, because he couldn’t call for senselessly high ceilings, but that all the rooms had to be about the same size, in the end not much larger than the service spaces.

All his designs might well have been for comfortable, intimate, restful, substantial, and cheerful spaces, but they could not be reconciled to the spirit of the age, and therefore he could not implement them; they usually remained on paper. His ideas did not turn his colleagues against him; they merely smiled at his plans. Samu Demén drafts pretty little country houses, they would say, but hasn’t the vaguest notion what a city apartment building should be like. And his plans scared away potential customers. In buildings that his colleagues designed the interior proportions were indeed different. Rooms in the front — drawing rooms, studies, smoking rooms, and dining rooms — were larger and high-ceilinged, in the rear quarters all the spaces, dark corridors, pantries, dens, recesses, and alcoves became narrower, which made their interior height alarming. As for the apartments on the courtyard, their proportions were even less convenient; everything was crowded, intruding on everything else. Kitchens encroached on rooms, rooms on windowless alcoves and sleeping recesses; there were public toilets on the rear stairwell landings; in short, the city’s dense and impure atmosphere invaded the living space.

As opposed to all this, Demén dealt with space so generously that on any given floor he could put no more than two apartments, which of course found no favor with developers, who balked at the prices of building lots or looked for more profitable deals. And when he might have stood up for his ideas by arguing courteously and cleverly, everyone could see that he nearly exploded with anger when crossed.

Please understand that when you draw a line across the topmost point of the tympanum parallel with the crepidoma — that’s the terraced substructure of an ancient temple — and then connect the two at each end, all right, I see you don’t understand, you’ve probably never seen a Greek temple, well, that would give you an almost regular square, and that’s the essence of the thing. Well then, please note that this is what we call a classical proportion. A virtual square tending toward a flat rectangle. And I would go further, but please understand that I can go only as far as is optically tolerable. I won’t go past that, trust me; I simply won’t. Now then, if we put another floor on this building, or two or three floors, as you would like me to do, then we would stand the world on its head.

Well, look at it, please, as you can see this would give you a bare prism shape that bumps up into the sky. And that, with your permission, is not me. I will not take on a project like that.

Indeed, his witty colleagues saw the facades of his structures, missing only a grand tympanum and Doric colonnade, as some sort of old-fashioned archaizing creation. Yet he never used archaizing elements in his work, just as he stayed away from showy Baroque or Renaissance ornamentation, which his colleagues liked and for which customers paid willingly.

This he could not get through his head. Why would they spend so much on nonsense when for the same amount they could pay for a comfortable and well-balanced space.

On all three floors, every room facing the street or courtyard had two symmetrically arranged windows, and he gave each only as much emphasis — with foliated profiles carved from Sóskút sandstone — as the human eye receives from brows and lashes. One profile he placed high, as in neoclassic buildings, well above the window openings, if for no other reason than to keep the rain from hitting the windowpanes directly, and the other, as if supporting the windowsills, as a corbel. The profiles, made of three narrow layers, took their pattern from Ionic stylobates. He ran a wider line of the same profiles not only above the storefronts on the ground floor but also under the well-elevated roof, as a kind of cornice to close off the vertical division of the facade with appropriate friezes.

The principles voiced by his contemporaries, their jests and objections to his work, were not without foundation. Because he tried stealthily to smuggle back the classical look not only with these subtly restrained references and markings but mainly with vertical segments of brick. Even he could not eliminate the tension between structural demands and the realized interior proportions, and as a result unabashed ornamentation came to characterize that era.

In October 1956, a few senseless submachine gun bursts sprayed this symbolic colonnade.

The bricks, fired many times, resisted the impact of the bullets well, though one could follow the arc of the bursts in the damage they caused. Here a brick was dislodged, there the edge of another was chipped off, somewhere else a bullet lodged in the mortar. The plastered surfaces had been painted a bright, sunny yellow, and in those days, segments of the brick facing were virtually dangling between the light corbels. Today, there is no trace of color; floating airborne dust and soot have turned the facade’s modest details gray, and from the profiles, friezes, and cornices pigeon shit has been dribbling daily, turning hard as stone.

Coming through the gate and walking by the long row of garbage cans, whose lids the cats continually pushed off, allowing whole packs of rats to feast even during the day, one would probably not notice that the filthy, begrimed walls were decorated with the same simple, layered profile as could be found on the facade. Because of a burst pipe on one floor that went unattended for months, huge patches of plaster had peeled off the attractively arched ceiling and bare bricks, exposing live electrical wires that dangled from between the fraying stalks of plastering reed. The concierge, who was still a stripling when ancient Samu Demén had him brought up to the capital from Jászberény, looked up at the ceiling several times a day because, to be honest, he was anticipating a disaster. He feared that the loosened mortar between the bricks in the vaulting would not hold and the enormous, slowly rusting ceiling lamp would come crashing down.

First as assistant concierge and then as concierge, he has been taking care of this house for more than thirty years, and he’s been doing it with unsparing and passionate enthusiasm, as if he could not forget that his life would have turned out very differently if not for this job.

Mentally he was fit, aggressive, sly, and mean, but he had serious physical limitations; in his early childhood, in his own environment, he had been drifting dangerously toward a speedy end. Somehow he was in everybody’s way, useless for regular work in the fields, beaten by his siblings, kicked, knocked over, and neither his mother nor grandmother had spared him; if by chance providence hadn’t snapped him out of there he’d probably have ended up in the corner of the stable, an outcast. He had an exceptional relationship with animals. Since the death of old Demén he has lived as one who must work off a loan that providence gracefully has advanced him by tending to an inanimate object, this building.

Unexpectedly, in the last months, his enthusiasm has faltered, something was used up or exhausted in him, something snapped. There were no signs of illness, but he realized from one moment to the next that with his waning strength the deterioration was too far gone for him to arrest. And suddenly his adored daughters also became unmanageable; they drank, swore, did not come home at night. Total collapse was sneaking up on him.

Since the garbage man stopped coming every day and showed up only twice a week and sometimes not at all, this task too fell to the concierge and he didn’t know how to cope with it. He did not get any new cans, but he had somehow to store the building’s ever-accumulating trash when a week went by without its being collected. Pox on them all. He swore too, why not. He got hold of some rusty paint barrels, soldered handles on them by which he dragged them out to the curb. If the garbage people didn’t come, he’d drag the barrels back at noon. From other barrels’ bottoms, he made lids for the ones with handles.

He kept doing everything, of course he did, but in the meantime he thought that if the big lamp was going to fall out of the vaulted ceiling, let it fall and bring down the ceiling and the whole building with it. Let everything collapse, everything has to rot eventually. In the past, he wouldn’t have dared think such thoughts, but now it felt good to think this way, that’s what made him a free man. He still kept his eye on everything, but his helplessness, and his fury over his helplessness, spread wider and wider. He could not prevent the stench of rot invading the entranceway that Samu Demén had so lovingly designed.

Back then, horse-drawn carriages were the means of transportation for genteel folk, and Demén had designed a driveway that took into account larger baggage wagons as well. The finely proportioned, slightly convex, and sensible driveway, paved in insanely yellow ceramic tiles, was appreciated later by people who rode no longer in horse-drawn carriages but in automobiles, streetcars, and taxis, or who simply walked. It was obvious that somebody had taken great care to anticipate how all the expected movements in this space might take place unhindered and in easy comfort. He had even considered that horses had to urinate and that urine is yellow and must somehow drain away. Rats now used the small openings in the sewage pipes that were hidden under the wide stone ledges on both sides of the driveway; they were just the right size for rats. With long years of labor, they had chewed their way through the finely wrought brass drain-netting so they could reach the garbage cans unnoticed. In the old days, the wide stone ledges, useless today, served as a place where one could step from one’s carriage, and they were wide enough to keep the follow-up step steady as well. When the planner figured that there should be enough room to open the carriage doors on both sides without pressing either the passengers or coachmen against the wall, he was thinking of their dignity. Although no carriage or automobile has turned into this driveway for a long time now, the need for dignified behavior has been well guarded by the dimensions of this space.

The building received arrivals with a certain solemnity, as did the stairwell, separated from the driveway by an enormous windbreak. One’s first glance at the surprisingly well-proportioned stairwell, bathed in natural light on every floor, would be through the huge, colorful ground-glass surfaces of the windbreak. Its four panes survived the war, but during a nocturnal disturbance one was shattered. Such a large sheet of glass was nowhere to be had; the tenants complained about the draft, and the concierge replaced it with plywood. Still, the space preserved its beauty. One could step in here without fear of immediately bumping into the elevator door. Sometimes a whole group of people would arrive at once while another might be on its way out; in a genteel building one should take such possibilities into account.

And horses are not always patient; let there be enough space in the courtyard for them and their carriages to turn around comfortably. Demén extended the depth of the courtyard, but then brought the second-floor gallery a bit forward, thus optically recapturing the near perfect square.

True, the second-floor gallery blocked the sun from the concierge’s apartment on the mezzanine, yet the apartment was neither dark nor unfriendly. The light reflecting on the courtyard’s bright yellow ceramic tiles filled its kitchen and two other rooms. Although direct sunshine never reached it, the apartment had both strong illumination and pleasant colors. The insanely yellow hues alternately glittered and dimmed even when, as now, clouds were moving across the sky. But one could not see the sky from down here, even if pressing right up against the window. The concierge was doing exactly that now in his kitchen, where he had the best view of the roof, whence tiles were falling as if the wind were picking them up and hurling them down. What probably happened was that an already loosened tile slid down the roof’s incline, the next one followed it, and after that the job of each subsequent gust became ever easier: it simply reached under and lifted up the defective row and at the weak points heaved the tiles into the air. The concierge, whose name was Imre Balter, looked up again but could delay no longer; he grabbed his visored cap, the keys to the attic, and was on his way.

The tiles were sliding ominously, with long grating sounds, banging against the eaves, only to explode within seconds on the courtyard floor.

At another time, perhaps Balter would have made his decision faster.

A pox on it, he grumbled.

It was not likely he could stanch the ruination by himself.

And the elevator hadn’t been working for weeks. It took him a long time to drag himself down the wooden steps from the mezzanine, him with his dislocated hip. The dangerous courtyard and the three flights up were still ahead of him. The technician at the housing authority claimed that this elevator could no longer be repaired; it had done what it could and that was that. Everybody knew this wasn’t true. A pox on them. By the time he reached the courtyard, the tiles had stopped falling off the roof, but because the pouring rain continued, he hobbled on in the protective shadow of the second-floor gallery. As he passed over the entrance to the cellar, he looked down and even made his customary puss-puss call because today none of his cats had come outside, as if they were not hungry.

He had been able to keep cats from the time he realized that there was no longer any landlord. Ten years had to go by after the general nationalizations* for that to happen, partly because the heirs were still living on the third floor and kept the concierge in line with their looks, glances, or stares, although they never said a word; whenever he took things into his own hands or violated one of the building’s regulations, they nearly skewered him with their eyes. At least that’s how he felt. Besides, you never know what will happen. In 1956, those heirs might have gotten their building back if the mayhem had lasted a little longer.

His limping shuffle echoed in the entranceway. He carefully pulled the windbreak shut behind him, passed by the officially dead elevator, from whose dark maroon depths the edges of the beveled mirror, like a rainbow, always glittered into his eyes, and then, firmly grasping the bannister, he began his climb upward.

After the death of Samu Demén, his two heirs did make alterations in this building that was so extravagant with its spaces; they made them in moderation and good taste, but in the definite hope of increasing their income; they proletarianized it somewhat. They supposed that the kitchens, pantries, and maid’s rooms could be a good bit smaller, and from the spaces retrieved from them they built two new apartments on each floor. They also redid and partially modernized the continuous front of the second floor, which Demén had designed for a small, short-lived national-conservative political party, after whose demise he’d rented it to the party’s surviving weekly paper. Destruction would better describe what the heirs did here. They had the fine wainscoting ripped from the walls and the marble fireplaces in every room thrown out. Originally, neither of the heirs intended to occupy any of the new apartments, the building not being in tune with their taste or their concept of modernity, but in the end Demén’s favorite grandchild, Erna, moved into the apartment her grandfather had left on the third floor, and Miklós, the other grandchild, who was already working for the illegal Communist Party, moved into a house on Aréna Road also built by their grandfather. All this happened in the 1930s, and after that, aside from Teréz Boulevard being renamed Lenin Boulevard and, in honor of the Russian Revolution, Oktogon Square becoming November 7 Square, not much happened to this house on Grand Boulevard.

There was very little turnover among the tenants. The stairwell was not painted, and no door or window saw a new coat of paint either.

Aside from its proportions, the stairwell had no ornaments. The unusually wide and unusually shallow steps, on which the concierge was now climbing upward, were buffed to a marble smoothness; a few months after nationalizing the house, by order of the Party the red coir carpet had been removed along with the brass stair-rods. The intermediate landings between floors were the stairwell’s true ornaments, along with the turning spaces at each floor, where well-proportioned wall sections were framed by Ionic profiles similar to those on the building’s facade and in the entranceway. These framed surfaces did not completely darken; or rather, one could see that originally the profiles had been painted white and the framed areas presumably yellow; and they had been careful to preserve something of the sun’s heat by mixing a bit of red and black into the paint, thereby throwing into relief the dazzling white of the apartment doors and highlighting the discreet but dazzling surfaces, the brass casings, knockers, nameplates, doorknobs, finely chiseled latticework of peepholes and doorbells’ oval ivory bearings.

The concierge kept taking small breaks, his deep-set eyes darting fiercely and rapidly in all directions, and he tried not to pant as hard as he needed to.

At times like this, the two poles of his self-deception touched each other.

He pretended that his eternal step-climbing was not tiring, even though on some days, even without the garbage cans, he could barely drag his lame lower body along. He also obstinately pretended to assign his tasks an order of priority, though he couldn’t have cared less about them and found any number of reasons why they could not be done.

He reached the third floor when the telephone stopped ringing.

Since the very first time he set foot in this building, the only change to this door had occurred when another nameplate was added to the original one. One said DEMÉN, in large roman letters. The other said DR. LIPPAY LEHR. He eavesdropped for a little while. Not out of curiosity; rather, it was the sweet instinct of natural laziness at work. If he had gotten here when the phone stopped ringing, why not stay a while, find out who called, from where, and who picked up the phone. He had a hiding place in his kitchen from which he saw everything while remaining unseen; he knew everything about everybody. He always knew who was at home, who had gone out, and he could guess who would be coming back when. For weeks, he hasn’t seen Professor Lippay, who is being treated at Kútvölgyi Hospital; from there they’ll take him to the cemetery, that’s all. And the younger Lippay simply dashed out of the house pretty early in the morning. He did not remember anything like this ever happening before. He knew that in the morning all the connecting doors of all the rooms were wide open; still, no sound reached him on the landing. A pox on it.

He decided it was because of the wind.

The professor’s spouse, whom for some mysterious reason everybody called Nínó or Aunt Nínó, which Balter could never understand, was just stepping out of the bathtub. Her bearing has not changed over the passing decades; her waist is almost as shapely as in her youth, but her hips, thighs, buttocks, and breasts, much admired by many, have immeasurably filled out. She has grown heavy; under her skin the fat is becoming granulose; this is the hard reality.

Whenever I look at myself, I feel like puking, she kept telling her female confidants, who idolized her for her bluntness. With which, of course, she expressed only a small part of reality.

She spent more and more time in silent, thoroughgoing personal hygiene. For she was becoming more and more aware of various intrusive, completely strange odors emanating from her body and permeating the air around her, and she felt helpless against them. But she never mentioned this to anyone. Had a stranger of refined taste caught a glance of her now, standing in front of her bathtub, he would have thought that, overall, this was still a very imposing body. The problem lay not in the disintegration of its shapes but with its irrepressible odors.

What has happened to me.

There was such a question in the world, though it sounded more like a statement. She had no idea where the scent of decay was emanating from, from her mouth, her loins, or her every pore. This decay had become her idée fixe. When getting out of the tub and, driven by the pleasure of painful self-torture, she could not avoid looking at herself in the hazed-over mirror on the opposite wall, neither statement nor question helped. As if she were asking, who have I become, while the answer was ready and waiting: this is not me, I don’t know this body. She quickly averted her face. So she would not have to carry in her limbs all day what she had just seen.

What she did take along was the changed, unknown odor concealed under her perfume. If she happened to forget it, however, or if she managed to ignore her reflection, and she tended to do the latter, then she exuded a determined, positively cheerful self-confidence, just as she used to when she was a girl.

The Italianate sound of her nickname originated with her little boy, Ágost, who for a very long time could say nothing else. He tried but could not. This was his one and only word, which meant both eating and mother. When his mother pronounced each syllable very slowly, puckering her lips to match the sounds, she practically chewed the words for him, as it were, listen, Ágó, listen, my darling, ma-ma, little Ágost stubbornly and with sly pleasure responded with a triumphant nínó. This became not only a nickname but also the unit of measurement of the young couple’s pleasures.

How many nínoes did you have, asked the young wife, stretching sleepily among the wrinkled bedding.

One hundred and one, answered the young husband bashfully.

Funny, I’ve had at least a thousand, replied the young wife, and maybe she wasn’t even exaggerating, though one tends to do that if only in the hope of a better future.

They would think nothing of taking their child into bed with them and doing various exercises for half an hour, because it made them laugh, their sides nearly splitting, writhing with pleasure, which of course the child also enjoyed. For them, however, this roughhousing was a preamble to submerging themselves in each other again. He said it instead of mama, he said it instead of papa, instead of kaka, peepee, baby, daddy, instead of everything. Listen, Ágó, my sweet, say mama, say it nicely, say daddy. The child really listened, but mainly to guess whether his parents would be laughing again. And as a result, he always gave the same answer.

Nínó.

Even without knowing anything of these matters, as indeed the case had to be with most people, no one could say the nickname was not apt. Lady Erna was considered a weighty personality among her friends and in her family, a person who had to be respected and who was not easy to evade. She had characteristics, though, that could not be taken too seriously. At this moment, for example, she has just overcome one of her angina attacks, which never fail to put her out of sorts physically. Now, she might also be upset about the telephone. She rarely allowed this to show, though she grumbled or fumed to herself. She has to be careful not to lose her temper, which could bring on another attack. Her little fits could not be anticipated or prevented because they never fully exploded. While she dried herself fretfully, and absentmindedly let her eyes stray several times to her reflection in the mirror, she felt that this was the last drop in her glass. Her own rashness.

Why am I gaping at myself.

What she could least abide was her dark and mighty nipples, forever facing downward, and who knows since when. One irritation increased the next, and she became furious about being furious. Good Lord, how utterly witless I can be. I’m a silly goose, she said to herself half aloud, hoping to calm her agitation.

A common goose, that’s what I am.

Agitated or not, the attacks came and went; depending on which branch of the coronary artery they occurred in, their symptoms varied. Now she felt their painful pressure in her chest, now the fingers of her left hand went numb. Sometimes the pressure was great yet an attack did not develop, at other times she barely felt anything yet the attack laid her low. Occasionally she had so much pain in her shoulders she felt as if her accelerated pulse were beating through the marrow of her bones, but occasionally the pain was very much like what she experienced after an eating binge when she indiscriminately stuffed herself. Even her back suffered sometimes, as if it were about to give way, or her shoulder. Nothing, a mere swelling. If in small doses she passed some of the gas in her intestines, she’d feel better immediately. Because the inner pressure felt like pain to her.

However she disciplined herself, the pain was unbearable; or rather, she endured it but wished to be free of it. But there was no wind in her bowels, there was nothing to release, only this slowly rising, pressing ache, the unmistakable sign of an attack. And then she felt the pressure would burst her sternum asunder from the inside. And breathlessness at the same time. How she longed to breathe, but there was not enough air. Maybe somewhere else, but not here. Above her lips and on her forehead cold sweat broke out in every pore; a clammy film covered her face as if she were wearing an icy mask. Still, she could not cool off. Maybe she should open the window.

There is no air in the room; there is no air; there is no air in the air.

Oh, her bones won’t bear this, she’ll simply explode. She can see the air of others; they have what she does not.

Oh God, how happy they are. They walk on the street and don’t even notice they have air.

Oh, this is absurd. There is no way to get air from the air. Or maybe there is no oxygen in it.

She knows, she sees that others have air, only she has none, they’ve taken it away, there wasn’t enough to go around.

If she is not alert to what’s coming, it might be too late.

But the idea of lateness always gave her a bit of an extension, which she used to struggle against the panic of being late, so that it should not overwhelm her, because then the too-late might come true.

But her feet are not carrying her body fast enough, she is too heavy, everything has slowed down, and she cannot tell whether she will reach her goal before total darkness. What eternities pass while one foot manages to catch up with the other. Yet she feels her body to be lighter now, her steps barely touching the ground. And there is a stranger here too, whose breath whistles more loudly in her ear.

Cannot tell how long she might continue to feel it, hear it, even though she hates it.

When this happens, she moves blindly, with numb fingers she rifles in bags, drawers, jewelry boxes, phials, so at least at the very last moment, with the very edge of her nails, she can grasp her medicine. Sometimes she succeeds in getting at the lifesaving medicine with her long manicured bright red nails; her fingers do not have the confidence to extract a single pill from the many, but a pill can stick to the underside of a nail; that’s how she brings it to her mouth, tucks it under her tongue, where it has to dissolve. A vessel called the vena lingualis runs across the base of the tongue, and nitroglycerin, the agent that widens blood vessels, is easily dissolved in this intimate location and then seeps through the wall of the vein. After a few long, impatiently awaited seconds, it reaches the heart; in the coronary artery, it widens the passage narrowed by sclerosis and fatty deposits.

And then the blood begins to circulate. Blood pressure drops, the pulse slows, oxygen reaches the heart’s muscles; the body, tensed with anxiety, relaxes.

There were times when the medicine took effect immediately. At other times it had no effect at all.

Sometimes it had a little, or she deceived herself that it did — yes, I’m feeling better — even though she felt worse. Or the medicine began to work but only a few minutes later, when the stranger had stopped panting disgustingly into her ear and the icy mask on her face began to melt, and suddenly she felt the next and stronger attack approaching. And if this were not enough, the medicine caused a collateral hyperemia in the abdominal cavity, loosened the abdominal wall and the sphincter muscles, resulting in an attack of diarrhea; gasping for air, entrusting the weight of her body to empty walls and sliding furniture, invoking God, she fought her way across the entire apartment.

If in such a state someone tried to help her she would silently refuse to accept it.

Until now, she always made it to the toilet, if only just in time. Where the shit literally burst out of her rectum. While, of course, the pain, pressure, and tightness below the sternum did not let up. While her mind was racing, writhing with humiliation. While the rotten medicine was back in the room or she couldn’t find it in her dressing-gown pocket. She kept repeating to herself a single sentence, but of course, I’ll keel over right here, I’ll drop dead like this, and her hand was groping after the toilet chain on the wall.

If she could at least reach the chain, she wouldn’t have to die in this awful stink.

And a wicked little girl was sitting inside her who has been giggling at everything. Maybe this was her soul, something that people call the very depth of the soul.

And that reminded her of her little dead daughter.

This wicked little girl could not be frightened; she feared nothing; she kept laughing at Lady Erna’s little vanities. Of course, you’ll drop dead like this, craven, the way you have lived. Good Lord, how much crap you still have in your guts. How did you think they would find your body; you think people would be interested in your shit then. But don’t worry, you’re not going yet. And if you stay, you’ll swear you’ll lose at least ten kilos. You wouldn’t have to shit so much if you didn’t gorge yourself all the time, that’s right. The urge to stuff yourself is still stronger than you are, no matter how much you protest. That is how the little girl talked to her and she, of course, swore, I swear, I swear I won’t do it again, knowing her words were worthless.

Her false swearing sounded like the sniggering of the wicked little girl, and she imagined that if she didn’t make it this time, they would find her in this awful stink.

That is what she had to go through that morning. And she thought she heard the telephone ring again, for the fourth time.

No, this cannot be.

The towel stopped in her hands, she listened, thinking that her anger and her ears were deceiving her.

And just then, simultaneously, all three of them started for the telephone. One woman jumped up from the tile stove, taking with her the poker with which she had just slammed shut the stove door; the other woman jumped nimbly out of bed and, because her searching foot could not locate either of her slippers and her dressing gown lay too far away on the back of a stuffed chair, went off as she was, barefoot, wearing only a short silk nightie, a so-called baby doll, that clung to her body and left her thighs bare all the way up to the top.

The young man tore himself away from the windowsill, though only a moment earlier he had noticed a police assault car stopping in front of Café Abbázia. With great alacrity, policemen were jumping out of both sides of the vehicle, which could have deflected his attention from the woman he had been observing for months, whom he kept following secretly, and whom he wanted to see this morning though he knew that from this vantage point he could not.

The wind howled while the telephone rang.

Lady Erna lost her patience completely; slamming her towel on the laundry hamper, she slipped, still wet, into her pink bathrobe which, despite its garishness, became her. Her movements were nervous, uncoordinated and hasty; her fury egged her on and at the same time hindered her. What a bunch, she mumbled to herself, what a rotten, inconsiderate bunch. Her reproach was directed not only at the three people in the apartment but, mainly, at her son, who at the moment was not at home.

He was shooting the breeze with his friends, two men of his age, in a heated glass-covered corridor at the Lukács Baths, but Lady Erna could not have known this.

At last, it was the maid who picked up the receiver; she’d barely said who she was when at the other end someone began to speak, very firmly and to the point.

It was like a report from the battlefield.

Which caused the maid’s jaw to drop and her features to freeze. With one hand she grasped the receiver tight, she had to listen carefully, understand every word, but concentration made her forget her other hand, from which the poker slipped free.

It hit the rug with a thud.

At the sight, the other two people stopped in their tracks; aghast, they remained motionless.

The person on the line spoke continuously and at an ample volume. Ilona Bondor would have been glad to stem the flow and hand the receiver to someone more authorized than herself, to a family member, to Kristóf, who understood the hesitant little movements of her hand and seemed ready to take over at any moment. But it was impossible to interrupt the seamless speech. Twice she responded helpfully by saying, yes, yes. After that, she could only utter yes, yes, thank you very much. Lady Erna also heard these last words and saw her employee’s telltale, in fact ridiculous, features.

But mainly she saw their motionlessness, their posture, the way all three of them leaned stiffly forward.

She stood in the doorway of the sitting room, a little wet, the fluffy pink terry-cloth bathrobe barely gathered around her ample body, in her high-heel slippers, her bleached, tousled hair still dripping.

Oddly, at such moments, everything else ceases to exist. Still, she cast half a glance at Gyöngyvér’s sinewy, slender brown body, which had always impressed her, as if she were hearing a sudden snap, a sound that for a thoughtless moment brought everything to a halt in her mind. It was rare that she saw her so scantily dressed. She had to take advantage of the opportunity.

She loathed this woman, did not believe anything she said, though she understood her own son: after all, the woman’s body had an effect on her too.

Ultimately, it was the sight of this body that restored her calm.

She stopped fuming.

As if she knew what had happened and as if she were reinforcing her realization with a clumsy nodding approval.

The maid replaced the receiver and remained where she stood, facing the wall. She had to turn away, not to see anyone, for at least a second. Not to let them see her face. Everything that had happened between her and the professor during the past year was way beyond anything that conventional human relationship recognizes or allows.

For a long time, this little transition into silence, this click of the receiver, lingered as the last noise in the room, or rather, they all felt that a very long time was going by. Outside, it was a moment when the sky became lighter, even though rain was whipping the two windows. All three of them were watching Ilona, watching her thin, unnaturally raised shoulders.

They waited for her to speak. And they wanted her to remain silent for a while longer. Gyöngyvér Mózes’s teeth knocked together several times but luckily no one heard that. She had no idea what she was doing, and her movements were uncontrolled; she pressed her thighs together, grasped her short nightie, kept tugging it as if afraid for her loins.

The rich darkness of her pubic hair glimmered through the light material.

Is he dead, Lady Erna asked cautiously after a time.

For hours after her attacks, her voice was usually colorless, and now she sounded hoarse from the first syllable. Of her listeners, only the young man discerned the sober calculation in her question. More precisely, the dread that her plans would crumble. He could see it on his aunt’s face, which without makeup always seemed offensively bare. Her boldness frightened him so much that he tore his gaze from her. In fact, this was his greatest concern: the boldness of human emotions. He did not want to hear Ilona’s response. And to see the effect of the response.

Not a word, nothing.

No, please don’t be afraid, cried the maid, choking and stammering. He recovered half an hour ago. The doctor told me to tell you they won’t be able to keep him conscious for long. He said he felt he had to say that unfortunately it won’t last long, he could not give any reason for hope. As far as it was humanly possible to make a prediction, they said. But he is exceptionally lucid now. He wishes to see Ágost, he wishes to see Nínó.

And please hurry.

But whom did you talk to, for God’s sake.

In response Ilona gave her shoulders a little shrug. She didn’t know, did not understand why suddenly this would be important or interesting. Actually, her next sentence would have been a request to accompany her mistress.

Some man, she answered, and her voice trembled with the effort, he said he was speaking for the head physician, because Lady Erna had discussed something with him that now would be absolutely necessary.

And with this she turned away, she could not continue, and because of the frustration at not having voiced her request — I’d like to say good-bye to him, and she was losing her courage to say it now, I’d like to see him once more — her shoulders trembled silently.

Even though she did not want to cry at all. What had she to do with all this. I don’t want to cry, she shouted within herself.

Where is Ágost?

I don’t know, I’m very sorry but I don’t know, Gyöngyvér replied too loudly to the threateningly quiet question. I can’t help it, she added as one caught and accused of gross negligence who must make excuses. He jumped out of bed at dawn, she muttered, got dressed without a word, wouldn’t tell me where he was going, and ran out.

You were probably fighting all night again.

We were. Unfortunately, that’s true.

Ilona, please bring me my dark gray suit. Kristóf, you’re coming with me. Somebody order a cab.

Her recent fury was replaced by this cool, patronizing voice used to giving orders, which the three people before her could not easily oppose.

It was difficult for her to master not her emotions but her lack of strength. She really had no time to lose, and she had an aversion to unpleasant scenes. Luckily no one noticed the corner of her mouth quivering, her knees shaking and her long fine fingers trembling. Not so much from her own shock, because for her this matter had long been considered closed, but from what she had not counted on: that now it would indeed come to pass, what until now seemed to be impossible to finish.

Her breath was accelerating; she had to slow it down.

Otherwise, everything had been properly prepared for the moment that now managed to surprise her after all. She only had to take out of her desk drawer the sales contract requiring the dying man’s signature. She knew where to find it. And luck would shine on her after all; her little good fairies would be with her. A heart attack must not interfere now. She turned to leave for her room.

And it was not the five words that Kristóf called after her that stopped her, but the shock and indignation that anyone here might have an objection or hold a different view about something.

I am not going anywhere.

What are you talking about.

I am telling you, I’m not going to escort you anywhere.

You’re out of your mind.

This was an attack she would never have thought possible.

She had no illusions about her own son. But this boy, in whom she daily saw her murdered younger brother, which she considered a precious gift of life, was the most gentle and attentive human being she had ever known. During the past six years, she had never for a moment regretted taking him into her house instead of putting him back into some filthy orphanage. Involuntarily, every person makes such selfish calculations. Whom can I trust when in trouble. What benefit will I have by doing this. Him I can truly trust. Neither her body nor her soul had any appropriate sense organs with which to comprehend what she was failing to comprehend with her mind.

She did not understand what was happening.

Not going anywhere, no, repeated the young man almost impassively, and softly rather than loudly.

But why not, for heaven’s sake, why are you telling me this, or what is this supposed to mean.

She could not conceive where this voice could be coming from. And then there was one long moment from which the two other people present were excluded. A peculiar situation. If objects had eyes, they’d be looking at one another as neutrally as Nínó and Kristóf were looking at each other now, and that made them similar, turned them into almost identical beings, or more precisely, brought into daylight their common familial features.

Their egomania grappled with their sense of justice, only to force both of them to retreat, defeated, into the protection of illusions.

Kristóf found no appropriate moment to explain. He didn’t even know what signals he should be sending to make others understand his intentions. It was not possible to understand; he himself did not understand it. When in January, in the business district near Café Abbázia a few old stores were reopened on the boulevard, there also appeared a saleswoman with whom he unaccountably and senselessly fell head over heels in love. So much so, that he never dared to speak to her. He wouldn’t have known what to say. Of course, things like this happen to young people almost on schedule; the adventures of their instincts, however, are not without dangers. Although no one noticed, and he did nothing to attract attention, for some months now he’d been teetering at the edge of the steep slope of clinical madness with his helpless and ever darkening passion. His aunt was close to the truth. What in January had promised to be nothing but a playful little adventure by now paralyzed him, and his conscience did not have a sober spot or a sane corner left.

What whimsy, what a weird idea, my dear, what a disgusting recklessness.

He could not move from his post.

That was his soul’s only command. Though he couldn’t have confessed even to himself what good it would do to stay put all day. No good at all. Something very important failed to reach his consciousness. He could not tell himself or say out loud I’m very sorry I cannot go with you to the deathbed of my uncle because I must stay here on account of a strange woman who actually I can’t see from here. If he said this, even if only to himself, he would make public the fact that his days had no meaning at all. His rationality had broken down, and that is why his aunt called him to account.

The only thing that stood between him and schizophrenia was that he had not uttered these sentences aloud, considered irrational by the world, though the inclination to do so was there.

He clung to an old, infantile feeling. As if the matter at hand had to do with things being unfriendly, and their indubitable reality offended his sense of justice. Or sense of morality. The two women could not have been aware of what his aunt had secretly prepared here. While your husband is dying, you are busy working on your son’s inheritance, but you want me to go along with you and you have the nerve to talk about disgusting recklessness. You can all go to hell, together with your inheritance. I’ve had enough of all of you, once and for all, I’m fed up with my family. This is what he would have liked to shout into his aunt’s wet face, but he couldn’t even do that. At that moment he thought it important — much more so than the justice of his childlike sentiments, that no matter what happened to anyone, he should not go anywhere from here. He could account for the reasoning of this desire not even to himself, but now it meant nothing less than the betrayal of his aunt and was therefore morally unacceptable. Following common sense, he should have been looking for some excuse for not going, some pretext or reason, however hollow, however baseless.

Yet he said something that frightened not only the others but mainly himself.

I’ve had enough of his death. Excuse me, Nínó, I beg your pardon. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want any more deaths.

But this is not about you now, Kristóf. I need you to come with me. So I won’t be alone in such a troubling hour, my boy.

In her confusion and agitation her mouth trembled uncontrollably, while Kristóf looked at her obtusely and apathetically, and obviously without having understood anything of her very real need.

His glance remained so innocent that Lady Erna thought with some justification that maybe it had been a slip of the tongue, that he would now change his mind, retract that insane earlier sentence of his, and everything would be back where it had been before. But Kristóf could no longer restrain himself; he simply turned his back to everybody and, as if nothing was more natural now, stared out the window again. But Lady Erna’s behavior was equally unpredictable. Her own weighty sense of justice had already taught her not to do anything that would needlessly further complicate an already difficult situation. Rising above senseless and confusing phenomena, she expediently cut to the chase and instantly ejected the confusion from her mind. As if saying that anything that might interfere with me simply never did and does not now exist.

Gyöngyvér, you are not working today.

That’s right, today I am not.

Then maybe you can come with me.

I was about to suggest it myself, Gyöngyvér replied, as someone gasping for air, though on her own she would never have dared to make such an offer. They had never gone together anywhere.

I’ll get dressed right away.

Ilona, please pull yourself together. It’s too early to start crying. Call a cab, I say, and get my gray suit. And put out my short Persian lamb coat too.

Outside, the wind and the rain subsided for a few seconds but everything grew dark as if it were dusk. In the meantime, the policemen disappeared; the empty assault car, as though on a leisurely patrol, slowly cruised around the large square, pulled into the Andrássy Road intersection, and stopped, exactly at the spot where in November 1956 the Russians had set up their cannons and blown away Café Abbázia. Since then the café had reopened. In the apartment a door slammed, maybe the bathroom door, closet doors creaked, the two women were running around excitedly.

In a few minutes, the taxi arrived at the front of the house, a gray Pobeda. It had to wait quite a long time.

Gyöngyvér had dressed quickly and, stamping her feet, waited in the hallway for Lady Erna, who also put on her clothes fairly fast, though she spent some time on her makeup.

The concierge still had half a flight to climb to reach the attic.

As if walking up three floors once wasn’t enough without the elevator, damn it, now I have to do it twice, and this half a floor too. A pox on the whole business.

He huffed a little and then shoved the key into the lock, and as he turned it, the gust of wind roaring through the damaged roof nearly tore off the attic’s heavy steel door. It opened with a loud creaking, and in a little while it slammed shut because the wind not only knocked it outward, but also immediately sucked it back in the other direction. He staggered, found no place to back up, the wind opened the door again, he grabbed the railing. An appalling sight came into his view. It was bad enough that so many tiles were missing, but they were missing at places he could not possibly reach without the right ladder or scaffolding. And where the tiles were missing, the sky had fallen through. In the dark attic loft, divided by the various incoming shafts of light, peculiar rags or skins were swaying in the insane air currents. Order ruled everywhere, no superfluous odds and ends, everything spic and span. He had more than enough roof tiles to replace the fallen ones. Neatly stacked between the two chimneys, the original tiles had been left here by the tile setters eighty years earlier, and had served as the reserve supply ever since. He had to get to work because not only light but also rain kept falling through the holes.

In vain he tried to close the steel door, the wind kept knocking it open. He looked around for something flat to use as a wedge, but he relented and locked the door from the inside as he had done many times before.

I should take these beasts down too, he grumbled to himself, and walked to the front of the attic facing the street. The long rags or skins hanging off the longest crossbeam, five of them to be exact, were packed tightly next to one another; they were almost exactly the same length. He had to walk around them.

These were not rags and not skins, but cats shriveled down to their skeletons. This hardly surprised Balter; after all, he was the one who had hung them there.




Isolde’s Lovelorn Swan Song


The rain threatened to fall on that early cold spring morning but did not, as for days it had not, and the weather remained as it had been all along.

By afternoon the steaming gray earth, unnoticed, reached up to touch the deep gray sky, and suddenly it all turned into mauve evening again. Under penalty of death, the blackout order was in effect. People holed up in their cellars, in their cold houses, among the ruins; the endless night was ahead of them.

On the flat lowlands extending to the horizon where the Maas, the Niers, and the Rhine flow toward one another, it is not rare to have such a late February day shortened by spring fogs.

From the windswept tower of the old brick church, two people were taking turns observing the darkening landscape. No planes came. The artillery was silent. As if they had been forgotten. The enemy’s advance guard had not arrived. They were expected to pop up suddenly from the direction of the meadows of Herongen, to emerge from the swamps that in this area are covered by low, bushy coniferous forests full of trees with twisted trunks. Or maybe they would enter with tanks on the Broekhuysen highway. In such foggy, vaporous weather, even to the most experienced eye familiar features of the terrain seemed to move, pitch and rock. One tends to see successive ranks appearing, advancing with weapons at the ready, but it’s nothing but the fluttering of eyelashes, the hovering of patches of fog or scattering smoke in the hazy dimness as it glides in and out of the fluffy mass of distant pines.

Two older men, both veterans, took turns at their post in the heavily damaged tower, a duty not without danger.

A few days before, the church’s clockwork had crashed, tearing through the lower floors, leaving the beams in shambles, and on the opposite side of the church the resulting blast of air cut a two-floor-deep hole in the tower wall. They were relieving each other day and night; they could still manage three-hour shifts. But even they, at the highest possible point, could not see or hear much; after all the noise of weapons and blasts of explosions, there was only painful silence.

They were cut off from the outside world. He could hear his grandfather saying, we were cut off from the outside world. He repeated to himself this long-ago sentence, we’re cut off, we’re cut off.

After the heavy air attack of the previous day, their town, crisscrossed by winds from every side, lay in ruins. Try as he might, he was unable to tell whether this used to be Kloster Street or Mühlen Street. There were too many wounded and there was no place to take them; countless dead under the crashed roof beams. The odor of burned flesh wafted in the air, clung to the smell of smoke, and even if the air current changed direction in the evening, it still brought the stench of burned flesh and bones.

It was often said earlier, when referring to this stench, that somewhere out there people doing compulsory labor were making soap out of bonemeal.

During the day, the radio broadcast patriotic songs, marches, Isolde’s lovelorn swan song, nothing but, without stop or intermission, over and over. The music blared from loudspeakers mounted on the facade of the city hall, crackling, scratching in the grooves worn down by the blunt needle. No one deluded himself anymore with fairy tales. News was no longer reported. Because of the danger of enemy propaganda, no one could own a radio. Everyone knew that a total and unconditional surrender would be unavoidable, yet no one would speak of that.

This situation can lead to nothing but. For days now, there has been nothing to talk about.

The next morning, the priest climbed the tower too.

Who knew what might be happening here.

He wanted to see what was causing the threatening silence.

The front was thumping and clanking farther away. At the top, he found not the religion teacher but Döhring, the retired director of the local branch of Raiffeisenbank, a man whom he had always somewhat feared. They were barely nodding acquaintances and thought even that was a bit too much; yet now they sensed how vulnerable they both were above the gaping depth below. The distinguished, authoritative old gentleman, who bore signs of the Battle of Sedan on his face, signaled with alarmed fingers that the priest should pay close attention to his every word and every move. Back in his time, doctors could not remove metal fragments from head wounds, and those fragments marked for life the depths of the scars on his face as well as their uneven ridges.

They could not be sure that the tower’s damaged girders would support for even another minute the enormous weight of the bell looming above them.

When nothing happened after three days, though in their ears the army kept happily marching on and Isolde kept dying in her lovelorn sorrow, members of the town council — who had all been seriously wounded, mustered out, and sent home — decided at their peril to take action. They anticipated an epidemic and protracted hunger. It would be the end for all of them unless the fields could be prepared for sowing. To ward off any temptation on anyone’s part, seed corn and seed potatoes were stored in the municipal warehouse. First, one of them carefully lowered the radio volume, as if to test whether the others would stand for such serious disobedience. Then with great difficulty another one got up and in the midst of Isolde’s tragic grief turned off the city radio’s broadcast with such zeal it was as if his nerves had completely ceased to function.

In the awkward silence that followed, which made everyone happy, there was no need to say much about the tasks ahead.

More than a week earlier, guards at the nearby camp had driven away all the forced laborers who could still walk. Some of them then put on civilian clothes so they could hide out on their farms near the town.

The city councillors knew what to expect, or what the consequences might be of certain actions.

Before leaving, the guards crammed all those unable to walk into the two small one-story hospital barracks, boarded up the doors and windows but, as it turned out, did not take enough care when they set the two structures on fire.

One guard who was leaving at the last moment handed a paper box to his older brother, another guard who was staying behind, with instructions to hide the box.

This Döhring was a middle-aged, heavyset man, and he rode his bicycle to his farm with the paper box hidden under his raincoat. The fire had long yellow tongues; the gasoline, bluish and purple within the yellow, kept hissing, while the people inside whimpered and bellowed like animals; though they were men, they screamed, the walls were shaking until they trampled one another to death in the smoke; and this did not take more than twenty minutes.

But perhaps not everything had been considered thoroughly.

For a long time, this too remained a mystery.

Inside, everything smoldered and continued to char even a week later, but outside the flames subsided in no time, shortly after those who were leaving had gone.

They all walked together for a while under the pitch-dark sky, which was occasionally rattled by the din of distant battle. At each crossroads one of them would stay behind until the rest had vanished somewhere in the lowland fog.

In the meantime the windows cracked in the heat, the planks burned off the boarded-up windows, paint singed off the frames but they did not catch fire, and though the ceiling fell down on the slowly incinerating bodies, the flames did not catch the beams. The two buildings spewed their putrid smoke into the heavy, foggy air.

On the order of the town council, the dogs were tied up outside.

But they could not tie up the cats, the birds, or the rats; these creatures went their own way.

It also had to be considered that nocturnal frosts would soon end.

The bicyclist made a large detour across the fens; he was riding on dirt roads, on barely noticeable little paths. He avoided all human settlements so as to arrive unnoticed.

He was perspiring heavily, with foglike ice settling on his face; he met no one. He heard his own panting only when he dismounted. He lifted his bicycle into a rowboat, untied the boat, and rowed to the other side of the lake. Luckily for him, the evening mist was thick over the water, practically steaming; even the plashing of the oars or creaking of oarlocks could barely be heard. As if slowly he had forgotten where he was coming from and how uncertain his future might be. He was a little sorry too that he would reach his farm before dark and would have to lock himself inside the cold house.

But first, he hid the paper box in the fruit-drying shed.

This handsome little brick structure stood at the edge of the apple orchard about forty meters from the whitewashed one-story main building with its reddish-brown crossbeams. The moment he pulled out the empty drying racks his lips and nostrils were assailed by the smoky, sweet fragrance of prunes. He grumbled that his daughters had left the dryer like this for the whole winter after the plums had been preserved.

His fingers became sticky.

He had to crawl inside the soot-smelling little building attached to the big oven and smokehouse; he groped around in the honey-sweet darkness and soon found the small recess.

He was already making plans; he could not imagine ever giving this paper box to anyone.

Council members had raised the possibility of beating all the cats to death, down to the last one. Some people did this without official authorization because it gave them meat to feed their raging dogs, going mad with hunger. It’s not simple to kill a cat. It must be bludgeoned on the head to daze it; then, having a firm grip on its hind legs, one must keep knocking its head against the chopping block or house wall or anything else until not even a sigh comes out of its mouth.

Then it is dead.

He became almost cheerful at the thought that he would never give it back to anyone; he was very satisfied with himself; the hell with all my relatives, I’ll come up with a story.

He had to push back the sticky drying racks carefully and see to it that under every second rack the tray would slide into its proper place. As if his escape had freed him from something whose weight he had not acknowledged until now; or rather, because of the paper box, the seriousness of the situation now made some sense, retroactively. No matter what happened, the gold promised a future.

In those days, farms on the periphery of the town had no electricity, but the flames in the fireplace gave ample light.

Sitting in the dark, looking into the flames and thinking about the hidden box, fright seeped back into him, filled him to the brim and strained his chest.

I’m a deserter, I’m taking part in a mass desertion, and to whom would he have to account for this.

Nobody could stop the prisoners, either, who at the news of the evacuation managed to hide somewhere and now were coming out of hiding; and maybe a few broke out of the burning barracks and could crawl, driven mad by thirst, as far as the next corpse.

In the infernal noise and chaos accompanying the evacuation command, the guards could not maintain order without shooting at least two dozen people dead, though according to Himmler’s last instruction of the day no harm should come to any prisoner. But instead of taking them out to the fields behind the camp, where in long ditches corpses dug out of earlier mass graves had been burning for weeks, they carelessly left the new bodies to their fate. And these corpses, dangerous prey for man and beast, now lay around everywhere on the camp’s open areas and empty roads.

The flammable human colloid gathered in the ditches, fat and marrow arranged in fine layers according to their relative density; at night, the religion teacher or the retired banker watched as fires burst to life with fat and flames flaring up from the depths.

With their glow, fires lit up the low-growing forest, which still somewhat concealed the camp from unwanted and unauthorized eyes.

Searching for anything potable, the living were roaming about or, hardly differing from the corpses, lying about in the smell of burning hair and scorched nails.

Although they felt no hunger, they had an obsessive image of some moisture that must be found in the fibers of dead muscles.

He was surprised to have hit on this unexpected idea.

On tree branches, icy dew collected every dawn. On the mossy partitions of the barracks, fog settled every evening. Some moisture could be sucked from the moss, the branches could be licked, but there was no water anywhere. They could anticipate how sweetly moisture would spread all over their tongues.

Because the electricity had not been cut off, nobody made it across the gate or fences alive.

In such a short time and in such cold, flesh would not dry out, that’s what he thought to himself too.

A boy a little older than he, crouching by the wall of one barracks, was trying to figure out how to cut the electricity in the fence, how to create a short circuit. Because beyond the electrified barbed wire the Niers river rolled lazily along, its waters strained clean by its sandy bed. He stared at this boy, in his heart feeling great warmth toward him while they discussed the electricity, but he had no idea from where he might have known him. He looked at him from afar, from close up, but he didn’t dare ask, because he was afraid of being mistaken and then it would become clear that he was the victim of a terrible delusion.

Maybe they should dig out one of the fence’s supporting poles, which, with its weight, would yank out or snap the electrified wire.

While they were talking, he seemed to have heard the gurgling of water near the grassy shore.

But even for that, they needed a spade, a shovel, anything.

They’ll dig with their ten fingers.

And then he couldn’t stand it anymore and asked.

No, not him, it’s possible that he knew not him but his twin brother, the one who burned to death along with the others, answered the older boy, but his twin brother wouldn’t have survived anyway, he was getting so damp for weeks but was unable to urinate, and when he succeeded a little, just imagine, he peed blood.

They should get up and go look for something. They won’t get anywhere sitting around here making plans.

The continuation he dreamed the next night. Everything remained the same. The misty grayness was the same. Although he knew he was dreaming, his mind did not spare him, it allowed the sticky smell of flesh to cross the spreading smoke; the nearby gurgling of the slowly flowing Niers remained the only hope.

He was amazed that in the meantime the boy, who unfortunately was not his twin brother, managed to create a short circuit, and only a lone church candle placed on the long shiny walnut table illuminated the Pfeilen council chamber. When anyone raised his voice, every word reverberated loudly under the dark brick vaults.

All sorts of familiar things.

Throughout the centuries, council members had grown accustomed to the echo in the council chamber; they certainly took it into account in their speeches, but now none of them wanted to hear his own voice multiplied or magnified many times over. Rather softer, as soft as possible, soft so that the unavoidable would be no weightier than necessary.

The burning ditches must be extinguished, covered over. The bodies left behind must be buried.

But nothing happened the way they discussed it in softer-than-soft tones, or in the way the secretary, in thrifty phrases, noted it down.

Early the next morning about fifty people gathered on the square in front of the city hall. Besides the four councillors and the secretary, all in the upper age bracket, there were hardly any adult men among them.

At the same time, at the edge of the Niersbroek apple orchard, three ungainly figures appeared, their heads wobbling on long bare necks as they walked.

He knew they were Hungarians, like their three forgotten bicycles.

The light stripes of their clothes and caps flashed among the low, wet tree trunks, velvety with gentle moss. They looked pitiful, not the way they would look later, in the movies, and they were aware of this. At their slightest move, foul smells poured from their mouths, their bodies, and their rags; they couldn’t ignore it. This peaceful late winter seemed unreal, as did the smells, the forest, the trees, and the fact that in this external world probably nothing had changed. One of them fell back to urinate behind a tree; this boy, familiar from somewhere, or maybe the twin brother of the one who stayed alive, leaned his forehead against the tree and also on his heavy, sharpened stake cut from an oak tree; each of the other two men had one just like it.

These two immediately took cover behind the drying shed.

People with pitchforks, spades, and shovels, women in turbans and boots, little girls in black coats, shivering wide-eyed teenage boys in their fathers’ short fur-lined jackets, energetic old ladies in their shabby fur coats pushing their creaking wheelbarrows were all about to start from the square toward Nordwall when high above them the bell began to toll.

The tolling lasted only a moment; by the time people had quieted down and stopped there was only silence again.

The religion teacher had merely knocked the clapper against the bell’s majestically heavy patinated body and then stopped it immediately.

This was the agreed signal.

He could not have finished urinating yet, he urinated for a long time and it was painful, he urinated blood and it hurt him, he moaned quietly, he was still at it when the distant sound of the bell was heard, and a man stepped out of the house wearing long johns with some of the buttons undone. In one hand he carried two empty enamel buckets, in the other a short-handled hatchet and an empty wooden basket. His striped shirt was open on his chest, and he had on thick felt boots. He pretended he was checking the weather, the sky, the horizon, but in fact he was taking furtive looks in every direction. They did not understand why a person who has things to wear does not put them on. He probably has a fur jacket and a coat, which they will take away from him.

Whatever the man was afraid of, he expected it would come from the opposite direction. Therefore, before heading for the well, he listened in that direction.

His fly has been open since last night when it became warmer and warmer by the fireplace; he’d spread out, chewed on some prunes, then taken his prick out of his long johns. It had a powerful smell because in light of the impending evacuation the enlisted men’s showers were no longer heated. He had to work for a long time before his pleasure took the edge off his anxiety and he stiffened properly. He spat into his palm, spread the saliva, sweetened by the prunes, around the bulb of his penis, making it even more sensitive to the hard surface of his palm. By then everything was coming together just fine. He licked the taste of his prick from his palm and wasn’t bothered by the strong smell of his ass either. But he wouldn’t dare reach into his hole yet. He was always a bit afraid of reaching into soft shit, but his rectum seldom remained unclean. It had grown light enough by the fire for him to see himself grow darkly erect against the flames, his purple bud open and then close under the folds of skin; but it wasn’t so light that he would have to be ashamed. And now he could do everything nice and slow. No need to hurry. If it got dry, he made it more slippery with his spittle, but the excitement had already squeezed out the fore liquid, the liquidum seminale, also known as seminal fluid, through the wide-mouthed urethra, which made it slippery and increased his pleasure. With the tip of his finger, he could reach a little into his urethra, but that turned into a terribly painful touch, too deep.

He could be satisfied with his cock.

His cock had a nice curve. There were women whose clitorises were located unusually high; his wife was one of them.

He didn’t mind; at least he could feel each time that he could satisfy even those women.

That’s how they lived with each other.

To prevent everything from falling to pieces, he had to put up with her. It hadn’t occurred to her for half a year, for example, that the girls should wash the drying racks, holy shit, he had to swallow this kind of thing each and every time, he had to put up with her. Before getting married, he would never have thought that things would be this way. Even though older men had always told him, laughing their heads off, don’t ever get married, buddy. Whenever he got involved in some little adventure, he was glad that thanks to his experiences with his wife, he had an easy time of it with other women. His daughters inherited their idleness from her, from whom else would they have. Their clits, as far as he could tell, were locked between their large swollen labia down there pretty deep. Maybe it was her laziness, her slowness, that had made him fall in love with the damned woman. She got excited very slowly, it took her forever to come.

All he had to do was slide it upward when he pulled out, and then he could enter again, but he had to do it for a long time, evenly, and to keep sliding it.

He did not notice that this was what he was doing for himself now.

He was used to it.

He kept jabbing the swollen rim of the head with one of his fingers held apart for just that purpose.

This is what is on his mind; he doesn’t want to think about anything else. When he pulls it out, he slides it up and gives the clitoris a twist on the thick rim of the bulb. Has to be careful not to come as a result of his active imagination, but his breathing is becoming heavy. He wants to prolong it. He searched his mind for women of whom he had more innocent memories. He saw only female limbs, could not imagine anything else, only gaping cunts as he filled them with his cock, there were no faces, no whimpering, nothing belonged to them anymore.

He didn’t need anyone or any fantasies anymore. With his other hand, before it was too late, he crawled into the crack of his ass, getting stuck in his slushy long hair, but with a forefinger he quickly found the way in through the wrinkles of the sphincter muscle made slippery by the heat.

It was too late, he couldn’t quickly stop anymore, he whimpered, let out long howls, remembered the burning men, there was no point anymore in pulling and tugging the petrified head of his prick. Before the sperm shot up, all he could do was yank back his legs and lean forward so he wouldn’t soil his underpants or shirt. The movement took away some of the pleasure, but the tremendous sight added something. It erupted with more strength from somewhere deeper; his mouth was set to howl not only from the usual self-gratification — and the beastlike bellowing stuck in his throat — but also from astonishment.

With what power was each stroke bringing out of him what enormous amounts. True, he hadn’t had an ejaculation for at least five weeks. He shuddered, grew stiff, held his member as if it were a stranger, and screamed. A veritable puddle collected in front of the fireplace, the reddish flames threw a dim light on it, and fresh jolts made additional splashes.

In the generated heat, he scrubbed his hands.

Then the several days’ accumulated exhaustion finally came crashing down on him; he did not even clean up the place, did not close his fly, and in the morning he awoke with his stiff large-headed cock in his hand, just as he had dropped into bed with it the night before. Or he must have grabbed it later, because first he had somehow pulled the quilt over him.

It’s a good thing they didn’t surprise him in this brute sleep of his.

Now he carelessly left the door of his house open.

He put the buckets down by the well, careful that the handles made no noise. One is very seldom afraid of what is about to happen. His plan was to heat water in the kettle and, since he had the chance, not only give himself a thorough wash but also clean the drying racks sticky with prunes.

They always dried the apples first.

He had to be careful not to let the rack absorb the smell of the other fruits.

In the silence of the foggy forest only a gentle dripping noise could be heard. He crossed the grassy yard and closed the shed door behind him to muffle the thuds of chopping wood as much as possible.

The three men did not immediately recognize him in his long white underpants, but they could hear him whistle as he worked.

The two men wearing prisoners’ uniforms looked at the third one behind them, and they understood each other.

From the distance, they heard the screech of a pheasant.

The youngest of the three sneaked behind the door of the shed, ready to strike when it opened; the other two, bending low at the waist, ran to the house and, clinging to the wall, gained entrance in an instant. They couldn’t have known whether there was somebody else in the solitary forest lodge standing there in the middle of a long, not too wide clearing, surrounded by bare fruit trees. They half expected to find a family at breakfast inside.

Döhring, however, had not wanted to endanger his family, at least not in this period of transition. Things would sort themselves out later.

Because he was branded under his armpits, he decided it would be best if for the time being he stayed by himself.

The religion teacher who that morning relieved the bank director in the tower shouted down to the people that there was no big trouble, no reason to be afraid, but some group was approaching, that’s how he put it, probably from the outside. Yet he also thought that no one had stayed alive out there. There are about twenty-six of them, I’ve counted them twice already, he shouted. The oddest thing was that they were coming in close formation, just as they had once been marched out to work.

In close formation, twenty-six of them, he shouted.

People on the ground could not see the religion teacher in the open tower, but he could see them, small white faces above the darkly shining stones, turning toward him. Even their shivering reached him, but he chose to look through his field glasses again. The shivering was his own. He could see there would be trouble after all. They held things in their hands, sticks, boards.

As soon as they reached the first houses, they moved right in.

Who could have anticipated this. This meant that the camp guards had left behind not only corpses but living prisoners as well.

Get going, he shouted down to the square.

But those on the church square did not understand where they were supposed to go, they wanted more precise instructions from above. The other people were already entering a second house, but the religion teacher was so paralyzed with fear he could not make any corrections. Or rather, for long moments he had to cope with the thought that the fate of this village of Nordwall, with all its inhabitants, was now in his hands. That meant nothing but trouble. Had he called out to them immediately he might have been able to save some of them, but he kept quiet, and they all had to perish.

They kept coming on the road, in files of three; three of them veered off at the third house and entered it.

They had already drunk from the water of the Niers; what they wanted now was food, warm clothes, money, and revenge.

When the religion teacher from the tower hysterically made people understand what they should do, since some were already jumping out the windows of the first houses, they quickly took off toward Nordwall. By the time they got there, panting and exhausted, the village was in flames, and although some tenants managed to get out at the last minute, others, beaten to a pulp and frozen in their own blood, were awaiting a fiery death. Seeing this sight, the townspeople knew no mercy. They knocked milk mugs out of the mouths of some; some they tore away from pantry shelves along with fruit jars clutched in trembling fingers; they took some prisoners out of clothes closets from among hidden furs or biscuits, or caught them when, trying to escape, they got stuck on fences or high hedges.

They beat them to death with spades and shovels; they pierced the hearts of twenty-five of them so they would never rise again. Some resisted fiercely, and many of the townspeople, despite their numerical superiority, were left on the scene badly wounded. The twenty-sixth got away. They couldn’t find him, or the religion teacher miscounted. But they did not give themselves enough time to see to the wounded, help put out the fires, and calm down a little. In the heat of killing, they piled fresh corpses on handcarts, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, on any old conveyance; they were proud that there were so many corpses and that they were the ones who had produced them. The corpses were dripping with blood and slippery with splattered brains, there were too many ears, noses, truncated parts; hastily they collected what they could find and then pulled, tugged, dragged their burdens to the burning ditches to be done with the job before dark. The damn ditches were far from here, and they had already lost a lot of time.

They reached the camp in the afternoon. It was impossible to tell whether humans or animals had picked and gnawed so brutally at the corpses lying on the deserted roads.

To be honest, nobody tried seriously to answer this question.

The important thing was to burn the corpses as soon as possible so the ditches could be covered over and the land above them properly plowed.

The sole escapee who survived was picked up by a British patrol near Venlo, among the greenhouses of St. Thomas Monastery, and at this very hour he was regaling them with the story of his escape while they fed him with lukewarm sweet condensed milk, covered him with a blanket, though his whole body kept shaking uncontrollably.

Slowly, slowly, motioned the British officer, there’s plenty more where that came from. Take small sips. You’ll get more, but first we’ll give you a bath, put you in a nice warm bed. In the meantime, I’ll bring somebody who speaks your language.

So until that time he saw not him but his twin brother.

He screamed in his sleep that he did have a twin sibling, after all, and it was a boy.

Yes, he mixed them up.

From which he gathered that, luckily, the other boy had made a mistake. His twin brother could not have burned to death if he reached this place and was still alive. Because of this final realization that put everything in its place, a happiness of enormous proportions and unknown source gripped him, though he knew he was dreaming; still it was as if he were rescued, because at least in his dreams they were both alive.

How old are you, asked one of the monks curiously.

The question was so unexpected that, no matter how hard he thought, he could not answer it.

Don’t tire him out, said the other monk. He can’t be more than fifteen.

Or maybe he just can’t call out of his dream to tell us.

I think he has to be a little older than that.

It was odd that he could not understand the simplest things.

His grandfather had taught Döhring that the devil always wears a disguise and never sleeps. Or even if he stops to rest sometimes, a cautious person never leaves hatchets, knives, sickles, or scythes unguarded.

When the basket was filled with firewood, he put the short-handled hatchet among the freshly chopped wood, as was his wont, and took the basket under his arm. He kicked the door open with his knee. Nothing fatal happened in that instant. The flinging door of the shed covered the boy with the sharpened stake, crouching and waiting for him, and almost hit him on the forehead.

Döhring did not look back, because the door worked on a spring and would shut automatically behind him.

Unsuspecting, he walked toward the house with his basket.

And the boy did not immediately follow him, because he was certain that here indeed was that German, either someone who looked just like him or the man himself, though he had had no contact with the prisoners until the last few weeks.

But then he had revealed himself to them.

He took after him only when the familiar figure had almost reached the open door of his house.

He found himself facing the ones coming downstairs from the upper floor.

Because they had found nothing in the house. This calmed them down, though at the same time the mute house with all its possibilities upset them. Their mouths and hands were full of dried apples and prunes, their pockets stuffed with them too. Up in the ice-cold bedrooms fruit stood in open sacks and baskets; they had stuffed themselves with fruit, kept on chewing. Here is the bad egg, look, one of them yelled in an incomprehensible language, his mouth full.

He didn’t think he’d find us here too, added the other in German, which is to say, in the language spoken at the Niersbroek camp, and it sounded most like German.

At the sight of the two live prisoners, Döhring was not only deeply surprised but about to turn around because he sensed, rather than heard, footsteps behind him, but just then a mighty blow hit his head. A single dark flash that scattered in bursting sparks. This seemed to make him feel lighter, but he did not understand what was happening, and then he received the second blow. He no longer felt the basket with the firewood in his arms, but he saw from close up the faces of the two unknown figures, and that made him feel like laughing.

And before it grew completely dark with the third blow, the sense of being light was the last thing he comprehended, that the burden of life was being lifted from him.

This time, it would have been better to have left his short-handled hatchet in the shed: this became his last sensible thought as the light of the sparks slowly faded into pitch darkness. He knew it was superfluous to think of anything else, he was already dead, even though he was still breathing and thinking. Sprawled among the firewood, he gave the impression of wanting to rise from his death.

But you can see there is no more, one of the monks explained kindly, and enjoyed the pleasant fragrance emanating from his body.

The monk had a scent like lemon drops when their honeyed contents burst in one’s mouth.

Both monks wore thick white frocks.

They tried to take the lukewarm mug from him; he did not want to part with it. The mug reminded him of something from the past, from the distance of eight long months he did not exactly remember of what. They tried to peel his fingers off the mug handle and make him stand up, but he insisted on remaining seated, pressing his soles hard to the floor of the unknown room. This made the monks laugh, as if they were enjoying his mulish stubbornness. And he tried to laugh along with them as they were laughing at him. He understood well that for his own good they could not give him more of the sugared milk and that they had to move on, go to some other place, yet his response turned into whimpering. He did not want to be taken from here. And he was profoundly ashamed of this.

He whimpered and implored them, begged them and beseeched them to give him just a tiny bit more.

Until he disappeared, that squat British officer had spoken to him in French, and with his words he delicately thrust out and retracted his red lips under his red mustache so that he looked like a snuffling Easter bunny looking for more to eat.

The bunny just popped into his mind for no reason; he wasn’t sure it wasn’t a dream.

The Dutch monks addressed him in German, informally, while he kept crying and pleading in his own mother tongue, almost as if he did not want them to understand.

Which helped him a little.

He had to overcome something within himself, something he would have liked, in vain, to hide from them; they understood that.

And then he relented; let them take him, let them do what they wanted, as if he had been dissolved in the strange bodies and the familiar smells. The two monks laughed at this too, their Adam’s apples bobbing; they were enjoying themselves, and their double chins were trembling. They took him along white, sparkly corridors, their steps echoing. They descended an endless spiral staircase; this too seemed like something in a dream. Occasionally a tall window passed by; bluish fog was rolling in the twilight outside. He no longer felt himself, only the steps under his feet, though he could see his feet walking on the spongy cream-colored stone, his soles brushing along the chipped, worn-out parts that made walking even harder. The tall window kept returning; they were going down, but always to the same landing; the fog was outside where nothing ever wanted to end.

Suddenly he reached the ground floor and they were leading him farther along a corridor where it was dark, though just below the vaulted ceiling were small, grated windows. There was a great hubbub and he was blinded when they opened the dark, strap-hinged doors of the bathing hall. In the thick steam, in the midst of shouts and splashing, he could see nothing between the thick white columns but a vast whiteness at whose bottom red fires were burning, dark hair, and glistening patches of faces, drenched dark hair on white bodies. In booths partitioned by white walls, white bathtubs stood under the vaults; white tiles sparkled, light coming from under white lampshades illuminated everything through the steam; hot water dripped from brass faucets and gushed from the many showerheads; fires blazed in large copper drums stoked by naked men, their buttocks spreading as they squatted before the flames; firewood was brought in from somewhere outside. They were bending toward and away from the heat, whispering, the British soldiers were soaping and scrubbing one another, shoving and jostling together with the Dutch monks under the hot water, shouting and drying themselves, throwing ice-cold water on one another with wooden buckets, some of them screaming as they sang.

In the meantime, the helpless, large-bodied German, after having fallen on his face, lay before them on the green grass: their prison guard.

It felt good to see his huge limbs twitching, now this one, now the other, as if he wanted to get up but couldn’t.

Or maybe he didn’t get up lest they hit him on the head for the fourth time.

You’re in a big hurry, aren’t you, said the second prisoner.

Nobody inside, said the third figure reproachfully, and you had to waste him right away.

Would have been enough to stun him.

Now he won’t tell us where he put the money, that’s for sure.

The asshole left us only his gun, we saw it as soon as we walked in, on the table, to have it handy for him, ausgerechnet on the table, peaceably explained the former, who produced the pistol from his pocket full of dried fruit.

Before putting the weapon to use, he had to clean off the prunes sticking to it.

Now that we’ve gotten this far, he added, grinning, maybe we should try it out on him.

None of them would make a decision without the approval of the youngest.

The one with the pistol handed the prunes to him.

To the one who had been standing above the body, watching, mesmerized by what he had done.

Perhaps contemplating all the many things he would still have to do. This was not his first murder, and he had the premonition that killing would fill him with great contentment. After stuffing a few prunes into his mouth, and while beginning absentmindedly to chew them, he raised the sharpened stake, which they had pulled out of the ground at the edge of a meadow, and plunged it into the nape of the lifeless man on the ground.

No need to make noise with your weapon for no reason, he said to his comrades, while he paused in his munching.

Although it slipped a little, the stake did pierce the skin and made a popping report when it reached the spine, but it slipped on the cartilage. The stab was not powerful enough to make it straight through the sinews and muscles. The strength of his arms and shoulders might have been reduced by his having bitten down on a sharp plum pit, removing the flesh of the plum with his tongue, letting the smoky, honey-sweet taste, which he had not experienced for so long, engulf his entire mouth.

It was interesting to see how his two older buddies were serving him.

They put the short-handled hatchet helpfully into his hand.

He missed with his first blow, which made them all laugh simultaneously.

Instead of the stake, he almost hit his own hand. With his second blow, however, he hit the stake fully on its flat end.

Although the vertebra did not give — on the contrary, it returned the blow — the slippery wet fibers of muscle and sinew finally led the stuck tip of the stake to the space between the third and fourth vertebrae, where the gap kept widening and, after the third and fourth blow, was ripped open completely. He must have been bleeding internally, because around the stake’s dark, splintering pulp appeared a translucent liquid, barely stained by blood. With his fifth blow he tore through the windpipe, they heard a peculiar bubbling, perhaps rattling sound, and the stake became lodged in the frosty ground.

In the end he shat in his pants for us, said one of the older prisoners, though he remained alone with his laughter.

In an instant, the smell rose to their nostrils.

All the more reason for them quickly to abandon the pinioned, stinky human remains.

They hurried, did not even close the door behind them. They immediately found hunting outfits, ammunition, work clothes, warm socks, boots, striped and checkered flannel shirts. Not everything was freshly laundered, and so along with the clothes they put on the cooled-off scent of strange German male bodies.

They would have liked to move on before darkness.

They found nothing of value. As to money, only five imperial marks in a wine-red purse in a windbreaker pocket, even though they looked everywhere, turned everything over, while they kept eating and searching, eating and searching.




Everyone in Their Own Darkness


It’s a lot of hooey, the whole text, every bit of it, said the man standing stark naked in the door of his cabin.

He had been leisurely drying himself for minutes.

Now he would wipe his neck, now his ears, while turning his head to the rhythm of the words, and often he would reach between his legs with the thick towel.

It’s of no interest at all, I don’t understand why you bother with it, came the second man’s irritable reply.

Who’s interested in a text like that today, added the third man quietly.

I see that, of course I do, how wouldn’t I, but it’s impossible not to notice what they’re doing, continued the first speaker, who might have been the most restless of the three. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on these comrades.

He gently and quickly wiped off his testicles, then rubbed his luxuriant pubic hair, maybe a bit too vigorously, and when he was done with that, he returned to his shoulders and neck even though there was nothing left to dry there.

Oh, André, my dear, the second one started again, a large, blue-eyed man with pale gray hair, who was irritated not so much by the affected lecturing tone as by the nature of the prevarication. It doesn’t interest anyone, believe me, not anyone. Not even you.

You mean you know better than I do what interests me, called out the naked man from the cabin; his body was thin as a blade.

A long silence followed.

You’ll be surprised, but it happens that I really do, growled the gray-haired one benevolently.

He spoke with a slight foreign accent, as did the man continuously drying himself — who sounded sort of English and stammered nervously like a little boy — but the voice of the gray-haired man was more German, powerful and reliably manly. According to his birth certificate, he bore the high-sounding name of a well-established family from Erzgebirge, without the title of baron, and not only because in Erzgebirge titles and ranks had been done away with, but because he had been born out of wedlock. Hans von Thum zu Wolkenstein would have been his honorific, and this became the object of much jesting, especially since, according to his official documents, he had the simplest possible Hungarian name, János Kovách. They called him Hansi, or Hansi Wolkenstein, a name that had a good dose of childlike kindness, about the same amount of loud contempt for Germans, and a portion of truth, since in his childhood the name on his documents had been simply Hans von Wolkenstein. His mother, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, had tried to soothe the indignation of the Thum family by leaving Thum off the birth certificate.

Since the Middle Ages the Wolkenstein family had lived mostly on its name; they had not in fact been in possession of their magnificent fortified castle since the sixteenth century.

His close-cropped hair was indeed, for his age, surprisingly grayish white, his eyes offensively blue. Opposite his friend’s cabin, wrapped in his light blue bathrobe, his large white terry-cloth towel wound around his neck, he was stretched out to his full length on a wide bench, leaning his head against the hairless thigh of the third man.

He looked like a large wild animal, a kind of lazy cat, and occasionally he could not hold back caustic remarks. His friends thought him cynical because of his biting remarks, and perhaps he was.

Or he may have chosen this allegedly manly pose, sometime in the past, as a permanent defense.

The intimacy with which he rested his head on the third man’s hairless thigh obviously meant more than a chance physical contact.

This third man, with his friend’s prematurely graying head on his thigh, sat at the very end of the whitewashed bench, a bit squashed against the backrest, and was looking impassively out the window giving on to the pool, which meant he had to twist his entire upper body uncomfortably. He had no bathrobe on, and one could see from his skin that he was a bit chilly. Maybe he should have put something on, but that would have meant tearing himself away from this minor bodily contact.

Every mid-September, here in the Lukács Baths, large glass panels were put back between the columns supporting the upper floors, and in May they would be taken out again. In the open courtyards, the two swimming pools were surrounded by rows of wooden cabins on several floors, just as arcaded corridors surround a cloister courtyard. In summer it seemed that what one saw and heard was a cloister of bees: bathers swarming in great clusters around the sunlit multitiered beehives. As the nights grew cooler, the stairs leading to the cabins on the upper floors were closed off; in winter, snow settled on the corridor railings. But the sight was no less fascinating now. From the springs of Saint Luke, medicinal waters of various temperatures keep bubbling up, the warmest close to sixty-five degrees centigrade, the coldest seventeen degrees on the average, and the bath attendants mix them so that the water flowing into the so-called men’s pool is no more than twenty-one degrees. Those unable to swim can splash around in the warmer water of the women’s pool. But the moment the outside temperature drops, the open pools begin to fog up, steam, nearly smoke; on overcast winter days, such a thick fog settles on the enclosed space that swimmers are always apologizing for bumping into each other.

The vapors were fairly strong now too; a gusting wind picked up small clouds of steam and carried them along, or simply whisked the vapor off the surface of the water, which at once became blistery and ruffled. While the storm raged like this over the pool, the long hands of the clock on the opposite wall of the yard were making their indifferent rounds. But one could see the passing seconds only until another gust slapped the next burst of a shower against the clock’s convex glass cover; then the clock grew hazy for a while.

It was getting to be half past nine in the morning.

This third man was interested neither in the exact time nor in the spectacular display of the spring storm, and even less interested in what his friends were going on about. He made no effort to be polite, did not pretend to be interested. With other people, he was usually rather indifferent or at least very reserved, but this time he took strong offense, which he did not bother to hide; this may have been one explanation for why he chose to turn away from them, however uncomfortable it made him. The previous evening, when they had had supper at the Fészek Club, they had taken him aside and told him that today, as soon as the pools opened, Viola would be there with her husband; he should be at the Lukács by six.

He must catch her, they explained, before she went in the water or, they suggested, when her old husband disappeared in the showers.

He had overslept, had had to run, but he’d gotten there in time.

It wasn’t that his friends had played a trick on him — it wouldn’t have been the first time, and he understood why they would — but in this instance he could not forgive them. Something, he could not exactly tell just what, had become too much for him. They simply wanted to lure him away from the Sports Baths so that he’d be with them and not alone, and mainly not with that silly goose he had been living with for a while. Viola did not come at six, or later, only the elderly dentist arrived; Viola was nowhere to be seen, which did not put him in a bad humor but, on the contrary, relieved him. And that is how he surrendered to hopelessness, which had been waiting for him with open arms. All three agreed that Viola, although a little loud, was an entrancing woman. His friend swore up and down that she had promised to come, they weren’t lying, he must believe them, but of course she was unpredictable. And he despised this place where every morning the crème de la crème of Budapest came together. He did not believe them. Viola was anything but an entrancing woman.

He despised them for choosing such a measly swimming pool, where one could get from one end to the other in just six strokes; and he seriously thought that Viola might be his last chance. Je m’en passerai bien. However, it would be easier without her. A witty woman of considerable temperament who, on top of it all, had a rather flashy appearance and to whom he was related, though fortunately not by blood. In any case, he did not have much of a chance with her. How could he have believed that Viola had promised them she’d come. The young woman had decidedly rejected him; moreover, she had publicly made him a laughingstock. From which he understood why, in her childhood, she and her younger sister had laughed so much behind his back. For reasons unknown to him, those two were always laughing at him.

Which, of course, could have meant the opposite of what it did mean. He knew it did not mean anything else, and that hurt him. Still, he could not give up the possibility of a last chance, and that is why he had gullibly taken the bait.

In such awful weather, there were very few guests in the heated glass corridor on the ground floor. The three men were conversing at the end of the left row of cabins near the telephone booth, in a spacious corner where for some reason the pool’s not necessarily pleasant odor was strongly felt. The man called André, whose first name was originally András and whose family name was Rott, for which many people thought him to be a Jew, did his undressing and dressing every morning in the very last cabin.

Anybody who was anybody at the Lukács Baths had his own cabin, which of course demanded the appropriate social standing along with an entourage. These were his favorite friends, though he could have called them his subordinates. They had known one another for only six years, but there was no doubt about the depth and strength of their relationship. András Rott’s offensive nudity was part of the threesome’s close and mysterious relationship. Not that they had no secrets from one another, even bodily secrets, for they did. But it was as if Rott had to convince his two friends or keep them captive not only with his pronouncements but also with the sight of his naked, sharp-as-a-blade, dark body. There are secrets weightier than bodily secrets, and this truth well suited the connection among these three.

Concerning the secrets of their lives, which they could not share with anyone, it seemed more propitious to retreat behind flagrant nakedness. They displayed their unconditional trust in one another with the bareness of their bodies. André especially enjoyed doing this because, coming from a militantly Catholic family, he was no stranger to ceremonial exhibitionism. In addition, he was often on the losing side against his two friends, and the loss had to be made up by the introduction of physical perfection. Not that the other two were not at least as perfect as he was in their own ways; as if every moment they had to cajole the proof of self-denial from one another, though their mutual and common silences always remained weightier than their proofs.

His two friends regularly conspired against Rott, and since he was an emotional man, he took up the challenge heroically; he either struggled valiantly with them or willingly threw himself on their mercy, but in fact he was more powerful than they and, of the three, surely the most influential.

He glanced at his body and the sight filled him with contentment; he felt it to be a worthy gift to bestow on his friends.

Accordingly, he fell silent for a while. Then he let go of his testicles and with one quick movement pulled the foreskin back on his cock. Let it be said in his defense that one has to dry the bare bulb or rounded tip of one’s penis well, or it might easily become mucous and, in a few hours, develop an unpleasantly strong smell.

Male nakedness has no higher degree than this.

No women were allowed in this row of cabins. If because of some small but pressing business on the other side, a female cabin attendant had to come through here, she would start by shouting from afar, heads up, gentlemen, I’m coming through, woman on the way, look out; and to emphasize her words she would rattle her keys or slap them on the closed cabin doors, and still she had to take a lot of lip from naked or half-naked men, each in turn, as she went past the open cabins.

Until the mid-1920s, men and women had bathed separately. And to this day, the lasting reminder of that strict tradition is that men and women are not allowed in the other’s corridors. Yet no signs were posted to this effect. Even people who knew little or nothing of the bath’s past or of the merciless local rules of conduct sensed the invisible borders. An unsuspecting man straying into the corridors between the floors around the courtyard might easily end up in an unpleasant situation. Believing he was still in a shared area, he might suddenly find himself in the company of scantily dressed women who in exceedingly friendly tones would shout for him to come on, don’t be afraid, come on closer, at most we’ll unscrew your thingamajig.

Or he would find himself face-to-face with a naked woman who without hesitation would throw her wet towel at him.

Nobody was swimming in the women’s pool, used more and more nowadays by children and uninitiated occasional bathers. The only voices to be heard came from the cloakroom, somewhere in the corridor connecting the two wings of the bath. Except for the three men, there were hardly any guests in this transitional hour. In the men’s shower room, the water ran behind the white canvas curtains, steam rolled outward, but no doddering old men shouted under the hot water. Nobody in the long row of cabins called for an attendant, nor did the attendants chat with anyone. As with everything else, such activities had their order, time, and rhythm.

Early in the morning came the most important people, and then there was a lull for a while. Well after ten o’clock began a stream of young men about town, ladies, pensioners, various artists and writers, children, mothers, ladies of easy virtue who for no amount of money would ever dip their heads in the water and only floated on the surface with their bathing caps, usually pink or lemon yellow, decorated with rubber flowers or rubber stars. Late in the afternoon, when these people had gone, a new wave came and stayed until closing time — students, lawyers, physicians, and older, high-ranking government officials.

The cabin attendant who also doubled as a lifeguard sat idly in his booth, at long intervals getting up to look out dutifully at the empty pool, over the two men sprawled on the bench. The other, obviously bored attendant went on mopping the ribbed yellow floor in the corridor; the early morning stampede, though not as overwhelming as on other days, had left many footprints. The cross-eyed chief attendant was signaling to the improbably obese, utterly unattractive ticket taker, who, with her multitudinous costume jewelry and towering hairdo, was enthroned and sparkling at the drafty elevated place near the entrance, a tribal queen.

The chief’s signal meant that no matter what might happen, come whoever may, he was going to disappear for some time.

Go on, have a good shit, Józsi my dear, shouted the fat woman.

A barely noticeable side door instantly swallowed him up. This door led to the steam bath, and using it was the prerogative of only the most privileged members of the bathing public.

Important and dangerous people in whose company somehow everyone is overcome by well-mannered speechlessness.

The erstwhile green, worn, narrow door had no doorknob.

The windbreaks, swollen by constant vapors from the pool and in the corridors, were not making their customary dull slams, the windows were not rattling, and no new guests had arrived for a long time. Pleasant warmth pervaded the bright glass-enclosed corridors; intimate silence prevailed everywhere except for the water running in the showers; outside the wind roared above the water and in the bare crowns of the huge plane trees leaning over the water. The new attendant, who from his booth and with considerable alarm had listened for a while to the three strange men, later nodded off in his chair. Actually, he did so out of fear, so he would not have to hear their nonsense. He listened but did not understand. He did not want to see anything, either. From their words, he couldn’t even figure out what sort of men they were. This new attendant had been transferred here from the Gellért Baths, and no matter how much he had heard of the Lukács, he could see that this was a completely different world. And these three did not even try to keep their voices down. They didn’t mean to blab to people about anything, but they clearly didn’t want to keep anything secret, either, which is what struck the new attendant as strange. He was very young, barely more than a boy, from the Kispest district of the city, and he could not have known the meaning of their diversionary gestures and their sentences traveling on circuitous byways. He was not familiar with this sort of sentence, this coy sort of smirking. What he was trying to figure out was whether these men were famous fairies. He did not remember seeing them in the Gellért, and they did not look gay; hard as he looked or listened, they did not lisp. Maybe they were foreigners. The bathrobe of the graying one, and the conspicuously and indecently small plum-blue bathing suit of the other one seemed to point in that direction. And the man who kept drying himself, with his lean-to-the-bones, hairy black body looked anything but Hungarian.

Or they pretended to have forgotten their mother tongue.

He couldn’t have observed them more attentively; in his nervousness, the dropping of his head woke him occasionally, and then he’d think he had missed something.

Nothing was unambiguous here, as it had been in the Gellért. But from the chief attendant’s cheerful grin as he walked by, from the sugary tones with which he demurely engaged the men and at the same time winked in his direction with his awful crossed eyes, the new attendant could see that no matter how stupidly they might behave, these three men were big shots of some kind. In fact, it seemed that the chief attendant was trying to send him specific instructions — that he should stay away from them, be neither kindly nor rude, have no contact; don’t try to find fault with them, don’t pick on them; to point out their trespasses, if any, is simply forbidden.

The Lukács was a hard case, because people’s varying behavior was determined daily, rather like the daily fluctuation of a stock exchange. There were rules of etiquette determining what might be the subject of public discussion, what must remain a secret, and, most important, what was forbidden, recommended, or allowed for whom. The cabin attendant, if he wished to keep his new job, had to learn all this very quickly.

It was as if his hand, for a long period, had forgotten what it should do with his bared prick and, while he continued to talk, that is what he would be thinking about.

Of course, it doesn’t interest me, either, he went on listlessly, because again he decided not to take offense, which made him stutter more than usual. Out of the goodness of my heart, Uncle Hansi, I am telling you what your favorite comrades are busy with, he said, and although he was talking to him, he evaded the other man’s penetrating gaze. Even you cannot know exactly what’s happening around you, he said, and they do what they do out of sheer instinct, like animals. Like animals, he repeated with great pleasure.

The pleasure André Rott thus gained with his words at the expense of the two other men was not without risk, risk both political and personal.

At the same time, he looked over his body again, at the shiny deep-purple bulb of his penis, rimmed more strongly than most, which he held with three fingers as he was drying with a zeal reserved exclusively for this excitable organ, blotting up the wetness carefully and quickly pulling into place the wrinkled, almost black foreskin. He not only did not stop talking while doing this, as other men would have done, but, stimulated by the small sly pleasure spreading in his body and by the involuntary disclosure of the same pleasure, was impelled to ever more enraptured oratory.

They don’t know Hungarian, that’s for sure, he all but shouted, a statement that sounded especially funny coming from him, given his speech impediment and the fact that on his beautiful lips every vowel remained annoyingly closed. But it’s clear as day that the problem can be solved, he shouted, flushed with his own idea. They have to love what their sense of justice makes them despise. They keep trying to prove to us that they are adherents of progress and, according to the logic of things, they should really know in advance how many washtubs and how many nuclear rockets to manufacture in the next decade. If they can’t do that, gone is the theory of general progress, and if they can’t keep up with the competition, they’ll fail at something they had no intention of achieving in the first place.

And now listen carefully, this is their big question, he said loudly.

The other two were indeed all ears, though they looked like people to whom it was impossible to tell anything new, which was indeed the case. In the depth of their souls, they were listening not to what André Rott was saying, but to what he was rather perilously communicating with his words. Rott again knew something and, for the sake of maintaining his prestige, wanted to share the major outlines of the information — but in due measure, rationing it out, drop by drop.

How might they keep stupid modernization, which they hate from the bottom of their hearts, restricted to military engineering, he continued, with his knowledge from secret sources. And how can they increase consumption when they are trying to hobble private enterprise however they can. That’s what that paper is all about, my sweets, nothing but that. Where should they put limits, saying consumer goods are all right up to here but no further. They have no methods for that, my little doves. Until now, everything’s been decided by the politburo. Whom now can they trust with decision-making. It’s an impossible situation: if the generals are rebelling, they cannot guarantee the security of the empire.

Rebelling in Moscow, and the generals at that, well, don’t hold your breath, interrupted the gray-haired man sarcastically, and clicked his tongue for emphasis.

That’s right, everything must change in a way that ensures everything stays the same.

Pugachev was the last general who rebelled against the tsar, the Little Father, and that was two centuries ago.

Kovách had spent most of his teenage years in Moscow, smuggled there from Nazi Germany by his father, named Kovách, so he knew exactly what he was talking about. But no comments and interruptions would stop André Rott.

It’s a very interesting technique, the way they blunt the edge of any statement just as soon as they make it, while sharpening every potential conflict to the extreme — in other words, the way they play off everyone against everyone else.

As if he were saying to the other two, careful, take a good look at where you stand.

If you’re right, I’d be the happiest person in the world. The man who had been looking impassively out the steamy rain-swept window spoke sternly, in a rather chilly way, without visible emotion. He turned back and looked hard into the eyes of the man drying himself as if he wanted to petrify him. Then we would still have a few years, maybe we could come up with some ideas, maybe we could square the circle. But it’s not possible, André, you know yourself, my sweet, it’s just not possible, nobody has a patent on modernizing the dictatorship of the proletariat. And nobody ever will. It cannot be improved and it cannot be accelerated; all one can do is draw the sad conclusions.

Even you can’t square the circle, put in the blue-eyed man.

By birth, all people are indeed equal, which is a fine thing, but they are also greedy animals, which is in painful contradiction to the basic idea of the dictatorship of the good.

He spoke quickly, protecting himself from the other’s self-satisfied nakedness, whose effect on him he could not completely ignore. Somehow, he always wanted to speak faster than one can in Hungarian. Hungarian is a slow language, and his consonants kept piling up. Of the three men, he had the strongest accent.

If there is a shortage of something, their reaction is to collect more of it. The theory of equality has its own shadow.

The other two would have been ready to laugh at this, but hearing such seriousness, they thought it better to remain cautiously silent. They feared that this might turn out to be a settling of accounts with the entire socialist movement.

I’d like to remind you of the Harriman Report.

What Harriman Report, what are you trying to say, André Rott asked indignantly.

You know damn well there isn’t any competition and there won’t be any, either; at most, a little hurry-scurry. You won’t make me swallow this dumb text of yours. There will be war. Any other prognosis is empty rhetoric.

Well, even so, what does the Harriman Report have to do with it. You’ll pardon me, but you’re talking apples and oranges. Unless you’re thinking of the Ethridge Report.* And except for Republican senators, nobody enjoyed reading that. It was the work of a witty journalist, what else would you expect, written with a rhetorical intent. And if I too may express myself rhetorically, I’d advise you not to take on the role of offended oracle.

Sorry, but I am thinking of the Harriman Report. Competition is possible only between sides of comparable abilities, we can accept this as a realistic axiom, and that is why there will be a war. Obviously, you refuse to acknowledge what Hansi has been trying to tell you so patiently. We are not in Moscow, we are not in London, it is completely irrelevant in this cunt-size country’s cunt-size capital—dans ce trou à rats, in this rathole — what your dear comrades are scheming about. At most we have to suffer them silently. Boredom is what’s killing us. We must admit we have drifted out to the edge of the world. But even from here you can see with your naked eye that war is unavoidable. For you, it’s better to think on this scale, better for everybody, everybody knows it, everybody dreads to admit it, everybody’s looking for appropriate reasons, pretexts, bunkers, and escape hatches for it.

Please don’t go on with these unbecoming statements, I beg you, my dove, said the prematurely gray Kovách, interrupting, wanting to pacify. András fears him more than he fears war.

What you call competition is really only preparedness, desperate preparation, the third man continued more loudly, to override the other’s voice. He wouldn’t let interruptions stop him. You can’t possibly draw any far-reaching conclusions from that terribly boring, totally uninteresting paper. And in case you have, please then tell me what is the difference between my beloved father and you.

None. None, he shouted, excited by his own thought. Neither of you can let go of your social utopia.

I’d really like to know what you’re talking about.

What he is trying to grab from the right, you grab from the left.

Are you done, André Rott asked. The strength and edge of his voice were not part of their friendship.

No, I’m not done yet, came Lippay’s quick, dry answer.

But his unusually sharp tones alarmed all three of them and something upset their customary cheeriness; they became hesitant.

Rott and Kovách often argued; they felt almost duty bound to go at each other; it would have been hard to imagine a reconciliation in their ways of thinking. Professor Lehr’s son, on the other hand, very rarely voiced an opinion about abstract political subjects. He’d rather listen and wait; sometimes, as an impartial moderator, he summarized aloud what had been said, thereby reducing the increased friction between the debating sides. Now he surprised them with his bitter combativeness. They sensed big trouble again if he resented their well-intentioned prank and could not forgive them for it. By criticizing the strictly confidential paper, Rott had probably gone too far in railing against the powerful, generally hated professor. He provoked something in the third man that he himself did not want to hear. The dying professor’s name was listed among the authors of the confidential document. Of course, he had gone as far as he did in his critique and taken the risks he had because on many previous occasions they had all slated the professor. Ágost Lippay lived under the same roof with him, but he left out the German part of his double family name in order to reduce the chances of being identified with Professor Lehr, whom oddly enough, despite his having Hungarianized his name in his youth, everyone referred to by his German name.

Don’t be angry with him, little Ágo said, breaking the uneasy silence. Kovách, whose real name no one knew except his present company, said, this is what’s on Prince Andrei’s mind, this is his leftist leaning. His prick hangs to the left. Even his balls dangle well to the left, you can see for yourself.

It’s not realistic to hold forth on great-power competition, Lippay continued in the same dry tone, as if he hadn’t heard Hans von Wolkenstein’s appeasing banter. The more realistic question is whether there’ll be any difference between the front and the home front and, if there won’t be, how supplies and reinforcements might be assured. If in the new kind of warfare everything is part of the battlefield, a no less vital question would be what sort of bunkers should be built for the civilian population, and where, how large and to be used for how long, for god’s sake. No government can build bunkers big enough. I don’t give it more than three weeks before they’ll announce the acceleration of work on the subway system.

Is that so, responded Rott in his cabin, calmly and quietly. His reputation was inviolable; the other man knew less than he did and did not grasp his intentions; moreover, Lippay’s words indicated that in his desperation he’d probably given up. But at least he had done nothing irreparably stupid. As if to wipe his ears, Rott lifted the towel to cover his body because his bashfulness returned. You’re afraid of a nuclear war, eh kid, he added pensively; now he was thinking of something entirely different.

For many long moments, they had been looking only into each other’s eyes and nowhere else; compared to this, nothing else had any meaning, neither what they were saying nor what they kept to themselves. They could not let go of each other. André Rott’s pitch-black wet hair fell on his forehead, he knitted his thick eyebrows almost distrustfully, and his dark eyes, adorned with lively long and curvy eyelashes with which he managed to convince and enthrall so many people, did not let go of Lippay’s always shining yet piercing countenance, radiating either wounded pride or rebuke, a look that usually frightened off the very people he hoped to win over to his cause.

I have nothing to be afraid of, he answered quietly. I don’t even want to wait for the big experience. But even if I were afraid, that wouldn’t be such a big crime. You wouldn’t have to censure me for it. Anyway, it’s dangerous, I’d call it a professional mistake, to keep harboring a fear we don’t dare admit even to ourselves.

Now they all grew gloomy and heavy, despite their efforts to be cheery.

That’s what I think, András.

Not a rare occurrence in men’s conversation. Once the obligatory ease is gone, when they have nothing to flaunt in front of one another, a mutual embarrassment arises, and if no one knows how to deal with it, conversation about more serious topics simply runs aground. Ágost justifiably felt that André was rebuking him, and he did the same in return. Peu à peu he understood what the other one was saying. He should not be surprised if he no longer wanted to protect him. No surprise if other people also feared his fickleness; the moment was not far off when in some official place they might ask whether this behavior hadn’t started to stink or even burn.

Had he not swum to the other shore.

During the last few weeks, Ágost had indeed played with the unavoidable thought that he should swim across, and that is why he felt André’s glance piercing his heart.

But exposed to the rebuking glance of his friend and subordinate, André Rott should have felt that his views not only supported but actually prepared the annihilation threatening humankind.

Or that he was the one who had initiated the investigation of Ágost, of which Ágost was certainly aware.

What he really wanted to let his friend know was that the investigative process had already been put into motion; it was time to lie low.

They should have made a decision about something they had debated artfully every day for years but could never resolve. The pangs of conscience provoked by rebuking glances were linked not to what they said or did not say, but to something they wouldn’t have dared communicate even with secret signals: it had to do with the essence of their profession, with the question of whether there was, would be, or might be any palpable meaning and explanation for everything they had done with their lives until now. If they had been mistaken, after all, and there was nothing in the future to justify the necessary and accidental crimes of the past, then à quoi bon vivre, was it worth their while to stay alive, or, alternatively, what should they do with what was left of their lives. After all, being a socialist or a Communist in Geneva or London, and happy that the dictatorship of the proletariat had finally been established in distant lands, was very different from returning, with the same frame of mind and awareness, to a Budapest where the world had been shut off for good like a dripping faucet.

Still, Kovách thought these two were good boys, though they didn’t really understand anything.

They chatted on, discussing abstract questions, most of which he himself didn’t understand.

The practical question he kept asking himself was whether they would be left alive; whether the managers of the firm hadn’t been trying to figure out a way to get to them, and how long that would take.

The long shadow of obligatory and inviolable silence, which they had been able to avoid only at exceptional moments, still tarried in their midst.

Ágost was struggling with his recurrent attacks of melancholy, for which neither he nor his friends had any balm. The danger was not imaginary but real. It had become his determined, cherished, and probably unalterable intention to kill himself; this was not a secret because once before they had collectively yanked him back to life.

It had happened about two years ago and since then their conversations had come to resemble a hopeless hurdle race. They should have somehow risen above the memory of that brutal experience, but because they could not, each of them heard, at different times, a false ring in Ágost’s sentences. Something had opened up and, precisely because it had brought them closer, could not be closed again. At the same time, all three of them knew that in case of an investigation it would be impossible not to acknowledge the matter and also, since so much time had elapsed, it would also be impossible to do so. At this point, embarrassing for all of them, André Rott usually grew weak and, to keep tears of helpless fury from erupting or, worse, to keep from pouncing on the other man with frustrated and insane hysterics, he felt compelled to defend himself frantically.

And at just such a juncture, Hansi usually ran out of his charged jests about parts of the lower body.

But André admitted his friend’s anguish of unknown origin as he stood in front of him, and he did it in a way that made it painful to himself.

He preferred to make amends. Even though in the depths of his soul he reproached and accused his friend, he also hated him. He had to hate him for weakening him with his attacks of melancholy. The other two had been waiting for the investigation that always preceded harsher measures, but André knew that the investigation of Lippay was already under way. And that at a certain stage they would haul Lippay over the coals. He envied Lippay, was even jealous of him; why hadn’t they started the investigations with him; he’d either choose friendship and lie, or stick to his convictions and profession and therefore betray his friend; and he would, too. But that would also mean betraying himself. He had a third choice: to inform on his friend, to accuse him gravely and baselessly. He could not even lower his eyes. Perhaps he was too craven; perhaps his ethical-religious upbringing was still more powerful than his principles. He did not dare commit such a betrayal, though he knew from experience that the greater the betrayal, the greater its success, which would greatly increase his pleasure.

But he could not decide what would give him greater pleasure, because he loved him.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense, he said very quietly, disconcertedly, as, driven by the instinct to flee, he took a step backward and with a swift movement of his foot kicked his cabin door shut before their noses.

At the very same instant Hansi’s head rose, as if hesitating whether to abandon his comfortable position on Ágost’s smooth and hairless thigh. Unlike André, he always knew what to do with Lippay. He well understood that one could suffer from something that could not be named accurately and even physicians called depression for lack of a better label. André did not understand this, became angry because of it, considered it all nothing but feminine fancy. Not only did he brush it aside, he was unaware of his own true condition and, as a result, in the well-developed man’s body there remained the little boy. Kovách couldn’t have described or explained it, but he saw its depth; the bottomless pit was there, gaping inside him as well, though for quite some time he wouldn’t acknowledge that what he saw was nothingness itself.

Void.

One senses that at this place one should see or feel something.

He must tear himself away from his pleasurable selfishness. These were not things of great consequence, only a patch of raw warmth of skin, or another body’s fine vaporous fragrance.

He sat up.

Kovách exuded rough goodness, and somehow it was also his nature greedily to collect all bodily pleasures, to hoard them senselessly, as if one could store enough warmth of female and male bodies or scents of male and female pubic hair and stockpile them for leaner times.

Really, what nonsense, he mumbled, just to say something, using the darkly warm overtones of his voice to calm the other man, and with his meaty hand he ruffled the chestnut-brown tuft of hair that had fallen on Ágost’s forehead, and in his next move grabbed him by the hair and started doing all sorts of things to him. He enjoyed this jostling, squeezing, and ruffling perhaps more than Ágost did. He shook him gently; for a moment, with an arm around his neck, he drew him to himself and shoved him under the armpit.

As he sat up, it could be seen what a robust well-built man he was, though Ágost wasn’t small either. He shoved Ágost away but kept muttering and grunting, come on, come on, my dear, my little pigeon, why go on like this.

Prince Andrei, our own Andryosha, is indeed a wild blockhead, but you’re talking impossible drivel.

There was so much mutual affection between these two men, looking for a legal outlet, that no matter how they kept measuring it out, slowly and leisurely, alternately withholding it and letting it out in small doses, they each feared it might burst and drown the other one. Ágost did not reciprocate, never gave anything in return, but at least he did not resist; he endured the onslaught of the other man’s affections and the rudeness that stemmed from them. André, however, was beset by shame the moment his cabin door closed; he was ashamed of his urge to escape. And he had to be on guard against his ambition for control; he could not risk his friends’ turning against him again.

Without them he could easily remain alone and become the loneliest being on earth. A kicked-in door, no more, was enough for him to feel the weight of such a possibility, a careless move of his foot.

André did not bear solitude easily, though of the three he was the least aware of this or, rather, his awareness of it was always in direct proportion to the increase in his daily consumption of whiskey, which was both expensive and hard to obtain. He had to go to sleep somehow. At this rate, though, he would become an alcoholic before his next assignment.

He tried to keep down the daily dose.

I really am a wild blockhead, he thought, and allowed himself only as much time for reflection as it took to slap his wet towel down on the bench in his cabin and slip into his bathrobe.

He felt a little cold.

Despite the unexpected turn to the dark side, the scene in the corridor had had its humorous touches. For one thing, the new cabin attendant’s mouth had been wide open with wonder for a long time. He had understood nothing. A silent witness, he sat only a few steps away from the three men and honestly did not know what to make of their nonsense. Back in the Gellért he would have known, of course, he would have taken the thick red hose and let them have it with an ice-cold jet of water, gentlemen, please move along, sorry but he must now hose down this bench. And he would let go a spurt at their feet or asses.

Here he couldn’t do it.

He jumped up from his table and, without knowing why or where to, ran out of his booth. Even if he had known that these men not only could get away with pawing one another in public and talking as they did, but in Budapest’s best circles were considered enviable, dreaded lady-killers, he still could not have understood what was waiting for him in adult life.

The three men were thought of as merry, happy-go-lucky, amusing fellows whom people should not take too seriously and who did their best to live up to their reputations.

Their games were very entertaining.

It was to their advantage that around this time the dominant tones of the city were given not by strong personalities but rather by friendly societies, clans, tribes, associations, and secret professional alliances, all of them blessed with leaders of dubious character and, for that reason, bent on cultivating and strengthening their common reputations. As if there was not a single significant and independent personality left in the city, as if everyone had lost the last vestige of former prestige and had no more use for self-esteem. People lost their reputations because of petty betrayals, or they were bought very cheaply and used as servants. Still, life went on because what people lost in personal authority or dignity they cleverly cobbled together in a smaller circle or society they assumed to be private and safe, and which they joined to fit their interests and where, according to the momentary requirements of self-esteem, they could flatter one another a little. The inner tension of each group was great and that helped give it strength, at times sufficient not only for defense but also for offense or even for a bloody showdown with other groups.

The three men’s enviable and despised light-mindedness, their foreignness and outsider position, was their trademark. They were lounge lizards. This sobriquet gave them status, while their strength and rigor provided protection. Ágost’s own mother did not know or understand him well enough to explain his nerve-racking indifference to her. She disparaged him and constantly disapproved of him; weekly she tried to cast him out of her heart, hoping to make it less painful to acknowledge what had become of her son. Even though she really didn’t know what he had become. A ne’er-do-well, a nobody, a parasite. At the same time, she secretly consoled her anxious maternal heart that, on the principle of birds of a feather, at least those other similarly overgrown good-for-nothings took her son seriously. When they showed up in her apartment with their awful women, it was as if a benevolent wind were sweeping through the large rooms; when they disappeared again, Mrs. Lehr, née Erna Demén, against her better judgment, saw all her well-tended furniture as dead, her life as a desert, her miserable ambitions as meaningless.

What am I talking about, why am I grumbling so much against him, I haven’t been able to succeed in anything either, she kept telling herself. At best, I keep up the illusion of a meaningful life, but not its meaning, and I know the price I’m paying.

Why should my son live a life like this.

Except for the men themselves, nobody knew the richer, more refined, or more tragic and noble sides of their conspicuous traits.

At the next moment, when the irritated cabin attendant looked back from the far end of the corridor, the graying man was grabbing and hugging his apathetic friend huddling on the bench, and the other man was crouching in front of him, his bathrobe barely held closed in the front. They made no movements that didn’t upset the cabin boy. He really must scatter them somehow. Now with both hands André grabbed Ágost’s spread knees as if they were two strange objects and in desperate anger slammed them together, and when the two kneecaps clapped together hard, probably causing pain, he kept shouting in a choked, threatening voice.

Now what’s wrong? Would you mind telling me at last, what’s happening again? Answer me, damn it. What’s happened to you again?

And he held Ágost’s knees in with his hands, as if he had really decided to smash them, pulverize them, if he didn’t get an answer.

What’s happening, nothing. What might have happened, nothing, answered Ágost slowly, listlessly. I simply don’t understand what you’re going on about. I don’t understand your premise, your pitting modernization against progress.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not the one who pits one against the other. I’m not the one you have to beat. You must stick it out, and you will, I swear to you. Otherwise I’ll drown you in this pool with my own hands. You’ve endured six years, now you’ll put up with another few months.

If only you didn’t jumble up the principles. You mix up what you read in Pravda with what you read in The Guardian.

Don’t you understand that along with you, somehow I have to endure my own fate too.

What do we have here, when has there ever been any modernization here. The last time was just before or at the turn of the century, when my loony great-grandfather built this stinking bath. Look around you. Ces sales connards. What do you want from them, these serfs, these stinking ruffians from the puszta.

I’ll explain it later, Ágó, but you know perfectly well we’re not talking about political philosophy. Please spare me and be straight with me, no deceptions.

But I’m only interested in this, la guerre ou la paix. That there will be war again. La bourse ou la vie. Nothing else interests me.

Naturally, they couldn’t reply to this.

None of them knew what to do with such a statement, at once defense and provocation. The negative outburst accomplished one thing, however; it paralyzed the other two men. Let them be paralyzed, completely, like bugs in a beam of light. While he locked himself in, he silently hoped, nay, demanded them to help him, to save him from himself.

For the other two men, however, the question was always the same: but how. How can somebody be rescued from himself.

Come on, responded André angrily, you don’t even know what you’re talking about, how the fuck would you know what war is. You were sitting on your ass in comfortable Switzerland while your mother kept sending money to your uncle’s account.

They knew well how the final lap would be run; both of them were aware of its fast approach.

But they were late; at this stage it was a mistake to continue talking, and they always wound up being late. It was as if on his face they were seeing the approaching, threatening waves of a natural catastrophe. Occasionally they even talked about it among themselves, it was so strange, extraordinary, to see such a thing on someone’s face; alarming. It wasn’t more than a bright summer sky suddenly grown dark because of a large cloud. Who could avert it, who could prevent what happens inside another person. He became overcast; something set upon his body, his features, his mind, and overwhelmed him. Perhaps his skin darkened too; at least that’s how they saw it. And as if someone who is still talking, now for much longer and somewhat more loudly than usual, no longer sees out of himself.

And that ended too, he wouldn’t answer any questions either, as if he hadn’t heard them.

In the eyes of others, they were bound together not only because they each spoke with some sort of accent, but also because of their impressive appearances. André Rott was the oldest; his skin dark even in winter, if he stayed in the sun he looked as if a gray veil had been drawn over him, on his brownness. This appearance is sometimes called Gypsy-like, but he could have passed for a Yemenite warrior or a Bedouin tribal chief. Everything in his body was gothically elongated, his skull and his bones, also his muscles. He was the type on whom hair grows in abundance, but even in this, nature arranged things favorably: in proportionate, harmonious, energetic, but not exaggerated waves. As if from the mouth of a well-sculpted baroque fountain, hair from the packed bush of his loins sprouted up in a straight stream on his hard and flat abdominal wall until it bumped into the rim of the breastbone. There it split into two branches and with elegant waves surrounded the hard breast muscles that peaked in darkly purple nipples; evading the thin and nakedly protruding clavicles, the current of the two branches clashed tempestuously and, like a foamy froth or gaudy frill, shot up to his close-shaven neck. If he was not careful while shaving and did not go low enough with the razor, a few hairs would impudently remain and peer over his closed shirt collar, curling outward. He was an impeccable dresser — if he had to, he shaved twice a day, and carefully at that — so a small bodily disobedience like the peeking hairs, relating to his body’s more concealed territory, would indeed attract the attention of strangers.

Ágost Lippay, André’s junior by about five years, also had dark skin but that was the sum total of similarities between them. There was nothing dramatic in Ágost’s colors or in the shape of his body; at most he could boast excellent proportions. His complexion, inherited from his mother and through her from his Jewish great-grandfather, whom he often mentioned, was very different. He was hairless, except for a few short individual hairs curling on his chest, stretching across his muscles like a wrapper made of some delicate material; on his chest muscles, buttocks, powerful thighs, and classically molded calves his skin practically shone. And Kovách, with his illuminating blue eyes, the youngest of the three, differed from the other two not only with his imposingly loose-limbed build but mainly with his amazing colors. He was at least two heads taller than the other two, wider in the shoulders and ampler in every way. A kind of ideal big-boned, hulking, Germanic forest dweller, whose limbs nature had created with no special refinement or suppleness, but whom, since he had to endure much, the gods had given muscles capable of great expenditure of energy. According to his own story, his hair began turning gray the week he entered high school, and the following summer his hair turned as white as if the sun had sucked out his blondness. The physician he went to see only shrugged his shoulders and didn’t know what to say to the eighteen-year-old boy with a full head of snow-white hair. His eyebrows remained blond, interspersed with some long black hairs. Ever since he’d sported a crew cut.

There must have been something unusual in his pigmentation, an irregular trait whose initial signs puzzled the experts who examined and evaluated students at the boarding school in the hunting lodge in Wiesenbad, assessing whether they met the strict criteria of the pure Nordic type, which scientists wanted to refresh genetically. The examiners came every other week from Berlin, from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, where his own mother worked as a eugenics researcher.

Most of those who proved unsuitable, because of the measurements’ results or because of behavioral problems, were not removed from the boarding school, however. The objective was to create in the same location a statistically measurable sample that could be followed later of individuals among whose ancestors there had been non-Germanic Aryans. Hans was examined for an especially long period. Already in his early childhood, dark hairs had mingled with blond ones in his eyebrows. Since one examination always followed another, it was impossible to know who belonged to which scientific category. At first he thought they were examining him so thoroughly because his mother was their colleague, but slowly he became suspicious, and not without reason, and he began to suspect himself.

It seemed to him that the dark hairs were becoming predominant, though on the basis of measurements and other characteristics he would be considered a pure Nordic type, like his mother, who sought, relentlessly and methodically, the scientific evidence to support her conviction. They had set up this special boarding school on their estate in Erzgebirge, where the Wolkenstein family had turned over their hunting lodge for a protracted period of time. When Hans first realized that something irregular had been detected about him in the examinations, something that might expose him once and for all, secretly he began to pull out the black hairs, but he could not cope with them; later there were so many he had to give up because of the pain. Even after the hair on his head had completely grayed, his pubic hair remained blond, which to this day he considered a special bit of good fortune, but on his legs, chest, and abdomen, later on his back, more and more dark hair appeared.

But beyond all the sensual peculiarities of their exteriors, it was their life stories that bound the three men together. Their fate had brought them together by accident and kept them firmly at one another’s sides. Obediently they bowed their heads to one another. Either because the exchange of intimate signals was more important than words or because it seemed expedient to keep things to themselves, they never spoke of any of the experiences they had lived through before they met. If one has a few things about which one cannot talk, involuntarily one does not talk about a hundred other things either.

They overcame the strict prohibitions, at most with cautious allusions.

All three of them worked for the state news agency, up on Nap Mountain, and the only thing that distinguished them from the other drudge translators was that they were given separate rooms on the top floor of the extremely ugly quasi-military building, far from the storms of local intrigues and the continual mayhem that hurried news agency work generates. Their three, almost completely empty, bright rooms opened into one another, officially as a separate unit, with André as their chief. They translated strictly confidential state documents from Hungarian into foreign languages — André to English, Ágost to French, Kovách to German and Russian. Eventually, these documents would reach an international public, but just when and how, or by what means, was decided not by the news agency director but in every case, and not always logically, by the highest political circles.

It wasn’t their linguistic abilities but their trustworthiness that was priceless.

They were now beginning to discuss one such document, namely the latest report of the Theoretical College, which all three of them had translated in the previous few days, though there were signs that in the highest circle mud wrestling was still going on about the text.

The infamous and powerful body, the highest circle, had only three members, each a well-known university professor, Ágost’s father among them, but he, because of his recent mental decline, could not have had much to do with this. Still, André brought up the subject in hopes that Ágost might know something from his family sources. Hansi had been well along in the Russian translation when they telephoned from the prime minister’s secretariat to say that for the time being they would not need the translations. This call made André suspect that something was amiss; he did not understand why the secretariat had put a stop to the project. He knew the prime minister had direct contact with the Russian secret service, and he also knew that decisions were made based on the prevailing situation or, rather, on how the prime minister was leaning in any given situation. And he wanted to know which direction it was this time. Officially, the prime minister had no contact with the highest circle; yet with one of its most powerful members, Ágost’s father, he did have a close personal relationship. During the Spanish Civil War he had worked as a political officer in the International Brigades, yet he belonged to the influential circle of clandestine nationalists. André believed the text would never be published officially in Hungarian but would be floated for a while in foreign versions — not in Russian, though, because from the Russian viewpoint something was wrong with it. But why should they let the translators know this unless they had a definite purpose in mind. It would also be nice to know what exactly the Russians found wrong with the text. They could just dump the finished translation in the wastebasket without calling attention to it. If the call from the prime minister’s secretary was a hint that the Russians had protested even before the official translation was completed, what did he really want to convey to the translators. It surely was not a secret to Hansi that they had other sources giving them advance notice of various officially planned actions. So then why the phone call. The prime minister couldn’t have just wanted them to know what everyone else knew, something on which everyone, including himself, was working diligently.

Ágost either knew nothing of any of this or wanted to take his revenge by not letting on that he did. He put on his poker face, which neither of his two friends could see through. All three of them had special sources of information they jealously guarded and concealed from one another.

At boarding school too there had been such ritual behaviors.

They could give thanks for their confidential jobs to the exceptional ability with which they wrote and spoke better in foreign languages than in their mother tongue. Though Hans von Wolkenstein’s father was Hungarian, his mother tongue was German: his mother to this day lived and worked as a district doctor on the Czech border, not far from the family estate in a small town named Annaberg, in Erzegebirge. The three men were in close contact with military reconnaissance, military defense, and the civilian secret service operating abroad. All three of them had high military rank and had received decorations for their activities, about which, of course, very few people knew. André had been considered one of the most successful agents in the British secret service until a few months after the war, when he changed horses and went over to the Russians, for whom he worked no less successfully. He was given just a half hour to leave his last workstation, in Eindhoven, Holland, and allowed to take with him only a briefcase. Hans was first sent to the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to visit his mother and settle in Dresden, then completely destroyed; after a while, to his great relief he was transferred to the Hague, then to Prague, and finally to Budapest. But after a few months, with no reasons given, they handed him over to the Hungarians; he received a new name, since then he had been called János Kovách, and in the same hysterical way they removed him from the intelligence service. In the same year, Ágost was called home for consultation from Bern, where he had been the cultural attaché in the Hungarian embassy but in fact in charge of the South European section of Hungarian military intelligence; not only could he not return to his former post, but he was not allowed to travel abroad again.

In their peculiar exile in Budapest, they met for the first time in the autumn of 1955.

For completely different reasons, they were being kept out of circulation. They had no idea how long this enforced rest would last, and none of them considered the possibility of a lifetime of uncertainty as a piece of good luck. All three of them were waiting, in silent anxiety, and this too was one of the delicate matters they would not discuss with one another or with other people.

Nothing, not with anyone.

Their common past restrained them, because they hoped it had not yet ended. Its strong inner dynamic spared them the need for thoughtless chatter. They were not ordinary people, their temperaments and their fates were not ordinary. Far from one another, at distant points of Europe, left to themselves, they had spent their childhoods in various boarding schools, their youth in various colleges. They had learned about solitude long before they met, André in wartime England, Ágost in neutral Switzerland, and Hans, in truly exceptional circumstances, in Nazi Germany, from where, through illegal routes, he had been taken to Moscow. The reason why among themselves they were compelled to use that secret and supranational sign language which can be acquired perfectly only in boys’ boarding schools was that to this day each dreamed, counted, and thought in his own separate language. They were also alike in not understanding Hungarians, whom they disdained, and this profound disdain had become one of their favorite topics. The tension between their thinking and their behavior, between their own linguistic needs and the Hungarian they used for communication was so great, so full of deviations and misunderstandings to be clarified, of uncharted areas and breakdowns, that without the guidance of this mute sign language, which seemed very stable to all three of them, finding their bearings would have been nearly impossible. But by using it, they involuntarily steered their attention back to a time, and placed their sensitivities in a position, about which they could hardly talk, or rather, which could not be reconciled with their stations in adult life.

Their lives had run aground on the treacherous shoals and sandbanks of the double consciousness of childhood timelessness and preadolescent solitude, from which they could not escape even when the waters came in abundance and the tide raised their boats. This is why they probably chose and enjoyed the dangerous life. Although they managed to make themselves and others believe they were responsible and thinking people, André’s stammering, Hans’s eternal jests relating to the lower body, and Ágost’s destructive apathy directed constantly at himself gave them away.

However, they did not have to make one another believe anything.

And anyway they couldn’t have done so, because they had no protection against one another. Left to themselves, and no less to their individual introspection, in their secret and common language they continued to play the game of their painfully missed families. The game had much more to do with children’s imagination than with adult lives. They did not have to step out of the fantastic world in which every gesture turns into a question of life and death and yet everything must be handled playfully. They sometimes altered and exchanged roles just as they had in school.

Although Hans was the biggest and strongest of them, not to mention that he spoke more languages, the role of the father was kept firmly in the hands of the oldest, André, who otherwise tended to be more sentimental and brutal. Without exception, in every boarding school the leading role is always that of the missing father. And because tenderness was one trait of the physically better constituted Hans, he could aspire only to the role of the mother. In their secret language, casting acquired a double meaning. Hans was much stronger and more important than a father, since he was taking care of the family in place of a real mother, yet he was only a deputy of the father, who needed care so he could guide the others unimpeded. This meant everybody. In the spirit of this duality, they struggled with each other for first place. Which also meant the clarification of the eternal question of who should have a bigger say in interfering with Ágost’s life.

They attached neither doubts nor hopes to the outcome of this ritual battle; since André was maintained in his autocratic role by the most secret fighting signal, he had no reason to fear he would lose his paternal authority. That, however, did not keep the other two, aside from short periods of cease-fire, from continuously trying to topple him, if necessary by underhanded means. Kronos must be blinded.

They appreciated one another strictly from the viewpoint of this struggle of mythic proportions. André was considered clever, though in dangerous situations a bit hesitant, Hans decidedly irresponsible, cynical, and dull, though in delicate situations inventive and reliable. With their basic constitutional traits these two confirmed their own casting but also placed Ágost in the role of the child to be taken care of, who meant more to Hans than his own children, for example, from whom he lived very far geographically and with whom he was not allowed to maintain contact. Ágost needed care, guidance, at times protection as well, and he was phlegmatic enough to endure this. In public he did what Hans considered proper, and to keep things simple he matched his opinions to André’s way of thinking. He wound himself around them, a tactic that matched the one he had followed as a child when from one day to the next he found himself at the Villeneuve boarding school, where they beat him on the very first night. He already spoke French quite fluently when his father took him to Switzerland, but the other children could not forgive his not having it as his mother tongue. He infuriated them with his mistakes. They wanted to expel the intruder. They counted his mistakes and then he had to endure silently the same number of slaps on his face in the bluish glitter of the night-light. Try as he might to be heroic, after the third or fourth slap he could not take it anymore — broke down. Then they gagged him, wrestled him to the ground, and wrapped him in a blanket; that’s what they’d been waiting for. All day long they waited for him to yell in Hungarian, cry and call out for his mother in Hungarian so they wouldn’t understand. For which he would earn extra punishment.

Every night they beat him, kicked him, tortured him, and stepped on him, until after a few weeks he found the solution.

He put himself under the guardianship of older boys. This meant humiliating slavery, he had to fawn and flatter, but in fact, he was using them as he would use objects needed for good camouflage. This turned into eternal servitude, yet in this way he could better conceal his shattered self-assurance, and that was more important for his survival.

Perhaps, unlike the two other men, he constitutionally did not have the urge to show his real self directly or show off before others. Occasionally, though, he would rebel against them, just as once he had done against his slave drivers, or he would pout and sulk ridiculously, behavior that also belongs to the ambiguous childhood repertory of extortion and resistance. On such occasions, André, looking daggers, would order Ágost back to his place, and/or Hans would enfold him in his huge body, warm him as a stove would, and in no time the two men would defuse the rebellion. This was precisely what Ágost wanted to achieve, this is how he rewarded them. In their game, this became the source of mutual enjoyment, because at one point the bigger boys had to bend down to their protégé, exclude their effusive tenderness from sexual proscriptions, and he could legally break free of them. They no longer had to play the roles of Zeus and Hera, at last they could behave as those lost distant parents, on whom they had given up completely, should have behaved with them.

Between women and girls, the differences in mental constitution, the fine mechanism of emotions, is probably even more important.

Between men and boys, it is the physical traits, the coarser or at least more visible signs, that dictate this secret casting of roles.

Size, muscle power, adroitness, or, more mysteriously, energy is linked to traits that are not completely physical. Of course, the possession of certain mental abilities can be advantageous, especially if the fine mechanism of emotions is also first rate. Not because they would be put to use — among boys this use is forbidden — but because it can serve their cunning and wickedness. André Rott was of smaller stature and more fragile than Kovách, who struggled with a number of illnesses usually attributed to women, such as migraine headaches, and who was always on guard against chest colds of a mysterious origin that were hard to cure. He gave the impression of a soft canine; not harmless, it could probably tear you apart but, if left in peace, it would loll around or curl up and snooze on the warm oven. Looking at André, however, one would have the impression of a looming clash; there are faces and physiques that emanate some unnamable restlessness.

Something radiates from them that demands a response, but not everyone is ready with one. His skull was unusually narrow and elongated. In relation to his body it was not out of proportion, but it resembled nothing so much as a spool. His forehead was bony, lumpy, and convex, his nose thin, hooked, with a very prominent ridge. He exuded rigor, authority, and strength; his dark hair and the bluish stubble bristling under his skin deepened this impression. Two of his facial features not only softened and greatly reduced the grievous sternness of his appearance, but were also enchanting, alluring, enthralling. One was the deep dimple on his forceful chin, which was difficult to shave, and the other, his dark eyes, accentuated by very long lashes; his soulful glances.

Looking into his eyes was like entering a labyrinth; if one didn’t stand on guard, one might not find the way out.

Added to this were the almost repulsively thick, purplish red lips, the lower one jutting out a bit.

The same shade, hinting at hyperemia, was noticeable on his nipples with their swollen areolae when he took off his shirt. Or when he withdrew the abundantly creased foreskin from the blunt-ended, strongly rimmed, shiny bulb of his penis. This bashfully rapid yet demonstratively exhibitionist movement was also part of their sign language. This was the most secret signal that made his fatherly authority incontestable: his prick. Showing it meant a prolonged warning. And its effect lay not necessarily in its size. Not showing it, avoiding the opportunities to show it, meant withdrawing himself, as though withholding love, the denial of the greatest trust, a deliberate punishment.

What once has been seared into one’s brain will be missed, or at least will need occasional reinforcement, because its mere sight is evanescent. It is in this sense that size and strength are meaningful — but in proportions, relative positions, shapes and characteristics, everything that speaks of activity, of glowing energy, everything that can be intuited but not shared, in a word, everything that had to do with aesthetics in the category of the taboo. And of course all this belonged to the language, placed under the obligation of silence, that every male understands well no matter how vague or distorted but does not speak because of the constant threat of death, and very often will refrain from even touching in his thoughts. Boys can learn to understand this language fully and speak it flawlessly, without distortions, only in the corridors, sleeping halls, and baths of boarding schools, where, left to their own devices, they must fight for their existence and position. Not by chance was the new cabin attendant so upset when he ran off. He understood, and had good reason not to acknowledge, what he saw and comprehended. Most men who grow up in the bosom of their families behave stupidly and obtusely. Before he reached the end of the corridor and must have disappeared into the dark passage leading to the women’s dressing rooms, the ticket-taker woman enthroned behind her table called after him.

Where in the hell are you running like that, my dear Jani. I envy you your legs.

The new attendant stopped. Confused and surprised, curious to know what the woman might want from him, he took a step back.

I just want to tell Uncle Józsi right away, he offered quickly, but did not explain what he wanted to tell his boss; instead, he approached the ticket-taker’s table with such cautious steps it was as if with his locomotion he was already revealing to her something very meaningful and particularly confidential.

He was afraid of this female. In the circumstances, of course, he pretended to seek her graces.

The luminous ticket taker, who each morning applied thick layers of baby cream to her face, did not even bother to look up from her crocheting. She could not be easily swept off her feet with this transparently mysterious behavior. The crochet pattern book lay on the table before her; she was counting the number of stitches on the appropriate diagram. Her fingers kept working fast, and the counting made her lips move too. Crocheting was not some thoughtless entertainment. She worked for marketers who took the merchandise to the countryside. When she reached a round number that was easy to remember, she quickly looked up.

Didn’t you see him go over to the steam, my dear Jani. He walked right in front of you. And you’re not allowed in there.

Is that right, the boy asked dumbly. I didn’t notice him going to the steam.

You probably fell asleep again, Jani. What are you doing again at night.

From the moment he laid eyes on her, the young man had hated this woman the way he hated his own mother. But now he couldn’t protest, he couldn’t say he hadn’t fallen asleep and did see the chief attendant go to the steam section. No matter how he hoped, how he tried to be smart, his lies never managed to cover over his other lies or never fitted together properly. A small error always managed to slip in, or something got stuck out of place and made him vulnerable. And this female seemed to get her kicks by constantly observing him. She was keeping an eye on everybody. To divert her irritating attention, he leaned across the table and lowered his voice to a whisper.

Will you look at what those three are doing there.

But the fat woman did not look where the new attendant wished her to look, and instead shot a sharp glance directly at him. As if to say slightingly, well, look at him, what drivel he’s unloading again.

And don’t bother me just now, Janika, she said aloud, you can see I’m counting.

She was indeed counting, her small narrow lips, painted bright red, were moving, though it would have taken no effort to leave off counting.

The truth was, she could see right through this young man and felt that if she did not set him straight, he might get her and the others into a lot of trouble. They had a hunch why he had been transferred here in such haste. Nobody had asked the management for a new attendant, and it didn’t help that the chief was dead set against hiring one. No parting excuse occurred now to the new attendant that would let him quietly retreat; he kept standing helplessly in front of the woman whose goal was exactly to have him stand like that. Let him stay here, with her. He shouldn’t be allowed to go to the cloakroom. Occasionally he still managed to go over there and help the two younger women; they too couldn’t stand the ticket taker, this Rózsika, for trying to lord it over them.

He did not understand this system at all. It seemed to him that in this establishment, this woman had more authority than the chief cabin attendant. And once he realized this, it was as though he were carried along by a warmer feeling for her, in addition to his hatred; maybe he should be closer to her. Sometimes one is ashamed of such strong feelings. Because he’d like to rub elbows with the powerful ones but without drawing attention to it, so people wouldn’t envy him for this little advantage. He wanted to make this woman understand his unusual position, which, come to think of it, meant an equality in their ranks. After all, he too had special assignments, giving him a more important role than his official position indicated.

If he were hindered, however, he wouldn’t be able to carry out his important task properly.

You people out there in Kispest, Janika, probably keep pigs too, said the woman unexpectedly when she stopped her counting. Make those tasty garlic sausages, don’t you.

Please, just take a look, Aunt Rózsika, over there, look what they’re doing, the young man insisted, and because of his impatience, he no longer whispered. Leaning all the way across the table, he spoke directly into the shiny face of the woman, who relentlessly went on crocheting.

And this was indeed one of those not too frequent moments when the three men unceremoniously abandoned themselves to the tenderness they felt for one another.

They knew exactly what they were doing. They were also aware of the limits in their mutual contact. For the outside observer, of course, all this had a disquieting effect.

André was still crouching in his barely gathered bathrobe, his hands holding Ágost’s knees, but he did not wish to inflict more pain. On the contrary, he was about to do something very pleasant. His eyes had welled up in his helpless anger, he wanted to stifle his sadistic emotions, beat back his fury. He had come up with the silly prank to get Ágost to be here with them instead of going to the Sports Baths with Gyöngyvér. Of course Viola hadn’t sent a message or arranged anything with them. She hadn’t because, though she came for a swim every morning with her husband, there was never more time than to say a quick good-morning and, on rare occasions, to exchange a few innocent, cheerful words. André was left with nothing but total humility. With the bowing of his head before the other man’s pain of unknown origin, which could be an illness, weakness of soul, blissful torment of a new love, or an unhappy old love, or something entirely different. And to bow his head even if he understood nothing and had to fathom, terrified, his own treacherous intentions.

André had a penchant for biting sarcasm that he found difficult to restrain when it came to Ágost, because he himself did not understand the whole business. He had no sense of humor, without which sadism really cannot be understood, neither one’s own nor anybody else’s. How was he to understand, on a more profound level, this peculiar torment, this depression; how to submerge in it, how to talk about it with the other, if he could not ward it off himself no matter what method he used. At the same time, he saw that the process was unstoppable; no personal sacrifice would bring it to a halt. Ágost was sinking, falling, and it would take long weeks before they could pull him back again from the depths.

At such times a crude stubbornness settled in his sensitive face; utter rejection. Maybe that was his true countenance. As if he regarded everything around him, people and objects, as worthless, disgusting and contemptible. His deep-set eyes narrowed completely. André looked at him with aversion; though Ágost was no longer fleeing from him, he knew he should surrender himself to this unknown and awful danger. No, maybe he should tear it apart, bite it off. Except there was no place to begin at, because the danger had no substance. He only knew what to do with things he could consider objects. And this was the characteristic he least liked in himself. This constant desire to act. For which the other two men often laughed at him, because all three of them had to remain at a reasonable distance from their own actions. But still. With his palms, he squeezed Ágost’s knees together again. He was struggling not to do anything violent, bad, or painful, and to allow no sarcasm to creep into what he was doing. Luckily, he couldn’t say a word. And like a supplicant who not only demonstrates humility but begs for mercy, he suddenly placed his forehead on the closed knees. He was not completely alone with this movement of his; Hans was also doing his job. With his large hand, he ruffled Ágost’s hair again, grabbed it and pulled it down until it reached the bowed head of André crouching before them. Ágost did not resist, he gave in, as if to say, go ahead, do it, it makes no difference to me one way or the other what you do. And when his forehead touched the top of André’s head, Hans added his own white-haired head to the other two.

His slightly wet, gray stubble had a light scent, while André’s thick dark hair had a powerful one. They remained like this for quite some time, with involuntarily closed eyes. They were enjoying, each in his own way, their warm breathing. In this too André was the strongest, he was practically panting. His breath was permeated with the raw scent of his gums, tongue, and palate. Hans instantly joined in the panting, taking over André’s rhythm, he played with it, enlarged it, clowned with it. As if to say to Ágost, you see, this one is really like an animal, but he still loves you. And with that, putting his other arm across André’s neck, he clasped and held the three of them together.

Hans’s breath had a sweet fragrance.

They were sitting at the end of the corridor in the darkness of their closed eyes, each in his own darkness.

In the illuminated hothouse silence, nothing could be heard for a long time save the wind and the splashing rain.

The only problem with these delicacies, Janika, piped up the fat woman near the entrance, slowly and softly, as if telling herself a story while crocheting, is that they have a strong smell. That’s the problem. And you can brush your teeth all you want. Of course, I also like it, there’s no better breakfast than head cheese; you can season it with a little vinegar, still it comes back from your stomach. The doctor says that one’s mouth stinks only because of bad teeth, but I say it stinks from the stomach too. And in places with high humidity, like here for instance, you can sense everything more strongly in the air.

She looked up for a second. She saw that the young man had misunderstood her, turned away, and was already becoming red from the neck up. She didn’t wait for the blush to overtake the young man completely because she wanted to spare him her own lustfully gloating look.

I don’t know how you people over in the Gellért did things, she continued, looking at her crocheting, but here we know what to do and we stick to the rules. Our guests are pretty keen on it too, you’ll see. They notice everything, and I mean everything, and they also have something to say about everything. If they’re convinced that the water in the men’s pool is at least two degrees warmer than it should be, then it’s two degrees warmer. Another might tell you that today it was colder. Warmer or colder, I let them say whatever they want. It’s all the same to me. If they want me to, I can take the water’s temperature ten times a day. You do it for them, show it to them, because you never know who is who. Later you’ll find out, believe me; you’ll know exactly who is who. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is, Janika. I’m only telling you; don’t argue with them. Well, will you look at this, you’ll say, it’s really colder, you’re right, and that makes them happy. Or they’re happy because it’s warmer. Just make sure you do things that keep them happy. You don’t have to let them do everything they want, but most things they want to do, you can let them. You, of course, don’t know it yet, you can’t have that much experience, on account of your age, but believe me, people are similar, very similar, but they’re also very different. Sometimes we play on how similar they are, sometimes on how different, you can’t learn more than this, Janika, not even from Uncle Józsi, believe me. She stopped for a moment, and since there was no response, neither questions nor objections, not a peep, she added almost apologetically, that’s right, Janika, there are many kinds of people, no end to the variety.

She wasn’t impatient.

She waited for him to process everything properly and when she looked up she noted happily that she had managed to sidetrack the young man for quite a time. The new attendant was standing before her, all red, nervously switching from one foot to the other, almost kicking them to the side, as if he couldn’t control himself or his limbs were about to fall off. Actually, she liked him. He was a pretty nice boy. She liked his wide peasant face, his protruding cheekbones, now in tremulous motion, his milky skin, his angrily knitted brows. She pitied him a little for being so shiftless.

Motherless. That’s what popped into her mind first, and afterward she could not get rid of this conclusion.

Well, why don’t you go about your business, Janika, she added firmly. Hose down your corridor; it’s getting to be ten o’clock already. The chief won’t wash it for you, I can assure you.

But this was too much for the new attendant, more than he could bear.

He weighed things for a second, and the richly bejeweled woman could see well on his face what he was struggling with, still he could no longer restrain his irritation.

Now don’t tell me, just don’t say that my mouth stinks, he said, fuming.

I didn’t say that, Janika, I didn’t say anything about your mouth, came the woman’s dignified severe reply, now why would I say such a nasty thing. But you probably eat head cheese or garlic sausage every morning, that I’m willing to bet you anything. I can even detect the red pepper. Maybe your little bride likes it, but it offends others. And take this as an honest remark, nothing else, and I made it straight to you.

So you people will tell me what I should eat for breakfast.

I won’t tell you what to have for breakfast, sonny, but if the chief took it into his head to tell you, well, that might not be such a good thing for you.

The new attendant felt himself shuddering because he would have liked to slap the large, shiny, calm face of this woman, or to kick over her table. This rotten woman had found out not only that he had a bride but also that he ate sausages for breakfast.

Which nobody in his right mind could comprehend or accept.

In the Lukács Baths, regardless of the season, cabin attendants always wore white linen pants and white sleeveless undershirts; only the bath masters wore short-sleeved white shirts. He now felt as if an icy wind had rushed at his bare shoulders, as when an icy wind clings to hot perspiration. But wind does not cling to anything. What happened, he asked himself, alarmed, what has this woman done to me; what’s happening to me here. Which did not necessarily refer to the place he was standing. The question grew large and loud, though in fact he couldn’t say a word. But he too, deeply disgusted, acknowledged the stinking smell of garlic. A dried-out, mute mouth, from which he could not disgorge the smell that nauseated him. He had cleaned up enough puke, pumped enough toilet bowls blocked with shit and toilet paper, and now it was as if all his experiences were pouring back into his mouth, as if he were retching them up from his stomach. Exactly the way this rotten woman had described it to him. He mustered out of the army six months ago and thought things would be better because in the army they were constantly fucking with him. He had to hose down and wash muddy corridors; in the laundry room, he was the one who had to stuff the shitty underpants into the machines, and they made him scrape all the soapy hair from the drains and gratings. If he didn’t hustle fast enough, his trainer cursed his whore mother and he had to take it, he had to take whatever they dished out. Still, he had never felt so humiliated, done with such cunning, as he did this time. No matter where he looked, he saw nothing but closed doors, and nothing had changed on the rotten woman’s smooth face. Then why am I feeling this rotten cold on my back. As if he could never break free of those motionless eyes; of the ridiculous eyebrows drawn on her shiny forehead; of the blood-red beads rattling on her neck, ears, and arms. No matter how scared he was, how much he cursed her, how he raged inside, this female saw it all, everything, because on him everybody could always see everything.

To scream; he would have liked to scream, but he stifled it; the intended scream turned into a pitiful whimper, barely passing his throat. Which surprised him so much he didn’t know what to do. Suddenly his tears began to flow and something gripped his throat, squeezing from it one last pitiful whimper. His body stiffened, he ceased shaking his feet, and he stood in front of the woman’s table as if he were nailed down. In his misery, he alternately threw his head back and let it drop forward, all the way to his chest. His crying bubbled up in spurts. His face is also cute, thought the ticket taker, without giving any visible indication of her thoughts. But what can one do with such a big crybaby. She was prepared for everything, including the possibility that the new attendant might lose his mind and even attack her. She was fairly immobilized in her corner post next to the entrance; she wouldn’t have a chance to rush out. In a fraction of a second, she took all the necessary preventive measures. And luckily, those strong men were still there at the end of the corridor.

She kept the ball of yarn in a plastic bag, the bag resting in her lap. She now lifted the bag and, along with the completed crocheting, wrapped it around her finger, put it expectantly on the table. She quickly turned the needle outward from between her large thick fingers, so that it protruded from between her blood-red nails like a dangerous weapon. She will defend herself. She leaned forward a little. If the young man attacked, he would first upset the table. She readied her legs. But I’ll poke out those little pig eyes of his if he attacks me.

The men at the end of the corridor must not have noticed anything. Their intimate moment ended quickly when Ágost, not too gently, shoved them away. Which didn’t mean that he managed to break free of their embrace.

Come on, let me go, he said petulantly. And please, stop pawing me. I’m sick of both of you.

Which sounded to the other two men like an unhoped-for confession of love. They burst into laughter, huffing and puffing with delight. A victory that had to be celebrated and enjoyed.

They often pronounced things that were true, only to forestall their true effects. Or, conversely, they would tell a lie in a way that would make it transparently obvious. Hans chuckled haltingly, André roughly and too loudly. They enjoyed it when their words did not express what they meant and strengthened their secret dialogue with its concealed meaning. Ágost’s aim, however, was to stop them from using the language of their little secret dialogue. There was an off-limits area here that neither they nor any strangers were allowed to enter. Ágost too enjoyed the situation, enjoyed the game. He had nothing against Hans’s hesitant chuckles and André’s violent guffaws, these adolescent sounds that might have struck an outsider’s ears as unpleasant. Their irritating exaggeration only meant that they accepted the cards Ágost was dealing them. Or at least pretended to accept them.

Even if he couldn’t get out of the noose immediately, he was moving in the right direction.

To avoid letting their guard down and entering the off-limits area, almost everything conveyed in their own language meant the opposite of what it would normally mean. They had never entered the forbidden area.

No woman was allowed to enter it either.

If he succeeded in getting out of the noose, if even his secret family could not hold him back from doing anything anymore, then he was a free man. At last, he would be alone; he would fall. And although his two friends were high-minded and noble-spirited men who until now had instinctively done everything to prevent this accident, they would not sink so low as to limit anyone in his self-destructive freedom. On the contrary, in their own considered interest they would allow it, and would enjoy it too. They would affix to it the blood-red stamp of nihil obstat. So be it. Indeed, existence has no palpable significance. Let him do it. Anything. Everybody should be allowed to do anything.

And because this current situation had arisen so suddenly, Ágost was on the verge of speaking. This would have been the other solution: to give, or at least to lend some meaning to certain things for limited periods of time. His exasperation was credible because it referred to his own genuine helplessness. He did not have the strength, or the humor, to look into his own nihilism, even though he was the only one among them who did not entertain notions about a better future.

To simplify things, he should have freed himself of his inability to speak.

He could not claim he had no language for what he wanted to say; the whole damn thing, with all its intricacies, was not so complicated that one couldn’t intelligently relate it. Boys, he could have said lightheartedly, the stinking situation is that for months my life has been completely void of joy. But this he could not say, could not ease his terrible anxieties, because these vultures well knew he wasn’t impotent and he wished to deflect their attention only because his mind was struggling with even greater, more insoluble problems. However, he wanted to say something impressive, weighty, which might even be partially true, only to stop them from involuntarily drifting into the forbidden area where they would glimpse one another’s true faces. Or he could have said something else. Boys, the problem is that I’ve fallen in love again. This sentence could have been easier to say. Le coup de foudre. Yet it might have carried them into even more dangerous territory. After all, these vultures well knew that he was not in love, as he had never been and never would be, but again he wanted desperately to solve something; he also knew that he was fleeing. He wished he were at least impotent, if life had to be so utterly dreary and joyless.

At this moment a terrible scream accompanied by a deafening clatter suddenly ended the intimate little story of the three men.

Someone must have fallen headlong on the floor, or was being beaten; loud, heavy sounds of a body hitting or bouncing off some hard surface mingled with, but probably preceded, the clatter of a window that might have smashed or been broken. At the same time, an object tipped over and landed on the stone floor with a resounding thump.

A woman’s voice shouted for help.

Hans jumped up, banging against the bodies of the other two, and, probably in fright, tore the towel from his neck; but by the time all three of them looked toward the source of the din and, overcoming their surprise, were able to see, they found only the ominous tranquillity of the corridor.

An upended table, a body on the wetly glittering yellow tile floor.

The wind rushing through the broken window was literally shrieking.

What happened, Rózsika, Hans shouted to the ticket taker, who stood, leaning over between the legs of the turned-over table, like someone who has just knocked the other person down and has no clue what to do with him.

Maybe she killed him.

True, she had prepared to defend herself, pressing her massive legs against the crossbar, but in the end she didn’t have to. She had toppled the table in surprise and mainly in fright. She wanted to help the hapless boy. She saw him turn pale and when she looked again she saw his eyes turn inward, or rather she saw only the whites of his eyes, which was frightening enough. The eyeballs turned away in some direction. But she did not think, even then she did not think anything of it. Though she noticed that on the young man’s slightly open lips the saliva had become frothy, and he was shouting something awful, as though he had to say or ask something. And then his entire falling body seemed to have stiffened into this one enormous shout because it was so hard, so hard to say what he wanted.

Ágost remained indifferent, as one whose eyes barely acknowledge what is in front of them. André’s sharp features took on a look of childlike surprise, however, and of dread that he might have something to do with what was happening around him.

Hans was the first to gauge and understand the situation.

Verdammt, schon wieder, he said to himself, annoyed but quietly, damnation, here we go again, and with lightning speed he grabbed the flat pink bottle of André’s body cream from the bench and, pushing the other two men aside, took off at a run. Occasionally they used foreign languages when talking among themselves, but this peculiar little comment was something else, more like something returning from the depths of time. He ran with giant steps, losing a slipper as he did. And he was shouting. Get me something soft, Rózsika. Your pillow or sweater or anything. He demanded these things as one used to coping with similar situations. But his shouting failed to reach the woman’s consciousness, though all she had to do was turn around for these objects. She did not understand what pillow, what kind of sweater, what would they be for since the man was already bleeding to death. She stood there, above the table, like a statue. And the body on the floor, as though wanting to jump up, flexed into an arc. Blood was flowing from under his head. It was spreading slowly over the wet ribbing of the yellow tile floor. The sight of blood was what held the woman captive.

The blood is pouring out, she said softly, almost reverently.

While running, Hans realized he hadn’t taken off his bathing trunks; by the time he reached the scene, with the cream bottle in his hand, he managed to shed his blue bathrobe. The corridor, the shrieking wind, his running steps, all of this seemed to him to have occurred before and more than once.

The blood is pouring out, said the woman for the second time, still in a quiet, soft voice.

Stop talking so much and let me have your pillow, Rózsika, he said quickly, and knelt by the body on the stone floor.

He saw the flashing of tightly clenched teeth from behind the frothy, slightly open lips. Whether he had bitten his tongue in half or not, it was no longer possible to pry open his teeth. There was not a second to lose. He simply dropped the cream bottle, which was now superfluous, and with both hands, as if gently embracing the boy, shoved, stuffed, pressed, and pushed his blue bathrobe under the arching body. The last time he had done something like this was in the main-floor shower room of the boarding school in Wiesenbad. He was now waiting for the pillow. The tonic convulsion began to ease up. As if the body were relaxing on the soft bathrobe, but this did not mean the fit was over.

The blood is pouring from his head, repeated the woman for the third time.

Hans was concentrating on the young man’s outturned eyes, white frothy lips, the rhythm of the spasms, but he also sensed the possibility of being swept away by a terrible flood of hysterics about to gush forth from the motionless body of this woman by the table. He felt its imminence, and he was right.

Oh, my god, she squealed, beside herself, do something already. Blood’s pouring from his head. Can’t you see how it’s flowing out, there, right there, it’s pouring out, she screeched. Blood is pouring from his head.

Hans turned around slowly, looked up at her, and replied wearily. Of course I see it, I see everything, Rózsika. And then he bellowed so loudly that the woman’s enormous body trembled like a leaf. Get back to your work. And give me that fucking pillow.

At least she now knew what to do.

She handed over the pillow from her chair and then gave him her thick hand-knitted cardigan too, but simultaneously protested that no matter what happened she wouldn’t let Hans talk to her like this. She assumed he had said fucking in some sort of connection with her.

Well, said André at the far end of the corridor, laughing with relief, if I’m not mistaken it’s an honest-to-goodness epileptic fit.

And before turning to go, André and Ágost looked at each other as experienced diplomats assessing the damage caused by warfare and taking measures to prevent its consequences. André had to acknowledge his defeat very quickly. And Ágost had to overcome the easy joy he felt about his unexpected good luck. It was there, glittering in his deep-set eyes.

And because he did overcome it without effort, because it was not hard to refrain from gloating, he felt happier and the old sparkle returned to his eyes. That could only make André happy too. Because, owing to an unexpected incident, they had gotten away with it: they wouldn’t have to cope with a three-week depression. He added a little nod that meant appreciation and acknowledgment on the one hand, and on the other a warning that the matter was only postponed and ultimately Ágost would not get away with it without a detailed confession.

And with that, they broke eye contact. André retired to his cabin to get dressed at last. If Kovách could take care of everything, why should he, André, bother with the epileptic fit of a complete stranger. Ágost went into the cabin attendant’s dark booth because he thought he should tell the bathhouse to call for a physician. He was not especially shaken by the attendant’s seizure, but he always liked to help Hans, to see him selflessly and instinctively offer his services to others. Ágost lacked this ability. He found a tattered sheet fastened to the wall by a thumbtack, listing the internal telephone numbers; it had been corrected many times. He saw the entry for the physician on duty but could not make out the number. He wished the whole country to hell with its idiotic lists stuck all over the place.

There was no dial tone; he kept tapping the receiver’s cradle.

In the meantime, the empty main-floor corridor came to life, filling up with people attracted by the frightening screams, everybody running. Half-dressed customers and desperate but helpless staff members. An older cabin attendant, with a horrible war wound, two shiny dents on his skull, two younger women from the cloakroom who would have gladly taken care of the young man, if only to irritate Rózsika, and of course the wavy-haired swimming instructor, that slightly decrepit nervous dandy who at this hour had no students. Everybody was talking at once; questions and irrelevant comments flew everywhere, as if they couldn’t see what had happened, while Rózsika continued with her ever louder indignation. The seizure moved from the tonic phase to the clonic one, with the body on the stone floor rapidly alternating between contraction and relaxation; the face looked as though a terrible hand had crumpled it. And blood kept spreading in the ribbing of the yellow tiles, and only Hans noticed it was becoming more watery.

And the pillow was still warm from the indignant woman’s large bottom. André waited for the helpless body to relax so he could thrust the pillow between the floor and the boy’s head. As he lifted the stiff head, he reached into thick blood and felt as if his finger had slipped into the open wound. Because the head is full of capillaries, it bleeds quickly and profusely when injured, but the bleeding can also subside just as quickly. He was hoping the head injury was not serious. The tonic and clonic spasms were alternating more vehemently, which loosened the tensors in the young man’s neck and, as a result, the body writhing in opposite directions was literally bouncing the lifeless head on the red pillow. He waited patiently and there came an opportune moment when he could shove the pink bottle deftly between the young man’s teeth.

In the meantime, the hubbub above them seemed to be growing louder.

In addition, exactly during the worst moments, more bathers arrived. They could barely squeeze by the struggling body on the floor, the long legs of the kneeling man, the upended table, and the loudly protesting hefty woman hovering above them. Two of the new arrivals could not even get inside. Two frightened teenage girls kept peeking curiously through the always steamy windbreaks.




The Real Leistikow


On an empty wall of the aunt’s dining room hung one large and noteworthy oil painting, a Leistikow* that could be found in albums and catalogues and occasionally at exhibitions. Sometimes porters would arrive, take it off the wall, pack it, and take it away. They would bring it back after a long time and then it would hang on the large empty wall the way it was hanging there on this winter morning.

Its perspective was deepened by the shadows of branches swaying in the strong wind.

Catalogues provided the essential data of the painting, of course, such as its size and title, they noted that it was a signed work, but at the aunt’s request they merely indicated that the painting was privately owned. As a child, Döhring often wondered about this. Here was a valuable object in the world, unobtainable for most people, and even its location had to be kept secret. As he saw it, it was only thanks to a strange series of lucky coincidences that he could at any time view a painting others could not see whenever they wished. What this capricious series of coincidences was, he did not understand; what is coincidence, what is sheer luck. Later, he probably wouldn’t have enrolled to study philosophy had these questions not remained firmly in his mind. The painting was mysterious enough to stimulate his imagination.

He could start at any point; at most, he would become bored, but he had never gotten to the end of the road.

Sometimes he caught himself arriving at the same spot; this too is familiar.

Why he, and not someone else, and why this painting when so many others, also privately owned, were concealed from him. When gazing at the painting, he took delight in his own ambition. If he could only fathom this secret system or chain or mechanism that conceals the knowledge of important things from some people while exposing it shamelessly to others — or rather, that sometimes hides and sometimes shows it — then he would be onto something, then he would know and surely understand things.

When it comes to good luck, the world is inexhaustible. True, the same goes for bad luck, in that the world keeps a great many things concealed. On his first afternoon in Berlin, when he pedaled up the treacherously long and boggy slope and, having reached the ridge lined with tall pine trees, wanted to continue on his way, his mouth would have fallen open with amazement had his bicycle not tipped to the side and, with momentum still carrying him along, he almost fell off. Which was embarrassing because several people noticed, a woman and an elderly man for sure, and this sort of clumsiness is usually pretty funny. In the end, he managed to stay upright, grasping the handlebars, both feet on the ground, but the pedals had pounded and bruised his ankle, shin, and calf. He was in pain, sharp stabbing pain, yet he almost shouted with amazement because now he was standing inside Leistikow’s painting. He never would have thought that there was such a sky anywhere in the world, such reflection of light, this kind of lightness, this kind of darkness.

It was among the famous optical peculiarities of that Leistikow that whoever looked at the painting thought its shape was a perfect square, while in fact there was a big difference between the picture’s height and width. And that was the first thing Döhring immediately understood about the painting when he found himself at the original location. The height was filled with a carefully painted empty sky, a pure, cloudless, crystalline, dense sky; a shadow-dappled heavy earth took up the width of the painting, and from the deep throat of this earth a motionless little lake with its leaden surface stared up impassively at the sky. And the sky was the same here too, where he was standing; it had the same texture and volume, the motionless surface of the tiny lake was pulling it down into the ominously darkening depths the same way, tugging into itself the airy perspective of infinity. Leistikow had surely painted his picture at the same spot where Döhring was standing now.

Perhaps in the same hour of the same day of the same month, though one could not claim that nothing had changed during the intervening hundred years.

In the deep valley, on the steep shores of the tiny lake, in the last, waning, reddish beams of the sun, naked people were standing and lolling about. There weren’t too many of them anymore; some were in pairs, others at a respectable distance from one another, alone.

Up to his ankles in the water, a slightly built man with a nearly black suntan stood facing the weakening sun; he swiveled playfully from his waist up when his friend called to him from the shore. Light shone through the outline of the sun worshipper’s body, slid down on his chest muscles, his abdomen, now indented by his turning, and highlighted the rich crests, ranges, and loose shrubs of his hair. His friend, though, was his very opposite, a white giant whose fuzzy skin seemed never to have made contact with the sun. He was shouting short, incomprehensible, though probably funny or sarcastic words while rifling inside a large red bag. Döhring laid his bike on the ground and sat down at the edge of the slope. At first, as if doing it only for a moment and while looking around him, he absentmindedly rubbed his ankle, his aching shin and calf, and then rolled up the leg of his tight pants as far as he could, to see what he had done to himself. Still, his eyes caught the sunburned man just as he was shrugging his shoulders, as though he really wasn’t interested in hearing what his friend was saying, and turning back, apparently offended, to face the sun. Döhring had to take a good look because he felt that while rubbing his ankle, his fingers had slipped into sticky blood.

The bruise wasn’t bleeding much, but it kept oozing from under the skin.

He did not keep on looking at his leg because he was worried or in pain; he was only putting on a little show for the woman who had noticed his faltering with his bike and who, with her large strong teeth, had had a good laugh on his account. He also wanted to avoid looking at all those naked bodies, somehow to curb his uncontrollable curiosity, which might have taken him in who knows how many different directions.

From behind her glasses at the tip of her nose, the woman steadily kept on looking at him, sizing him up, every part of him, as if touching his skull, his shoulder, reaching into the hollow of his open legs, grabbing his feet, and she kept on steadfastly grinning at him. Which was difficult to understand exactly, because the person she belonged to was lying right next to her. And there was no doubt about that. The most interesting thing was that the moment he laid eyes on them he knew everything about them. He was no more than ten meters away. This large woman was lying on her stomach, on a pink terry-cloth towel, her chin propped on her fists, an open book before her, her strong breasts pressed down and facing in two directions under her heavy upper body. The slope with its shining, thick grass was so steep she had to find support for her velvet-smooth sandy limbs; she pulled her thigh a little under her, which made her huge buttocks push upward, her crack open. Döhring had never seen so much indecency in one place.

Once a long time ago, however, he had been close to it, on vacation at the seashore when, unsuspecting, he found himself at the edge of a cliff, and down below him, like thick sausages clinging to one another on a grill, naked people were toasting themselves in the sun; his father had pulled him away, shouting that this was dangerous, it’s forbidden, never, never again, he must promise him, this was a sandbank that might cave in anytime; but Döhring sensed the danger had to do with something quite different from the sandbank, and the incident had remained in his memory as a secret excitement that he should look into sometime.

And now he took a closer look at the injury to his leg.

It was interesting that on his shinbone, along the edge of the scraped-off skin, blood, and a clear watery fluid sat in separate drops. He looked at these drops for a long time and then smoothed them carefully with his finger as though it would be better to combine the two. Having to pay attention simultaneously to several things, he instinctively aimed his performance in different directions. In one corner of his eye, he could see an older man who stood on the slope with spread legs, from whom he had to avert his eyes at all costs, given that the standing man was following his every move eagerly and arrogantly, and probably wanted to attract his attention with some barely concealed public indecency. He did not look in his direction, wouldn’t risk it, absolutely not, though the man was doing everything to make him look. It seemed incredible what this older man was doing to and with himself in the safety of pretense. Yet he could not gain Döhring’s undivided attention, because right next to the pink terry-cloth towel, on an equally large turquoise-blue towel, lay the coffee-brown girl who belonged to the bespectacled woman, whom Döhring dared look at only in stolen glances.

He had to defend himself from her. His breath quickened because of her; no matter how stealthy and hurried his glimpses, the large-bodied bony and ugly sportswoman, her wild red hair gathered in a bun yet with many of its oily strands hanging loose, would see, understand, and jealously follow them, thus keeping him from making any free, natural moves. But he had to risk it. The girl was probably Ethiopian, still a child practically, her limbs tender and delicate like finely carved small rods. Everything around the two women was chaotic: hastily strewn clothes and shoes, a box torn in half from which crackers had spilled on the grass, a large paper bag from which fruit had rolled out on the towels, a few peaches, a pulpy pear, grapes scattered everywhere. And their positions were no less amazing than the girl’s beauty or the two women’s visible relationship; the coffee-brown girl slept sweetly on the downy towel in this blood-red late summer twilight on the lawn whose green was darkening into black. Leistikow also mixed green with lots of black, here and there with steel blue, ocher, a bit of brick red; from this combination, one could see that in only a few hours, along with the impending night, autumn would arrive.

Sunshine was still glowing at the top of the pines’ loose branches; dark twilight covered the tall trunks. The forest breathed cool air and exuded warmth; the valley trapped the powerful scent of resin. Curled into herself, she slept on her side like an embryo turned woman. Her lips were like a languid purple moth, her hair a black dense forest of rings and curls. Her fingernails all but glowed. Her temple rested on her clasped hands, her tightly clamped bony knees were pulled all the way to her bosom and her thin arms pressed her small, firm, aggressive, and pointed breasts together so that one large nipple spilled out over her arm: raw pink, raw clotted purple on the bluish-brown skin.

He dared to graze these places with his eyes only twice, but he had to return to them; he wanted to return a third time. One more time, the last time, as if making a vow to the bespectacled woman and to himself.

He felt grateful, very grateful that he could sit here, because from here, from this higher place, he could see directly into the shady warmth of the Ethiopian girl’s dark lap, and her labia were open. And nobody gave him permission for this, for something like this there is no permission anywhere in the world. For some reason, the entire vision was like a forgotten summer afternoon to which, against his own wish, he would like to return.

He imagined seeing the luxuriant pubic hair.

Then all at once many things began to happen, frustrating Döhring’s anticipations and making it impossible to keep track of them.

The older man, who was bald and muscular but already tending to pudginess, and whose entire body was covered with graying hair, was stroking himself with ostentatious indifference, as though his hand had merely gone astray, or as if he were scratching himself lazily while impassively staring out into the great wide world. As if he were not trying to charm Döhring, but was merely looking over and past his head to where an extremely interesting occurrence was attracting his attention. He started his activity on his chest muscles, a spot to which he regularly returned. He kept filling himself with air, literally inflating his hairy chest, and then tried to stretch and elongate his thickset body.

At any rate, he tried to look like something other than what his natural endowments allowed him to be.

He had some kind of image of himself and he hoped to share his self-adoration with someone.

He was enacting how voluptuous it must feel to run one’s fingers over and squeeze a lean bundle of muscles such as his. Only this bundle of muscle was no longer so lean, in fact it was rather fatty. He pinched his nipples, shuddered, which must not have been very pleasant though the little nipping movement was very sensual. Then slowly down to his waist, following the inner rim of the hip bone along his pulled-in abdominal wall, just barely brushing the loins, the length of the thighs, then suddenly in, between the thighs, and with his hands, after they met, lifting his testicles. He did this too as if by accident; he wouldn’t mind airing them out a bit, and it would only be a physical necessity that along with the testicles his semi-erect prick would also rise.

He let it go, let it fall back, showing off its weight and size, let it appear prettier, larger, and stronger than it was.

And while he was obviously offering up himself, or his services, or one really couldn’t tell what he was offering or to whom, it became clearly visible that he did not care about anyone, that he was alone in this entire universe.

His hands in parallel motion, he was working on various parts of his body, demonstrating that pleasure was determined by the sensitive pads of the fingers. He was like a butcher sampling his own flesh who could not have enough of the first-rate merchandise, and was offering it rather nervously because it was very perishable and he should mete it out as soon as possible and as much of it as possible, to anyone. Just then, the crouching white giant shoved something, maybe a camera, back into the red bag already stuffed with all kinds of odds and ends, towels and clothing. He sprang up as if launched by his own feet and at the same time let out a kind of war cry that sounded something like just you wait, you’ll be sorry, which made his friend with the delicate body look back at him from the water.

Döhring couldn’t understand why the people lying on the shore paid no attention to these two.

The shout reverberated a long time over the water.

Why was he the only Peeping Tom.

At the same time, the female athlete turned to her side on the pink towel, showing off her intrusively strong body and fiery red pubic hair. As though she hadn’t done any of this, she calmly closed her book, used both her hands to take off her glasses and place them on the book.

Because she has had enough, time’s come for action. She was obviously preparing to do something. Her eyes captured and held Döhring’s uncurbed glances, without grinning at him unpleasantly.

Döhring was sure she was a shot-putter; he could see her stretching herself long as she threw a discus or javelin. Maybe she’s a coach and the Ethiopian girl is a short-distance runner. It seemed as if he could clearly see the two women’s intertwined lives on the sports field.

Then he was rebuking himself, my God, where have I got to.

His whining stepmother talked like this. Döhring had to call her Mother and he did not hate her less or have less contempt for her than for his father.

No, he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with people like that.

And that sounded like a paternal prohibition.

No matter how much he hated them, he still talked to himself in their voices. But maybe the country boy who had lost his way was talking now, the one who didn’t know what to do with so many strangers around him, could not make sense of so many strange gestures and movements popping up everywhere, could not even understand his own impressions.

Yet it did not occur to him that he should get up and go somewhere else; nobody was forcing him to grumble or be upset.

To soothe his agitated conscience, he told himself that although he was seeing these peculiar beings, and all their terrible doings were clear to him, he was not one of them. He was merely observing them from a respectable distance, did nothing more than peep at them, and therefore his parents had nothing to worry about. He was behaving properly.

But peeping was also forbidden.

And suddenly he realized that his conscience was not his own.

He was enthralled by these naked people who pretended to be indifferent to one another. He was discovering a part of the world he had been familiar with for a long time, yet he did not reckon with its reality and proximity. At last he was being allowed to peek behind a familiar picture that purported to be compulsively innocent and harmless, where every gesture seemed crude, coarse, nay, disgusting; yet for now he had nothing with which to oppose these crude forces except his own pretenses. For the first time in his life, he discovered in himself the eternal, incurable, and hateful deceiver, whom he despised in his parents and because of whom he had harbored so much resentment against them that he could not even talk to them anymore.

Because of whom he had to escape, no matter how much it hurt not ever to have had a home, and not ever to have hoped to have one. And here he was now, sitting inside the painting, forced to face the dread of nothingness.

But this dread could not frighten him away from his indecent gaping; on the contrary, inside, he was jumping with joy.

At last here it was, he had found it, the world does have such an indecent place, and it must be his place too. This is where everybody brings their deceptions and this is where they show them to one another.

Take the white giant, for example, who whooshed down the slope like a storm, and what Döhring saw and experienced from that moment on contained not one whit of deception or pretense.

In a way this giant seemed to be a man from whose every pore oozed kindness, cheerfulness, and goodwill. As though he was in a constant state of embarrassment, would toy with anything he came upon, would feel he had to apologize continuously for his strength, yet being aware of all this wanted to play with this trait of his, make it into a plaything too.

As if he did not take himself quite seriously.

Not because he was bright or wise enough to fathom his own attributes, but because he was not evil. With his constant playfulness he blunted every unpleasant edge, softened every aggressive rigidity. His skin, covered with ruddy blond down, shone brightly on the green lawn. Döhring saw only his back, his enormous shoulders, thick nape, huge skull with reddish hair shorn to mere stubble, and his childlike profile flashing a few times.

It was hard to understand how so much innocence and tenderness had grown to this size, and why those bundles of muscles. It would have been easier to believe all sorts of infamy of his friend, who was vain and touchy.

The way he slapped the soles of his feet on the surface of the water was also like playing a game; he did not wade in, he did something between treading and stamping on the water. And the way he approached his friend from behind, his arms wide open and pouncing on him from behind like a predator, engulfing him and gobbling him up, that too was a game. Döhring would have liked to be the friend of this naked giant so much that he wouldn’t have minded forgetting about the Ethiopian girl. He imagined himself in the place of the brittle dark man as he vanished in his friend’s embrace.

He suddenly realized that the sportswoman had addressed him and was talking to him.

A not too loud female voice somehow reached him after a short delay.

The woman addressed him in a voice filled with empathy, asking him if he had hurt his leg badly.

He didn’t quite understand her question at first, and why or what she could possibly have to do with his injury.

It was as if she were exposing his feelings, his passionate longing for a friend, and deliberately taking his mind off them. He thought the intervention was improper, offensive, as if he were being accused of something. In the water, now, under the weight of a huge white animal, the light body of a shiny black animal was thrashing about. The female athlete spoke quickly, her voice was pleasant, and with her voice she moved closer to Döhring. In a way, she spoke forward in time; she knew why she was doing what she was doing and therefore did not have to bother separately with the words.

Döhring tried to remain courteous; he said it was still bleeding a little. It was all because of his clumsiness.

And to demonstrate how insignificant the whole matter was, he rolled his pants down to cover his ankle.

Of course, the movement could be interpreted as a rejection of the other person’s interest.

In the meantime the enormous arms literally folded, packed up, and tucked in the body of the floundering man, and both men seemed to enjoy their struggle.

He’s had injuries more serious than this one, Döhring said.

The rolled-up body flew quite a distance before it splash-landed like a helpless heavy sack, only to surface immediately like a big fish. Stretched to his full length, the enormous white giant hurled himself after the dark one, who dodged him cleverly and skipped about gracefully. Maybe the giant caught one of his feet, because they both sank below the water surface and their tussle continued there; for long seconds one could see only limbs, splashing hands, tops of heads, mouths gasping for air, and hear calls for help, laughter, and the sound of bubbles.

Then it would probably be better not to go into the water, she replied.

He thought so too, Döhring said politely. It wouldn’t be very smart.

They spoke in slightly raised voices; they had to overcome the distance between them and the riotous noises being made by the two men.

He should be careful, shouted the athlete, the water is not so clean at the end of the summer. A wound like that could easily become infected. Maybe he wasn’t aware of it, but these small lakes did not have proper runoff.

No, he had no intention of going into the water.

Well, that’s what she meant, that’s why she asked him about his injury, shouted the woman quickly and mysteriously.

But pardon me, replied Döhring, what exactly was she objecting to.

If you’ve no intention of going into the water, shouted back the woman cheerfully, what are you planning to do here, that’s what she was asking, nothing else. She would not want to express her personal opinion more directly than that.

Suddenly the splashing, plashing, flapping, shouting, and laughing came to a halt, and although in the ensuing silence Döhring heard well what the sportswoman was saying to him and in what tones, he felt drawn more to the water. Farther out, where the water was too deep for feet to touch bottom, two heads facing each other were floating on the surface. Moving neither toward nor away from each other, only their shoulders rising a little from time to time. They were treading water and holding each other with clasped arms.

Slowly, the water around them became smooth as a mirror. The cool water makes skin contract on the bones.

Their faces grew somber; they paid attention to nothing but each other.

They concentrated on keeping themselves afloat by treading evenly and looking for a chance to push the other under the water.

They both waited patiently, undisturbed, motionless, for the right moment.

Or perhaps this too was nothing more than that eternal pretending. And he still did not understand exactly what this athlete woman wanted from him. Yet he became frightened more by what he sensed and felt at the sight of the heads on the water’s surface; if this is what people do in public, maybe he would not want friends like this.

Above the floating heads, the sky was a saturated blue.

At this moment, Döhring indeed sensed his situation more correctly than he could think about it. He had to escape.

And while time was ticking by, because he could not tear himself away from them and he did not respond to the woman, the two heads moved closer together. With imperceptible slowness, they were approaching along each other’s arms. The two bare bodies would soon touch under the water. They kept treading steadily and evenly, but while earlier they had clasped only wrists, now they were grasping arms, making gradual progress to each other’s body, grabbing elbows and then the muscles of the upper arms, and the closer they moved to each other the harder they had to tread water. Then the dark man grasped the giant’s shoulder, while the giant caught his friend by the waist underwater; they both kept treading.

The giant said something, just a few words, and his friend answered him probably with the same words.

Döhring could delay no longer. He had to turn back because the woman was talking to him, somehow pronouncing the words young man very disparagingly.

The young man probably does not know, she shouted, that whether he goes into the water or not, here he shouldn’t be sitting around all dressed up.

That’s the kind of place this is. Besides, it’s posted too.

From the water, evenly receding strokes were heard because the friends must have begun to swim toward the other shore.

No, he really hadn’t seen the sign, answered Döhring, who made no move either to leave or to undress. He begged her pardon, he said; he was speaking to her but his features remained impassive.

No problem, the athlete shouted back; she said, as if rushing to his help with placating excuses, how could he have, when he had taken such a fall with his bicycle. It’s a good thing his injury wasn’t serious. But now it’s time to decide whether to stay or go, because he probably wouldn’t want to expose himself to the unpleasantness of being considered an intruding Peeping Tom.

While the two of them were shouting to each other, the Ethiopian girl awoke with a start.

If he were accused of something like that, Döhring called back to the woman, almost cheerfully, he would most vigorously protest.

They were so steeped in their altercation, each of them enjoying the dual militancy, that Döhring could not move from his spot and could not resist stealing stealthy glances at the awakening girl. As if to prove that though he knew he should be leaving, he was handing the sportswoman a touchy defeat. At first it seemed that an electric shock, a current, was coursing through the brown body; the sharp elbows trembled, as did the closed knees pulled up to the breasts, and small spasms traveled along each thin limb.

She sincerely hoped, shouted the sportswoman, they would not have to go that far.

From the water, even strokes could be heard; the two friends were swimming side by side in all likelihood.

He hoped so too, Döhring shouted back, grinning.

As if he were shouting, I’m through looking at your ugly red cunt, and now one last time, shamelessly, indecently, despite all your warnings, I shall take a good look at this girl’s, I don’t even know what, her everything, so that I won’t ever forget it.

And this was very important, because he was fond of images. Images followed him or, more correctly, he followed and cherished images within himself. His memory had a large secret archive in which he indiscriminately stored everything that touched him. The waking of the Ethiopian girl: no matter how much he would have liked to conjure up this image, however hard he insisted it reappear, within a few hours the image faded so much that regardless of where he might begin or on what he might concentrate, neither from her thin limbs nor from her sharp features could he make the total image come together again. Even though he could have described her every move individually and in detail. The way she withdrew her clasped hands from under her head, or slowly raised her eyes to take in the world, spread her arms and straightened her long legs, yawned so contentedly that for long seconds her limbs froze into motionlessness within the movement. Like a swelling coxcomb, the pitch-black, curly pubic hair slowly became erect. Her body was like an overstretched shiny bow. Even a natural shout issued from her yawn.

To which the athlete responded by turning lazily to her side, getting up on her knees, and greeting the girl with a smile. In the sudden movement her breasts collided; she remained in that pose, eyes spellbound, as the awakening body before her trembled with a series of tremors. Following one tremor, the girl raised her arms above her head and, stretching even further, rolled onto her back and then relaxed completely. The athlete woman leaned closer, bent down and covered her, as if to whisper something in her ear, her two pendulous breasts swinging forward and touching the girl’s coffee-brown skin.

Döhring even thought of quickly undressing.

She may have actually whispered something, but she definitely planted a kiss right on the girl’s ear which made the long, thin, bony body grow taut. That very evening, Döhring was already unable to conjure up these images. He heard the girl’s yawning shout, but no matter how he tortured his memory, he could not see her. He would have liked to see the girl, the coxcomb-like hair on her mound of Venus; instead, he saw the other woman’s muscles, abused by much training, her squashed, swinging breasts and fire-red pubic hair.

That evening, as he was trying to fall asleep, he had to be satisfied with these images.

The next day, however, during his morning run he decided to go back there and take off his clothes. He figured he should arrive a bit earlier to be sure to find them. He did not notice that he wasn’t thinking of the two women but had the two men in mind. When, on that first day, he had finally left on his bike and looked back toward the lake one last time, he’d seen that the two figures were engaged in intimate conversation on the far shore. He looked toward the far shore to avoid looking at the solitary man who was still working on himself on the near side of the lake and who followed the bicycle with his eyes until it disappeared among the trees. And if Döhring was curious to know what bound people together and how lasting this bond might be, or whether this bond saved them from a howling loneliness to which others fall prey because of their nature, then he would rather identify with the Ethiopian girl or the dark-skinned man than with the red-haired athlete woman or the white giant. Döhring was shy, reticent, but by no means bashful or especially prudish. If he noticed someone watching him, he did not dare return the look, because he dreaded the contact, though he liked to expose his body to the eyes of others.

That in itself would not oblige him to do anything.

But he rode his bike into the woods in vain, because he did not find the fabulous little lake.

He didn’t even find the wider promenade from which he had strayed and which could have led him back to the lake. He rode across unfamiliar clearings, wound up in unfamiliar woods. It was a bright clear day, sharp breezes vibrated in the air; it was a pleasure to pedal hard. As if he had narrowly escaped a life-threatening situation. As if he were missing out on something, but compensating himself with the relief of an escape. Finally, as a substitute, he found a large body of water, a lake or river, he couldn’t tell, whose sunny banks were filled with people lying about. He didn’t have his swimming trunks with him, and he did not really feel like mingling.

It seemed to him that the large water had some movement to it.

He parked his bicycle, sat down at a respectable distance from the bathers and watched them, not so much the children squealing in the water or the adults playing ball among large beach baskets, but the water, the strange mass of air, the slow-moving sailboats, and the entire faraway high sky. This was the public world; he, however, was already familiar with the secret one. He had no doubt as to which one he should belong. The air was not free of vapors near the water, it was late afternoon, but above the greenish-blue woods on the opposite shore the disk of the sun was still very much present in its glowing yellow dazzle. And in the sky, very slowly, three tiny clouds were making their way toward the sun. Much time went by before one little cloud slid into the sun; everybody waited for it to move on.

But it would not go away.

Rather, the other two clouds slid into it. First, only the people who wanted to sunbathe sat up, looking about and asking what would happen now. A little later parents fished their children out of the water because a wind came up and it was no longer pleasant.

People had not realized that summer was over, but they began to gather their belongings.




Döhring’s Continuous Dream


Slowly, silence reigned and whiteness; and everything was sweet weightlessness.

First, they sat him on a bench, and then they helped him stand up. They argued a little as to what to do. He let them, did not care about anything, though he found it a bit embarrassing that it took two people to take care of him. They took off his coat. If he could have spoken, he would certainly have protested, because he feared for his coat. It wasn’t that good a coat, but without it he wouldn’t have gotten this far. They threw it aside. Freed his long arms from his shirt, loosened his pants around the waist. The priest who said it would be easier sitting up was right.

I told you we couldn’t take it off like this.

They could probably pull his pants over his shoes but not the long underpants. They quickly made him sit back on the bench. Familiar smells were mixing in the thick steam, most of them overwhelmed by that of chamomile, but this did not keep him from seeing himself, wearing these awful clothes, standing in a familiar summer meadow where chamomile was flowering.

He wanted to warn them there would be big trouble, but did not dare.

He fainted when they tried to take off his shoes the first time; it was clear that afterward, along with his tattered underpants they might pull off his striped pants, which were completely soiled on the inside. Then this would be discovered. He could already hear them starting to shout and then beating him up but good. He felt a bit of joy when his shoes wouldn’t let go of his feet. He’d gain some time. He was so weak; his flesh would not survive another beating. And these men are well fed; no longer young but fit as a fiddle, their blows must be really hard. He had learned well what a pleasure it was when death grants a small reprieve. The shabby, three-buttoned, wooden-soled prisoner’s shoes in which his bloody, pus-encrusted feet were embedded swelled up and absorbed his toe rags. He would have liked to warn the priests not to experiment, accept that this was how things were, but could not put together a proper sentence because he had no idea what language he should use. Not German. It was easier to imagine an entire remaining lifetime without ever taking off his shoes.

It pained him that he would never again be German, that he could be.

He let everything happen, endured it all, let them do whatever they wanted to do; let it be. This did not take much effort on his part since his mouth was filled with the sweet, familiar taste of the sticky sugared milk; let them have their way.

He remembered the promise that he would get more after a bath.

Wait, for the love of, are you blind, cried the monk who stood above his shoulder in alarm, watching what the other priest was doing to the boy’s terrible hooves.

His foot is completely stuck in it.

What do you mean stuck; it’s rotted into it, said the monk irritably, squatting in front of the boy and trying to hold the shoe so as not to soil his frock. He did not pull it to him completely, his face showed restrained disgust, but he did peek into the uppers, and then sent in his fingers, cautiously, drilling down. He reached into something soft and slippery, mud, filth, clotted blood, or bare, oozing bones.

Should be cut off along with his foot. He looked up, grinning, he didn’t know what to do, he mumbled desperately, and he had nothing to wipe his fingers with.

It’s a good thing you always know what to do.

He concluded he had no choice, he must pull off the shoe with one swift yank.

He looked up again at the other monk, but another grin would have been out of place.

Are you holding his shoulders, he asked.

Why should I hold his shoulders, retorted the other monk irritably.

But then the boy spoke up too, because he really didn’t want to have any trouble.

Truth is, he told them quietly, I shat in my pants.

He would have liked to explain, to make them understand he couldn’t help it when he got stuck atop a hedgerow and two people were beating him, which actually helped him fall down on the other side of the hedge. But before he’d even finished his words the monks were already shouting, except it was not shouting but guffawing with no trace of jollity.

You don’t say, shouted one of them, almost choking, this is fantastic. Shat in his pants.

Who would have thought.

For half an hour we’ve been enjoying nothing but the smell of your shit, you wretch, enthused the other monk, who hugged him from behind, pulled him close, buried his face and shoulders in the sleeves of his frock, as though dipping him into the homey fragrance of a lemon drop’s sweet filling.

Hold the stinking Jew dog tight, don’t you dare let go of him, yelled the first monk.

He came to only when in the lazily vaporous silence the large naked men were already standing around him.

Both his shoes were there, on his feet, as if nothing had happened.

Someone had brought some warm water and poured it into the shoes, but that had accomplished nothing, it poured right out.

In the meantime the two monks had disappeared.

He must be dreaming, should wake up; or could the earth have swallowed them up. Their absence made him think all this was really nothing but a dream and he was only replacing one painful dream with another. Instead of the monk who had been there before, now a large naked man was squatting before him, his long coal-black hair fallen over his forehead, knitting his thick, long-haired eyebrows a little distrustfully. He listened with his lively eyes set too close to each other, and he was speaking, kept speaking to the boy, who understood every word even though he couldn’t place the stranger’s language. As if he had never heard it.

He said he was some kind of lieutenant, he mentioned his name too, some lieutenant in some army, maybe the Royal Air Force, and he was curiously waiting for him to say his name, and where he was born, where he was from.

From where had he been deported.

From where, indeed.

The lieutenant’s lips parted halfway, he leaned very close, his healthy white teeth flashed encouragingly, but then his sweeping black lashes began to flutter with disappointment because in this unfamiliar language the boy could tell him only the number. The five-digit number, as it was, as they could see on his lower left arm; he showed it to them as his name. Why should he hide it, if they had given it to him instead of his name. Someone was holding his arm, held it down and drew his fingers across it as if to test the reality of the numbers, but seemed to be commiserating a little. Perhaps he could also say his name if he really put his mind to it, but he didn’t want to, and therefore he didn’t remember it, even though he thought about it. The lieutenant looked Italian, or at least not the way the boy imagined Hungarians looked. And he could not understand what a Hungarian was doing in the British Army.

In the meantime the others came up with the idea of soaking the boy’s feet, with his shoes on, in a large bucket. The insane logic of recent events could not be broken by the demands of common sense.

Everything continued in its own way. Until now they had used these buckets to throw cold water at each other. They were pleased with their idea. He laughed along with them, though he did not become as excited as they did. The water was undoubtedly nice and warm; at first it burned but he was glad to be among such attractive people. The lieutenant was only watching him now; he’d stopped asking questions. Then he noticed, in the midst of the general laughter, that one of the monks was standing with his back to him, not very far off, leaning his head on the white wet tiles, covering his face with both arms. As he watched the trembling shoulders, the boy was not certain they weren’t shaking with laughter, and he wondered who could have said something so funny or whether they were laughing at him.

Finally he asked the naked man, whose black hair ran up from his belly in parallel stripes, something like water in a fountain, all the way to his neck, from where it fell back to frame his chest muscles, what they had done with his coat.

It was odd that he could say anything in this unfamiliar language.

The lieutenant showed him, there, look, they’re burning it right now.

And indeed he saw that the other monk was shoving his belongings into the fire.

He didn’t trust this lieutenant, because he wasn’t as white and red as the others, but skinny, as though he himself had been a prisoner for a few weeks.

Don’t worry, said the lieutenant, you’ll get regular clothes from them, and they won’t let things get out of hand. True, they did delay a bit, but now they see the situation for what it is. They will retaliate. If he just listened, he could hear what was happening that very moment.

And he could, very faintly, penetrating the old monastery walls, the sound of motorcycles being revved up.

The lieutenant was nodding, yes, yes, an entire motorcycle company, flying like swallows, seventy-nine cycles all told, among them twenty-seven with sidecars, 123 men all told. It showed on his face what profound self-assurance and superiority his disciplined thirst for revenge was lending him. They won’t do anything extraordinary. All they really had to do was wall in two city gates; they studied the maps. The whole operation would take a very short time.

He would have liked to beg and implore, don’t let them do it, to shout that nothing happened, victims, innocents.

But the words drowned in him before he could shout them.

How could he claim such a thing when not even one among them could be considered innocent. And then he would have tried to argue differently. The lieutenant could see that not everyone had been killed; after all, he, along with his twin brother, had survived. Only he could not talk about this either, he had to keep quiet about his twin brother, who had just killed a man named Döhring. He knew of this in his dream, oddly. But then is there anything I shouldn’t keep quiet about.

In his agony, he began to throw himself about, he felt as if they had cut off his arms and legs, he shouted senselessly as one struggling to wake up.

I can’t keep quiet about everything.

He was shouting in vain because the attractive naked men lifted him up and put him in the tub while he could hear — and the dark-haired lieutenant even raised his finger to call attention to it — that the swallows had flown away, the motorcyclists were gone. By next morning, the city would be walled in and the people of Pfeilen would have to perish. Over the empty Kloosterplein, clouds of gasoline vapor hover in the evening stillness. Everything comes to pass. It is impossible to prevent what has to happen, to stop anything. While several men were washing, scrubbing, and soaping him at the same time, and the noise, the cacophony increased again in the bathing hall, and everybody was talking, laughing, and shouting simultaneously, through the cracks in the walls and doors, unseen, thick gas was seeping in to mingle smoothly and treacherously with the chamomile-scented steam.

And the attractive naked men now thought he had fainted because of the gas.

The wretch is so weak, they said laughing, he can’t withstand even a little gasoline vapor. But he lost consciousness because of his premonition. He did not know who he was. Because of the staggering knowledge that while he was enjoying his bath, and he could not but enjoy it and even think of the promised sweet milk, the catastrophe had come to pass.

He didn’t know what all this meant, who might be his people; he was searching for the meaning of his own dread.

And then it occurred to him that it hadn’t been his grandfather’s shift but that of the religion teacher.

What luck.

He could see from above how they were approaching from two directions at once, in close formation, their headlights rending the early night asunder.

He delayed no longer; the teacher of religion sounded the bell for the second time that day. He did it cautiously, barely touching the body of the bell with the blunt clapper, briefly; the penetrating sharp little sound could be heard over the dark town lying in ruins. This was followed by a terrible crack, bang, and snap, then a detonation, then a single resonance reminiscent of a bell ringing, but this was coming from below the ground. The earth, the entire half-dead little town and its distant environs, trembled, people were thrown out of their beds; even the thick monastery walls in faraway Venlo were shaking. For a second, silence fell in the bathing hall; the naked soldiers listened; only the noise of water rushing from the showerheads could be heard.

The breakaway bell splintered all the beams below it; it lodged itself into the ground four and a half meters down. This made the market square, along with its heavy stone pavement and the houses around it, explode, rise up in the air, and then collapse into itself. The rectory collapsed too, and in place of the Lutheran church only a pile of rubble remained.

Yet he knew it made no sense; there was no point in having such dreams. He should wake up. He would understand things all right when awake.

All this lasted but a short time, and then silence reigned everywhere.

Still, he was awakened by a scream, and he kept hearing the scream as he screamed to wake himself up.

On the bedroom ceiling, the big city was buzzing in yellows and reds, as if it were not the middle of the night.

And he still felt he could not talk about the things he should be talking about, and this increased and deepened his pain, no matter how hard he struggled. Whom could he talk to; he was alone during the day and alone at night. In his last dream, he was sitting awake and felt a pain as if, without anesthesia, his limbs were being chopped off, but despite all the pain he comprehended his dream, and that gave him a lift. He rose above everything. Even though his body was a mass of torn flesh from which blood poured in thick streams. He knew what happened to whom; he also knew what he had dreamed just now, or the night before last; he was glad to be able to separate out the various illusions. He could foresee what would happen in his dream, even though he awakened and his mind could not have been more alert. He saw the British motorcycle riders who, not caring that the church bell had just crashed down and that fresh corpses and perhaps injured living bodies lay under the marketplace buildings, were driving everybody outside. In the blinding beams of their headlights, they were having the two city gates walled up. This bleeding cannot be stanched. Here everyone must perish. Weighing matters while awake, I must witness my own death. He was looking for logical arguments with which to continue refining his knowledge. True, the church bell broke off and crashed, but not then and not like this. And it was also true that four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, and looked maniacally for some paper box that he supposedly had given to his older cousin, Hermann Döhring, for safekeeping; but Isolde did not want to hear about any paper box, there had been no camp of any kind in the vicinity.

But there was a camp; nobody denied that Gerhardt had been a guard and that he went mad in his search for the box.

There was a camp, repeated a completely strange and indifferent voice, that he could not escape from.

He was sitting in bed and felt that he had to tell these made-up stories and lie so stubbornly because he couldn’t tell who he was. Who am I, if there was a he who consisted of more than one person. It’s true, however, that Hermann Döhring was killed in front of his own farm that morning, though it never came to light who did it. It did come to light, of course it did. Almost everything comes to light. But then where have I come up with these twin brothers. Why am I accusing one of them of murder, and why do I say that the other was burned in the Revier, the sick bay. His dream invented this so that he could not distinguish between the twins and thus might freely shuttle between them. His dream invented the story because of his twin sister; because of her, he looked at himself as a girl, and to this day had been unable, and had not really wanted, to make a proper distinction between the two of them. This is the very reason I want to study philosophy and psychology so I can have an insight into these tricky things from both points of view. But what if I don’t understand, complained his dream in a weepy voice; he shouted that he did not understand, could not understand. Still, the knowledge stemming from his dream proved stronger. In his body, he felt their exhausted, condemned bodies, both their bodies. And that they were alive had become his only defense. Which means that I carry within me people who are not me, and with them I look back at times and places that could not have happened to me, or I can glance ahead into times that without me cannot possibly happen to anyone.

This explanation made his head spin because he knew where he was; still, he did not understand it.

And quite sensibly it occurred to him that perhaps I, the one thinking these things, am not me. Others might live in me, people I don’t know, or people who took their leave together with me when they died sometime in the past. As if in his dream he were searching for his this-worldly self among these people; but he woke up because of all the shit and felt that no matter how much he’d like to separate his self from all the others, he is not he, he cannot find himself, he has no self of his own, he has no self, he does not exist.

At best, he might find his twin sister, and that was probably the reason he disliked her so much.

He did not understand why he smelled the smell of shit so strongly, and then who was the one who smelled it.

My dream filled up with shit. But he couldn’t accept his own empirical experience as the sole explanation.

In his mind, he first tried to avoid the problem by looking at it as a philosophical one, but that did not even come close to explaining why he smelled the penetrating stench so realistically.

This might not be the only explanation in the world, but it made him sense that someone else was here, sitting in the warm thick shit on the strange bed and thinking about empiricism. It was Isolde’s bed. I shat in bed, or maybe I’m dreaming this too. The crack of this somebody’s ass is full of shit, or rather in the soft puddle of the runny shit there is a harder, fatter sausage, right in the crack of the ass, inside the pajamas.

It cannot be.

And in that case, on the farm, it wouldn’t have been Döhring who shat in his pants when my twin brother killed him. Because I am Döhring. Or it wasn’t my twin brother who shat in his pants when they tried to yank him back from the top of the hedgerow and beat him with nailed planks all over his head and his back. I don’t have a twin sibling. But of course you do. I am a different Döhring. One who sits in his own shit, like a small child. Although neither of us is permitted to do this anymore. They’d thrash you for doing that. The only reason my dream invented my twin brother was so that it shouldn’t be me, or so that I could kill myself, so that I shouldn’t be my own younger twin sister, or so that finally I’d have some excuse to kill her, so that I wouldn’t be the only victim.

What nonsense you’re wasting your time on.

He heard his voice bellow into the room glimmering with reflected nocturnal lights.

He felt the watery shit dripping down his leg but did not dare jump up lest the fat sausage slip out. But what should he do then, what should I do, he yelled desperately to himself.

He had never heard of able-bodied healthy adults shitting in their pants while asleep.

As a saving idea, it occurred to him that it was only the natural effect of all that dry fruit, all those apples and prunes.

A starving person should never take solid nourishment so suddenly.

But he had to discard the saving idea too; after all, he couldn’t have shat in his pants because of apples and prunes he’d stuffed himself with in a dream.

But he starved only in his dreams.

And that, at last, made him conscious of having no further reprieve, conscious that there was somebody else here, somebody sitting in warm, thick shit on the strange bed. I’ve shat in my pants, maybe I’m only dreaming this too. And this other somebody has the crack of his ass full, which is to say this other person is sitting in the soft puddle of diarrhea, but there is also a harder, fat shit sausage in the crack of his ass; I am in my pajamas.

No matter how big the trouble he was in, how hard he laughed at himself for his miserable saving ideas, the verity of his dream remained more realistic. Perhaps because it was on Isolde’s bed, in Isolde’s bedroom that his shame had caught up with him.

Disgrace.

But his shame also clarified connections that until now neither he nor anyone in his family could have understood, and no one in all of Germany could have, either. He even understood, at last, that this was the reason he could not speak German in his dream. He’d rather be a different man. It was also more pleasant to escape from his shame, back into his dream, which, despite his being awake, had not stopped. The dream literally forced itself on him, as if whispering seductively, if you want me to, honey, I can take you even deeper. It was very clear now: the others remained unsuspecting to this day about the paper box because they are truly innocent.

Isolde was alone when she found it in the fruit-drying shed. Who else would have found it.

There could hardly be anything clearer than this.

He also found it interesting that his dream reworked the relationships among his relatives. He turned his great-grandfather, whom he could hardly have known, into his grandfather, and the older brothers into cousins. The dream showed Isolde too, as a cousin, though she was his aunt. It’s clear that my aunt Isolde kept her secret to herself, but her career, so strongly out of tune with the family’s general financial situation, one could understand only from the dream.

He appeared to be dreaming again, even though he was awake and free to be euphoric about having finally found the explanation.

Isolde’s father accepted the paper box, rode his bicycle to the farm, hid the box there, but the following morning three inmates freed from the nearby camp killed him in front of his house. When four years later Gerhardt Döhring returned from a POW camp, he did not believe the desperate explanation according to which the concentration-camp inmates must have taken the mysterious paper box with them and the family members knew nothing about it. How could he have thought his older brother was so stupid as not to hide the box properly. It must still be around somewhere. He could not have hidden it so stupidly that those miserable inmates would find it right away. More than once, they helped him turn the whole farm upside down, the cellar, the attic; they tapped the chimneys, the walls, all the floors. Twice they carried all the firewood out of the woodshed and back again. The fruit-drying shed they searched from top to bottom at least three times. Not by accident. They dug in the more suspicious places. Still, Gerhardt refused to accept the cold fact that there wasn’t any paper box anywhere. In the family, they knew about every possible and actual hiding place in the house; in the wall of the fruit-drying shed was a secret hollow, made 150 years ago for just such a purpose, but the paper box was nowhere to be found. Who could have imagined that two weeks before Gerhardt Döhring’s return, Isolde had found the box, Isolde, a mere child.

Barely a few weeks after his return from the POW camp, the entire town became frightened of Gerhardt Döhring. Even though strangers could not have known anything about the paper box.

Without authorization he conducted a secret investigation of the extraordinary events that had occurred during the last weeks of the war. Not alone, but with two good friends and the hero of Sedan, his own father, who was a lawyer, after all, and on whose pockmarked face Gerhardt, from his early childhood, had been observing and touching with his fingers the strange and hostile history of the world. The four of them held the view that the fact of the occupation could not retroactively justify major crimes; those who disobeyed orders, traitors, saboteurs, and deserters could not escape the appropriate punishment. And the four of them had to deal with these matters behind the backs of the occupiers and as quietly as possible. Of the deserters who managed to survive the first years of the occupation, two vanished without a trace, and to dispel any doubt about the cause of their disappearance, a third one was found dead. There was another unsavory affair Gerhardt Döhring was keen on uncovering. If the two hospital barracks had been properly set on fire, why did they not burn down completely, and how could the prisoners have escaped from them. He sought answers to these questions as frenetically as to those about the paper box.

In his dreams, however, he had to admit that Gerhardt Döhring had not been mad, contrary to the family’s opinion. He was tormented by being unable to avoid his own story, but only a lack of acceptable solutions to his problems later drove him to insanity. Defeat could not be redeemed by murders. Now he could see this with absolute clarity, but it only made him experience the intolerability of his newfound knowledge. With this knowledge, he would follow into madness the old man who lived in him.

The fruit-drying shed was heated up twice a year.

When fruit was plentiful, the first heating would last and continue into the second one, and together they would take a whole month. It was quite possible that in the fourth year, after having been heated to a red-hot state twice a year, the paper box simply went up in flames.

Of Döhring’s two daughters, Isolde disliked housework more than her sister did.

After the horrible death of their father, all the heavy work was left to the only son. The widow tried to keep things equal among the three of them. She was always after Isolde, would not let her shirk her duties or slacken at the expense of her siblings; that winter too it was Isolde whom she sent alone to the farm to put the drying racks in order. This job did not necessarily require two people. And if Isolde was afraid, well, let her get over it. As she was pulling the racks out of their slots, she noticed a few sparkling objects among the charred remnants of the paper box inside a pan that usually caught dripping fruit juice. She didn’t know what to think. A few minutes later she found the large pile of gold in the secret hollow. It was clearer than daylight who and in what circumstances must have hidden it there.

For the first time in his life, he was sure about something.

Even though he had been the cause of many terrible things.

And at last, he was startled to wakefulness by the horror of his dream, which showed him things no one had been able to decipher.

While taking in the bedroom and its open doors glimmering in the yellow and red reflections of the nocturnal city, he still hoped a little that shitting in his pants was part of his dream.

But it was, along with its stench, part of reality.

He pulled up the wide, striped pajama pants to his knees, held them together, and stepped off the bed; it could drip only to his knees. Plenty of it remained on the bedding. He took small steps, managing to carry the sausage for a few paces, squeezed between the cheeks of his buttocks, but the moment he reached the nearby bathroom, it fell out, fell apart, and he had to scoop out the pieces with his hand from the diarrhea-filled pajama pants.

By then, everything was dripping and became smeared everywhere, as blood would be after a brutal murder.




Le nu féminin en mouvement


He had had it up to here with them.

He saw clearly that the morality, loyalty, and devotion he had demanded of himself were nothing but shameless hypocrisy, lying, and cowardice. Simply put, I’m gay — he should have said it out loud.

I’m looking at the men, he now admitted to himself.

Still, he couldn’t accuse himself of anything.

It would be closer to the truth to say he didn’t know his way around women and, though he was looking for nothing more than their company, was frightened of them. He couldn’t specify what he was frightened of, and would have been hard put to draw up the orographic and hydrographic maps of his fear, but he grew so intent on observing what men did, whether they were as frightened as he was or what made them luckily enough not frightened, that he could not pay attention to anything else.

To be able to see them openly, without reserve; there should be nothing he didn’t know about them; how do they do it, that’s what he wanted to know; that’s what he caught himself wanting to know more than anything else.

Every single man got him excited.

I’m a lousy little liar, he thought, alarmed, always have been; in an undertone, he kept speaking and breathing on the windowpane, while what he really wanted was to go down, cross the boulevard, and talk to that woman. Perhaps what frightened him so much was the possibility that suddenly somebody, an unknown woman, simply with her sheer existence, might give him pleasure. For whom he felt nothing and whom he did not love; how could he without knowing her; yet he was in love with her. But how can one be in love in such circumstances. He wanted to possess her. Could that be the sum total of that much-admired thing called love. It’s not only me; everybody is selfish, mendacious, evil.

His aunt Nínó too, everyone, every woman is a traitor, they are born traitors.

But even with sentences like these, he could not find the right place for his own betrayal because the moment he’d said he did not want it, had had enough of death, he’d simply managed to evoke even more intensely everything it would be best to forget.

As if he were shouting at himself, asking why did you let Nínó leave with that other woman, that dumb slut, why didn’t you go with her yourself, but the question could mean only one thing: why is your life so miserable. His protest notwithstanding, death would reach out to him with the hand of his aunt. And there was no point in making excuses for himself, that Nínó couldn’t care less about the death of that old fascist either; all she cared about was the inheritance for her loathsome evil little son, nothing else.

It could not have been anything but an illusion or wishful thinking to imagine that there existed human relationships lasting more than a few seconds. They’re nothing but snorting pigs, all of them. And they dare call it love when they wallow in the slop, snorting their heads off, and that’s what they value above everything else.

I’m not going. I am not going anywhere. I am not.

He went on turning these words over in his mind a long time after the foyer door had slammed shut behind the two women and complete silence had finally descended on the apartment.

Ilona did not move, but her presence or absence made no difference. He looked through her as if she did not exist. In his eyes, Ilona was no different from anyone else, a born traitor. A born servant, a whoring female who could not take her own fate into her hands so she rented it out to others.

He pressed his forehead against the windowpane again. The reflected masses of the sky moved brightly across the dark sidewalk.

Nowhere, you understand, nowhere. For himself, he had to convince Nínó of his rectitude.

I’m not going.

Down on the street, the cab was still waiting for the women.

What could they be doing so long in the stairwell. As if they had forgotten why they were supposed to hurry. In the farthest room facing the street, reclining on the professor’s abandoned sofa, Ilona was weeping. Now she could mourn her shattered life. It felt good to hear her little moans.

Downstairs, in front of the apartment building, the two women were crossing the street in a hurry, leaning into the wind. That’s what he’d been waiting for. As far as the eye could see there was nobody around, the boulevard was empty; Oktogon Square remained deserted. Let them go. I’m not going anywhere. He bade them farewell with these irritated words, emptied of meaning, while it was clear to him that lying to himself was in vain. Going nowhere. As soon as they were out of sight, he’d take his coat and be gone. Nothing to wait for anymore. He’s finally free. He’d face any risk. Actually, it was hard for him to call the dying man an old fascist pig, but by using that appellation he had liberated himself. Broken with his family.

At last he could tell himself that he was breaking with his family, that was the word, break, with which he supported his rebellion or, rather, made himself realize there was no way back.

The younger woman literally leaned into the wind, walked sideways against it; the older one, as though enlisting her entire body in her defense, doubled over and scurried forward as if making an escape. They both wore hats, Gyöngyvér’s a firm tiny round box decorated with bits of lace, of the kind usually called a pillbox, Lady Erna’s soft and woolly, wide-brimmed and large.

The wind kept changing direction; now it rushed into the city from the north and swept across Andrássy Road, now it came bouncing in from the west off the hills of Buda and wreaking havoc on the boulevard. They had to hold down their hats with their gloved hands. Identically, they pressed their pocketbooks hard to their chests. With that same movement, Lady Erna also held together her short fur coat. Gyöngyvér’s broad, long coat, the color of faded violet, had a large decorative button right under the round collar, and if she hadn’t clutched the coat together over her breasts, the wind would have opened it, reached under it, and made it flutter in every direction. Although the two women’s bodies differed greatly in weight, firmness, dimension, and pliancy, looking at them from above, their gaits seemed very much alike.

They both wore high-heeled, narrow, long-tipped pumps; they appeared to be toddling. And with every gust of wind their nylon-stockinged legs faltered a bit.

Before they reached the curb, the cabbie thrust the rear door open from inside and quickly leaped out to help the older woman into his vehicle. This courtesy was surprising because in those days taxi drivers had long ceased to fulfill this basic business obligation. Younger ones probably didn’t even know such a thing was expected. They didn’t say hello or bother with a thank-you when accepting a tip, though they did not refrain from remarks if they found the tip too small. Lady Erna saw the man’s strong profile for only a moment, when he raised his head to see out from under his cap and rain sprayed his face. She thought she might have known him from somewhere; he was about her age.

The three people appeared to be participants in a ritual, performing a sacrificial dance around a large, dimly glimmering cultic insect.

They halted abruptly, colliding gently as they walked around each other, parted by leaning away from one another, paused, and then bent over as the wet wings of the insect closed behind them.

The small, dim thuds could barely be heard behind the closed windows on the third floor.

The moment they slid onto their seats, they filled the tobacco-smelling cab with the fragrance of their perfumes.

The cabbie was a man of the old school; though his face was abundantly supplied with bitter, vertical creases, his playful, watchful eyes evinced a humorous or ironic disposition. Such eyes inspire confidence. He had on a well-worn visored leather cap, which seconds before he had pulled down tightly over his forehead against the wind.

Private chauffeurs used to wear caps like this, a long time ago.

Still, Lady Erna could not shake the nagging thought that this man was a retired secret service officer. But then how, where would she know him from. There was something about people like him; one could tell right away they had been ÁVH men. As former monks and nuns gave themselves away by their sickly pale complexions and overly cautious way of walking. Everyone knew that the mustered-out ÁVH men stuck together and were only waiting to come back to power and take their revenge.

Once the women were settled comfortable in the back and the man turned around, looking at them expectantly, she no longer had any doubts. This is a superannuated ÁVH man. He flicked up the visor of his cap with his thumb and asked where to. Who knows what kinds of thing he must have done in his life. Everyone knew they kept themselves in a permanent state of preparedness and were very influential. This man, with his small graying mustache, was not at all bad-looking. His lips were too pretty. Unpleasant, very unpleasant to ride with such a person, she was brooding to herself, as if to pluck cautiously the familiar strings of dread in her memory.

Or maybe he was Arrow Cross.*

We are going to Kútvölgyi Hospital, she called out, in a voice unlike her usual one, as if making an official announcement through her nose.

The cabbie’s playful glance did not change. One could feel he was not ready to accept this tone.

He asked if the hospital would be their final destination.

His wrinkles seemed to radiate all over his face from the inner corner of his eyes.

That’s correct, our trip ends there, came Lady Erna’s short, unfriendly reply, and, so as not to be exposed to the impersonal, penetrating look of those eyes, she turned away.

The driver started the cab, drove across the square, but the tension between them remained, and in the rearview mirror he quickly sized up the other woman too.

She wore a tolerant, slightly suffering, restrained smile. It wasn’t easy to figure her out; the impression she gave was that with her entire devoted being she would go along with and support Lady Erna in everything that might happen. Though it was also obvious she was playing a role, and that Lady Erna did not object to this.

They were sitting too close together. This had never happened before. Which was somewhat embarrassing for both of them. As if trying to keep their bodies at a distance, they did not turn to each other. Gyöngyvér played her role well. Lady Erna, despite her resentment, couldn’t but admire the young woman. Perhaps she envied her son for having her and may even have feared for her. For she knew the relationship could not last and already felt sorry about the inevitable complications of a breakup. She had occasionally helped to speed up the predictable separations. Carefully yet relentlessly she had let her son feel she did not think this was the right woman for him. She admitted that a person from such a low social class, with nothing and no one in the world, who not withstanding dressed so impeccably and showed such diligence in her behavior, well, however silly she might be, she must have talent of some kind.

She must be truly knowledgeable in something to which her son clings steadfastly. No question. Of course, Lady Erna could not even think of these talents without summoning up their opposites. A chameleon, she said to herself, a common little minx who disguises her eagerness and greed in a rather primitive way.

She had better be careful with her.

Yet, her eyes could never have enough of the young woman’s body. She had made detailed reports of it to her best women friends.

It was her general experience that it was best to be forthright and unhesitating when talking of dangerous things. Her friends had a great laugh. What wouldn’t that Nínó make up, what fanciful new tale.

To talk openly of a mature female body was not among the conventional conversational habits at Café Gerbeaud, the Abbázia, or even the casino on Margit Island.

Ultimately: nowhere.

Although she had talked of it unreservedly, her repugnance got the better of her. What a miserable little chameleon. Her stunning figure and perfect appearance can’t be denied, even if she isn’t really beautiful. No, she isn’t. God, her low forehead right away tells you where she’s from. The less said of her mental abilities the better. And her character isn’t exactly flawless. But there was no flaw in her taste. This irritated Lady Erna, who had a broad education and a practical background in art history; she had been an appraiser for a while, and among her friends she was considered a kind of expert in aesthetic matters.

In fact, it was not the young woman’s flawless taste that fascinated her but the ascetic nature and dry austerity of this taste. She could not look at her without seeing her as a precious object she must guard and look after, precisely because she was so aware of precious works of art.

As if her surface were dry and rough, and her inside swelling with delicious juices; as if a subterranean secret vein nourished it with its fluids, a rich oasis in a windblown desert, a tiny lake hidden under drifting sand, a small secret body of water.

What first caught her attention was that the woman did not leave her things all over the apartment, as had all her hysterical, chaotic predecessors who’d stayed for a few weeks or sometimes only a few days. On the contrary, she barely leaves a trace. She eats exceptionally small amounts. She gives the impression of someone making choices from a huge wardrobe. And picks things correctly. Others, driven by greed or insecurity, keep piling up objects around them — the entire fragile, dark art trade is built on this emotional instability — but this one must be infallible when she makes her purchases. She takes the one piece that others would never choose in a lifetime. Lady Erna kept an eye on her to see whether she was a secret eater, stuffing herself at odd times and places, whether what she saw was only false asceticism or hypocrisy. It was not.

Everyone strives to be infallible. Lady Erna herself could not resist eating too much; she had a special weakness for sauces and spicy gravies, chewed every bone dry, sucked everything from chicken bones, dipped fresh bread into the fat gravy of roast meat or with a crust of bread spooned the golden cream off the top of curdled milk or the sweet icings from so many surfaces, gobbled up floating islands.

She had indulged her curiosity too. She wanted to solve the secret of this serious asceticism. She found all sorts of reasons to open the doors of the closet in which, right after moving in, Gyöngyvér had put all her little things. She told Ilona not to stop ironing; she herself would put everything back. Ilona kept silent, shrugged her shoulders and looked put out; she did not know what to make of Mrs. Lehr’s unexpected zeal. An unfamiliar scent that assailed Lady Erna from the closet bore witness to the same, almost painful parsimony that emanated from Gyöngyvér’s supple body. And because she had done this not once or twice but more or less regularly, as if to keep track of what was taking place among Gyöngyvér’s belongings, Ilona slowly began to figure out what the lady of the house was up to.

She used some inexpensive, insignificant perfume; still, Lady Erna had to admit, well, she had got it right. The scent was almost too sweet, yet overall it was rather dry and acrid; on her skin it was as if the sweetness came from summer hay and sun-dried spices. It matched her bodily endowments, as did the style with which she wore her clothes. This was her maddening quality, and this is what probably intoxicated her son.

When she opened the closet door, Lady Erna felt her heart thump in her jugular vein. This wasn’t completely unjustified, since her son kept his shirts there too. She imagined she was doing some harm to her heart with such powerful excitement and also felt that what she was doing was somewhat absurd, but she did it anyway. And if not in the clothes closet, then she rifled through Gyöngyvér’s shoes in the foyer.

Gyöngyvér’s feet, as is the case generally with dry beings, probably did not smell.

And she would tell Ilona, but more for her own benefit than anything else, that she couldn’t find this or that item.

Gyöngyvér did not wear down the heels of her shoes, either; the sight of her graceful feet filled Lady Erna with particular envy.

She removed the cambered silver lid of the ground-glass candy box in which Gyöngyvér kept her cheap costume jewelry and a few pitiful real pieces. She looked at the thin little trinkets, which Gyöngyvér must have received from previous admirers. She glanced at the sloughed-off skins of cast-off lives. The pretty candy box was among the objects Lady Erna had managed to save from her grandfather’s manor house in Jászhanta the night before the inventory was taken for the public auction. She reached in only with her fingers, to expose everything to her eyes, and chuckled, a little ashamed to think that her son, cheap and stingy as he was, would probably add nothing to this poor collection. But she did not take out a single piece, seeing none she cared to examine.

In the depth of her soul, she would have liked to have a daughter-in-law, even one like Gyöngyvér. But not one with such an empty head. Yet even resisting the idea filled her with a certain pleasure.

A kind of physical sensation, as if experiencing her son’s secret joy, or at least understanding it.

See how cleverly she covers her ugly forehead with that pretty little round hat.

Gyöngyvér’s forehead was indeed not attractive. Convex and decently proportioned, but her hair grew in close at the edges, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that; it was not the kind of forehead that could carry off bangs. Of course Lady Erna did not fail to notice that once or twice Gyöngyvér had had her hair styled with bangs cut square above the eyes. Her thick dark hair lent her appearance a kind of wildness, and, probably because she couldn’t abide this, she resorted to removing superfluous hair with the aid of resin wax; but the tiny bloody craters caused by the violence had barely healed when fresh bristles would crop out in their place.

Dark shadow on her forehead.

She longed for tenderness, sensitivity, and refinement; she simpered and grew touchy, and what the little goose could not obtain except perhaps accidentally she was trying to get to with outward show. Of course her pug nose told the world what a low mark the little waif earned in intelligence. And that filled Lady Erna with contentment, if for no other reason than that her persistent physical attraction to the young woman sometimes so confused her that she behaved more brusquely, meanly, or maliciously than she could afford even by her own standards.

All of this, however, had a less common, more delicate aspect, a more intimate map. She was still a little girl when she discovered this map; it was already drawn up.

The buggy was taking her somewhere from the house in Jászhanta, perhaps to the train station, when they turned onto a long plum-tree-lined allée. The trees had been planted when the handsome manor house was built at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since then they had grown enormous, some had lost branches, so there were gaps in their rich foliage, and she could see clear summer sky through parts of the towering crowns.

She put her gloved hand on Gyöngyvér’s gloved hand for a long moment, lightly. But as soon as they made contact, the light touch gained weight, as if the other hand had been waiting for hers. She felt as if they might lock.

Gyöngyvér, my little girl, she wanted to say. If she’d said it out loud, and the very thought of it made her choke, not only would it sound false, but it could be misunderstood in any number of ways, and then she would only act out a newer, more absurd scene from one of the usual dramas. But that was what she was thinking at that moment. Her awareness was permeated with a sense of her absent daughter, along with the guilt she felt about her. She had been a big girl when they carried her off; she was in her first year at the university when they took away my little girl, though she still wore her hair in thick braids. For two weeks they left no stone unturned trying to get her back from the Gestapo on Melinda Road. Maybe not every stone. The daughter’s appearance now clung to Gyöngyvér’s mature exterior, because the daughter had never become a woman.

She never experienced the things this silly woman enjoys so freely with Lady Erna’s son. Perhaps it’s for the best.

Still, she could not forgive herself, or anyone else.

Most of all she could not forgive the dying man. She had been his daughter in every sense of the word, yet he failed to save her.

Whatever flowed from body to body through their gloved hands could not necessarily be identified as maternal love. If only one could shut off the disrupted current so easily, she thought suddenly. Still, there was something maternal here; after all, this woman belonged to her son, and she, being his mother, had to feel something of what her son found attractive in her. Or rather, it did not resemble the sensation she had not felt for quite some time at the sight of men.

In time, her desires somewhat shifted in proportion. She would dishonor the memory of her little girl if she called this strange woman her child.

Perhaps what she had to forego had already been marked on that map which, as a little girl, she’d seen in the sky framed by the treetops.

Still, even now, and forever, she must be restrained, self-possessed; no use asking why she couldn’t lose her mind, spin out of control just one more time.

Lady Erna’s other hand, perturbed by this welter of emotions, stirred a little, of course, and her small lips edged with wrinkles trembled. Helplessly and hungrily, seeking and avoiding the other’s gaze, they looked at each other while the car sped along the boulevard with the noise of rain lashing at the windows.

I don’t know what this afternoon will bring, she said, keeping her voice low if only because of the cabbie, as she grasped the young woman’s gloved hand. The cabbie, with his unusual face yet goodly mien, whom she could not place, was obviously observing them. I don’t really know how, she continued, her voice trailing off awkwardly, but I must come up with something. And in her effort not to alarm Gyöngyvér with a sudden gush of emotion, and not to lay herself open either, she sighed and, with her upper lip retracted like an animal snarling in pain or joy, burst out laughing.

Sigh and laughter followed each other.

You may not believe it, Gyöngyvér, but I’ve no mourning clothes.

And when she said this, she felt strong enough to break the flow between the two of them. As if asking for indulgence, signaling that the other person should not give the fleeting moment too much weight.

There is one big role left she would not mind playing.

Some other time.

She must now continue in a reasonable tone.

I must get downtown to the shops, if only for a short time. I’d be grateful if you’d come along, Gyöngyvér. I’ve got shoes, I’ve got handbags and coats, actually I’ve got everything, but black stockings, for example, I don’t have at all. Actually black is not my color. Well, I’m lying. If the moths haven’t eaten them, I must still have a black velvet cocktail dress and a black taffeta suit. But those aren’t exactly right for now, they won’t do at all. You can appreciate that in the circumstances I can’t deal with things like this by myself.

But I would trust your judgment entirely.

Gyöngyvér was not quick to answer, she remained silent, or she did not grasp the meaning of the unfolding scene; but she did not alter her pained smile. After so much mute and treacherous humiliation, this unexpected trust was like an even more treacherous attack; it paralyzed her. It deeply shocked her that a person could speak like this about her own husband’s impending death, so openly, so shamelessly and brutally. She could not consciously gauge all the places Lady Erna knew and had been to, how many things she had had her hands in; even what she experienced unconsciously of Lady Erna’s deeds and existence was too much for her — the familiar strong attraction and familiar proximity, which she could not avoid. Besides, she had a problem concentrating on more than one thing at a time.

When Ágost or other men before him called her at the kindergarten when she happened to be playing with the children or singing to them, when someone came in to tell her she was wanted on the telephone, she had to pay very close attention to understand the person at the other end of the line. When she left the house in the morning she became distant from him; it was as if she did not have another life besides the kindergarten.

And the same was true the other way around.

If they went out in the evening, to the Fészek Club or anywhere else, and people she did not know asked her what she did, she would say, I’m a kindergarten teacher, but then suddenly she’d be unable to explain what that meant. Hours would go by and still she could not recall what she did there. In a matter of seconds the divider in her soul would rise between things, and it was wider than the Great Wall of China. Because if something had not happened, then something entirely different must have, and the former was no longer visible. She was in constant fear of not understanding what had happened or was happening in a given moment. She got the idea that others could not grasp her incomprehension. She kept it a secret how difficult it was for her to get into the present from her various pasts. She did not comprehend how others could connect different things and times in themselves. This is why she did not feel at home except among children. She would stand by the telephone, listening to the familiar voice to which no face or expression belonged, only a possible name and a pure sensation.

Although they had been living under the same roof for half a year, she had not been this close, even in the simple, physical sense, to Ágost’s mother. Their shoulders touched, their thighs a little too, and neither of them found it necessary to move away. Sometimes Gyöngyvér keenly perceived how different mother and son were in many areas; at other times she was surprised, it nearly overwhelmed her, by how alike they were in other ways. Now, from the moment they walked out of the apartment, she had sensed nothing but their similarity. Neither physical nor mental difference existed any longer between aging woman and young son. Her entire attention was taken up with the sensation that she was in the presence not of that barrier thicker than the Great Wall of China but of a familiar attraction, an intimacy she could not avoid yet could not make her own.

This led to an insane thought — perhaps she should reach Ágost through the person of this elderly woman.

During the past weeks Ágost had quietly, politely, and brutally rejected her and not only in his sleep and not by chance. The night before, the struggle had turned brutal; it wasn’t, Gyöngyvér felt, the usual transition between two bitter fights and reconciliation, which sometimes she provoked for its gratifying excitement. Now, with the older woman suddenly opening up, Gyöngyvér felt that these two mature humans were made of much the same stuff. If only she could cross over into Erna, she might be saved. In the meantime, her splitting headache was getting worse. The realization struck her like lightning: if she could manage this, she would truly be saved. It was no longer about mother and son having identical tones of voice, skin color, deep and close-set eyes, piercing and constantly inquiring looks, of being almost perfect reflections of each other. No. Which would explain everything.

Gyöngyvér, contrary to all appearances, was not stupid. True, what she could formulate for herself, based on the reports of her senses, was usually flatter, more banal, more boring, and much simpler, almost primitive, because so much less than what she had sensed. Now, for example, she kept telling herself that if she succeeded in winning over the mother, she would not have to move out of the apartment. Which she dreaded.

Like a child, she was euphoric that Lady Erna would save her.

The survival instinct compels no less greed from her than it did from other people. Still, she often became entangled in situations in which she appeared to have committed some unforgivable impropriety or done something immoral.

As was happening now, when Lady Erna failed to see why Gyöngyvér responded to her overture with silence. She could have gone on looking at the younger woman’s pained little smile, but she was increasingly impatient. She preferred to turn away and look, through the rainwater dripping down the taxi window, at the buildings on the boulevard rushing by. A good thing she did, because the pain and the dissembling made Gyöngyvér’s lips tremble violently. Pain assailed her in merciless waves. She nearly fainted. It was clear to her that she was not going to lose the man, but this was sheer self-deception, because she had already lost him. She sought an explanation for this loss, but there was none, and she should have accepted it like that, as something that made no sense.

They had to stop at the intersection with Podmaniczky Street; the windshield wipers creaked and clattered. Lady Erna grumbled to herself, I have only myself to blame. I had to bring her along. If I only knew why I’m so stupid, even in my old age, why am I going out of my way for this silly goose. How can I be so stupid. And how could this little foundling understand how insanely generous I have been.

Gyöngyvér sensed the rebuke, but from afar, for now she was preoccupied with what might be the great discovery of her life. Not only was the dread gone, but it was replaced by the kind of happiness that until now only this one man had given her. As if a footpath across one person’s body led to the soul of another. As if in proximity to Lady Erna, she knew Ágost’s body better. Not only did she think these general thoughts, but she saw the path before her or, more correctly, the circuitous but ineluctable paths that lead from one person to another. She must choose one, must set foot on one of them. In the exhortation lurked an unpleasant urging or reproach. But I am already on the path. As if she were failing in some way.

I’m going to fuck it up; I’ll make a mess of things again.

She sensed, of course, that she should have returned the touch, she should have squeezed Lady Erna’s gloved hand in return.

Now she could no longer reach for it.

That meant something irreparable.

She was barely nineteen when on a winter morning she stepped out from the gate of the kindergarten teachers’ college in Szeged. A small suitcase in one hand, in the other a cardboard box tied with string. She started out on the wet street in the hazy December cold. In her coat pocket she had a slip of paper with an address where she could stay for a few nights. Ever since then, she had had to find a roof for every single night. This was not a figure of speech; it happened many times that she returned to her lodging only to find, in front of an office door or in a filthy stairwell, her hastily packed and discarded belongings, and she was out on the street again. Then there was only the streetcar, train, or train station, until the police chased her away. She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know. In those places, her head held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body. She had been a night lodger, sleeping in beds rented by others for a day; when she had it a little better she became a real subtenant, first in Kecskemét and later in Budapest. From there, however, she had no place to go. Singing lessons were expensive. And her decision to marry a rich fellow made no difference. Either no sugar daddy presented himself or the men she managed to snare did not want to marry her.

One man would have been ready to marry her anytime but she did not want to; she was disgusted by him even though he worshipped her.

Slowly she outgrew the marriageable age.

As soon as she got to know someone new, the familiar dread returned, and no matter whom she went to bed with, in what fashion, she felt she had an intestinal obstruction and should spend the trysts farting rather than making love. And whenever she broke up with someone, the destructive excitement went away.

As if she had to wander down a wide, hopelessly dusty highway without end or beginning. But every cell in her body, her every hair remembered the paradisiacal state that she had left behind and to which, due entirely to her own clumsiness, she could not return. Still, secret little footpaths might cross the long wide highway even now.

This promised a greater experience than if she had found her mother.

When she had thoughts like these, there often appeared to her the image of that woman, now forever ten years her junior, who probably always traveled on this highway of despair.

Now, however, she felt something that might be called an acquittal and it was close to happiness.

She thought she should say thank you, she was happy.

Oh, my, suddenly I am so happy. And if ephemera hadn’t entered her mind, she would have let those words spill out. But luckily she could not say them out loud because her enormous bitterness, the thin-aired plateau of her dissatisfaction, and her own grave self-rebukes filled her with ephemera. Suddenly she didn’t know how to address Ágost’s mother. Actually she had never known, and therefore avoided doing so. Hard as it was to accept that Lady Erna unceremoniously addressed her in the familiar form, there was nothing she could do about it, and she’d never dare do the same in return. Maybe after she had been discovered as a great singer. But now she did in fact want to use the familiar form with Lady Erna; having her hand squeezed by the older woman’s gloved hand not only paralyzed her sense of reality but gave free rein to her imagination and made her uncontrollable. She felt an unhindered flow of possibility, which Ágost had never given her completely nor completely withheld. She had been living with him in a state of constant agitation. The passion so unceremoniously unleashed by the mother may have been matched in every respect by the passion that alternately flared up and died away, though not completely, in the son. Gyöngyvér had to catch at the mother. And as a second, final possibility, even her early morning dream appeared. Perhaps to protect her from hope’s exaggerations.

The enormous, murky river with its deep current, this is the familiar river, but familiar from where.

Unfortunately, I have a singing lesson this afternoon, she said hoarsely after a little while, which was a quite ridiculous response from the other woman’s point of view, almost insulting and coming too late. If I could get to a phone and cancel with Margit Huber, she added hastily, as if hearing her own words had brought her to her senses, I would love to go downtown too.

She felt she had extricated herself cleverly and just as cleverly managed to avoid addressing the older woman directly in the formal or familiar form.

But now Lady Erna would not even look at her.

The voice was false.

It gave away that the singing lesson was more important. Lady Erna knew only two extremes. She either engulfed the other person, all but devouring her, not letting go, hugging the other to the point of suffocation, or she kept a proper distance, observing everything coolly and scornfully, picking at every little fault one by one. Every little mistake. Every last little weakness. As if explaining to herself why this relationship was beneath her. Don’t bother yourself, my dear, she said to herself while Gyöngyvér was going on about her singing lessons, complaining of the cost if she failed to call off a lesson in time.

It was ridiculous, it was downright painful to listen to this.

And where is this lesson, where does this Margit Huber of yours live, she asked in the same grating high tone she had used earlier to instruct the cabbie.

In Hajós Street, right behind the Opera.

I see, Lady Erna replied, as if with these two words the entire matter had been settled forever.

Just as she had not beaten about the bush with Kristóf either; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. No betrayal fazed her, and this was a source of her strength. There was no empathy or love, nothing, there was nothing without a beginning, and in that case why shouldn’t everything have an end as well. There was perhaps one amorous exception in her life. Whenever she remembered it, she shuddered with joy and sorrow. Hatred is more persistent, unfortunately, but even that comes to an end one day. At the same time she realized that her nihilism was a strength only in the eyes of others, because at bottom she always had to choose it; that’s how it is when misanthropy is born of insult.

If not for this weakness of hers, she might not have had heart problems. Now Gyöngyvér managed to say something that made Lady Erna turn around.

At least I’d get to see some ready-made suits, she said pensively, and was happy that when talking about clothes she did not have to feel Ágost’s body inside hers, his face on her face. There’s no use looking for an English suit. Not only in black but in any color. Besides, the English style is too severe and not very feminine. If you ask me, it’s not worth having one made, either.

While the taxi waited for the light to change and an almost empty trolley passed in front of them, the cabbie watched in the rearview mirror, hoping to understand what the women were talking about, in his concentration forgetting to take off when the light changed.

But for god’s sake, exclaimed Lady Erna irritably, what makes you think I want a black English suit. I never said anything so asinine, and why would I.

Please believe me, Gyöngyvér went on, any seamstress can come up with a nice little suit in two days. And it’s something that has many uses. You can wear it with a blouse or a thin turtleneck, which is very nice. The better the fabric, the greater one’s playing field with a suit like that.

You may be right, Lady Erna replied, surprised.

Why did she have to share these delicate matters with this woman. She wanted to withdraw, not let their shoulders touch.

Yet there was something impressive and self-assured in what Gyöngyvér had said. And it was news to Lady Erna that the English suit was passé, démodé; she’d never heard English tailoring called overly severe. What idiocy. As if it did her any good to learn about English suits. Still, the contact of the shoulders felt good. Taking advantage, deviously, of what seemed accidental. What had been cut off between the gloved hands a moment ago now streamed through their coats and dresses. But, refusing to believe it might make her feel better about herself, she could not. And she let it happen for another reason: Gyöngyvér sat on the side of her heart, and her touch had a decidedly calming effect on the rhythm of her heartbeat.

Her medication had largely resolved her two attacks that morning, and she had some satisfaction in having emptied her bowels properly; in the pericardial depression, however, there remained a certain amount of tension, a restlessness that had deepened with the news from the hospital and the ensuing haste.

Very close to a fatal ventricular fibrillation.

It seems I’ll be indisposed again, she thought suddenly and for good reason. What she felt was less than the usual forewarning of an attack but more than a mind set on self-preservation could ignore. She grimly monitored her body functions and could not arrest her rising fear. Her tension was eased somewhat by the involuntary contact with Gyöngyvér’s shoulder, though it communicated tension radiating from Gyöngyvér’s body, unhindered by any excess of weight or fat.

Unexpected happiness radiated directly into the muscles of Lady Erna’s heart made tense by dread, and her pulse slowed, the auricles and ventricles working less convulsively. In proximity to the other woman, the cardiac tension she had been carrying around for weeks as a terrible ache of the soul was subsiding. Of course, she could not count on any lasting relief. Any feeling that originates in another human being, however pleasant, by necessity leads to new, possibly harmful stimulation. If you need me to calm you down, I’ll give you something, but you can be sure I shall take it back or make you work it off. And assaults of pain or pleasure are all the same to one’s system. It responds to both with agitation. Agitation raises the pulse rate, the pulse increases the blood pressure, pleasure and pain exact the same price. Young people hardly distinguish between the two payments: a young body takes joy in sensing the heart’s pursuit of either pleasure or danger.

A damaged system will, however, after perfidious silence avenge emotional excess with an acute shortness of breath. Not when first stimulated to excitement but a little later, when the heart muscles can no longer meet the demands of rising blood pressure, speeding pulse, and localized hyperemia. Pressure and asphyxiation are warning signals when the shoulders or lips or loins, engorging with blood, are no longer points of stimulation, but the entire body is — from the hair on the head to the tops of the toes, when the very flesh of the heart labors under the spell of stimulation.

It does not have the reserves to supply the system’s center and peripheries simultaneously.

But by then it’s too late.

Gyöngyvér, my little girl, said Lady Erna, her voice hoarse and reduced to a whisper by the sudden urge for self-preservation. She was loath to say aloud what she was about to say. It was exactly what she wanted to keep to herself. I don’t want to frighten you, but I haven’t been feeling well since early this morning, and I think I had better prepare you. If you see that I’m getting worse, my medicine is here, in my purse. If I become very weak or even faint, you should put it under my tongue.

Yes, I know the medicine, Gyöngyvér answered dryly, as if she too wanted to move past this, wanted to get it behind her.

Contrary to Lady Erna’s expectation, neither fear nor surprise showed on Gyöngyvér’s face. Indeed, her pretended empathy and genuine curiosity only grew.

With the excuse of having to look for her medicine, Lady Erna turned and shifted away on the seat with a small laugh. As if to apologize for clinging to her miserable life. Which is truly laughable. Common sense told her it would be more pleasant to slip into the hereafter in a state of unconsciousness than to continue wide awake, trembling for her wretched life. And if that was how it was going to be, and it could hardly be otherwise, why bring her back with the help of medication, why couldn’t she be content to simply faint away. No matter how hard she tried to find her instinct for self-preservation ridiculous, her fear of death won out. There was another creature within her, too terrified to be amused — in the hope of overcoming fear — at being terrified. Efforts to master her fear had never been successful, yet she never gave up. Exactly the opposite happened. Laughter did not help overcome the dread, and the elemental fear, much stronger than she, deeply humiliated her and repeatedly made a mockery of her faith in common sense.

Common sense failed to stop the symptoms; her hands shook visibly. The telltale spots caused by afflictions of the nervous system, going from flushed to pale, made their appearance, along with imperceptible dewdrops of fear gathering along the rim of her upper lip. And there was no good reason why she was unable to click open the latch of her handbag.

Even if I confide in this woman, I can’t expect anything from her but hypocrisy. In her restrained fury, she practically tore the gloves off her hands. She didn’t regret this. She had noticed earlier that at times Gyöngyvér’s eyes were glued to her. At least her hands had not yet lost their shapeliness. The young woman had something to envy. Leaning back from the edge of her consciousness, she somehow gathered that what she was doing now had nothing to do with her heart; false alarm, a lot of hysterics, no threat of another attack. But her inner tensions, with their various origins and vectors, were raging so furiously that she genuinely feared being unable to control herself.

Then it must be death I am so afraid of, after all. No matter how I’ve tried to deceive myself, telling myself that he’s been dead to me for so long that no matter what happens the actual death won’t be a shock.

She finally managed to undo the clasp with her trembling fingers. She glanced up to assess their progress. She did not want to be shocked. She saw they were still far from their destination. God, help me have him sign it. We’re only on the ramp to the Margit Bridge. She did not understand herself. Why is her body producing such absurd hysteria in front of this young woman, and also because of her. What need does she have of anyone’s empathy, why make a stranger feel sorry for her. She couldn’t say.

And she couldn’t even thrust her hand haphazardly into the bag the way she wanted to; first she had to take out the copies of the sale contract.

I’ve been having such a migraine since early this morning, said Gyöngyvér dolefully, I’m nauseated, my head is about to explode.

The handbag was the kind in which one could never find anything. Just let your head explode, my dear, there’s nothing in it anyway, said Lady Erna to herself; she was furious that instead of empathizing, the young woman was looking for pity. What a stupid hen you are. What a primitive soul. A decorated pouch of a handbag on a strong metal frame. Just recently very fashionable, and particularly to her liking because it reminded her of the sporranlike pouches her mother carried to soirées and balls. And now the two of them in the taxi were holding two all but identical handbags on their laps. This also annoyed her.

Lady Erna’s purse was made of soft, dark gray calfskin, just like her shoes; Gyöngyvér’s was so-called Negro brown, a fashionable hue that also matched her shoes, but it was made of imitation leather. Which, at the time, was considered more chic than real leather. This insignificant little difference made Lady Erna feel the light-years of distance that separated them. The rage for successful imitations had shattered her image of the world. She could not conceive of owning a purse or anything else made of artificial material. The whole world, as it was, must now be considered one big forgery. Still, one should spare no effort to curb the display of falsehoods, or at least one should hide one’s own.

For heaven’s sake, how would you know about this miserable medicine, she asked irritably when she found it at last and lifted out the antique silver etui. What problems can your heart have.

You are young, strong.

Silent for a moment, the young woman pressed her hands to her temples, squeezed and kneaded them, moaned and whimpered.

Nobody can get trinitroglycerin except people with serious heart problems, though as a medication it’s not dangerous.

Lady Erna’s hand in the meantime also found her handkerchief of snow-white, lightly starched lawn. The absentminded movement with which she put it to use was among the imperceptible supreme achievements of her upbringing. Looking deep into Gyöngyvér’s eyes — and it was these apparently incidental gestures that Gyöngyvér absorbed and internalized most eagerly — she dabbed and blotted up the pearls of perspiration under her nose without either the immaculate kerchief or her fingers touching her lips. The lipstick was not smeared and the movement was not in the least conspicuous. This was the trick of the proper use of a handkerchief. The gesture must be rapid and restrained but not fussy.

In her other hand, she was still holding the little silver box.

Explosive, I know, believe me, nitroglycerine. Gyöngyvér’s words tumbled out. By the way, I have what they call an athletic heart, really, it’s like steel. She felt she was making no headway with her headache. But I did have an old lady colleague with very serious heart problems. I liked her a lot and helped her often, believe me. I lived at her place for months, and while she was telling this story she blushed and her face showed signs that it might be painful for her to remember this friend.

The little chameleon has finally betrayed herself. The pained artificial little smile, which she had built on a true headache, might have been provoked by a memory of real pain, but she had buried it under the unceasing pain she felt because of Ágost, which filled out her skin and made her face beautiful, even though her soul was filled with scab-encrusted injuries, purulent sores, and open wounds.

While her gaze wandered elsewhere. Unblinking, with an all but shameless lack of empathy, they kept looking into each other’s eyes.

Who in fact was an old gentleman, this dear old lady colleague of yours, if I’m not mistaken, came Lady Erna’s venomous response.

Immediately she thought she shouldn’t have said this, but the sentence had spilled out of her with elemental force. As if she had said, I know you were nothing but a whore and you still are. And now, with your mawkish sentimentality, you are trying to put one over on my son.

She could see through the young woman, who herself had the feeling she shouldn’t have come up with such a big lie.

And I’m blushing, too, so the old bitch can see how big a lie it was.

They were both slow to say more. The two statements remained hanging in the air. Neither one could be retracted.

But why say such things to me, why, Gyöngyvér whimpered under her breath, as if still moaning and whining about her headache, and as if, above all, she must convince herself that something terribly unfair had taken place. Though she sensed that her childish self-pity led her to an open clearing where there was no shelter. I don’t understand, she whined, I don’t understand at all why you hate me so much.

What are you talking about, may I ask.

I feel it, yes, I feel that you hate me.

Well, if that’s how you feel, one can’t argue with feelings, Lady Erna answered severely. But you constantly prevaricate, my child. And that’s putting it mildly.

Their faces seemed to be glowing in a peculiar light.

They could not acknowledge the source of the light, they could not look aside, and right now neither of them could afford even a flutter of eyelashes without risking the other drawing conclusions. Neither of them had room to move to let the other one pass by. As if they had been trying to avoid this very moment, or rather, as if they had been on the way to it. This is what they both felt. Lady Erna was filled with restrained expectations, Gyöngyvér with light-headedness, with the mature vitality and explosive superiority of youth. As in a game of team handball, when her movements were most intimately her own, dexterity, anticipation, and strength all working together. And these feelings now painted vaguely ironic smiles on their faces, which simultaneously spoke to itself as well as to the other.

At least for a moment, they both laid down their weapons.

Which made Gyöngyvér the more audacious one; Lady Erna’s audacity gave her permission. The way it usually happens on the handball court when she gets the ball, makes a lightning-quick movement with it, feints, steps to the side, takes off, and has already broken through the line of outmaneuvered girls. She seized Lady Erna’s hand, the older woman was ready for anything but this, and did what she should have done minutes earlier but could not without permission: she pressed it, held it in her hand, and kept it there.

The elderly heart-patient friend had indeed been a gentleman who kept her, she admitted, but fortunately he was no less seriously ill than her female colleague might have been. Somehow, there was some truth in all her lies. She apologizes for every one of them, belatedly and in advance. And here I am holding your hand because for a long time I’ve been admiring and envying your beautiful hands, your delicate fingers, your exquisite rings and the fine, thick gold bracelets that slide down your bony wrists. I love it all, love it. Perhaps the way I love every bone in your son’s body, his skin, his hair, his smell, his voice, his breath; to me they are jewels. I’d like to adorn myself with them every night. I love him, love him. There is no part of him I can do without.

Oh, I would die without them.

Now, as at other times, she turned her self-pity into a passionate humiliation. With her slippery subservience she matched the selfishness, rejection, and superiority emanating from Lady Erna — eerily reminiscent of how she treated her son. She rejected him; there was hardly anyone in her life she had not rejected for the sake of some unfulfilled desire. There was no such person. Her daughter had rebelled against her and perished because of her; but her son, nevertheless, followed her loyally and unconsciously. Like a dog. For not only their flesh but also the quality of their selfishness and sense of superiority were alike.

Gyöngyvér went so far as to bend over and kiss the beautiful hand. She usually took men’s cocks into her mouth when she bent over so nicely.

Surrendering to their childlike selfishness.

In this fleeting moment, the silver box in her hand both confused and somewhat hindered Lady Erna. Her hand would have felt good clasping Gyöngyvér’s gloved fingers. The skin of the glove was smooth, tight, and cool. She saw the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck for a moment. She was strongly tempted to kiss the closely shaved female nape, thin as a child’s. Her sense of aesthetic proportions would have demanded as much, as did her desire erupting from the depths, hitting her briefly and bluntly.

She shuddered; she was so moved her body grew damp.

If only Gyöngyvér’s lips had tarried a moment longer on her hand. They were soft, silky, and cool, like the touch of a lizard. But Gyöngyvér quickly sat up.

She could never count on mutuality or reciprocity; Ágost had never pampered her with either.

The dark gray clunky Pobeda reached the entrance to Margit Island and slowed down. Not so much because of the turn but because of the terrific northerly gusts of wind. This is the highest point of the bridge as it rises from the two riverbanks. Arriving from the Pest side, and with nothing else to do, one registers the sight of the hills ahead. But the cabbie could not have seen much of them now. The windshield wipers were working at top speed and the wind pressed the rain’s myriad drops like a robe around the taxi. An opaque curtain was dripping down each window. It was as if nocturnal darkness had descended on them, but with something continually illuminating or flashing in it. The sky turned black and dense over the entire city; but beyond, somewhere in the south, over the flatlands of Csepel, and in the west and north, behind the hills of Buda, the clouds opened up. The rim of the sky was clearing fast in a wide arc and from there a flat, white light shone into the bottom of the darkness. The mass of clouds, gathered and piled up by the strong winds, slowly began to move eastward where flatland, clouds, rain, and city seemed to touch. And the flatly falling light was reflected in the mud-darkened foam on the surface of the Danube, illuminating from below, under the swirling firmament, the faces observing each other. There was something frightening, otherworldly in this phenomenon, though it may have had a simple explanation.

The cabbie correctly sensed that something unusual was happening between the two women behind him.

They were both laughing, but very quietly. It was a vocal confirmation of the knowing twinkle in their eyes.

As if Gyöngyvér were saying, you see, I’m not lying now, I admit it; and Erna were responding, my sweet, as far as I’m concerned you can lie all you want. I understand you even when I pretend not to. And the laughter had nothing to do with the old female colleague in Gyöngyvér’s life who happened to be an old gentleman with heart trouble; they were beyond that already, had forgotten all about it, had brushed it aside. And they were laughing not at the sudden revelation but out of embarrassment, at their mutual state of exposure.

Each sat facing the other as if facing a mirror.

As if they both had drawn in their bellies, thrust out their chests, and with tightly closed thighs pressed themselves to the seat. It was pleasurable to be here together, at each other’s disposal. They were entrusted to each other, and that is very different from the usual, everyday routine, deeper and more carelessly familiar. If this was true, then it was possible to get to Erna through Ágost, and Gyöngyvér hardly even noticed how it happened. Whatever the moment contained had no opposite pole, no charge of attraction or repulsion, and therefore the moment’s space and duration became infinite. And Erna did not even notice that the dying man, who might no longer be alive, had vanished from her life. A burst bubble would leave more of a trace. Their gazes opened wide onto each other, mutually revealed that each was not unacquainted with these lesser-known territories where no males ever enter. Of the two, Gyöngyvér was more experienced but also the more cautious and reticent. Lady Erna had always relied more on her imagination and memory, which made her demanding and greedy. But now the cabbie, much as he would have liked to, could not look in the rearview mirror. The wind was pushing the taxi this way and that; the entrance road to the island — still paved with the same smooth yellow ceramic tiles produced in Demén’s brick factory in Budakalász back in 1898 when they began building the ramp off the middle pier of the bridge, resting on the tip of the island — was slippery.

A careless thought or a wrong move while taking the curve would have been enough to send the cab into a spinning waltz.

The two women did not notice.

Their sensation was much more brutal than what is felt by little girls crazy about their female teachers, or by female teachers dazed by their own feelings for their frenzied pupils.

Every emotion has a primal state, the seat of instinct. Laughter had thrown them back into this primal state, whence they could continue, arm in arm and led by instinct, down another path. Instincts work the same way in everyone. But primal states, to which everyone always returns, are not the same and may not even resemble one another. In some people, the primal state lives on as a single experience that the person remembers only vaguely or would prefer to forget. Others forget so successfully that a vacuum is created where the experience had been; and the only reason to be aware of deliberate forgetting is that one cannot fill the vacuum with any old thing, for then it becomes a burning lack that can no longer be named. In yet others, the primal state means a chain of rippling interwoven experiences that cannot be untangled, and whether or not a person remembers which sensation produced which subsequent sensation, the primal state reveals itself according to the person’s instinctual needs.

Showing one of its pulsating and throbbing countenances — now this one, now that one.

Lady Erna, from a distance of several decades, looked back to the sole experience she cherished above all others as a sacrament. Gyöngyvér might have looked in several directions but did not want to see her experiences, neither yesterday’s nor yesteryear’s.

Yesterday’s experience filled the place of everything.

Instinct cannot be steered.

Once it stirs in its reeking den, there is nothing can keep it from flashing into view a few unavoidable images from a primal experience, even if it does not show the entire storehouse. One of Gyöngyvér’s primal experiences was that she had no one in the world and therefore felt as though she herself did not exist either. Or the very opposite: she did have somebody somewhere in the world, and the moment she could find this somebody would mark the beginning of her existence. Until then, pitying, cruel, caring, or indifferent girls and women would keep passing her on from hand to hand because they didn’t know what to do with her. She does not even have to look at them; one is just like the other. They are different in every way but similar in that none of them is the woman she belongs to.

Who does not exist.

The stream of others never dried out, however; they kept coming, replacing one another as though there was a magic source somewhere from which women sprang. She had had enough of women.

She’d preferred to look for a man who would supplant the only woman she’d been looking for, would fill the empty space.

Although she had spent her life in unceasing search, she never found what she was looking for, or rather, she always almost found it: a man, after all.

Lady Erna paid attention to only one young woman, one very special creature, in whom once, and only once, she had had a clear glimpse of herself. In her mind, she always returned to the same one and only young woman, whom she had failed to see for many decades though she knew she was still alive, and whom she truly did not want to see in the flesh since she could always see her in other women.

In the stormy half-light, in the taxi saturated with their perfumes and the acrid smell of tobacco, each stared coldly at the other’s strange face. As if the head of the young woman had been cast of bronze. Lady Erna had no use for a living person. But Gyöngyvér could see a double face in place of the single one. One of them wore face powder hastily applied, unevenly painted lipstick, and fatty beads of mascara as superfluous and clumsy armor.

No traces of their little laugh together remained on these faces.

Mother and son looked at her simultaneously, and if the son belonged to her, then she belonged to the mother.

This was terrible. This was no laughing matter. Once again, both women’s lips trembled with emotion. Which could not be taxed further. What is this, fumed Lady Erna to herself, in place of her own infuriated mother. And she fumed for Gyöngyvér too, because she had to be a mother to the younger woman. If the taxi hadn’t swerved a second time, in their embarrassment they probably would have leaned back on the seat and continued their chatter in an entirely different direction; it had strayed into dangerous territories and times.

The cabbie swore quietly to himself; the women heard only his muffled grumbling, not the innocent curse.

The swerve made them fall on each other and they couldn’t have said whether it was by accident or whether their instincts, quickly and almost shamelessly, took advantage of the moment. And once in this situation, they would have liked to touch each other’s face with their lips, lightly and fleetingly, to put an end, as it were, to the painful comedy that could not have been avoided. But this too turned out differently because of the taxi’s slipping and swerving. Lady Erna’s soft, lipstick-covered lips did encounter Gyöngyvér’s firm, perhaps too firm, dry lips — not directly, but as if the edge of one mouth enclosed the corner of the other. And each of them felt the other was the initiator, and deliberately so. That was horrible. Before one mouth could slip over the other completely, they both recoiled and restrained themselves. The swerve, the inevitable pleasure, the jostling, their fitful protestations, the entire turmoil was enough for Gyöngyvér’s hard little forehead to push Lady Erna’s wide-brimmed hat off her head.

Gyöngyvér reached for it carelessly. She did not catch it but managed to knock the silver box out of Lady Erna’s hand. Both women squealed, one after the other; and the large black hat adorned with a shiny cluster of ribbons landed gracefully on the front seat next to the cabbie, while the silver box snapped open and the blindingly white pills scattered on the ribbed rubber floor mat.

Relieved and squealing, they laughed simultaneously. The cabbie, busy steadying his vehicle, could not help them. They fell silent in almost the same instant.

They were both gripped by the fright they had caused each other.

The residual sensation of the other’s lips clung to their own like a painful mark that brands rather than rewards. But it was not so easy to dismiss the whole thing. To arrive at the bedside of a dying man with one’s loins swelling with blood, squealing and laughing, as they were doing now, was a bit much. Sane persons do not behave like this; they expect better of themselves. In their confusion they froze for a few moments, the silence turning icy between them.

At the same time, she was suckling a baby on an unupholstered Dutch chair.

Gyöngyvér moved first; bending down, she began to collect the pills from the rubber mat.

Oh, I’m so ashamed, she said, switching back to her plaintive tone, I’m so sorry. Don’t be angry with me, I always wind up making trouble.

Come, come, never mind, replied Lady Erna, and she too bent down to look for the etui, which had disappeared under the front seat. She had to be careful not to crumple the documents in her lap. There was also the danger of bumping into each other again.

Oh, leave it, let me, I’m so sorry.

Oh, come on, you silly little thing.

I’ll pick them up.

To do the job, Gyöngyvér had to remove her gloves. The little white pills were stuck between the ribs of the rubber mat. In taking off the gloves she felt as if she had indecently bared herself in front of the wrong person.

She did not understand why she would feel this way about the mother.

And then, like a huge splash, the mass and loud noise of the wave filled the entire cavity in the rocks. For a second, between the uprights of the bridge railing, she could see the churning, windblown water below.

Would you mind giving me back my hat, said Lady Erna to the cabbie.

Right away, give me a moment, please, replied the cabbie, coolly and readily.

The young men, glittering with perspiration, interrupting their even and until now most powerful strokes, suddenly drew in their oars with a single decisive movement. She could not take her eyes off them. All she could think of was that they too were capable of it, and might have even done it during the night. She saw, and she wanted to shout to them, that in the next instant they’d be smashed against the rock. This sight appeared to be closer than the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck; she was still looking for the pills on the taxi floor. With a loud report, the waves slapped against the side of the boat. It was a light, narrow boat, but much heavier than the dinghies on the Tisza.

Signora, heads down, mind the hats, Signore, your head, down, the young men shouted in their bright voices, in the early sunny hours, as they were tossed by the murmuring gentle waves of the sweetly fragrant sea; then the boat slipped through the narrow, craggy opening of the cave.

They were in nocturnal darkness and silence. She could continue to moan to herself, as she had done all night long, often outdoing the crickets. Nothing separates the different worlds. Impossible to separate pain from pleasure.

She put on her gloves again, adjusting them on her fingers as if that were the most important task in the world. She leaned forward a little, reached across the back of the front seat, but the driver still hadn’t returned her hat.

She had to press her knees close together to keep from feeling in her vagina this rapid little slipping across the seat as the powerful, rhythmic slippings of the night before. It was still sore. Just as it was back then, years later, when with her knees apart she sat on the hard Dutch chair suckling the baby, and the weak wintry light glimmered through the long, tall row of square-grid windows. Barely penetrating the fog and clouds. But under the gaze of the other woman she did press her knees together. To the demanding sound of the little mouth’s sucking, her womb contracted. She had plenty of milk, though. She had to press her bottom to the seat to lessen the pain when her womb’s opening convulsed; she could not help emitting tiny hissing sounds. Which she found pleasurable. The soft, glowing countenance of the other woman pampered, all but caressed her. The other woman knew well what caused those little hissing sounds. Wanted confirmation of her impression. When their eyes met, she knew the woman’s body was hungry. In the meantime, the opening of her womb repeatedly contracted and relaxed and she couldn’t have said, not even to herself, what she was hoping for and what she wanted to devour.

A sober, bright morning; the baby is working on her swollen breast. Does she hope that the turgid body of the cock and the large mass of its head, taut to the point of explosion, will still reach the mouth of her womb; or that this senseless and humiliating pain will dissolve in the enormously grotesque mouth of this woman, and that her parts will never be pried open again.

The first time they journeyed to the island of Capri was in the first year of their marriage, in the spring of 1924.

They stayed in the Villa Filomena, in Anacapri, the quieter, less expensive side of the island. The villa, with its antique columns and decorated terraces built on the edge of cliffs, hovered about a hundred meters above the sea. That morning, they went down to the water on the narrow, ominously steep steps cut into the rocks. There was no end to them. She said not a word of complaint about the steps, though her knees were trembling, albeit not only from fear. The small boat with the men floated below them like a blown dry bay leaf fallen onto the back of the waves. She held on, moved step by step; the depths attracted her irresistibly, as though another being were breathing inside her, one she ought to fear because it was ready to fall and take her with it. A gentle breeze kept her light blue silk dress close against her skin.

This provided enough pleasure to stifle complaints.

Down below, the little boat rose, then dipped gracefully, and on the shady rocks the waves kept roaring and rumbling, the water foamed white.

The woman who years later in the wintry light glimmering through the thick northerly fog watched the suckling was Geerte von Groot, daughter of the hotelier in Groningen. A peculiar creature, to whom she could not help returning in her mind because she never saw her again. Geerte was a few years older, herself a mother of two. After a few years of marriage, for reasons they would not talk about for a long time, she and her little ones moved back to her parents’ home. In a tall, narrow, Gothic house in Groningen, maybe the wallpaper changes, but otherwise everything stays the same for centuries. Geerte von Groot lived in the mansard apartment of the house adjacent to the hotel, in the same little room where she had lived as a little girl.

A connection between the apartment house and the hotel was made by tearing down the wall between the two on the second floor.

The baby slowly had its fill and grew tired. It stopped sucking, only kept munching on her breast, at times on empty air, though its little lips retained enough suction to not let go of the nipple completely. The small body sank into sleep, relaxed; there was a moment when it could be seen struggling against sleep. As if the approaching slumber were taking the milk away from her and she would get no more. What sleep had to offer had no taste, was unfamiliar and therefore was rejected. It would not satisfy the baby. The little face twisted in pain, the legs kicked a little. She almost cried out, then added two quick smacking sucks. All these tense efforts seemed to exhaust her completely.

Well then, let sleep have its way. The baby’s open little mouth remained as it was, a bit of milk dripping from its corner.

The mother used a damp rag to wipe off first the baby’s mouth and then her breast. Geerte von Groot sat opposite her on an identical hard-backed chair.

This wasn’t a hotel room, but a veritable hall of knights with a row of tall square-grid windows that now stared into fog. Neither the bare crowns of trees in the palace garden on the other side of the small river nor, through the other row of windows, the red facades of houses on the old city’s narrow streets could be seen. The sun twinkled through the fog, wearily, with a silver sheen. In the hall, it was cool and dead silent. The fire in the fireplace barely flickered, crackling and fizzling now and then.

Without a word Geerte took the baby from her and carried her into the adjacent bedroom.

She should be burped.

I’ll lay her on her stomach.

And cover her well.

Their words died away as if vanishing in cotton. The old floor creaked, almost cried, under Geerte’s steps, which echoed in the high-ceilinged hall under the blackened beams. She should get up. This has been nothing but a kind of extra suckle. She should have left long ago. But she didn’t have the heart because the baby cried so hard. The suckling had so loosened her body she was unable to rouse her sense of responsibility toward her own child. When Geerte returned after a few minutes, she found her in the same position. Including one breast hastily freed from her beige silk blouse: blazon of the ample body. She wore a long, close-fitting, dark, heavy silk skirt that opened into two wide inverted pleats above the knees. With her hands in her lap, she was sitting rather like an old person. Her heavy, dense chestnut hair, gathered in a chignon at the neck, had come somewhat undone.

Geerte lowered herself on her chair, for only a minute, she thought, and scooted a bit closer; their knees almost touched. They were looking at each other, smiling imperceptibly. Their smiles softened the glances with which they grazed each other’s surfaces; they kept returning to each other’s eyes, spending more and more time, one might say lingering more and more impersonally, in them.

I’d like to ask you something, Geerte, something rather personal.

Go ahead, ask away, Erna, anything, replied the other woman quietly.

If it’s too embarrassing, you don’t have to answer it, Geerte, that would be perfectly understandable.

For a long time now, I’ve had the feeling that I have no great secrets from you, Erna. You can hardly have any questions I wouldn’t willingly answer.

I’ve been meaning to ask you for days, how long after the second birth, or after the first one, after giving birth in general, when did you give yourself to your husband.

Never.

There was silence for a while.

What this means, continued the other woman, is that never after the second birth, never again.

Erna had not expected this quick and unequivocal reply. And she thought, no, it’s not possible that this would be the end of her life. And that happiness would last such a short time. Geerte’s answer hit her as a well-aimed coup de grâce. And gone too was the confidence she had had in Geerte. Never again, that just isn’t possible.

She looked at the strange woman with aversion and pity. One simply cannot be done with life at the age of twenty-eight. Involuntarily the next round of their glances set off in opposite directions. They had to avoid each other. As if to obey the dictates of decency.

But maybe it is like that, after all, only no one ever told her. It seems that it’s indeed that way, in which case there’s no point in doubting or protesting. She must accept it.

Geerte had on a light gray-and-white-striped housedress with a high collar. She had the air of a schoolgirl who had been deliberately dressed in uninteresting clothes and who had done nothing to make herself interesting.

Yet she was very interesting.

She showed no penchant for joking or lightheartedness; if she says this is the way it is, then this is the way it is. She kept her legs, in their coarse cotton stockings, pressed tightly together as if she had been ordered to behave decently.

Just as she said.

Her statement created such a tense silence that she was the one who had to break it.

But don’t go away like that, Erna, one shouldn’t go outside like that, she said, her voice hoarse, and she pointed to Erna’s blouse to show where the milk had soaked through.

She had to change clothes anyway.

As though she had shouted, stay with me for a while, my love. Take no offense, no matter what I say. Each with her own strong accent spoke a kind of schoolroom German. Erna with her open vowels, Geerte with the consonants rolling from her throat. Nevertheless, Erna’s impression now was that she had misunderstood something; perhaps the other woman had said something the wrong way in the language that was foreign to them both. As though she understood a sentence that had not been uttered, or that had been said but had a very different meaning.

Thanks for telling me, she responded, a little embarrassed, I’ve noticed it myself. My bras, slips, my blouses, everything is full of milk all the time, she added, laughing a little and a little irritated. She took a deep breath. But if you don’t mind, I’m still interested, could you possibly tell me why you never let him come to you again. Please don’t be angry for my asking such a thing, you probably understand I’m asking this for my own sake.

Which sounded like an unnecessary confession.

As if assuming Geerte hadn’t understood why she asked.

She simply wanted to compel the other woman to continue, to speak, to tell her everything. Not to let modesty hold her back. She felt she was entering unknown territory, violating all the rules of propriety. And that was exactly what she wanted. It helped that she was speaking a foreign language; that way she could go much further than in her own. And Geerte was turning her head this way and that, as if showing her willingness to speak; after all, her openness also had its selfish side. But she was still thinking; she opened her mouth as if in the next instant she’d find the right word, but then she merely nodded to what she thought to herself.

She was struggling.

She did not dare or could not say it.

Erna found so much seriousness rather comical, even though she understood the hesitation.

She struggled stubbornly with herself; she did not want to be false or vulnerable. She lowered her heavy eyelids, her large lips trembled several times. She was thinking, weighing things; and it was beautiful how she let it be seen that she had to reach back into the past for the answer. With her thoughts, she obviously grazed herself several times — while she was thinking, contemplating, and while Erna, in pleasurable anticipation, waited for her response. On every occasion, no matter what they talked about, Erna was moved to the depths of her soul by the seriousness and openness of this exceptionally structured pale face. Absentmindedly, she continued unbuttoning her blouse to free her other breast too, from which milk was visibly seeping. Under her blouse, she wore not a bra but a tight white camisole. Earlier, to free one breast quickly and pacify the baby, she had undone only its upper buttons.

When she was done with the blouse, she had to continue with the buttons.

I’d like to, I’d really like to tell you. Still, I’m not sure I can, said Geerte after a short while, drawing out her words, and as she spoke, her eyes absently focused on Erna’s ringed, nervously busy fingers as they looked for the tiny buttons sewn closely one below the other. The camisole was so tight that the base of each button, sewn with strong thread, stretched every buttonhole to the limit. The impression was that at any moment her strong, ample body would split the fine material and pop all the buttons. It’s also difficult to talk about something like this because I don’t know, I’ve no way of knowing, how you feel about it, Erna. Or anyone else. I believe people don’t talk much about this sort of thing. They think it’s such a simple matter it’s not worth talking about. And perhaps they’re right. I don’t know. A woman gets pregnant, gives birth, and that’s that. That’s the end of it. And then she suckles the baby. But it was never like this for me. For me it was never that simple, and that’s the reason I could never talk about it to anyone.

Not even to my mother, least of all to her.

My mother is the kind of woman, you can believe me, Erna, who gives everything, and I mean everything to her only son, and denies everything to her daughters.

If she could, she’d take the food out of my mouth.

To my mother, I couldn’t either, interrupted Erna vehemently, not a word, never. Imagine, my mother didn’t even tell me, listen, my little girl, there will come a time when you’ll bleed.

The deep resentment she had felt for her mother subsided as rapidly as it had awakened. Her vehemence had more to do with how much she understood Geerte, how closely she followed what she was saying about this difficult, painful matter. Not only did she want to identify with her, she was identical to her. No, this is indeed not simple, she added, a little confused. And quickly stopped talking because she did not want to catch herself in a lie.

She fell silent because until now she too had thought that it was a very simple matter. More precisely, she did not understand why it wasn’t as simple as it should be.

One feels, at least I always felt, that I could not be away from my child anymore, Geerte continued. And I don’t really like to put the blame only on my husband. The relationship between two people is difficult enough; how much more complicated are relations among three or four. Though I must say he behaved badly, what I’m saying is that he already became rough after the first one. He’d been rough before, but maybe I hadn’t noticed what kind of man he was.

The feeling that even when we were alone together, I wasn’t there by myself anymore, as he was, that is what he wanted to extinguish in me. As if he wanted if to be just the two of us again.

I’ve been ashamed ever since, or rather I’m ashamed for him. But the point is that one probably can’t break free of one’s child, not for a moment, because one is not a separate body. Or maybe one can’t break away from oneself, and the whole thing is nothing but terrible, animal selfishness. That you can’t give of yourself, or what you can give only your child deserves.

Perhaps one shouldn’t say this, but maybe I’m not a good enough mother, said Erna quietly after a little while, because I don’t feel anything like this.

She doesn’t.

Believe me, I do not. And my husband is not rough with me, he is patient, considerate, cautious, and likes to show his happiness. He strokes me, calls me pet names, and wants to pamper me. I feel and I know he isn’t thinking only about himself when he wants us to be together again, just the two of us. Sometimes he’s quite touching. Once, we even cried together.

They were both silent for a long time before Erna could speak again.

That’s not it, no.

It must be something else, then.

Something else.

I don’t know.

It’s as if we have been split, broken up, for I don’t know how long, as if we’ve been hacked apart. And then how could I wish him to come inside me again the way he used to long ago. No, I couldn’t. I’d rather never do it again, ever. I am not whole. Well, at first, one thinks it’s because of the torn perineum. When I had the little girl maybe it didn’t tear as much as it had with the boy, or maybe it healed faster. Or I just don’t know, really, that’s why I’m asking you, because I really don’t know what’s happening, and I’m beginning to be afraid. And to be honest, what sort of thing is this breastfeeding. Don’t be angry that I’m talking about things like this. Now, with the little boy, it didn’t hurt as much, or maybe I knew what to expect and that’s why it didn’t. But since then my whole body has been a wreck, my whole system, my everything, and no matter what I do, it does not pass. Everything. Maybe I’m just impatient, but I don’t know, compared with what should I be more patient — with him, or with myself, or with whom.

And you can see, I am literally flowing away, in all directions. All right, eventually that will stop, but sometimes it disgusts me so much. Is this what I have to put up with, every time.

While I feed the baby from one, she said, laughing a little and raising her breast, I’m dripping from the other. And there are other things one doesn’t talk about. The other things one must endure in the meantime.

Yes, I’m a wreck, I am devastated, all the time. And I don’t want to feel that it’s good to be like this. Yet it’s good to be this way, good, very good, this agitation, she cried out.

She had to get hold of herself.

Haven’t you felt, and this is what I want to ask, as if you’d been thrust out of your own body, that you can’t find your way back to the old one because in the meantime everything has changed. That’s what frightens me, that’s what I’m dreading. Where have I got to, where is the me I was before.

Or who am I.

That’s what I want to ask, is that what you feel.

No, I never felt anything like that, answered Geerte dryly. Everybody must feel it differently.

You probably never got as fat as I have.

No, I didn’t get fat at all. I was surprised by that myself, that I could breastfeed all right from these little breasts and that my child was very satisfied.

Because you’re a good mother. And not unlucky with your body the way I am.

Geerte did not reply, because she thought this sentence was offensive and unjustified. How can somebody so rich and beautiful be unlucky. It was hard for her to take her eyes off the other’s body, because she could not get enough of it. With a single movement of her wrist, she indicated that she was ready to take the blouse and camisole from Erna and have them washed.

She may have been saved; she could leave now.

For that to happen, Erna would first have to stand up, because while sitting she could not pull the blouse or camisole out from the waistband of her tight skirt. She knew she was pretending to get up to do just that, but that was not the reason. In her excitement, her knees were trembling a little, and, although she knew perfectly well what this excitement was all about, she could not believe it.

As if she had but one impersonal passion, and what was happening now was only another, hitherto unknown variety of the same passion.

Had she not been talking to this woman about how, in the absence of physical excitement, she could not give herself to her husband, how she did not even feel the urge to expose herself, how she did not understand why she didn’t; yet now, in its other variation, the urge alarmingly and powerfully made its appearance. It was shaking her knees, and it was impossible to tell whether it was joy or fear. Geerte stood up too, as if to follow Erna in everything, so as not to make her late for brunch at the university, which every month was an important event in the small town’s social life; at least that’s what she thought of her own helpful effort, as she sought, even more desperately than Erna did, to conceal her real intentions. A faint smile appeared on her heavy lips and began to spread, as if to signal the opposite of her thought.

Contempt.

Or something she disliked in Erna’s behavior.

She is rejecting her.

Perhaps the awkward trembling that Erna feels in her body and that is now visible.

What do I care whether it’s visible or not, Erna said to herself. She was definitely angry at Geerte von Groot, now ready to take her leave with that contemptuous smile of hers.

Well, in the end you haven’t told me anything, Geerte. You’ve given me only empty words. You’ve cleverly evaded all my questions, she said, and laughed openly at Geerte.

The laugh was indecent and alluring, because with her lips she broke through her own bashful trembling, even though the lips kept quivering.

Geerte had a good mind to slap her.

Teeth flashing wetly in the mouth are precursors of a bite. She handed over her blouse, and then quickly slipped out of the camisole too.

I did the talking, she said, I always talk too much, and now here I stand before you completely ignorant and defenseless.

But with this reckless little coquetry she was unable to shake the other woman’s seriousness.

Geerte von Groot took the blouse from her and then the camisole, carefully folded one into the other, lifted the mildly starched batiste and the slippery silk, and attentively, slowly, buried her peculiar, flat nose in them as if to seek Erna’s fragrance. Or to kiss the wet spots left by the seeping milk. In the intermingled odors, it was the milk’s fatty bouquet she could not resist.

Not only was it clear what she was looking for but also what boundaries they had crossed.

What are you doing, Geerte, for god’s sake, moaned Erna reproachfully, beseechingly, her modesty deeply insulted; what are you doing, please don’t, yet her entire body, with shuddering waves of hot and cold, showed its approval.

Indignation, beseeching, and reproach emanated from the same pleasure.

In truth she had fallen into another world, and measured against the enormity of this event, the signs she gave of how she was shrieking inside, while everything was ripping, creaking, breaking up around her, were far too faint. Feeble groans and whimpers came from her. As a saw when stuck in knotty wood. She wanted to flee, to protest that what had to happen should not happen, and quite involuntarily her hands flew in front of her breasts.

From the garments raised to her lips, Geerte looked up at her, actually rather surprised. She seemed paler than usual. The curls of her freed, unruly hair were aflame around her gleaming white forehead. Her face turned coarse, grew demanding, aggressive and somber. When she raised her head and began to speak, forcing the sounds up from her chest, when evil appeared in her features — hate, raw terror, a profound desire for revenge — Erna should have turned away; she should have run for her life.

I’d so much like to help you, I can’t tell you, she moaned. I want so much not to hurt you, not in any way.

But I don’t have anything besides my body, nothing, believe me. In what way could I help. I also know so little, nothing really.

And then, in her own language, she screamed.

Oh, nothing, nothing.

The scream, somehow, remained very controlled.

Her face was no longer suffused with the quiet intimacy of a Dutch painting.

Silenced reigned between them.

She saw that this woman was really a criminal. As if the tenderness and kindness she had forced on her had another, hitherto unknown side. This woman is capable of anything. Nevertheless, her desperate scream became stifled in the absolute silence of the house.

She saw the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War on her features. To restrain her, to frighten her away, or to keep her from coming close to her, to steer all events in a different direction, she should have dressed very quickly. Too late, and she knew it. Horses were trotting with her under the elm trees of Jászhanta. Everything is plotted, written in advance. Nothing you can do about it. And none of her things were to hand. She felt cold, her arms and shoulders had goose bumps, her nipples twitched, and she trembled more and more violently.

Why haven’t I noticed how hungry she was. And I’m so starved for her.

No, there was nothing close by she could throw on herself. She was standing in a large cool space; no help anywhere.

There was no god to whom she could pray. A little help came only — at least for a brief moment — from the ability to see herself from the outside, as she stood in this strange, cool, and austerely furnished hall, caught in this truly absurd situation.

And suddenly she hears the baby cooing quietly and contentedly in the adjacent room.

The only object within reach was a wet cloth, lying on a plain silver tray at the edge of a small table. She bent down for it. To use this movement, for lack of anything else, to cover herself. Immediately the hope that she still had a chance to leave this scene gave her some strength. As if an invisible tentacle were reaching over from the adjacent room, a secret power, the binding umbilical cord; then what Geerte had claimed and what Erna had never felt before was true after all.

Her baby was indeed binding her to itself and would hold her back.

I think, she said moaning and stammering and feeling a little stronger, I think it would be best if first I pumped this breast, it’s so full. But she could already tell by her own voice she was no longer master of herself or of anything else; neither did the cooing bind her. Her baby could not hold her back.

And if this was so, if she was going to betray everything and everyone, then she had better not see what she was doing; she closed her eyes.

But she would not give up, could not accept that there was no way back. When she spoke again, the voice coming from her throat was unpleasant, meant to be used with a disobedient servant.

Geerte, would you mind bringing the pump from the other room.

Their hands met on the wet cloth, and the silver tray rattled slightly at the sudden touch.

Geerte had meant to put the folded garments there because she wanted to free her arms and hands as quickly as she could.

She clasped her arms around Erna’s hips, though she did not immediately draw her close. Her swollen lips, which seemed so strange and out of place in the white face, were quivering.

Please, let me go, said Erna, gasping, feebly.

Her protest would not have been laughable if a man was forcing himself on her. But this was a woman, which made her feel she had no place to run to, no way to escape. Seeing Geerte’s approaching lips, she quickly turned her head aside lest the lips reach her mouth.

As if saying to herself, this won’t do. Which meant that anything was possible.

Something was really breaking through and opening up.

She was standing in such a small space, she had no room to back away. The baby was cooing and perhaps not entirely innocently. She tensed with elemental resistance, but the moment Geerte’s lips touched the skin below her cheekbone, her body went limp. There was no external sign of protest. But it wasn’t the contact of the lips that loosened her — it only turned the feverish shudder into shivering heat and back again — but, rather, feeling each other’s pubic bone strain and pulse through the fabric of their clothes.

But it could not disturb what one might call inner sensation or sober thinking.

She thought she saw more clearly than ever.

From a distance, she heard the baby cooing, the dim thud of horses’ hooves on the tree-lined path, her carriage flying between patches of light and shadow. One protuberance registered on the throbbing other as if it were within its own rhythmic beating; that was why each felt the other’s body pulsing through their clothes. The earth in Jászhanta is dark, heavy sand that becomes clumpy in the spring rains and condenses in the summer heat. Luckily I haven’t lost my mind yet, she thought to herself. She found some comfort in her alertness. Perhaps it was Geerte’s heartbeat, or her own, that she heard as thudding hoofbeats on the sand.

For the first time they felt each other in a way that was inseparable from their feelings for each other. As though she were observing from afar and would not dare experience her own findings, while the other person could no longer see out of herself. That was the difference between them. Or as though it wasn’t she who was feeling the other woman inside her but her husband, of whom she was constantly and not baselessly jealous. As if in contact with the other woman’s pubic bone she’d have to feel her own, yet as if not she but a man were thrusting against her.

At last she has the chance to feel what her husband feels, this man, these men, and to experience her own desires in their stead.

In her fear, she called him by his name, István, as if summoning him, the only one, asking for his help. She exchanged herself for the only man whom she had come to know through her body and to whose two children she had given birth. Which immediately reassured her that she loved him.

I love him, I love him, he is the one I love, no matter what happens. In reality, it wasn’t the woman she loved, the one she was now clasping more forcibly than the woman was hugging her back. This will turn into a mere episode in her life, she need not take it seriously. However, she hadn’t noticed when she had embraced the woman, so while her consciousness must be functioning well, she might not be aware of her intentions.

And that meant there was another self inside her.

Geerte was the stronger, or her feelings guided her more profoundly and confidently. Almost coarse and very common. The pubic bones thrusting against each other did not come to satisfactory terms. Erna was not certain whether she could want anything this other woman would not want from her. Her search for excuses and her doubts completely occupied her mind, though this did not decrease her pleasure.

At most, she enjoyed the other woman more slyly, enjoyed the way the other woman took pleasure in her.

Geerte had a definite goal.

A fantastic image hovered before her and she was determined to follow it. As if she were trying to force living matter into an ephemeral vision.

Erna pressed her body against Geerte’s, but Geerte thrust back as if to oppose her.

Erna felt clearly that Geerte wanted something. And this aroused a clear image that quickly washed away all other images. Even though the baby was still cooing evenly and by way of warning.

There was only this plump protuberance with its pubic hair when they rolled under each other. Only a kiss was missing to make it all possible; the contact of lips, the full taste and sensation of hollows opening into each other; and it was this lack, all that was missing, which now appeared to her as an image. Precisely what a moment earlier she had denied herself.

No, she shouldn’t deny anything. To open up, like two slow-turning, rippling, muscular snails sticking to each other.

She had long imagined Geerte’s pubic hair as fiery red. If she rolled down, their labia would open and nestle against one another. Her imagination mixed, mingled, and blurred the horizontal with the vertical, lips, kisses, and labia. She saw how Geerte’s opened up at her touch, and how her own opened into the welcoming hollow.

But she could neither move nor roll anywhere, because Geerte’s lips took aim at her tense, resistant neck — a snail, clinging, leaving a shiny film on tree trunks in the dim park; and simultaneously she shoved her back on the chair where she had just finished suckling her baby. The chair wobbled under the double weight, swinging a little on its back legs.

Geerte had a kind of grip on her, and she, for lack of anything to grasp and because of her fear, held on to Geerte, trying to keep them from falling.

She would have liked to laugh.

Then, in a flash, she saw Geerte’s frighteningly agitated face above her; her rounded lips, the darkening countenance, strands of her mad, reddish, scattered curly hair, and many other things ran across her mind. This is war, then, touched by the whirlwinds of horrible plague and conflagration. And now she will say something, now. And just as Erna wondered whether at moments like this every woman is repugnant, as repugnant as men are, the chair tipped over.

She fell, but not only on her back. The back of the chair hit the floor before her head did, which prevented a hard impact, and the two of them, arms around each other, were hurled from the chair. This happened more or less because of Geerte’s clever maneuvering. With their legs intertwined, they rolled onto the rug. The tipped-over chair remained where it fell.

As if they had been running alongside each other for a long time, they panted together.

Did you hurt yourself, my dear, asked Geerte, fearing her clumsiness might have caused Erna pain; her face returned to its former state, her features cleared.

How laughable the whole thing was.

Last time she had been involved in such horseplay was when she was a little girl, and always with boys. Arms around each other, they were lying lazily on the cool floor. And how pretty she is. As though this were happening to strangers whose warmth she could feel.

No, I’m not hurt, she replied, as if breathing words into the other woman’s breath. But you were about to tell me something, Geerte.

I’ll die, she shouted, keeping her voice down, I’ll die if you don’t tell me.

Geerte, in surprise, held her breath.

How could she possibly know I wanted to tell her something.

And then, along with the next sentence, hoarse with pain and shame she spat the words out.

I wanted to say that I’m hungry, I wanted to say I’m starved, Erna.

I’m thirsty, and I absolutely don’t feel like bringing you your stupid pump from the next room.

That’s what I wanted to tell you.

Silently and perhaps involuntarily they both laughed, which had the effect of a sobering wink, indicating how well they understood each other.

Erna freed herself from the embrace and slowly sat up, but neither of them let go of the other’s eyes.

Geerte, not to be alone, not to be left desperately to herself, reached after her.

She has finally understood; and this filled Erna with great serenity.

She felt enormous, powerful; with her blue-veined, swollen breasts, she ruled over and could have fed all humanity, but she no longer had any weight. They made barely perceptible movements. Even if in their own minds they were addressing themselves to each other, from this moment on they spoke each to herself, and about strange things that had no connection to and very little to do with the situation. Erna said to herself, I must check the dates, the years. She had a great urge to grab her coat, go to the library and look up the years, and she felt it so naturally that Geerte sat up, startled, sensing something of Erna’s strangeness.

However, she was wrong in assuming she was being rudely rejected.

Simultaneously they let go of each other’s gaze and hands.

And as they came off the bridge onto muddy Margit Boulevard, the convex basalt cobblestones began to rattle and toss the heavy taxi, whose springs were too stiff to absorb the shocks. I’ll get it for you in a minute, madam doctor, patience, please, said the cabbie, raising his voice against the noise, almost shouting. Just let me get through this damn section here. Anyway, I’d like to ask you something, madam doctor, if I may.

She didn’t understand where the driver had come up with this stupid madam doctor phrase, and what did he want from her anyway. She did not like, she could not get used to the idea of the help becoming independent. How could he possibly know that she had earned a doctorate when she never used the title.

The road ahead was clear all the way to Török Street. Gas pipes were being replaced, but now no one was working in the long wet ditch.

Above Geerte’s huge, meaty, heavily ribbed lips, a sharp-edged vertical scar disappeared into the cavity of her wide-winged flat nose. She had come into the world with a cleft lip; labium leporinum is the Latin name of the deformity. At the time she was born, during the last years of the nineteenth century, this condition was far from harmless. A cleft-lipped baby cannot suckle, because the various tissue lobes of its face have failed to join. The upper lip normally gains its shape from the union of a middle and two side apophyses, the lower lip from the union of two side ones; a cleft lip is an abnormal or irregular union of apophyses. It appears mainly on the upper lip, when the union is imperfect; the flesh of the lip is completely rent breadthwise. Moreover, a baby with a cleft lip cannot be operated on immediately but must first gain strength. Feeding it artificially, not suckling it, was not a simple matter in those days; babies easily got infections from the utensils used to feed them. A vicious circle developed. Because of infection, the artificial feeding would be discontinued, which posed the danger of dehydration. Geerte was three weeks old when she was finally operated on, and nobody dared vouch for her surviving the critical phases of the healing. They carefully sliced away the edges of the severely inflamed and suppurating cleft and sewed it together with three stitches. Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip, the natural mark of a proper union of the facial-tissue lobes. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round-looking — at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body’s wholeness or hint of at any threat to it.

It seems, Lady Erna thought, fate always brings me together with these thick-mouthed ones.

The dying man also had huge lips.

Pardon me, she yelled to the cabbie because otherwise they wouldn’t hear each other as the taxi bounced along, what makes you think I’m any kind of doctor. I don’t understand why you would say that.

The man, without turning around, spoke in a loud voice.

I took the professor to the university many times, to the academy, to Party headquarters. You’ve ridden with me too, but you don’t remember because it was at night, in the dark. One evening last year, when you went to see Aida in the Erkel Theater and we had that big snowfall. And once before that, when the professor, you remember, got that award, Order of the Red Flag.

As you can see I remember everything exactly, believe me, I do.

That’s very good, very nice of you, answered Lady Erna impatiently, but I still don’t understand how this follows from my being some kind of doctor. What sort of joke is this.

Listen to me, said the cabbie, laughing, and for a second he even turned around jovially. It’s very simple. I heard what you and the professor talked about. Please permit me to say, such a conversation demands at least a diploma and a doctorate.

I never mention my doctorate.

And my job is such, you know, I mean, its basic nature is such that I don’t have to understand everything to know whom I’m driving from place to place.

She couldn’t imagine what they might have talked about back then; she did not remember. She was sure they hadn’t talked about anything confidential, they would never do that in a taxicab.

And while with her fingers she grasped and then raised a little the swollen nipple of her left breast, she saw that milk was indeed seeping from it, she would have liked to ask the cabbie to tell her anyway what they had talked about during that trip. But she did not want to be so intimate with him. With a secret policeman who might have also been an Arrow Cross man. But now she had the feeling that neither assumption was correct; this man was somehow deceiving her in some way.

Geerte at the same time lowered her eyes but not completely, and from then on the two memories ran side by side.

Sometimes it’s best to separate tactile sensations from visual ones.

Nevertheless, Geerte does peek out from under her eyelids to see the nipple’s nodular, purple areola at a time when Erna entrusts her senses to its power of attraction. It never even occurred to her that she might deny herself this pleasure or that there might be any moral reason why she should. She’ll find me; let her lead. And Erna was admiring Geerte’s heavy, lazy eyelids, her auburn lashes whose roots were a transparent blond. It seems that her face, like seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, has hidden features. This is a secret they have in common.

Perhaps no one has paid attention to this or analyzed it until now.

The Thirty Years’ War with all its horrors is concealed in her special sense of family and home, in her inimitable tenderness and all-embracing attention, and in her gentility. It is like a benevolent curtain, hiding those aspects of human nature that the uninitiated should never see again. Or like a wrinkle, she thought, a soot-covered groove, sign of a blazing, continuous pain.

Should look up those years, to see if this is really so.

She had been regarding Geerte’s face, her bony and prosaic figure, as if in this small, strange town she had found the living model not of a single painter but of an entire tradition of painting. Just as it sufficed to step up to the square-grid windows to see what magnificent scales of depth and height the substance of air had taught Dutch painters. Now the situation was completely the other way around. In the face of a living person she had found what had been hidden in the paintings of a magnificent era. And if the dates of the years corroborated her assumptions, all the emphases would shift.

But this came as a hovering, uneasy feeling, something that seems to be on the tip of one’s tongue, not fully formulated, then vanishing and reappearing out of reach.

Of course I understood a lot of it, she thought bitterly, laughing at her old naïve self, at the entire brutal prewar world that had pretended to be so innocent, clinging to strict traditions and rules of etiquette. And all the while she pondered what the subject of their conversation might have been on that snowy evening, what indeed, and whether she should ask the leather-capped cabbie, who probably had not been an ÁVH but an Arrow Cross man but in either case was very chatty.

The help shouldn’t be chatty.

He was an Arrow Cross man, yes, now she was certain of it, an Arrow Cross man who later became an ÁVH man.

Geerte’s strong arms were again around her waist. It’d be better not to get into a conversation.

She was looking at this male head and she was looking at this memory of hers, observing the fleshy lips closing in on her nipple, tugging it away from her fingers. She released it, let her take it.

As if it were not pleasure but a noble deed to quench the thirst of these deformed lips. The gesture of nourishment acquired new meaning in this carnal pleasure. She sank the thrust-out fingers of one hand into Geerte’s woolly red hair; she thrust the other hand, a little clumsily, as much as the stiff, striped cotton dress allowed, and a little bashfully, between Geerte’s thighs. Still, for a little while she wanted to feel as if she felt nothing. She deflected her senses with thoughts, or rather, she seemed busy with something other than what she was experiencing directly.

What she was thinking about was the question of how the painting of a given era could deflect itself from the horrors of that era.

And that is why several minutes may have passed before she let out a loud moan.

She was thinking so hard about all this that she did not see the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck, did not notice when she had gathered the pills from the ribbed rubber mat and when she took her place again on the taxi seat. It was very painful to immerse herself in this old pleasure. She even berated herself for having torn herself away from Geerte. Though the years had passed the memory had not faded. She should have stayed there.

If not in Groningen then in Venlo, where they traveled together with the children. Then, maybe her little girl would still be alive. Why can’t one stay in the moment.

Why must one leave?

Or why doesn’t one know which moment to stay in and never move until one dies.

Besides, the cabbie shouted cheerfully toward the backseat, I don’t mind telling you I hear a lot of things from my son. He was one of the professor’s favorite students, and he’s been to your apartment many times.

To this day he goes there often.

I see, responded Lady Erna, who wasn’t especially fond of her husband’s favorite students and found interesting only those who visibly disliked or positively detested him.

Now I understand, she added with a certain reserve. And what’s the name of the young man, she asked. I mean the name of your son.




Himself in the Magic Mirror


He could not go back during the next few days because of the steady quiet rain. Or rather, it was as if the fog were drizzling. It did not want to stop. On days like these, the city fills up with vapors, heavy clouds settle on it, and under the wheels of automobiles the rain sizzles steadily.

Döhring waited for it to stop.

Standing by the window, he was staring at the slowly bursting bubbles of the raindrops. He was gazing at this simple phenomenon obeying the simple laws of physics, and drew the conclusion that he had not gone out of his mind. He could endure this. Perhaps he’d manage to separate his continuous dream from his normal life. At least he had left no trace of anything; he’d cleaned up everything. He hoped there’d be no consequences. No telephone rang. Even if it did, he wouldn’t pick it up, because the state of emergency still made his soul shudder. He did not go downstairs to check the mail. He wouldn’t find anything but junk mail anyway. Before stepping out of here into the hostile outside world, he wished to return to that rational self of his that perhaps never existed.

Now he knew.

He took out a map to study his innocent outings of the previous days.

Maps are rational objects; they deal with physical differences based on observation and are checked with precise measurements.

The body of water he had discovered on his first day in Berlin was probably Teufelssee, Devil’s Lake.

He found a similar small lake on the map called Pechsee, Pitch Lake, probably because of its dark water. He couldn’t decide with absolute certainty which of the two was the one he had been to. On his second excursion, however, he definitely rode as far as the Havel river, next to the Grunewald Tower. While studying the interconnected blue spots of lakes and rivers on the map, he had an irresistible urge to go to the water, to be on the move, to swim, to feel his limbs.

Let the water wash the night out of his skin.

Not to smell the shit anymore.

There were other kinds of lake on the map. But the rain would not let up. His aunt’s top-floor apartment was just under the roof. It had only five rooms and only one of these was disproportionately larger than the rest. An empty, evenly bright, barn-size room that the sun never penetrated. One wall, sectioned by densely set high windows, faced north, and from here one could step out on a balcony larger than the floor space of the entire apartment.

The rain clouds were coming from the north, hopelessly and heavily, one could not see their end. The northerly sky was divided by the dark stripes of the vertical structural beams. He could see far above the roofs, but nothing else. For security reasons, the solid white brick baluster had been built high enough to make leaning over it impossible. Originally, this is where his aunt wanted to store her collection of paintings, but then she and her agent found the bank in Düsseldorf more secure. Only a single, rather insignificant item from the entire collection was placed on the empty white wall, under the dark-colored, arced beams.

It felt as if one were standing in an empty church nave. And what was interesting was that on the painting itself there was nothing to be seen but white walls and beams, a fire and colorful flames, or something like that.

On this long and eventless rainy morning Döhring purchased those small, translucent underpants he has been wearing ever since. More precisely, that’s when he bought the first two, a purple one and a sulphur-yellow one.

Later he returned to the store several times to buy himself a turquoise one, two different red ones, more in black, green, purple, and even silver. And they were not inexpensive. He was sorry he had to leave all the others in the store. Buying them had become a mysterious passion that he was trying to keep a secret from himself.

Already on the very first occasion, he would have wanted to purchase a pink one but didn’t dare, not then and not afterward. There were colors he simply denied himself.

Had he bought it, he might as well have changed his skin.

But that was exactly what he didn’t dare do; instead, he bought the others.

Perhaps, originally, he did not even go out that morning to go shopping. He did not need any underpants. In general, he did not buy things for himself; he wasn’t even present when shoes were bought for him. His stepmother, a passionate shopper, especially at big sales, bought everything for him, and from his aunt he kept receiving finer items. This apparently sensible division of labor between the two women was also a kind of sly competition. One flaunted her frugality, the other her generosity. He had to do nothing to maintain and enlarge his wardrobe, and he wasn’t really interested in it; he had grown used to being cared for by the two women. Perhaps this is what made him so dependent and was also the reason he eventually let himself be seduced by a third one.

On the rainy street, among umbrella-carrying pedestrians, it occurred to him he might need better bathing trunks. One thinks of lots of things that luckily one forgets in the next moment.

He found the store somewhere behind Wittenberg Square; in the store window, torsos sunk in sand and rolled-away heads were lying about.

As soon as he entered, the salesgirl unerringly sensed the lost country boy in him. She pounced on him at the door with a fawning, well-rehearsed sales pitch, oh yes, those splendid little bathing suits, of course, and she’d also have something special to recommend. Would the gentleman follow her, please. One would think that underwear was really a little nothing, a small piece of colored artificial fabric, without realizing that the simplest things demand the most refined art.

Döhring not only had no idea that he had wandered into the city’s most expensive undergarment establishment but was also unaware that here they sold underwear made to the most exceptional requirements, and to satisfy these requirements they were willing to go to great lengths, the sky was the limit.

There is this brand-new material, the salesgirl was explaining, evenly and with great enthusiasm, while quickly and purposefully leading him into the spacious, mysterious interior of the store. It’s called living, breathing polyurethane, the realized dream of the age, if one may put it that way. It is the first synthetic that successfully combines the positive characteristics of natural materials with those of artificial ones.

It’s the invention of the century, and of course we can thank several earlier scientific achievements for its existence. It is thin, easy to wash, prevents perspiration, dries in seconds, dries in the natural warmth of the body without stifling the skin in the least, and because it is like silk or velvet to the touch, it never causes a rash. It’s available in every hue on the color scale; its design is so clever and handsome it can be worn as either underpants or swimming trunks, which makes it very comfortable; one might say it frees one from the last inconvenience and, what’s more, from the least inhibition, which, until now, in the absence of this material, no designer had managed to solve.

This was nothing less than a hit at the very center of the bull’s-eye. As a result, we now have a wide-pored, breathing, elastic material, silky to the touch, willing to adhere to the body as a second layer of skin.

She is confident in claiming that this material can perform miracles on the body.

It will not expand, won’t lose its shape, won’t lose its color. One wears it as one’s own epidermis, and would never be caught in the embarrassing situation in which one couldn’t undress in anyone’s company, at any time.

The salesgirl fell silent for a moment and, as if expecting Döhring’s approval or support, turned around.

She was lithe, tall, surrounded by a delicate cloud of scents.

In the dimness, their faces were intimately close to each other; and while Döhring felt that this was not unintentional, the salesgirl, with a single glance, saw that she had the young man hooked. But no matter how ingratiatingly she spoke, no matter how soft and familiar her tone was, as if they had known each other for a long time and were now only continuing a former, professional conversation, her heavily made-up face remained as indifferent as a mask. Her eyes were beautiful, her countenance lifeless in its self-control; there was something deliberately deterrent in her manner.

Perhaps this was the only way to speak of such delicate matters in the dark.

Or she succeeded in discussing the intimate lives of others, without offending any code of decency, because she had donned the armor of chastity.

From then on Döhring was more interested in the performance; he did not feel he had a role in the play. The salesgirl was only a few years older than he, yet she had already mastered something to perfection. As though it were not exactly she who spoke or moved; as if she had made another living and breathing person vanish in her, lending or renting out her corporeal shell to this stranger along with her voice. A completely attractive person radiating icy indifference. But she must have retained the natural attributes of her body, Döhring thought, though he could not see where or how she had made her personal traits disappear.

Her attractiveness, in spite of all this, remained intact, she took it along everywhere; and Döhring stayed on the trail, defenselessly going with her.

Her hair, cut boyishly short, glittered with gel; she wore dark pants, a dark jacket with a much too large, dimly striped, bright-white man’s shirt unbuttoned to the waist, very high heeled, finely designed shoes. She shouldn’t appear completely as a girl, rather as a slightly feminine boy. Döhring was quite intoxicated not only by this peculiar creature’s deliberately dubious exterior but also by the lighting and furnishings of the place. He had wandered into an unfathomably large, softly glimmering space; more precisely, he had entrusted himself to a knowledgeable and decisive being who would introduce and guide him across the labyrinth of this space of unfamiliar quality.

With the help of a silently turning windbreak, the store was hermetically sealed from the side street, which was not that busy anyway. Inside, in muted silence, barely audible psychedelic music played — softly elongated melodies, repetitive predictable rhythms. Coarse or sudden emotions were invalid in this space; everything that might interfere with the contemplation necessary for buying goods was excluded. In a restrained voice, driven by neutral enthusiasm, the salesgirl went on speaking evenly, irresistibly. Arced, elegantly bent graceful counters and whimsically scattered folding screens could be intuited in the soft dimness. Out of faint depths, huge mirrors with curved surfaces glimmered. As in a real dream, it could not be established where the place of anything was or where was the beginning or the end of anything. On graphite-gray wall-to-wall carpet, they were progressing toward a distant counter; the ceiling was black. A few concealed spotlights provided some illumination.

White, naked plaster torsos sat, stood, and lay about in the oval puddles of light.

Döhring was quietly resisting, as though grumbling a bit.

Breathing or not breathing, he said, he couldn’t bear artificial material on his body. There is no nylon or who knows what kind of synthetic, whether with small pores or large, that wouldn’t cause a rash, chafe his skin, and give him little sores.

All artificial materials make him sweat like a pig.

He deliberately used strong words. He hoped to lure the unknown person from behind the mask.

The salesgirl stopped again briefly. Quickly, expertly, she looked him over as if to assess more closely the physical qualities she would have to deal with. As if she were looking under his clothes, appraising the shapes and forms she might find when she undressed him.

Döhring actually enjoyed this look, though there was nothing personal in it. On top of everything, he’d had the impression all along that there was someone else besides the two of them in this space; someone was watching from the darkness.

And in that case, the salesgirl was working for someone else, not for him.

She understands every bias, every preconceived notion, the salesgirl said while they continued on their way. She herself is fond of wearing natural materials, silks, cotton, wool, linen, but why deny that from an aesthetic point of view traditional materials have disadvantages. Take cotton, for example. No matter how strong it is, after a few washings it stretches unpleasantly, in most cases it loses its color too, and there is nothing more pitiful and laughable than stretched-out faded underpants. There is no perfect male body that wouldn’t look ridiculous in one of those. Not to mention silk or Milanese knit; today we won’t even talk about those. Pleasant materials, but not at all durable. They don’t give headaches to designers of women’s lingerie, because here I can put a little frill, there a little lace, but a material that’s by nature incapable of keeping its shape is automatically alien to the philosophy of male undergarments.

But what he had mentioned had to do with much more common reasons, Döhring interposed.

The salesgirl was now behind the counter, she pressed some button and they were both bathed in a strong light.

People dealing with male underwear, replied the young woman wearily, deal with philosophy, which of course doesn’t mean that the peculiarities of the male body are forgotten for even a moment; not at all, on the contrary. The materials used must conform to the physical attributes. And she mentions these merely because, in her personal opinion, one should not separate the functional viewpoints from the aesthetic ones.

In a fairly irritated voice, Döhring asked whether this was really her personal opinion; her use of the word, to his surprise, annoyed him.

On the salesgirl’s face appeared signs of approaching danger, and a retreat was sounded. She nodded cautiously, yes, this would be her personal opinion.

Döhring liked the self-assurance with which the salesgirl lied shamelessly straight to his face. At the same time a small voice whispered to him not to dwell on the matter; he’d only be disappointed, it wasn’t worth it.

Still, he asked what the salesgirl had in mind.

Especially on the body of a man, replied the salesgirl almost reluctantly, stretched or out-of-shape underwear can’t perform its task. Its fundamental purpose is to provide protection. No situation should arise in which it cannot be relied on for safe support and the ability to keep its shape. That is its function; that is what it must do.

For a few short moments, an irritating static of silence crackled in the invisible speakers.

And the salesgirl lowered her eyes, as one wishing to conceal her face even more modestly. Not because she is ashamed, but because this is what professional integrity demands; after all, of the two of them she knows more about male underwear. Yet she did not flaunt her knowledge. The strong beam of light from above reached her brow at a sharp angle. It settled on her eyelashes, outlined the rims of her lips, painted almost black, and slashed her face with long shadows. The impression was that at any moment the light might flick the mask off this face.

Döhring became alarmed, however, did not want to see the face, felt that in this light his own face was equally defenseless. All this did not last long, the crackling increased and turned harsh until it became a single twang.

The salesgirl raised her head.

She is making only modest suggestions, she said, and if he’s sure she’s not taking too much of his time, she’d like to show the recommended items to him. She guessed that Döhring wore not the smallest size, but one not much larger, probably size two. And she asked if she was right.

Döhring motioned hesitantly that she was, because he couldn’t confess that he had never before bought bathing trunks or underpants for himself. And then he surprised himself by saying this out loud. He sounded a little as if he thought this was something to boast about. No, he was not familiar with the size numbers, he said, he had never bought anything all by himself.

But the salesgirl did not wait for him to complete the sentence; she pulled open a deep drawer and, like a magician, with adroit fingers spread a large bagful of cellophane packets on the glass counter. Only then did she look back up at Döhring, and her eyes asked curiously whether it was possible that he had really never purchased anything. Döhring nodded and felt he was blushing.

We have two series, two full lines of these, he heard the salesgirl’s reasoned voice. Gray ones, from black to white, and she’d like to show the other line too, including all possible colors beginning with white and all the way to black.

And the adroit fingers now spread out the cellophane packets from another large, rustling bag. He looked at the woman a little incredulously and annoyed to once again be up against an improbable claim of hers. Why must this woman rattle off these empty commonplaces. What does all possible colors mean. But while he was fuming about this and managed to look up again, many things happened in the darkness. In fact, nothing happened except behind the shutters of his closed eyes, and possibly coming over from the previous night, an ancient steamboat appeared.

In a sunny, barren landscape, among bare rocks, a superannuated steamboat, its hull nothing but rust, was making its way upstream in the narrow and shallow riverbed.

How absurd and foolish was its progress.

He would have shouted, but it was already too late; he heard the horrible thud that echoed long in the high mountain pass, and then the grating as rocks lurking in the muddy riverbed tore open the side of the boat. The hull trembled, but the engine did not stop; it kept puffing and struggling upstream. And then it was really the end; with the bottom ripped out, water rushed in, thick dark smoke arose, and suddenly lighter clouds of steam also began to rise.

Stuck between the erstwhile river’s narrow shores, the boat turned on its side and stopped. No one moved or called out.

A mute landscape.

No one could have moved or called, because there was no one on board. A completely empty ship. The reason there is nobody in it, Döhring heard the explanation in his own surprised voice, is because I am.

This is what I am. But at this moment he not only failed to understand why he was remembering a dream that he had forgotten when he had awakened that morning, but also did not know who he might be, talking to himself like this. As though somebody else was inside him who was talking to him.

He was completely confused; he must have stared stupidly at the salesgirl.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know his size, because in this store he can always try on anything. That’s no problem, which is to say he never has to feel that trying something on means an obligation to buy.

This is the philosophy of the business in their store, she declared triumphantly.

Döhring attempted a smile, though his face must have shown desperation. This was something he should have understood, but he had trouble comprehending the phonetic shape of the words. He still hoped to put a quick end to the salesgirl’s philosophical discourse. He literally recoiled. What he saw before him were the salesgirl’s long, nimble fingers, the clotted-blood-red fingernails on top of the shiny cellophane under the spotlights’ strong beams, and this sight was about to carry him away again. And here was the steamboat too, but he already saw himself as a child sitting in the cooling water of a bathtub. He was screaming at the top of his lungs that he wanted to be washed by his aunt and not by his stepmother. He liked that very much. When the aunt came, it was as though with her red nails she plowed his skin, his flesh, his entire body.

The soap kept slipping; with each slip the thin blades of her nails dug pleasurably into his body.

At the same time he sensed that from this large dark space that no longer had any exits he was hearing some other kind of human sound. Coming from behind the music, finding a way between the twangs. He noted a man’s ticklish laughter. Until now, he had never paid attention to the way the most disparate thoughts, sensations, and stories run and split into separate strands along one another. The brief laugh was answered by another man’s good-natured humming. But at the moment, he did not know what to do with the forgotten desire and gratification, just as he didn’t know what to do with the ship that had sprung a leak and now lay on its side though there was nothing in which it could have sunk. His aunt had gratified him even while he was a young child, but since his adolescence she had denied him the pleasure. Back then, his aunt could not have been older than the salesgirl was now. Both of them cold and distant, ready to do anything for the sake of their profession. He could admire the one in the other. He had no way of escaping the entanglement in which he found himself in the store. He desired the salesgirl’s hand, yet his brain felt pain with her every sentence; with his fingers he had to dig into his own hair, rub his scalp so he wouldn’t be driven mad by commonplaces, it was that painful.

He was struggling with madness, though he did not realize it, because he thought it was all the salesgirl’s fault. Maybe it was desire that hurt so much. He must have believed he was upset by this whole fashion business his aunt dealt with too. Perhaps there were sentences that hadn’t even reached his consciousness. Let the sweet pleasure of fingernails plowing his skin remain. In this bathtub-cum-steamboat that has sprung a leak.

So then, this is the reason I had to come here.

Words and sentences were showering on him.

And then he had to undress, after all. Yesterday, he couldn’t find what he found today. He was left with the desire, with which he always runs aground.

He knew he should somehow rid himself of these thoughts.

The salesgirl saw his deep confusion; in the dimness in which she sometimes spent her ten-hour workdays she had to get used to many surprising things. By profession she was an undergarment seamstress, but she hadn’t worked for long on the assembly line. And for the last few weeks, she had been running the company’s Berlin store. She was cautious, understanding, and much more sentimental than she let on.

And don’t worry either, she said to Döhring, that you might be trying on underpants that others have tried on before you. Don’t. You’ll never have a surprise like that in our store. If for no other reason than each packet is factory-sealed. They are aware how delicate an item male underwear is, and therefore they always offer to first customers the chance to try it on. There’s no risk involved. An item once tried on and not bought will never get back in the sales loop.

She guarantees it.

At last, Döhring managed to comprehend these sentences fully.

Of course they don’t throw the items out, the salesgirl continued hastily, as if to deflect a possible objection. They couldn’t do that in good conscience. These items, after being properly disinfected, find their way to reliable charity organizations.

She kept pouring out her words on him.

Experienced as she was, she worried that he might have too complicated a personality; as to shopping, he might be a difficult case. As she had done before with his body, she now surveyed his face, his not yet fully formed features, and then she added that these superfluous items were forwarded mainly to religious organizations.

Döhring caught on; this wasn’t the first time he’d been taken for a seminarian.

He was fascinated by the woman offering commonplaces and at the same time becoming alarmed and fed up with him. He tried to restrain his emotions somewhat, but he lifted out one of the packets and held it up as if it were evidence in a criminal case. The salesgirl’s darkly shining lips parted; they looked at each other, unaware of what might be happening.

He asked whether they sent the magenta (bishop purple) ones to church organizations. Did they send the canary-yellow ones to blind people.

The salesgirl must have decided either to endure these questions or deliberately to misunderstand them. She brushed across the color line with her clotted-blood-red nails, laughed lightheartedly, and begged his pardon; they had no canary yellow, but she’d be happy to suggest the sulphur-yellow one. She lifted it out of its wrapper and gracefully indicated to Döhring that he might try it on.

Döhring would have to turn around to go behind the folding screen, but he stayed put.

Both colors are in the category of best choice, the salesgirl continued enthusiastically. At first glance, she felt that either one would go well with his skin color.

But why, asked Döhring, in what sense would his skin have anything to do with this.

In the sense of choosing colors, replied the salesgirl patiently and in her most confidential tone, though she sensed that no matter how temperately she spoke, the irritation between them kept increasing; try as she might, she’d be unable to reach the young man’s skin with her voice. Suddenly she could think of no way to diffuse or avoid the tension between them. She felt the way Döhring did: she wanted to attack, jump in, and clash head on. She could no longer help herself with her smile. She did not understand how this situation had developed. She had no idea what she could do with such a crazy man. That was what now popped into her mind.

Although she saw that this was not a man, and wouldn’t become one either, only a boy. The thought persisted. The company in which she had become a leading member in a few short years worked with scientific methods; a psychologist prepared its sales personnel. And the psychologist told them to follow their first impression, always, and blindly. Now, however, this salesgirl was helpless, regarding not this boy but her own judgment. She had the feeling she had erred the moment they met. Some challenge or tension of unknown quality emanated from him, against which the company’s sales philosophy gave her no adequate countermeasures.

To be more precise, it was very confusing that sometimes these countermeasures were completely adequate and sometimes not at all.

Perhaps she was mistaken and this customer was actually a good boy.

She had thought of herself, perhaps not baselessly, as someone who could cope with any need or challenge, even if often with the help of blind good luck, but ultimately she was a meticulous listener. This time, however, something was definitely amiss.

She was among those young and ambitious co-workers who during the last few years had extricated this company from the quagmire of its exclusivity. They were convinced that its exclusivity and idiosyncrasy should not be concealed. As if to say that if people were supposed to forget the company’s reputation in this regard, the company had to forget it first.

Your faultlessness is not the result of surrendering to the hopelessly boring, everyday crowd and enduring the confused torture of all your inhibitions, the shame of your desires — no. Your faultlessness feeds on your ability to gratify all your desires with your head held high. Everyone can come to this conclusion because everyone has well-guarded secrets; one needs only refer to these secrets, and then everyone can be branded with his or her own mark.

The salesgirl rightly felt that for long minutes now she hadn’t uttered a sentence or made a gesture to which Döhring didn’t have a serious objection. She even thought of asking for help because she couldn’t cope with him on her own.

They were standing face-to-face, unmasked, each with a half-completed sentence. Döhring checked quickly whether the salesgirl wasn’t taller than he. But neither of them could have said what they had unmasked in each other or in themselves. As though they had both claimed to see through the other’s game, but their situation was mutual only in that neither of them could really see anything, not of themselves and not of each other. The cause of their feeling good had been the embarrassing ignorance into which they had strayed unsuspectingly and could not get out of. Not only muscles but the soul too cannot tolerate unfinished movements.

Simultaneously they began to speak, as if speedily to talk past their feelings, and at the same time they lowered their arms. With that movement, however, came something unintentionally and disturbingly tempestuous. Döhring in his confusion retreated behind a little-boyish alarm, mumbling that he should be forgiven for never having taken a look at himself with that consideration in mind, while the salesgirl, in a rather harsh and unpleasantly screechy voice, apologized that, oh, she doesn’t mean to appear forward, but ever since this new material arrived, all the sales personnel have been in a feverish professional excitement, which they like to share with everyone. And now that we’re at it, continued Döhring undisturbed, he wouldn’t mind asking why exactly did she think the magenta or sulphur yellow was the best choice for him. He had to ask. A professional should certainly be able to answer him. Seeing he’d had no idea until now what sort of skin he had. In the meantime, however, the salesgirl also went on with what she had started to say; she’d gladly withdraw those suggestions because there were plenty of others where those had come from. They completed simultaneously the two entangled sentences whose meaning they couldn’t really comprehend in the chaotic cacophony.

And to prove that the opposite of this was true, because the situation was indeed embarrassing, they cut into each other’s words again.

Your skin has a certain delicate tone, the salesgirl explained, that looks very good with bright colors. Because there are two basic skin types. At first glance most people would say, for example, that Döhring has white skin. A very fortunate skin type. Its base is indeed white, yet it is dominated by swarthiness. She’d be ready to bet, continued the salesgirl, and she had to be on her guard now not to look anywhere except into Döhring’s eyes, she’d bet anything that sunshine catches his skin on the very first bright spring day, though he’s never had a sunburn.

She asked if this was so.

They looked long into each other’s eyes.

Döhring really didn’t want to answer this question.

If he did, he’d be in big trouble. Then he’d have surrendered to the shameless, calculating world of commonplaces, the world that now stared at him expectantly through the salesgirl’s eyes.

He said to himself, so what if she’s beautiful, I don’t like her.

To avoid dealing with this thought, he took the cellophane packet and walked behind the folding screen. He owed no explanation to this woman. It’s better to consider women of this kind as servants.

During these moments the salesgirl indeed had to behave very cautiously. Some customers sometimes had to be left alone for a good space, while others, on the contrary, had to be kept continually busy, even above the folding screen.

She stepped behind the counter again, pushed a button, and instantly a spotlight lit up the space behind the folding screen which Döhring had just entered. He saw a small table on which he could put the packet, and in the large mirror he could see himself. He saw a gray chair on whose backrest he could fold the items of clothing he would take off. He had no idea why, but the mirror immediately and absurdly distorted his image. It made a spool out of his head, unnaturally elongated his body to the point where neither his figure nor features were recognizable. His image in the mirror made him feel all alone. As though he had not even a body, only a bundle of sensations.

Of course the music had a role in this impression, as did the silence and a few male voices in the distance.

While absentmindedly unbuttoning his shirt, he looked around carefully for the first time. It felt pleasant to be standing on a carpet. He could look out from behind the folding screen with greater confidence. He was getting used to the spacious, soft dimness lined with black and gray. The store’s space was immense and very high; massive, solid, rectangular columns supported and divided it. In the depths of the store, behind the black-painted railing on a mezzanine balcony, a slender figure was bending in various directions among pulled-out and shoved-back drawers. The light barely touched these drawers, painted gray and neatly labeled, which filled the whole of the balcony’s back wall from floor to ceiling. The bending figure was hardly more than an outline. It would pull out a drawer, occasionally two at a time, thrusting them onto a ledge, where it would count something with lightning speed; it was probably making an inventory. Sometimes it jotted down something in an invisible ledger that must have been resting on the balcony railing too. Whenever this happened, the figure glanced down below. Döhring didn’t remove his shirt right away, he wasn’t sure it was appropriate; he began to undo his pants. He was beginning to feel that he had strayed in here by chance, yet here nothing happens by chance. That he was standing in the middle of a scrupulously planned, constantly supervised world.

And he wasn’t alone with the salesgirl, either, as he’d thought at first.

When he realized this, he saw that other people were also moving in the darkness, among the distant lights, other salespersons and other customers.

Heads were hovering above folding screens just as his was, constant prattling, brief shouts and laughter could be heard over the soft music, or they may even have been part of the music, which pervaded and penetrated everything. When he threw his pants on the chair, he glanced at himself in the mirror again. All he could do was stare, he was so surprised. The mirror, which until then had absurdly distorted all his limbs, now gave not only a greatly sharpened but also a much enlarged view of the area between his navel and the top of his thighs. As though the world rising from the darkness and chaos had only one spot, a blurry-edged island. He had never seen the outline of his groin, the hairs curling out from his underpants, the hummock of his genitals so enlarged. He had lived in the same room with his twin kid sister for fifteen years. As if suddenly and unexpectedly he could see himself from closer up than he was really able to. He was bowled over like a child who sees things in a magic mirror. The moment he stepped closer or farther away from the mirror, his body either crawled away or stretched out of view, which is to say the loin area conformed to the general distortion, yet there remained a secure point in space, and when he found it precisely, he could feast his eyes on his mercilessly sharpened and greatly enlarged self.

He enjoyed this, as if it were an unbelievable game returning him to his childhood. It was good to hit the precise point. The better to see what was happening to his body in the mirror, he threw off his shirt as well. The white shirt flew, flared out, and landed on the back of the chair, one billowing sleeve hanging down. This wasn’t the first time he had scrutinized himself so thoroughly, but never so close up. The salesgirl remained nearby, though he did not feel her gaze. And she couldn’t see anything more than the nape of his neck or his naked shoulders. And if people were watching him, well, let them watch. Without moving from his spot, he slowly swayed his hips in the mirror. He didn’t notice that he was doing it to the forever repeating rhythm of the music.

He knew that if he took it off, he would irrevocably rebel against his own people. He’d be obeying alien rules. He could not resist it. In a totally strange place, totally without reason, he would take off his worthless underpants.

The salesgirl still did not go away, did not leave the customer by himself, but she no longer kept him busy with words. She remained at the counter but did not even put her hands on it. Her posture indicated that she was ready to resume her work at any moment, but now it was the turn of the customer’s taste. She was not even watching Döhring, not the nape of his boyishly shaved neck, not his shapely shoulders, but rather she stared, skillfully, somewhere into the darkness. Which did not mean she wasn’t staying with him. She was paying attention to him; in reality, she did not leave him for a moment, and this too belonged to the high art of selling. She had to sense, to feel something very personal from the other human being that would allow her to keep him captive. At the same time she was not supposed to feel anything personal for him, which is to say she had to restrain all her possible feelings and value judgments, to the point where she’d evoke an impression of neutrality.

Now I know, now I understand, Döhring was saying to himself as he turned around. But the moment he formed the words in his mind he no longer understood anything, nor did he see himself in the mirror. As though he had no idea just where he was in his continuous dream. He was staring at his shoes, at the rubberized floor of the phone booth, on which squashed cigarette butts were mixed, everywhere, among wet leaves; yet what he saw was the steamboat. He had no more time then, after all; he had nothing to think over, there were no more excuses, evasions, even if he understood nothing.

At any rate, even two years later he frequently saw in himself this boat tilted on its side. Even if he were a boat run aground, he had to get going. He could see clearly what was happening at the moment and what he must do about it. Isolde runs across the long hallway, takes her coat, calls the elevator, impatiently runs down the stairs, bursts out the main gate, goes around the block. All this would take three or four minutes.

He’d have three minutes in which to do it, no more.

He can neither avoid nor suppress his elementary enjoyment; he has to leave it to his body, the same way stupid people must be left to their babbling.

The boat tilted on its side in the narrow riverbed was the failure. This is the image that warns him he’s entering dangerous territory. Still, he can’t ward off the approaching detective. As if he were standing next to him, unwilling to budge. It is impossible, forbidden, one cannot live unpunished with murder, even if one is not familiar with the degree of criminality involved. And this means that chance is merely an illusion behind which two different necessities cross each other.

The reality of their meeting is what’s behind the coincidence.

The kind of crossroads where one cannot cross in two directions at the same time. It must be the almighty speaking to him this way, prompting him, explaining things to him because he’s a bit slow on the uptake, though in what he’s doing now no one can hinder him. Wouldn’t it be odd if a cock, slipped below the waistband of one’s underpants and now rearing painfully, stopped the almighty from doing something. And something must be done, because if everything has at least two faces, and he can see them simultaneously all around him and also inside him, then it’d be impossible to endure them, even physically. He must do something, break out of this with some deed and return to the human condition.

Only now did he let go of the telephone, which was already resting in the cradle, and quickly, as if he was ashamed of himself, reach into his pants. But his prick resisted, and the underpants were too small. The moment he freed the solid head stuck under the elastic and tried to pull back the foreskin, the cock, simply from being touched, reared up. From within his underpants, sperm was being smeared on his hastening fingers. He managed to shove it back, but realized how vulnerable he was. As though he had been exposed not only to himself but also to Dr. Kienast, from whom he no longer had anything to hide.

He felt like laughing; the urge began as a strange laughter but ended up showing his entire situation in yet a different light.

As if he were being whispered to by that other self he had not destroyed in himself — at different times it had taken on the shapes of his aunt, the detective, or the salesgirl, while sometimes it had no physical shape at all, no existence, only an essence; but when that happened he had to think of either the savior or the steamboat tilted on its side; in short, this other self whispered to him to relax, not to ruin things by being hasty, there was plenty of time for everything. At any rate, he gave up the struggle in his pants because he was thinking of the savior whom he had not known until then, and in the brief time of their acquaintance he’d failed to learn what he was like. He kept staring at the reflection of undulating bare tree branches in the glass. The street was still deserted. His three minutes reached comfortably into infinity, and he kept on taking more time from it. He no longer saw the telephone number he had etched into the soft yellow cover of the telephone book.

This was more like a memory; he remembered this too, as he simultaneously remembered everything. The police station was busy, and then he was switched to an automatic call center. He waited a little longer; the number remained busy with a bit of Brahms playing for him in the background.

He leaned his shoulder against the glass of the phone booth, to keep an eye on the corner where his aunt had to appear.

The wind was howling, lashing at everything.

When he tried to call again, a female voice answered, and that surprised him so much that instead of saying hello he said who he was, Döhring. Which the woman did not understand and he had to repeat. He knew this was going to be recorded, and that would determine his fate for good. While he was saying who he was looking for, and the woman replied that Dr. Kienast was unavailable at the moment, across the street a garage door began slowly to rise. Döhring wanted to say thank you for the information so he could hang up as quickly as possible, but the woman was quicker than he; she wanted to keep him talking. She was after a generous pool of voice patterns and wanted to identify the location of the caller’s phone booth. She had a soft, experienced voice; she was practically singing with kindness. By all means, she said, she’d be more than happy to help Döhring in any matter whatsoever.

The maw of the garage yawned darkly for a moment.

No, thank you, Döhring replied impatiently, he’d call back.

Then the shiny, silvery front of the car appeared in the deep, dark gullet of the garage and sped out onto the street as if indifferent to whether there was any traffic. Döhring realized what was happening only when among the lights of the windbreak he recognized Isolde’s black turban and severe features. As if she were ready to drive to the park, dragging the whole phone booth with her.

Maybe he just stepped out for a few minutes, said the woman on the telephone; unfortunately she could not tell when Dr. Kienast would be available, but if Mr. Döhring wanted to leave a message or had a number where he could be reached, she’d be happy to convey that to Dr. Kienast, who would return his call shortly.

And if he was speaking from a telephone booth, said the woman, who by then must have known that this was the case, he could in all confidence give her that number as well.

It was like the palest beam of hope; he no longer dared count on it.




Through the Entrance to His Secret Life


For a moment she thought Ágost had gone mad. That he’d really lost his mind. What are you doing here, she shouted, coming in from the bathroom. Not even in the taxi could she dismiss this image from the night before.

She couldn’t because for weeks she had been yearning for him more and more strongly, more and more hopelessly, and especially in the last few days. But her yearning filled her with dread. She was trying to tell herself it was not his naked body she desired so much. She felt ashamed of that. Then what did she desire so much. Could it be his soul. Which he did not possess; he did not. Just look at him, standing in front of her. She could not cling to him enough, take him inside her enough, kiss him, caress him, sink into his flesh deeply enough, tear at him, plow his skin with her nails enough, to assuage her yearning. She would seize it, hold it, stare into it as it spurted upward. Ágost wouldn’t let her swallow it, because he wanted to see it himself. What will become of her without him. This also occurred to her in the tobacco-smelling taxi.

She would moan and whimper, but not aloud, because the faintest sensual expression aroused aversion in the man. Not only would he suffer no passion but he would also reject as exaggeration the slightest manifestation of emotion. And she would have loved to love — no, worship — his ankles, his wrists, his every part, his cock, and every little bone in his body, even impalpable things like the curve of the arches of his feet. She adored him. More precisely, she convinced herself that she did, that she could not live without him, because she dreaded losing him. She had lost him already. She gave more than she had, showed more than she felt so as not to admit the latest defeat. Of course, when thinking about it sensibly, she saw that this was not a problem of right proportion or right quantity; their characters were no longer compatible. And who could think about this sensibly. Sometimes she tried to satisfy herself as she hoped to be satisfied by him, but she failed. She expected more of her body than it could provide, and it was precisely this something which could never take on bodily form that she failed to figure out; she did not know what it was. But to take a long knife from the kitchen and thrust it deep into the man’s chest, for that she did not have the courage. What was carrying her along, she wanted to know, what was pursuing her. Even though she knew nothing else would help. Except killing him. Now her helplessness, now her emotional outbursts tortured her. When she watched him, and when she recalled the scene in the taxi the next day, she saw him even farther from her than ever. This was something Ágost had never done, at least not while she was looking on.

She saw her own loneliness reflected in the naked male body. The hopelessness of her own secret attempts at gratification. She was disgusted by this, or by herself; it aroused her self-contempt. But nor could she turn away, her curiosity wouldn’t let her; she wanted to see how men do it. She suspected that he might have done it in front of others. But not in front of me. Because he doesn’t trust me that much. Instantly she became jealous of others. The shouting was muted enough not to be heard in the other room.

Luckily she could somewhat restrain herself. She would gladly have shared all her joys with Kristóf, but she’d have been reluctant to tell him about her torments.

There was hardly an hour, a minute, in which she gave free rein to her emotions or feelings. She could never find out in advance from Kristóf whether he would be sleeping at home or staying away again for days. She envied him too; he probably had a good life. She envied everyone; her entire soul, all her goodness, was consumed by envy, behind which lurked amorous greed. I’m the only one who feels bad. It made a difference whether she could shout and yell freely or whether she had to restrain herself when in the throes of pleasure. Something of her pleasure always remained stuck in her. Ágost could not, probably did not want to crash through the barrier. One of them wanted to give too much, the other held it back. That is why they were not compatible, and this was impossible to understand.

Already in their second week she had begged him, please, let’s get out of here.

We can’t do it here. I can’t bear it. You look at me as if I were saying something insane. I’m whispering even now; I can’t stand this constant whispering.

Then speak more loudly.

How can I talk more loudly when that little idiot is behind the door.

You’ll get used to it.

Sometimes she thought this was a family trait; after all, Kristóf also had this indifferent way of answering her. She wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d be out of the house. At other times she thought this was so because these people were Jews. Very cold, passionless people who keep to themselves.

On her skin and in the strands of her hair she would sense Kristóf’s presence in the adjacent room. Or his absence, because that irritated her too. She sensed when he was asleep, because silence had a different quality then. Or that he wanted to be asleep but was awake, tossing and turning, and torturing her with his little noises. Yet no response ever came from the adjacent room. Although she couldn’t have said what response she expected from its darkness. She would have liked to see Kristóf lose his superior airs.

Forlorn and unapproachable, Ágost was standing in the almost empty room, quite near the tall door connecting it to Kristóf’s room. On this occasion too they did not know whether he was at home or not.

The nightlight, from under its wax-paper shade, illuminated Ágost from below and threw on the wall a long tilting shadow of his naked figure. Its contours would swing out and then back as he moved his hands, elbows, and arms; the shadow would tremble. Behind him the door to the living room was wide open. He hadn’t even closed the shutters on the two tall windows. Engrossed, he was slowly stroking himself with odd, broken movements. Showing and at the same time withholding something. Every one of his practiced movements proved that he knew what he was doing, to what purpose, and needed no one’s help. His smile seemed to hover independent of his face. Gyöngyvér found it especially painful that the smile was not meant for her; it was meant for no one. Anyone on the gallery, or people from any of the apartments facing the courtyard, could see in.

Why are you doing this in front of me? Have you lost your mind?

She received no answer.

They never came home before midnight. As if Ágost had said, let’s go somewhere, anywhere, just so it’s away from here. They went out every night. Then why don’t you want to move out of here. He gave no answer to that either. Most of the time they came home around one, one thirty. And every night they were a bit tipsy. On the way home, Gyöngyvér hummed arias to herself, practiced scales half-aloud, exercised her voice in the deserted streets. Ágost grew morose and silent, but claimed that it only seemed he was in a bad mood. In fact, sometimes, late at night, he was in a very good mood. He really felt good whenever he could withdraw into himself. With her arm in his, Gyöngyvér clung to him, trying to synchronize at least their steps. Anyone seeing them receding down a street with their long powerful stride would have thought, with pleasurable satisfaction, that they seemed very alike. Or if not alike, one could see why they belonged together. Their steps reverberated evenly among the silent buildings.

Icy gusts would sweep between their faces, each new one spraying cold and sticky drizzle into their eyes. They had to huddle closer, which Ágost didn’t mind at all.

That is how they reached home.

In these late hours, a deadly silence covered the entire city. There were no cars on the road; occasionally an empty streetcar would clatter by on the boulevard. In the sparkling drizzle dark Oktogon Square yawned mutely. Hardly any pedestrians anywhere, except maybe on the other side, in the recently reopened Savoy Café. On the Andrássy Road side, behind darkened windows, a bar was functioning again. Drumbeats were battering the walls; occasionally a saxophone wailed triumphantly or dolefully. Guests arrived here by taxicab; sometimes the noise of carousing guests reached the street, and there would always be taxis waiting outside. After the doors slammed shut and the cabs sped away, the night fell silent again. Farther off, where signs for the underground public toilet in the subway station lit up the sidewalk, some idle figures could be seen. The ladies’ section was closed at night; the men’s remained open until dawn. Balter opened it and closed it.

At dawn, at night, and several times a day, he had to limp across the boulevard, and for that he collected a separate salary from the Metropolitan Sewage Company. Sometimes, even at this late hour, a head might appear in the bright light, coming up out of the ground, rising on the steps, then joined by the rest of the body. It might be followed by another figure or, conversely, somebody might be going down those steps, slowly disappearing in the ground.

It was hard to tell what was happening.

Other solitary men, like shadows, huddled in nearby entranceways, waiting. Some of them stood behind the lit-up round advertising column, smoking cigarettes. Others pretended not to be hunting for anyone, only waiting for the streetcar as they paced the island of the stop.

But when the streetcar came, they would not get on.

Gyöngyvér tried not to make noise, she wanted both of them to keep their voices down. They always woke up everyone in the huge apartment on the boulevard when they came home; some were startled, some only pulled the pillow over their ears.

Have you gone completely out of your mind, she whispered angrily, and in her light semi-high-heeled mules decorated with swansdown she hurried across the large room to close the shutters of the two windows giving on the courtyard. The darkened, desiccated old parquet floor followed her steps with loud creaks. How can you do such a thing, for god’s sake. Ágost did not answer. Not even for a second did he break contact with himself.

Their arrival had its own routine. Gyöngyvér first went to the toilet, then to the bathroom, Ágost right to the kitchen. He rarely ate at strange places; starved, he had to wolf down something very fast. Doors opened and closed, light switches clicked on in a predetermined order. The abundant and powerful stream of Gyöngyvér’s urine either made a harsh noise as it hit the toilet bowl or splashed hard in water.

Kristóf couldn’t do much about this.

If this happened while he was asleep, he saw it from close up, as if touching it with his tongue. It was a frequently returning memory. On a hot summer afternoon, when in a darkened room Viola pulled off her panties and squatted above him and Lilla demanded that he lick it. This room was in Dunavecse, not far from the river. In the darkened, creaking, large rooms of the house, they could smell the heavy, pervasive odor of Danube mud. Lick it for her, lick it. She whispered excitedly. Lick it; it’ll be all right, what are you afraid of. He felt its taste on his tongue for a long time.

Nothing had a taste like that.

He also understood from the excitement that Lilla had already done it to Viola. The characteristic odor of the mud mingled with this taste, he couldn’t get rid of it. Thinking that other girls might ask him for similar services, he spied on them, though he despised himself for the girlish trait of spying on people. Lilla and Viola rubbed themselves red. After that, he only remembered there was a certain taste he no longer smelled in the mud’s odor. He looked for it in vain. He nurtured the thought that he might find it. Half asleep, he sank into the mud, could barely extricate his feet. That’s when he woke up, to the memory of the taste and the odor, of there being a real Lilla and a real Viola, two little girls who were his cousins. Still, the taste was nowhere to be found, no matter how much he moved his tongue in all directions inside his mouth. He didn’t know what it belonged to, whose taste he remembered in his dream, the taste he could not find in his own saliva. His agitation was separated only by a wall from the aggressive loud sound of splashing urine. There was no point getting irritated because he had been awakened again. As much as he resented it, he in fact found the noise of Gyöngyvér’s peeing attractive; he daydreamed about her cunt.

And if he also had to hear her cautious farting, amplified by the wide old-fashioned toilet bowl with its hairline cracks, he could say good-bye to sleep for good. Gyöngyvér did not fart every night. Even when she did, she would release no more than two small hushed ones, briefly, in quick succession, not letting herself go completely, though she probably thought no one would hear it. As if she were ashamed of herself. Every person is a master of dissembling; people sharing an apartment must pretend especially that they don’t notice the life signs of others, and that the attempts made to conceal these life signs are also invisible.

This is what Kristóf did, out of politeness, but when Gyöngyvér startled him out of his sleep, it was like hearing a nice, rude, irresistible joke. He was shaken by involuntary, almost uncontrollable laughter. What he saw before him was the woman’s continually clenched lips and the fart emerging from them. Her disgusting attempts to gratify every desire. She certainly gratified every desire now. He saw Viola’s cunt rubbed raw. He was writhing, practically coiling up in his bed as he kept laughing silently. He could not laugh aloud or he’d be discovered, Gyöngyvér wouldn’t dare fart again, and that would be the end of his recurring joy. He was guffawing while winding and burying himself in his cover and pillows. This miserable creature defines herself most appropriately with her cautious little farts. The harder he laughed in the darkness, the stronger he felt that this had less to do with his good mood than with humiliation. His tears were flowing, his sides were about to split, the linen shoved into his mouth was all wet. In fact, he was on the verge of crying.

Meanwhile there were noises from the kitchen; the lid of a pot brushed off and made a huge racket on the tile floor. Eating and shitting. And if not only men but women could fart like this, his life would not be the kind for which they’d been preparing him. Very different from the one this finicky woman, or the others with all their affectations, made it out to be. A glass clinked; a plate thudded on the table. A simpler, more amusing, much more disgusting, more ordinary life. Later, in the bathroom boiler, the gas, with a tiny explosion, caught fire. And in the kitchen Ágost turned on a damned faucet.

Every evening Ilona carefully prepared and put out food; Ágost preferred to eat straight from the pots, with spoons or with his hands, and pots make a lot of noise. For him it was a belated satisfaction to eat out of pots late at night in the parental home, to dip bread into sauces and let everything run, dribble, drip, and flow. No night passed without Ilona waking up in the maid’s room. But whether she got up to feed Ágost, or stayed in bed and from there followed the noisy events in the kitchen, she took care not to awaken her little boy. They slept in one bed. There was no room for another bed or even a cot. Lady Erna would not have stood for it, anyway, because she did not want to provide any support for, let alone any legal confirmation of, the fact that the unfortunate child lived here.

He was a peculiar child; she admitted she could not warm to him. Or she kept her distance because she didn’t want him around. This was the situation Ilona had to accept. And at the beginning of every month, when collecting the rent, the concierge grumbled that the child still hadn’t been registered and he could not have such a situation go on much longer. They didn’t tell Ilona to take the child back to his grandmother who had been raising him until now, but they didn’t tell her that he could stay either. She had to get up very early to make breakfast for everyone and also have time to take the boy to kindergarten.

The water in the old pipes, given to cracks and bursts, made a clanking sound, almost like a moan; unwanted air bubbles held it up before it began to flow, gushing out and pelting Gyöngyvér’s thin brown body, pattering on the tub’s enamel. Every other week, Gyöngyvér had to get up early, without an alarm clock, of course. She followed Ágost’s schedule; sometimes she would give up sleep altogether, but not her nocturnal shower. Perhaps this was the only thing she stubbornly clung to, even though the restless pipes, rattling in the walls, often seemed to threaten to explode. Her smooth body, delicately shaped limbs, elongated and strong musculature, taut and almost poreless skin had no fragrance until she applied her cheap perfume to the crook of her arms and the area behind her ears. And oddly enough, her short, thick hair had no smell either. Ágost did not think about this, but it was important to have no smell. She probably wouldn’t have smelled even without the showers, but she took them constantly. Like a compulsion, a passion or obsession of unknown origin. She took a shower before going swimming; she took one before going into the pool and after coming out, and at night she took one even if she had already showered in the afternoon because they were going to the opera or to a concert and she had to change her clothes.

Until he was taken to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road, the professor was also startled to wakefulness every night by the unpleasant noise. Still, he slept a lot both during the day and at night, perhaps because of immoderate doses of medicine; he slept very soundly and if awakened was barely conscious of himself. Or he may have been conscious of something entirely different. He would sit in the dark, staring at the lights trembling and shadows shifting across the spines of his books. From the time his wife no longer put up with him in their conjugal bed, a good ten years earlier, he had been made to withdraw to his study, filled with books and papers, and onto the sofa that once had been only a place for an afternoon nap or snoozes during breaks from his work. No one knew whether he still remembered things like naps or work. His condition had been deteriorating rapidly and unstoppably for months, and then one day it suddenly leveled off. As if the process might be reversible, after all, bits of memory sometimes revived, and then quite unexpectedly he caught a glance of himself in his own situation. He stood among his books, sat at his cleared and cleaned-off desk, and wept.

One of the most brilliant minds of the age coming undone under his family’s eyes, and all as the consequence of one attack. The news was received with incredulity even by those who thought he had used his mental abilities exclusively for evil purposes, in the service of brutal authorities, which is why so many hated him, considered him spineless, held him in contempt. Now he was flat on his back. In a case like this, however, even gloating subsides because the sight of mental deterioration clearly declares that what a person knows and thinks is not necessarily his to command.

Sometimes he would appear in his white nightshirt, hesitantly, in one of the rooms. He would speak quietly or mumble to himself. He didn’t know who the different beings might be who were sleeping all over the place in the various rooms or suddenly turning on lights to blind him. They did it deliberately. Quickly he would ask for water. He had to be on guard; otherwise, they would surely confuse him. He begged their pardon, but he hadn’t learned to find his way around this apartment. As if in his conscious mind he had another home. They showed him where the toilet was. They would support him, guide him, give him water, help him urinate, and then at some point they would leave him on his own again.

He graciously agreed to everything, with one exception. He did not want to go back to his sofabed, anything but that, because he knew well why they wished him to be there.

That is where they will kill him, in his bed. And he puts them to the test, to see whether they are willing to satisfy his wishes.

Quickly he asked for something to eat.

Except for Ilona, no one understood his mutterings. Just a little bread, nothing else. He’d love to chew on a little dry bread. And they gave it to him because if they didn’t understand what he wanted, or wouldn’t give him the bread, he would begin to shake, his entire body atremble as if shivering, as if he was terribly cold, while in fact he was weeping, without a single tear, and no one in his right mind could withstand such a sight. He liked best sitting in the hallway with his bread, in a place where a light was always on. But he only pretended to eat the bread. This too belonged to a recently discovered quality, to his ancient, secret knowledge. He would chomp a little on the bread, look around carefully, and then with a quick, almost animal-like movement shove it into the sleeve of his nightshirt and from then on made sure it did not fall out. He would hide it among his books. Occasionally he would slip a thinner slice in between piles of his manuscripts. Every object remained in its place but was assigned a new function. The two paintings, for example, he probably still recognized. Perhaps he no longer had any other window to the outside world. Sometimes they left him there for a whole night; they’d put socks on his feet, throw a blanket over his shoulders, and he would go about the battlefield examining the corpses trampled under horses’ hoofs, or chat about intricate moral questions with Captain József Lehr.

In any case, it usually took a good long hour following their return home before everything quieted down again and no light could be seen coming from under the doors.

When he couldn’t fall asleep again, Lady Erna would turn on his light and he would read, sometimes until dawn. But not a single week passed without his trying to convince his son that they should move out of this apartment. He’d take care of all the necessary bureaucratic arrangements and cover all expenses. They became entangled in hopeless arguments. They didn’t say anything directly but managed to unleash huge reserves from their respective stockpiles of rebukes. Every uttered word hurt. Sizzled with repressed fury. Ágost argued that for the sake of a few days, maybe a few weeks, it wasn’t worth upsetting his father’s life. His mother countered that he’d certainly be right if the few weeks weren’t extended to another four years. This could have been accepted as reasonable, just as one could understand Ágost’s argument, since they did not lack all reason. But the conflict between them was not about reasonableness and certainly not about the mutuality of understanding.

He could not let his mother send him away again; that would have strengthened his quietly tormenting conviction, and that’s what he dreaded most, that’s what he never talked about to anyone except his friends.

As a matter of fact, he does not and never did have a mother. True, while he had lived far away he conducted a very heartfelt correspondence with this strange woman. And his father, un vrai monstre, was not worth killing, because he’d come to life in a dozen new forms. His mother never loved him, and he wasn’t the only one she did not love; she probably never loved anyone, and this is the inheritance he, the son, has to perpetuate. Qu’elle aille au diable. He felt, he thought, precisely for the sake of maintaining the semblance of a relationship with his mother, that he should leave — but only of his own free will, not be sent away or dismissed like a snotty little boy. And if he made a lot of noise with his life, well, let them put up with it. To hell with them. Every evening he waited for a telephone call or a confidential message, a message delivered by hand, something, a secret signal or written order so he could again leave this miserable country. Gyöngyvér, of course, knew nothing of these hopes. Earlier, he had worked abroad as a diplomat, and he had liked it; he had returned from his last position four years earlier and was now working at home on part of a confidential job: that is how Gyöngyvér understood the situation.

Kristóf knew no more either; besides, he wasn’t interested in his cousin’s future.

Nínó, however, should have understood what her son was counting on, what he was waiting for, what he suffered from. She herself had intervened on his behalf in some higher circles, but in vain. Which she could not comprehend and protested vigorously. By the nature of things, she could not have known anything about his conspiratorial tasks. More precisely, she pretended not to know what she should suspect.

Or he might have been waiting to be told that his services were no longer required, neither clandestine nor public ones. He did consider this possibility. Then why scare Gyöngyvér with the possibility that tomorrow he might leave her for good. He wouldn’t admit it even to himself, but he kept his eyes open, constantly alert to possible new ways of being approached. He detected no signs of being observed, or did not want to acknowledge that his best friends adequately fulfilled the job of observers. At most, he was willing to admit that perhaps they were all being observed, and he should pay more attention to that possibility. He had no strength to stifle his own hopes. In which case he should acknowledge that he was forever imprisoned in this miserable country, in this jail that, after all, was his homeland. Patrie de merde. He’d have to live his life in this profoundly unhappy city as an exile; and he’d be forever locked up with people whom neither his body nor his soul desired. He desired no one, nothing. His idée fixe was that only servants and gentry lived in this shit country, no one else.

In vain he told them that when it comes to one’s own affairs one cannot shift responsibility to others, even if one’s circumstances are oppressive. They just stared at him, couldn’t give a decent answer to anything, always changed the subject and went on talking. But he would not wait to become a victim of their obtuseness, their constant grudging, lethargy, their pathological tendency to prevaricate, and their slowness hobbled by helplessness. He was not going to wait for this. He had had it with his friends. He could see on them how much he had changed. Here, one conforms to the mentality of either servants or gentry; there is no other choice where there are no free people. Their souls are imprisoned.

Along with his friends, he had been living the carefree life of the gentry for years, for which he deeply despised himself. At the same time, his appointment was so certain, he saw so many positive indications of it — and making him wait for it this long was so absurd — that it made no sense to move now. And where in hell would he move to. Not that he’d have the money for it, and anyway, in this country one couldn’t just go out and buy or rent an apartment. He was contemplating plans of revenge. For the time when he’ll be convinced that these people are truly as hopeless as they seem. He won’t do away with himself, no. He won’t any longer make it difficult to let the rival side know he was ready to work for them. Or for them too. He knew the ins and outs of such a move. He toyed with this adventurous thought but without sending out signals. Not yet. And not because he was afraid. Why not be a mole if he had to live his life underground anyway, une taupe ou un rat. He couldn’t have so much left of his life that it wouldn’t be more exciting spending it as a mole. Still, he preferred to count on his appointment because during the long years of waiting he had grown used to idleness. He counted on Paris, at least on Rome, but at a minimum on Brussels.

Then why rush. Out there, he’d be able to decide about his other affairs in much more favorable circumstances. And why should he have to listen to his mother’s superfluous laments.

He stood with his head bowed.

His thick, straight, dark hair fell onto his brow, he looked out from under his long lashes to see himself, however dimly. The sight of his own body always unsettled him. At any rate, more than other people’s bodies did. And he was aware how extravagantly and insanely Gyöngyvér worshipped every atom of it. Because of her astonishment, amazement, lethargy, and anger he disdained her immensely; that was, in fact, the reason he no longer desired her. After only a few days, he quietly ranked her with the servants, though for his comfort he continually needed her services. Ágost was one of those people who cling to the primal models of their earliest life experiences, from which no one can tear them away.

He was ten years old when, at seventeen hundred meters above sea level, his father left him on his own. At the treeline, where the pines end and only the snow-covered craggy peaks of bare mountains reach for the sky. He was not a short child, but suddenly everything became too large and too high. The mountains, the other people, the arched windows in the dormitory. In the thin air, he had no possession except his body. He shivered as if he were constantly cold, though his skin was hot, on fire. He’d wound up in a world in which he could no longer predict what would be good for him and what would be bad. And he didn’t even have the words to help him cope with his surroundings. They laughed at him, derided him because several times a day and in the most unexpected situations he would grow weak, become light, the heavy earth slipped out from under his feet, and he would collapse, unable to grasp at anything. Already on the first night they beat him. During the day he fell into quiet, white faints, as if hoping that through the whiteness they would take him back to that place. But he understood much more than he could theoretically understand; the words he heard for the first time as well as the novelty of the entire situation. He found himself among people who used their bodies and their language differently.

The moment they entered the shower room for the first time and had to get undressed, another process was also begun. A hitherto completely unknown current of life. It did not matter that within minutes they all disappeared in the steam, the tension and ardor of the body were simultaneously present in him and present in the others too, though none of them let on. He had the feeling that sheer vitality, radiating through the contours of his body and penetrating the steam, had an effect. It broke through the steam and the noise of the water spurting from the showerheads. And at night they beat him until he discovered how others traded in this effect, turned it into a commodity. Until he himself started to deal in these existing but unseen currents. By then he spoke French better, though the other boys continued to correct him or to pretend they didn’t understand him. It was the other language, their bodies and his own, he had to learn. And in fact he wasn’t doing it for the first time, even if he hadn’t done it so frequently in front of others. And it didn’t occur to him there could be a person who might not understand or indulge him, who wouldn’t admire his perfection or would fail to see what a profound pleasure it was just to be near him.

From below his half-closed eyelids he saw his smooth chest muscles, the slightly convex and taut, hairless abdominal wall, his sex organ, somewhat filled out and hardened because of the delicate touches but still resting between the hills of his testicles, with a prominent vein running across its spine. He saw his knees, his delicate long-boned feet; Gyöngyvér was mad about taking his toes into her mouth to chew and suck them. He stood there as someone engrossed in something, contemplating something, brooding over it, though in reality he is not here, does not want to be disturbed, he has floated over into another dimension, using his rising and hardening cock to lift himself over, he can’t see and couldn’t care less what is happening around him. He was repeating a single series of movements. He touched his spread fingers to his chin, which at this late hour was stubbly, enjoying the scraping sound of the contact, and then puckering his lips toward his nose he kept sniffing and turning his five fingertips as if smelling some special fragrance. No one could tell or understand what he was doing with this sniffing and why he puckered his lips as if for sucking. He did not question why he was doing it, but from the time he had started it, he kept at it. With his smile, he was hovering in the dense tale of his pleasures; more precisely, the pure patterns of an unexplored past took possession of his features, which appeared, but only to the uninitiated, as a smile. He experienced it as that wild and unpredictable current he should not fear, because it would continue to flow, always and in everyone. It was opened by the scent and now he could step through the entrance to his secret life. Although he perceived what he saw, knew what he could know, and various things still occurred to him, still, with the scent of his body he was able to set himself free from the world of reality. With his scent he floated over to the other shore and from there glanced back at everyone else and at himself, whom he had left behind; the current carried him along. Loyalty no longer had any meaning; betrayal was waiting with new delights.

On this far shore, nothing had a name, naming was not obligatory, the entire story had not a single date; thus, events had no weight. He could not go over at just any time he wanted to, but when he fulfilled the only and very simple requirement, nothing stood in his way. On his fingers, he had to preserve the secretions and exudations of his body. Not wash his hands after urinating. If they didn’t check up on him, he’d skip washing his hands at least once or twice a day, deceiving even himself. As if he were in a hurry or had forgotten what they had pounded into him. The omission was not unconscious, though he couldn’t have told when it was or wasn’t. Neither did he know whether others were doing things like that, though he discovered that some boys picked their noses. Secretly, they eat their dry snot or, when back from the sports fields and taking off their socks, they dig in between their toes and keep smelling the stench of the darkest excretions of their feet. The stronger he felt the morass of hopelessness under his feet and the deeper he became entangled in some lie or wound up in some trouble, the more frequently he turned to a oui, voilà, yes, d’accord. Who else could he turn to if not to himself. Though sometimes his desperation was so deep that he could not utter this yes, and then it turned into a non, no. Then, clinging to denial, he sank even deeper; from there at least he could not see out at anything at all.

To this day, he urinated like a little boy. He did not pull back his wrinkly, unusually long, funnel-shaped and pointy foreskin from his bulb, and when he finished he barely shook his member, letting some of the fluid be smeared on his fingers. He’d dig in with his fingers between his thighs under the testicles, where he always found for himself some worthy odor. Only rarely did he risk invading the cheeks of his buttocks to touch the crimped edge of his contracted anus. Perhaps to rub it just a little bit, to reach into it, as an experiment. But it did happen on occasion. The various odors nicely mingled on his fingers where he preserved them for the rest of the day. He saved them for the night, when he would have unhindered access to his body, though he had to be on his guard in the bluish light of the dormitory, listen for and follow with open eyes every little stirring. He taught his body, led it to the point of dark defiance; he was the one who exposed it to danger and self-denial. He was delaying, playing for time, dragging the odor across his lips. This slowed him down, his breath was caught, and he returned to the cunning, careful little boy playing with the deadly danger of defenselessness, the little boy he had once been and whom he had never left.

When he couldn’t tuck his weenie between his thighs, or couldn’t touch it, not even through his pants, because in the boarding school everybody was watching everybody else all the time, he consoled himself with these odors. And this remained the same later too, with his cock, though its odor had become more penetrating. He was in need of consolation almost all the time, and until now the clandestine way he went about acquiring it seemed not have attracted anyone’s attention. He passed the test of various dangers; he never proved to be punishable. Success justified his behavior retroactively. Putrefying urine, the translucent drops of semen that bubbled forth at the most innocent sensual excitement, the dried remains of the previous night’s ejaculation and the excretions of his penis, now swelling, now shrinking under the uncircumcised foreskin, were the ingredients that produced this lasting, penetrating odor. He kept sniffing it, drew it across his lips.

Then he spread the fingers of both hands again and set out with them, slowly, ceremoniously. This was not done absentmindedly, far from it, indeed on the contrary. He did it as someone with a cultic respect for every fraction of every second of time. Although his attention is personal, he is not the one who is acting; he is merely performing certain movements prescribed in ancient times. As one person initiating another, who now happens to be an ignorant woman, into the cult of his body, the way others had initiated him. He never forgot this. What Gyöngyvér comprehended of the whole thing was that she should not interfere, and she wouldn’t know how either. Just as one should not chatter during the celebration of sacraments. Morally, she felt she had no right to say anything. What she was seeing reminded her of all sorts of other men who had done similar things in front of her.

Besides, she wasn’t that interested. As far as she was concerned, Ágost could do with himself whatever he wanted to, he could even beat his meat. She would have liked to get to bed quickly, so early next morning, before her singing lesson, she could go swimming. Still, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

Next time, at least close the rotten shutters if this is what you want to do, she hissed in her unappeasable anger, folding in the white-lacquered sections of the shutters from the window frame and slamming them into place, an action that vented some of her fury.

The long sections of the shutters were decorated with archaized profiles familiar from the building’s facade and the walls of the lobby and stairwell.

She felt she’d become ludicrous, even to herself, but still, with his obscene behavior Ágost was depriving her of something. What was she here for anyway. And in this, unwritten morality seemed to be on her side; after all, he was doing something in clear contradiction to accepted conventions. Even though she could see, as indeed she did, that he was giving more than he was taking. And she spoke as a kindergarten teacher, for she instinctively felt the presence of an inconsolable little boy in need of support.

The shutters’ lock clicked shut. Ilona forgets every night to close it in their room. This particular night, Kristóf was again awakened by the loud click. When they locked themselves in at night, the silence always grew ominous in the rooms facing the courtyard, which were so quiet anyway. In her silver-gray, shiny silk nightgown that gently clung to the flesh of her long thighs, and in her slippers trimmed with swansdown that barely peeked out from under the nightgown, Gyöngyvér remained in front of the suddenly blinded windows. Offended, she threw her head back; she would have liked to turn away, but kept watching him attentively. She coldly surveyed the terrain. The dark socks by the bed indicated that the man had begun undressing there. A little farther away, his white underpants were lying on the rug. His shirt was shining white on the back of an easy chair. She saw herself picking up these items one by one and burying her face in them. Scents and odors were among the incomprehensible things that would not let her leave Ágost’s side. If she had to describe his smell to someone, she would have likened it to a burnt electric wire. It didn’t satisfy her desire; she didn’t understand it, because she wanted nothing else but to see. Just to see. And not more humiliation. Just as she did not understand how a scent like that proved so irresistible to her. To see everything he would deliberately or involuntarily be ready to show her, what she could never have seen before. Anyway, her experiences with men cautioned her to keep her head, her calm, and her humility. When men are doing something like this, they are unpredictable and might beat her. But everything was changing constantly; her views and opinions were not binding either, and she could not stick to her decisions. She knew that what she was about to do this minute was not right because only her voraciousness, her wounded pride, and mainly her jealousy propelled her forward; go ahead, go, grab hold of it.

While Ágost, with his palms barely touching the surface of his skin, slowly slid his hands over his own body, alternately turning his palms in and out, Gyöngyvér started for him. And as the back of his hand touched the arch of his neck and then, following the round chest muscles, made light contact with the abdominal wall, his dark-haired loins convulsed as if excitement was trying to lock the body back into itself. He pressed his eyes tight shut. Again the cock was filling up, growing hard, and was already separated from the testicles, though not far, and rose a little along its entire length. Which made the man’s lips part hesitantly. His slowness did not surprise Gyöngyvér; on other occasions too he treated his pleasure with great economy, even frugality. He wanted to stretch each second into infinity. As if he were watching separately every sparkling atom, every single cooling grain of pleasure emanating from the nerve cells, doggedly following them, until sadly he would part with them when they lost their strength and unfeelingly died away. But now she saw that with the slowness he not only delayed the possible gratification but wanted to avoid it altogether or, as if it were something coarse and common, outright despised it. He isn’t looking for others in his desire. At most, there are viewers, observers, but these are not allowed to become embodied in any one person. This was indeed something new for Gyöngyvér.

Who had seen, not once and not twice, how men, bending over her, grabbed their cocks, only half-hardened or shrunken by fear, and quickly, bashfully, with nervous movements, tried to stimulate them, spur them on. As if ready to tear them, tug at them, eager to rip them from their roots. While with their lips they would glue themselves to her mouth, jab at a nipple with their tongues, suck it in, bite it, or hook their tongues into her vagina, searching for her clitoris. She could not shake off the images of these men, struggling with their helplessness, becoming engaged in diversionary tactics. After all, they weren’t doing it to enjoy themselves, but to revive, resuscitate the diminishing excitement, paralyzed by too great excitement; they helped, urged, encouraged the blood to fill the cavities of their pricks, let them be hard so they could make the longed-for penetration. Into me. That was the goal, after all: into me. And she did not have to do much, only moan a little, make sounds in the air of polite expectations, whimper and groan provocatively and patiently, close her eyes or considerately look to the side so they would not see that she could see what they were doing, not to disturb them, not to expose their foolish, somewhat laughable little exertions. She loved these hotheaded or inhibited men because she had power over them and they, at least at times like this, allowed her to love them. She could give them an advance on the joy waiting for them with her voice, pant a little, whimper carefully, anything to help them get an erection. They were grateful for this and therefore more attentive. But not to interfere.

That could make all hell break loose.

Stupefied, with her eyes growing wide, she comprehended what she had known before but refused to acknowledge. Perhaps it wasn’t even her eyes that helped her; rather, it was in her brain that she saw everything in its proper place. It hurt her. He is in love only with himself, no one but himself. He avoids what other men so violently, immediately, and continually desire. Ágost had many traits, but he was neither hotheaded nor inhibited. All the other men played with themselves but wanted only her.

Her face was burning with shame, her forehead throbbing with pain.

Because until now she had managed to make herself believe that this man was no different from other men. Except that she loved him more than she had ever loved anyone else. She’d picked him out, she was the one who insisted on him, and she was not ashamed of that. She has not regretted it. Perhaps she loved him more because his body had a more pleasant smell, because he spoke more gently, because he knew and had seen so many things and had different habits; still, in her mind she had him in the same category with other men. These other men with their traits and limbs became a big jumble for her. In the midst of lovemaking, there were moments, less or more pleasant, when she had no idea where she was in the progress of her life, with which man at precisely what time. A strange room, a man’s tense butt, pressing hard hip, wet and gasping chest: none of this spoke to her. Which was a rather good thing. At least it didn’t remind her of anything. And they wouldn’t notice any of her feelings, because there were no outward signs to show that she might have mixed them up. What really amazed her was how she could receive into herself the cocks of men so different from one another, and why her life’s pulse wouldn’t slow down enough for her to settle at last with one of them. But now she had to separate them quickly, very quickly, in her mind. She could see that what other men wanted or demanded from her, Ágost could give himself better, as he had done in the past. As though until now he had satisfied her only out of pity or mere politeness. This was part of his upper-class behavior, in which case she had misunderstood everything, but everything. That is why her satisfaction always remained a bit hazy. She shuddered at the thought. Then her place was with the others, after all. Then she should move back to one of the flea-bitten sublet rooms and start all over again. She could see with her own eyes that this character in front of her wanted neither reciprocity nor mutuality.

And that was impossible to bear.

He can get along just fine all by himself.

She thought the exertion would split her head immediately. Let him drop dead. She was fuming, seething. Even though she had already known that this man, as opposed to all other men, did not like to ejaculate; he avoided it if possible. With immense and painful, spasmodic efforts he almost always managed to withhold it. But this too was beautiful, this convulsive defiance. Moving and frightening, like an earthquake. He’d moan, prefer to tear himself out of her, roughly and unexpectedly, double over, bite his lips, but would not let it happen. Until now, Gyöngyvér believed that this had something to do not with Ágost’s nature but with his upbringing. She thought that since men lucky enough to be born into upper-class families were whimsical anyway, why couldn’t Ágost have a quirk like that. Everybody is different, yes, but not him. She liked to look as the sweat-soaked body, hideously tense in its struggle with opposing forces, turned on its side, writhing and growing rigid at her feet. She followed with her own body the man’s vehement rhythms as he convulsed in the pleasurable repulsion of his efforts. As if there were still a chance of fulfillment.

The pelvic nerve plexus can remember.

As if she were helping him, she could hear inside herself the rhythmic shouts of encouragement. Let Ágost’s willpower triumph over his pleasure.

Oh, no, please, don’t let him come.

She identified with him because the restraint wrenched her own throbbing away from its own rhythm, causing veritable explosions. The vagina’s oval muscles were already resisting with stronger throbs. And while she pressed her knees and thighs together, let out hoarse shouts, her orifice opened and contracted to the rhythm of the man’s writhing; while she was thus assisting him in not ejaculating, she often reached a retching orgasm of her own, thrusting her hands between her thighs.

She acknowledged that this was an odd habit, what else could it be. Other men could not convince themselves to do a thing like that even when they needed to, when they wanted it. Excitement broke through and overwhelmed their consciousness; more precisely, they would have found that kind of self-restraint humiliating. If they were able to control themselves and interrupt even at moments when the sliding and the touching were perfect, then they must not have wanted the woman, couldn’t have desired her so much. They did not want to be seen in her eyes as so petty as to stop their ejaculation; they preferred to take their chances. And if she could not yank herself away in time, things might become more than risky. She didn’t want to get pregnant all the time. She dreaded abortions not only because of the pain involved, but also because dread increased the pain and lengthened her periods. But with Ágost she could not become pregnant no matter how much she wanted him to come in her womb so long as Ágost didn’t want to. She was glad, at last, to see how a man denied himself a pleasure to which his own body responded with resignation. Why shouldn’t she help him if it’s good for him, and if it feels good. She did not admit it to herself, but actually, her own satisfaction was much deeper and longer-lasting than it was when the man, polite and attentive, tarried in her. And if that was possible, then fate was not inevitable. Then one could make a crack in even the thickest wall. Then she might become a singer. She did not know them, but she always learned from them, experienced more because of them. She wanted to be like them. Sometimes, unexpectedly, she’d get an idea from them. She observed their habits, imitated their cool behavior, and, although she could not use everything, she learned she could not hold their caprices against them either. And of course no one forced her to take those caprices seriously. Because no one could shake her profound, almost religious conviction that men and women were created to desire and find their gratification in one another. That was the way things had to be.

Anything else would be immoral.

But now she also saw, in the man’s beatific smile she saw that what he was doing was to give alms, all the time and to everyone. He does it when from under his lashes he looks at someone with his small piercing eyes. At the sight of the adored body, she was overcome with shudders of disgust. Even his most beautiful smile he keeps for himself.

And she struggled with an impossible nausea, as if not Ágost but she had gone mad.

In Ágost’s limbs, she recognized the bodies of other people. His arms, legs, and hard abdominal wall he inherited from his father, his joints, the shape of his fingers, and even their length from his mother. Something had rounded off his muscles, in their powerful bundles, including those of his shoulders and buttocks, and that was his mother in him. The shape of a woman showed in his musculature. Gyöngyvér looked at him and thought, oh god, it’s not him I’ve been sleeping with. With his mother’s fingers, with the hard pads of his palms he barely touched his father’s abdominal wall. Gyöngyvér stared at him as at a person she had nothing to do with, couldn’t have. While she seemed to feel his palm’s familiar hard pads on her breasts. Which meant that her nipples declared their independence; they did remember these hands. But she has more to do with the old man, when he soils himself and they have to bathe him, she thought, because she empathizes with him, feels sorry for him. And she could not understand what in the world she could have worshipped only moments earlier in this strange man.

While one of his hands reached his drum-tight belly, the other one was close to his pubic hair, into which Gyöngyvér too would have gladly sunk her fingers, her repugnance notwithstanding. But the hands hesitated, made no further advance. She seemed to smell the smeared shit from which they’d had to free the old man in his bath. And this one here doesn’t need anybody to touch him, his skin, his warmth, any part of him, not even a little bit. I still adore his hands, she thought jealously. He sees himself a little, touches himself a little, but even so he enjoys himself enough. Why would he need anyone else. Ágost twitched several times, excitement skimmed over his skin from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, shaking his limbs; his torso stretched up, bent forward, backward, and then unexpectedly relaxed again. From then on he kept his head thrust upward like a mutely gaping animal searching for the moon. Ágost’s face did not become distorted in the throes of pleasure, unlike other men’s. He wasn’t looking anywhere; there was nowhere to look except at himself. One can’t say he became more attractive in his pleasure, but his features grew more translucent. And his smile radiated even more strongly, more provocatively.

The floor creaked under the swansdown slippers.

He truly wanted to show something of himself, this was a deliberate decision, but he was doing it almost desperately, as if reaching for the last of his reserves. If you don’t understand this, it will be all over. It is over. Let Gyöngyvér take notice. She saw it, surely, but no matter what she noticed several forces were at work simultaneously. One, striving for understanding and sense, thrust her away from the man and held her back; the other, greedy and demanding, which acknowledged only the raw power of the moment, could not let her obstruct gratification. She’d have plowed through everything for it. Even through sense and understanding. One force was waiting, listening, felt deep empathy, weighed things, and that is why she managed to stop herself halfway, in the middle of a movement.

The high heels of her slippers rapped uncertainly on the floor.

But then she should go with the other, there was always the other. Now the one with eternal urges stepped forward, making the floor creak under the treading soles. This wasn’t anything like what other people call desire. She was driven by her conviction that in such a situation, Ágost would need physical first aid, and there was nothing more appropriate in the world than her body to provide that. Which may have been true; desire has its own reasons. The sensation of being exceptional and chosen needs no reasons of the mind. This sensation, usually called passion or love, had survived for a few weeks after they had met. Then it developed some cracks and slowly crumbled away, but neither of them could have said why. She must hug him. Cuddle up with him, cling to him, and suck him off. Take him inside her. She didn’t even notice that she was not only thinking faster but breathing faster too, and at the same time, as if to calm herself, she pressed her fists to her breasts. This was a very willful movement, which surprised her, because when she glanced at herself in this position she did not believe it was she, or that she had strayed on this forbidden path and become violent. Usually she suffered her greatest defeats in situations like this. But from this moment on it was her breathing and not her thinking that led her on; a rhythm, a rhythmic speeding-up that she no longer controlled.

Don’t move, stay there, said Ágost loudly, as if deterring an intruder. Stay where you are.

The voice was energetic enough to be heard by Kristóf in the adjacent room, though he could not make out the words.

Don’t you think it would be better if I could at least close the fucking door, Gyöngyvér replied with stifled anger.

But she obeyed him immediately. The man didn’t even look at her, yet she stopped where she was.

As if their bodies were torn out of time. They were no longer stoppable on their own paths, but for a second they both froze. Aware of one’s goal, one does not hurry. They were no more than an arm’s length from each other.

Gyöngyvér wondered what had happened to the man’s breath. Nothing was coming out of him but stifled silence. That’s what made her hear her own urgent, violent, painfully excited breathing. Which made her loathe herself, not the man. She could always turn around any animosity she felt toward the other, but she usually fell into a trap she couldn’t escape from. She could see how gentle, how considerate the other person was while she was crass, common in all her thinking, uncouth, with instincts that did not function above the animal level.

The deliberate selfishness of the man seemed more attractive to her than her own false generosity.

He was now turning blindly toward the lit-up ceiling and, while his fingers moved on gently and relentlessly, his entire torso lengthened, as if he had to keep away from his own touch and as if his body were rearing up against his own will. This position was still too much. Less would be more. Just a bit more, upward, as though it were possible to evade himself. To stretch his body so he couldn’t reach it, or only with great difficulty. He inched his way down, avoiding his belly, and from below, with his fingers crawling on the inside of his thighs, he approached his testicles. His lips parted farther, the nightlight illuminated the roof of his mouth, yet his voice still had no sound coming from the dark space. His knees quivered slightly when with two fingers he reached his testicles, which caused the two convex bundles of muscles to contract suddenly and then bounce back.

He hadn’t yet touched his testicles when the hurtful comprehension in his brain was extinguished and he was looking into a light much brighter than the one that had so rudely penetrated his half-opened eyes.

All sorts of thought fragments were swirling in his memory, but they had little to do with the images he now deliberately conjured up. Like a person rising on tiptoe who at the same time had to open his loins wide. To keep his thighs from absorbing the weight of his testicles. And there was an even more urgent command: to free the muscles between scrotum and anus from all tension and pressure. In a supine position, this is very simple; he’d only have to spread both legs and pull up the knees a little. In a standing position, however, this meant two mutually exclusive movements, which tensed his muscles on both his back and his chest. He thrust his buttocks backward slightly. He has to get to it. To something that does not exist, of course, yet that might be called forth from the body. To open up ever wider and at the same time become ever taller and to reach for it higher, so that he can touch his entire body with his entire body. It was no longer warm in the room; the mild chill of the skin’s surface indicated the bodily boundaries on his neck, chest, thighs, feet, and soles. He had already grown beyond these points both down and up, yet he held back, economized, so that he would still have room to go on rising and sinking. He immersed himself in an image and wanted to hold on to it.

There came another one; it’s not possible to hold on to anything.

The lightly sketched hand-drawn figures were sliding in and out of one another. Vous voyez là les nus féminins en mouvement.

You see there female nudes in motion. Usually, when talking to himself, he switched languages without noticing it. Once he arrived at French, for example, he could glide on to another more easily. Hungarian had a deeper, more elementary attraction for him but he did not feel identical to the man who spoke or thought in Hungarian within him. Now, in addition to words, a badly tuned piano could be heard. The naked figures were those of girls who were in motion. The hammers of the piano pounded dully. It occurred to him there was no way back. Sur les pointes, s’il vous plaît. Because if he spoke in German or Italian, he could not switch back at all. There is no path like this. First, he must touch on the French. Then the girls were running — on point, please; the pictures were running in the mirror in quick succession as if projected ahead of him and for him to follow. And he was probably thinking this way because for them there was truly no way back. One mirror was reflected in the other. Now I’ll grab it, I’ll grab it anyway, he thought. As if he had to reach into the reflections but could not grasp anything. There were many of them; bright footlights shone up on familiar faces, loins, and pointy little breasts.

Their noses cast funny little shadows that crawled up their foreheads. He never had to say to himself that these young girls had anything to do with anyone he had ever known or would have wanted to touch. They bent over, straightened, stood on tiptoe, and tossed their heads in all directions, higher, higher yet, quickly, with short broken movements. Une pirouette, s’il vous plaît. Someone gracefully transferred them to the corrugated paper. Pirouettes, please, single first. He drew what he was instructing others to do in his familiarly throaty voice. He was clapping rhythmically for the little idiots. Et encore une autre, et une autre, magnifique. The crayon barely stuck at the edge of the corrugated ribs. Like the girls who for a flash remained in the air and used their arching feet to keep from falling. But then they fell like stars. Everything was going so fast he couldn’t tell how many there were in the pictures. The napes of their necks were spinning by as they took their turns. A one-and-a-two-and-a-three, wonderful, shouted the woman with the throaty voice; that’s all. He could see them in the mirror simultaneously from the front and the back; with a magnifying glass, he went over their breasts and their backs. Of course, he put the magnifying glass back in its case. Into the black leather box whose brass safety catch was slightly worn. And then he put the black leather box into the upper drawer of the glossy yellow-red cherrywood desk. The large red eye of the stove was shining bright. Outside, it was growing dark over the lake of Zurich, the snow turned blue.

He could put the pictures away.

When he was left alone in the blue light of the dormitory, he could take them out and sniff his fingers. He could conjure up the voices, the little idiots’ giant leaps; he could stare into the large red eye of the stove. At such times, he usually lay on his side, curled up, and, as if mumbling in his sleep, adroitly worked his weenie in between his thighs. This was not so easy to do. Occasionally he would have to reach under the covers to help with his hand, which he didn’t leave there too long. Or he could go for the magnifying glass; this wasn’t the way he had it at home, because here he could enter this room at any time, open the black leather box, and take out the album. He placed it in his lap, possibly so that at the same time he could squeeze his testicles stuck between his thighs. And since his weenie was already between his thighs, it grew painfully hard. He held it like that; the pain increased or decreased depending on whether he tightened or loosened his thighs. And the book always opened at the same place, at the dancers. If he’d let it, it literally burst free of the burning thighs, and that made him feel that down there, in the darkness under the covers, there was another, separate and thinking head; but he didn’t let it. He’d rather go on squeezing it gently, for which he didn’t even have to slide his hand under the covers. They could not catch him. He remained alert, no matter how much his body was overtaken by excitement that was stronger than thinking. Not to mention his fear that it would stay like that forever, never subside again. He’d have to move among his fellows like that, which would be his punishment. He knew nothing more than what he knew from himself. He learned fear from himself and that fear was pleasurable. In the silence, he could hear the ceaseless susurration of the pine trees over the big house. And he could hear that the others were also doing something, not just he. He couldn’t know what they were doing, because, although he could fathom their noises and their voices, he could not fathom their muteness. If he wanted to, he could stop what he was doing at any time and then pick up where he left off because the excitement would make him slip into a slumber, or the pleasure wrest him out of his fear, chase away the dread, and then his pleasure itself would slip away while he slept. As if he had fallen into a terrible pit in which everything he had was taken away from him.

As much as she would have liked to, Gyöngyvér could not fall on him and fight him tooth and nail. She could not tackle him or run him down, because he was receding from her on his own orbit, moving ever more slowly; he could not have been slower or more absorbed in himself. The smile over the face dissolved unnoticed. He wasn’t anywhere. He was wiped away by pleasure, which commanded seriousness. He plowed the spine of his cock with his thumb, a very fast move in the general slowness, barely touching the surface of the strong, slightly slanting vein spreading toward the tip of the tightening foreskin. He was plucking the strings of a musical instrument. There was such an excess of skin there that despite the swelling and tension at the tip, the foreskin had not retracted as it would with other men. This might have happened partly because his long cylindrical penis curved downward and not upward, bending back into itself, as it were, and therefore, except for the brief tense moments prior to ejaculation, it could not rise high enough for the taut little frenum, huddling under the tip of the penis, to withdraw all the foreskin from the steep rim of the tumescent bulb. Gyöngyvér’s breathing, pulse, blood pressure, and imagination all worked against everything she was seeing, everything she knew about this cock, whatever she acknowledged or admitted. Her pulse was fast, as if she were running, and her blood pressure was rising, but she held back her breathing. She did this because she was kept from touching the other person at the very moment when that person began to talk about himself, without words, to tell a story that no reasonable mind could possibly follow.

She did not comprehend it; she could not, though she suspected the man was expecting something similar from her. Holding her breath made everything look slightly red and hazy. Not only did she see what she was looking at, but whatever she looked at penetrated her unhindered. She couldn’t have understood it, because her sensual experience was dominated mainly by the rapid, vehement, violent, and exaggerated satisfaction that her purported sensuality exacted. A play whose every scene was more or less written in advance. Not like this coolly restrained and passionless show designed unalterably for this one performer, its sole, distant focus, vulnerable to surprise and improvisation. For a few weeks they had thought their temperaments were well matched, but now they both had to see that their temperaments could not even meet in their strangeness. They were moving farther and farther away from each other. Gyöngyvér’s life progressed between the steep banks of extreme ambition and petty existential danger, which was why she rarely risked anything with men with whom she was unfamiliar. With women it was even worse; she shrank from them. Indigence, want, necessity, and resignation were stronger than she, and her experiences predetermined what she could know, what she was allowed or forbidden to do, and what she must deny herself.

A flat landscape extended as far as the eye could see; she was ambling toward the horizon, but behind that horizon was another one. The place at which she might arrive was no different from her starting point. All the while, some unapproachable, unfamiliar, and alluring high ground, which she had to reach at all costs, kept rising before her, vibrating vaporously, illusion and mirage.

Maybe this time I’ll make it up there, she thought. She imagined there would be one magnificent moment when suddenly everything took a turn for the better. There was no such turning point, but at least she sensed that the man had started out from a different place and wanted to arrive at a place very unlike the one she longed for. He was in a different landscape. It was hard to understand how she could possibly follow him in anything so alien to natural requirements. What principles should she abandon, what habits should she break if she wanted to relent, make concessions, and demand nothing that the man obviously does not desire and until now, probably, had only pretended to desire. For a moment she even thought, wait, he might be gay. And what should she do in that case, with herself, without him. Not only does he not want to come in her — and she could find no acceptable explanation for that either — he doesn’t want to enter her at all, and she’s not even allowed to come close to him. Just keeps on doing his exercises. Impossible to endure, and yet that’s the way it is. She didn’t understand what else she could relinquish.

Helplessness helps one cross borderline situations. From behind paralyzed desires, raw instincts, and persistent habits one’s other self appears and goes right into action. It knows what to do. This rarely happens, but when it does, one assesses the situation based not on experience and mainly not in conformity with socially accepted norms. Her loins wanted Ágost’s rough, strong hands. She was deliberating whether to surprise him from the back — snuggle up to him, hug him, take his cock out of his hand — or attack him from the front, kiss him, gobble him up with her groin, thrust her belly against his. She could do none of this and not only because he forbade it, but because she now saw something that was more than comprehensible.

It was already her other self looking out of her head, with her eyes.

This whole cock thing, this whole busying himself with it so much, is becoming something like a major and ominous natural phenomenon, and first of all she should acknowledge it. Until she does, she should say nothing, make no move and definitely not go close to him. Her body was throbbing with her breathing, or the violently stifled breathing was throbbing with her convulsing body. Red spots of excitement began to spread on her brown skin, on her neck, the strong cheekbones, her aggressive little forehead. She felt as if the hot wetness that flooded her vagina was pouring out on her labia. She wished in the depths of her body, in her womb and in her brain, in her shoulders, now covered in fine shiver-provoking silk, in her arms, and in her swollen nipples, she wished to be free so she could reach him and comprehend him; to touch the fine bones and taut muscles of his chest first with one nipple and then with the other; she wished for her belly to comprehend the tight wall of his belly, his hands to pry open her sopping vagina.

She knew she wasn’t going to touch him, no. He doesn’t want me. Her imagination tugged her back and forth between the possibilities and impossibilities that common sense dictated. He doesn’t want me anymore. And all her wishes were in vain, she could see, because the man was busy with his ominously rising, elongated, tumescent, and recurving cock, and with nothing else. Nothing left except this hollow piece of meat, enjoying its own tension and expansion, and all the relevant temptations and prohibitions in the indifferent brains of both of them.

She couldn’t say why things would go better barefoot, but she kicked off her slippers; they flew and landed with proper thuds, one here, the other farther away.

The next morning she couldn’t find them.

With a single tug, she freed herself from her dressing gown, slipped, slithered out of it without giving her actions a thought.

The next day, when in the corner of the taxi’s backseat she absentmindedly looked out the rain-swept window, she saw nothing but the half-risen, recurving cock she was not supposed to touch. As if seeing it for the first time, but at the same time seeing all the other cocks she had ever seen without the men the cocks belonged to. This image seized her attention as strongly as if she were backing away with it into a dusty courtyard of her girlhood. And the odor rising from the wet rubber mat on the taxi floor reminded her of some variation of the man’s scent. She kept the pills she had just retrieved in her half-closed fist. Saw Ágost’s hand on his cock, his mother’s cautious, thin fingers, and not the darkened facades of the buildings gliding by along the sharply curved Margit Boulevard.

The wind could not lash more strongly this section of the road, shaded by large buildings. Lady Erna was conversing with the cabbie, but these voices reached Gyöngyvér as if from afar, from an imaginary, elusive, and hostile world. She should have called over to this world to ask what to do with the pills. Instead, she seemed to be aware, even hear, how in the nocturnal light the sparkling silk dressing gown softly slid off her body and gathered on the floor around her ankles. And it was as if someone were opening before her a secret door whose existence was new to her. She had no idea that now a large dark hall would follow and behind it another, lighter one, and then a third, even darker than this one, and there is no end to the halls.

God, I’ve nothing to fear.

She’d have to traipse through it barefoot.

She still had on a short, sleeveless nightshirt, matching the color of the dressing gown, a huge V cut low between her breasts; static caused by repeated friction made the nightshirt cling to her body like a mucous membrane. She didn’t think about taking it off or leaving it on. Perhaps she was trying to hold on to the last vestiges of her self-respect; she can’t surrender completely. To someone who doesn’t want her, who doesn’t even look at her. To someone who is interested only in himself, and not even in himself, only in his cock. From this safe point she sent out volleys of rebuke. This, at least, I now understand. What she wanted to do was rip the mucous membrane off her feverish body. It can’t be that every man is like this. If for no other reason than the man, who had no particular inhibitions about himself and whose sense of duty was the only force restraining his extreme egoism, had already crossed a magic border. Holding his erect cock in his fingers, he pulled the taut foreskin backward and forward, protruding like a funnel, slowly, as if surprised by every little movement, while with his other hand he gently raised his low-hanging, heavy testicles and, as if entrapping himself, squeezed them tightly once, twice, and then grabbed at them to cause himself pain; they slid smoothly over each other. From behind the foreskin’s beak now began to appear the dull, purple-colored tip of the penis’s bulb, with the solitary, deep-seated, large eye of the urethra, but not completely, only partially, and then it disappeared again among the skin folds, in the funnel of his cautious fingers.

With her glances, Gyöngyvér would have liked to bring things to a halt or to full gratification.

But now, everything located between her mind and clitoris, the former stimulated by will, memories, wishes, and needs, and therefore compelled to run on parallel tracks, and the latter swelling with blood and pulsing to the rhythm of convulsing vaginal muscles, was concentrated on the single question of whether the tip of his cock would appear again and whether she would see it in its entirety. The means at her disposal, between mind and clitoris, included intense attention, involuntary dissolution of the nuclei of some cells, breathing, blood pressure, acid production, intestinal contractions, and extra heartbeats. In this scene, her person was left without a role except, to her shame, to look and to wait for the response of the person slumbering behind the strange body.

No way, it’s not going to happen, the bulb was distinctly outlined inside the skin, but he would not expose it.

She felt ashamed and was jealous of Ágost’s hands, which denied her; jealous of the cautious, loving movements with which he was following his own inner story and refusing to look at anything outside of it, jealous even of his mother, whom he resembled with his fine elongated fingers, and of his father, from whom he inherited his slightly protruding, tight abdominal wall, jealous of this whole rotten bunch of Jews. Someone inside her was raving. But the stubbornly down-facing head of the cock again refused to make an appearance. He wouldn’t show it. He was only playing, teasing. That’s him, all right, she recognized the man in him, yes, that’s him; someone who avoids repetitions, who does not go along with the steady acceleration, because he hates the monotony of life and therefore denies himself and others the expected peaks.

For him, denial is the summit. To which no road leads. Which means there is no road to him either.

But what attracted her to this man was precisely that he too was so alone and so untouchable. Yet their inner rhythms were different, incompatible. She finally understood this, though she did not formulate it for herself because she understood it with her hearing, she comprehended his syncopated rhythm with her sense of rhythm.

She gave no thought to the possibility of stroking her own body either. To do to herself clumsily what the man was doing to himself. Her uncertain, nervous, and quick fingers glided over the silver-gray silk clinging to her body. Which, in fact, felt good. Not so much because of the contact, but because it revived their dormant relationship, alluded to a time when, sometime, in the past, their inner rhythms had conformed to each other.

It conjured up the intoxicating days and hesitant nights of their first weeks. By duplicating the man’s movements on herself, she filled in the lack of their mutual physical contact.

She did it by feeling herself, which strengthened her observation and returned some of her consciousness. She could at least shed the superfluous feeling of shame. That she was watching, yes, watching that cock. Of which she had seen enough, though she had never allowed herself to look at it, observe it so unashamedly, how it worked, how it reached the center of her awareness. Ultimately, everybody is raised with the warning that one should not touch oneself in front of others, and spying on others is forbidden. In her confusion, a fingernail caught in the lace of her nightshirt. Which barely covered her pudendum. Finally, she could look at the cock, and now she was seeing something that was very different from what she was thinking about. And it did not have much importance, because she could not use it to get in better touch with her own thinking, but she saw things at the center of the world that she did not and could not understand.

At that moment Ágost roughly and unexpectedly yanked and then let go of the foreskin’s beak, and his other hand released his tormented testicles. It was impossible to guess what he would do next. The erect cock was trembling in the air. It would have reared farther, higher, but since it did not curve upward, it barely reached a horizontal position. Gyöngyvér seemed to sense, indeed identified with and lived the tension of the frenum hiding under the bulb as it held back the penis, not letting it rise further. She kept the memory of the frenum’s tension at the tip of her tongue and felt it in the arched muscles of her vagina. The impression was as if in preattack fury the cock were thrusting forward its lowered, large, dark head; done quite amusingly. She could identify with the stubborn fury, because the desire to rage made her tense too. In this fury she saw the physiology of her own bodily rapture. But she could not tell herself about this either, because her raving would not subside. She could see and feel how the down-curving head of this cock, as she continues to rave, reaches her swollen clitoris and how, when her labia finally roll back the foreskin, the folded-up collar of the bulb, now thrusting into her vagina, pushes the foreskin onto and then pull it back from the protruding head of her clitoris. She could see all the correlations. And although this had put an end to some of her unconsciousness, she did not know what to do with this new awareness.

Along with the cool stale air, a different kind of unconsciousness was streaming toward her from behind the opening doors.

When the shutters were closed in the rooms facing the courtyard and there was no draft at all, a mysterious heavy smell of old age seemed to pervade the air.

The current of this different kind of consciousness was hardly familiar, but it carried her along. The only time she’d ever felt anything like this was when, while singing, she could convince herself with her own voice. When she was not rummaging about for the right method or technique of singing, but rather when the written-out notes sang with her and she with them, producing a real character in whom she was surprised to recognize herself, and while with her thinking she still, stubbornly, violated herself. The singer does not hear her own singing but can feel exactly what others hear as her voice. She would obstruct her breathing, hold it back, would not let go of it — and then she was anxious about it. As if there were a commandment according to which her breath was allowed to mix only with the other person’s breath. Carnal pleasure and joy cannot remain within her; that way they are not permitted. She stopped at the commandment regarding her breathing, insisted on it, but she could no longer stop what she saw, what she was looking at, and what she was doing. She could not be stopped because, for the simultaneous occurrences to reflect one another, it was not enough for her two spread-out fingers to glide across her pubic hair and then open the gates of her mons veneris and slip inside. With her new awareness, she realized this was merely technique, and what her movement lacked was exactly what was so moving and convincing in the other person: selfishness, the refinement and unconscious elegance of selfishness.

She’d like to be like the other person, and here she is, failing at her very first, clumsy attempt. Perhaps she should be headed not toward but away from him. She couldn’t find the wetness, either, which she had felt so abundantly in herself only a moment ago.

I’m dry, completely dry.

Gyöngyvér did not have particularly nice hands, which made her attracted to and envious of women who did. Her fingers were quite long, and to increase their effect, she let her fingernails grow perhaps too long. She could do this because they were not brittle but strong, healthily and nicely arched, manicurists loved to work on them. But when an inspector visited the kindergarten and noticed those nails, Gyöngyvér did not get away without loud altercations and vengeful written reports.

She had them filed, polished, and treated carefully so they would not be dangerous weapons. The children liked them a lot, especially the little girls. And not only in the kindergarten did she have to mind her every move, which made her gestures seem slightly affected. With men it was enough for her fingers to slide unguardedly between their thighs and reach under their testicles, or to touch the sphincter muscles of the anus between the spread cheeks in the heat of vehement thrusts, or with the blades of her nails to plow across the blood-filled bulb’s rolled-up collar, to unerringly produce surprised moans, painful shouts, and a spontaneous ejaculation erupting in successive tectonic waves.

But she was as unable to surprise her own body as she failed to surprise Ágost’s. With the tip of two fingernails she reached the anteroom of her clitoris, the first fold of the skin. She was not careless, yet the sensation was more unpleasant than pleasant, even though the sensations penetrated each other.




The Quiet Reasons of the Mind


No, they didn’t just push me, he continued a little more loudly, it was something much rougher, or cruder. They dumped me into a ditch. The way they throw out dead animals.

What the hell are you talking about. Did you ever see a dry well full of carcasses.

I didn’t understand why they were doing it, how could I. Or they would put me in a cloakroom, I don’t know, like checking an umbrella or a coat. I’ll put it that way if you like.

Why would they do anything deliberately against you. She was whispering, with tiny breaths of words, into the man’s speaking lips while watching, cross-eyed, those lips — fleshy, with very taut skin. Why are you talking about them like this, not nice of you, I don’t understand. I don’t believe they wanted to do anything bad to you.

She wanted the man’s lips, she wanted to lap up his words from them; that’s why she was squabbling, acting contrary.

Why do you say they humiliated you. How could they have humiliated you anyway.

She didn’t kiss him, to see more of how the lips spoke.

I didn’t say they humiliated me.

You did.

Why would I have said that, in connection to what. It’s not a word I like to use.

But why do you say you didn’t say it when I heard you say it, with my own ears. Their lips touched, just barely.

She could not resist the touch.

You did say it.

All right, you’re officially protecting the terrible parents, he laughed, les parents terribles. He enjoyed seeing the uneducated woman’s recurring embarrassment. I know what you’re thinking. But I’m talking just about myself. If you’re interested. Not about them. And I’m not going to go into their moral qualifications.

She hasn’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, he thought.

He had managed to revive his hatred and contempt for his parents, but this robbed him of strength, since it divided his attention, yet it made him more attentive and his moves more cautious.

They wanted to give you a good education, whispered the woman, making a final effort to think this through. A good one, she said more loudly, a very, very good one, she said against her will, her voice gibbering, the foolish sounds knocking apart what had been a sensible dialogue. If I had such a sweet little child like you, oh, your mouth, please, please give me your mouth, she said, breathing hard, and had lots of money too, she tried to continue more sensibly, I’d throw my child in an institution too. She was kissing him. And whispering the words: you’re unjust to them, very unfair, believe me. I’m sure they love you more than anything in the world.

The man’s body fell silent again.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense. Something else entirely was going on. Bringing us up well isn’t even close.

He barely returned the kisses, but endured hers.

They wanted to be free of us for a while — it’s as simple as that. Not only because something terrible had happened between them but because something had really ended. Maybe they didn’t believe it themselves, but we felt it. My older sister kept whispering to me that they wanted to get divorced and that I should believe her. She wanted to torture me because she was suffering too. We eavesdropped on them. They were looking for a perfect reason to send us away, and they found the perfect place. Actually I was lucky, because if I hadn’t gone away they would have destroyed me as they destroyed my sister.

That’s not true either. They weren’t the ones who destroyed her, that’s another gross exaggeration. They loved you. They did what they did because they loved you more than anything.

My sister understood a lot of things then, but how could I, a ten-year-old boy, protest. She didn’t want to leave either. Much later, I understood that the poor thing was in love for the first time in her life — how could she leave that boy. And they seemed to guess — no, not guess, they knew what was coming. One day at the table, my father said, well, you bore two Jewish kids for me and now I have to suffer the consequences. Our mother put down her fork and knife and said, what, you can imagine. We just sat there. She got up, smiled as if she had just heard the best joke ever, kicked the chair out from under herself, and before she turned to leave threw a glass of water in our father’s face.

Sober up.

I think they should have gone through with the divorce. My sister idolized our father. Even though she had to accept that he had more than one woman on the side, and that our hapless mother caught him with her own seamstress and had a nervous breakdown. They couldn’t hide this from us. But don’t misunderstand me, I’m not blaming anyone.

But I feel you do, I can feel it in your voice.

Because I’m telling it to you the way I lived through it. This is a wound, a trauma, no doubt about it, a big psychological trauma. My father doesn’t want me. They outlaw something that originated in my mother, which she’d passed on to me and which made Father’s life miserable. This was terrible because it was my fault. Even though he paid no attention to me, did not even notice me, was busy with incomprehensible things. In which I disturbed him. And our mother could not give up this monster. Two days later, they were lovey-dovey again. If you want to know, that’s what you feel in my voice. Every word of theirs made me blush for them. That’s what you’re feeling. And my sister wouldn’t come with me. She stubbornly resisted, fought me as hard as she could. For the first time in my life I was left all alone, and you can probably feel that too. Although I knew French a little bit better than she did, I didn’t get very far with it. It was like being in a strange house. There you are, alone, in the middle of the night, and you don’t know where the light switches are. These are ridiculously small trifles but enormously large at the same time, and you can feel that too.

He stopped, because next he should tell her how they recorded all his mistakes, how they beat him every night.

The trauma remained; it was stronger than anything else.

As he turned away so he would not have to see the face of this strange woman, he saw Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s blindingly white neck through the steam. Standing there with his lackeys under the noisy showers, looking at him provokingly. He knew he was going to be beaten.

For a mistake in pronunciation, he received one slap in the face, for grammatical errors, three slaps. His hand, with the soap in it, slowly stopped moving. He could redeem ten mistakes with some service. He sewed buttons, shined shoes, and scrubbed their backs. Erasing was the most humiliating task. They would whistle for him and he would have to bring his own well-cleaned eraser to erase other boys’ mistakes in their drawing and geometry papers. During the lessons, when they were free to move about in the huge hall on the first floor. Lecluse lent him to others, but erasing required Lecluse’s special permission, and he would watch from a distance. If Ágost smudged a drawing because his eraser wasn’t clean enough or if, in a hurry, he wrinkled the drawing paper or made a hole in it, the punishment was nail pecking: holding their fingertips close together, the boys would batter the top of his head as if they meant to break through his skull with their sharp nails. Or they would decide that the erasing mistake deserved punishment with another kind of erasing. They would drag his own eraser across his bare neck, pulling at the stubbles of hair. Lecluse most enjoyed the game when Ágost winced with pain or begged them to stop. That is when excitement made rosy blotches spread across Lecluse’s milk-white skin. Ágost couldn’t understand why he thought about the rosy blotches, the excitement, and the pain when he didn’t want to think about them, and why now.

He’d never speak of them to anyone.

When we were on vacation in Normandy or Anacapri, he continued, as if interrupting himself, the situation was very different, of course.

Actually, what Gyöngyvér should understand is what he is not saying and never will say.

Word got around that the Hungarian boy had a pecker bigger than anybody else’s.

He said, this wasn’t like a vacation abroad, when, though you jabber all day in a foreign language with other children, you’re still a Hungarian kid because the vacation will have an end, just as it had a beginning. At this place it didn’t matter whether you were Hungarian or not.

I am Hungarian, I would say. They didn’t understand why that should make anyone blush. Politely they nodded, all right, good, or maybe just shrugged their shoulders. It was of no importance. Or rather, the light switches were just in different places. There were all kinds of kids, but they felt at home in those two huge languages. This lends incredible self-confidence to even the stupidest of them. Believe me, we Hungarians don’t understand this, and this is also something you can feel in my voice. If a Congo native can speak a human language even though his nose is as flat as a gorilla’s, then what the hell am I boasting about with my Hungarian. Who cares. And with them, everything was nicer, neater, better groomed, and I liked that. Maybe that was the deepest humiliation. That everything was more beautiful. Most especially those wonderful mountains.

You see, again you use the word humiliation.

Until you notice that by two in the afternoon, the sun is gone in all the valleys. Or the women’s legs, as they make their way up on their strong, stockinged legs. Those fuzzy woolen stockings. If you see only the legs, you can’t tell whether they belong to a man or a woman, both kinds are strong, short, with bulging calves. The bathroom towels were also fluffier there. The doorknobs more beautiful, the locks more considerate of humans, surprisingly quiet and without grating clicks, the streetcars much more beautiful. You have to admit that. Maybe not more beautiful. You can’t even imagine there not being yellow streetcars, but the streetcars weren’t yellow.

What do you mean, not yellow, what isn’t yellow, asked Gyöngyvér, puzzled.

The streetcars are not yellow, the color yellow is reserved for something else, Ágost explained. Yellow is the color of summer, and blindness, and envy, or madness. You found yourself in a place where everything works differently, you understand. That’s a pretty big shock. You must have experienced something similar. If someone says streetcar, for you it means white, brown, or yellow. You can’t imagine any other kind of streetcar. Which means that you should be different from what you are.

That’s impossible, he went on angrily, and in that instant, Gyöngyvér could see the erstwhile little boy in him.

Simply not possible. And as soon as he said, you know, your mouth is not fixed right for this rotten strange world, he saw before him Lecluse’s aggressively red lips, sickly pale face, and cruel blue eyes. He did not know what the boys saw when they looked at him. He had to take it because he was on his own and there were so many of them. He wanted to back away but his feet found no firm support, they were slipping on the wet wooden grating. He didn’t think it mattered who had a bigger one, and all he could think of was that he was in for another beating. There was no other world, no world he could understand better.

After all these years, he understood from the bewildered attentiveness of this strange woman that Lecluse’s countenance had made him accept the impossible. He had to trade in parts of his body. From his fictitious worlds, which he carried along in his native tongue, he had to move over to the only realistic world. Everything depended on size and strength, after all.

And Gyöngyvér began to giggle bashfully that no, no, not so.

And right away entered into the spirit of protest.

You’re kidding. How could I have had similar experiences. Where.

She thrust him away from her.

I’ve never been abroad, not anywhere.

Their torsoes, slippery with perspiration, on which only the purple-brown of their nipples glowed in the dimness, separated. She pounded the man’s chest with her fists, you’re kidding, and her small breasts quivered. How would I know, for god’s sake. I know only what you tell me, and I don’t even understand that completely because I’m silly, a very silly girl. Of course, how could you people here know anything like that, Ágost responded slowly.

He was thinking that one always prepares for something other than what really happens. They had not beaten him. He disdained these Hungarians, especially this woman with her submissive tendencies who was playing up to him; he despised them all, every Hungarian. He looked down at them for their sham naïveté, their insane selfishness that had nothing to do with individuality, and he scorned them for their real gullibility. Still, he was attracted to these traits as to something kinder, more intimate and time-honored. Withdrawing behind a smile of contempt, he tried to relive his former disowned self, the shared Hungarian self turned loose from every form of reality and locked into itself, self-pity within self-hatred. The tense feeling of lacking something, the continued Hungarian longing for something else, which simultaneously produces insatiable voracity, painful envy, haughtiness, incredulousness, and destructive indifference. But this was not what held his attention, because now appeared before him Lecluse’s other face, the attentive, caring one, the face of the great tempter.

And why should anyone here know anything about this, he added, still drawing out his words.

I’ve been to Lake Balaton twice, though, Gyöngyvér whispered back, making a face, and that was really a big thing in my life, don’t forget. Making faces gives the impression of being ashamed of something, but she actually meant to boast a little. She admits, she said, that something is missing from her life, but this lack makes her life unique.

Which they both liked so much they pounced on each other with their laughing lips. Once, twice, their teeth knocked quickly together. This hurt a bit, and they assuaged the pain on each other’s lips with the tips of their tongues.

A foreign tongue, you know, is paralyzing and alluring.

I know, squealed Gyöngyvér.

How would you know, you don’t know. It can swallow you up mercilessly, it can reject you — he would have continued the earlier subject because he wasn’t quite in the present; he was still back there trying to cope with the situation in the old shower room on the wet wooden grating.

Let me, don’t reject me, Gyöngyvér giggled into his hesitant sentence, which he had meant to be somewhat instructive.

Such a pampered little idiot shouldn’t try to teach him lessons.

Come on, let’s have that paralyzing foreign tongue of yours.

As if she were both interested in everything and bored by each new piece of information.

In response, with their tongues they reached into each other’s nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Ágost was merely following her like a good pupil; he was busy trying to break free of Jean-Marie de Lecluse’s presence, his wet body.

And now you must wash everybody’s back.

He thought the woman was common, her idea primitive.

Who was working herself more and more frantically into the situation; your seductive tongue, she moaned, more.

She was demonstrating the reverse side of their pleasures; she was being deliberately rough, but this is what made it interesting.

This means she can also be sarcastic with me, Ágost thought, surprised. She sucked in her lips and thrust them forward; what she wanted to do was conceal her sentimentality. As one making amends with her tongue for what had or could have happened to the man, which she did not see as having been all that bad — behavior radiating such warmth and candor that the man could not ignore it, despite his aversion.

They filled the little room with their continued laughter, and it responded with strong, cold echoes. The apartment houses on Pozsonyi Road had been built at the end of the 1920s in accordance with pre — First World War regulations that called for enclosed courtyards in this district of the capital. The builders used the latest, sometimes most expensive materials, among them bauxite-based concrete. This not only proved to be brittle but also created unpleasant echoes in the apartments.

All right, so you’ve seen the whole wide world, Gyöngyvér cried out, into this echoing laughter, but I don’t think you ever swam in the Tisza.

They had to be careful about shouting in the apartment because of the landlady whose subtenants they were.

Gyöngyvér modulated her cries to harsh whispers, filled with all sorts of seductive force, firmly sliding her voice as if along a sharp spine on which she was pulling herself back and forth.

Her single voice included two or three opposing shades.

Admit it. You have never but never swum in the Tisza.

You’re right, I have never swum in the Tisza.

Then you don’t know anything about water.

You’ll laugh at me, but I have never even seen the Tisza.

How lucky can I get, Gyöngyvér screeched, I can take you to the Tisza. I’ll take you to my foster parents. We’ll go to the farm.

I’ve swum in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, and in the Adriatic too. Abbazia was our home base.

That’s nothing, hardly worth mentioning.

I swam in the Atlantic Ocean, also in the Bay of Tangier.

Come on, come on, bay or ocean.

If I were to take you to a place like that, your jaw would drop. I’d like to inform you, sweet Gyöngyvér, that you were born in a hopelessly bleak country.

Please don’t move, I beg you.

What are you doing, moaned the man.

How come you have so much hatred in you. I don’t understand what we’ve done to deserve it, I really don’t.

What hatred, I don’t have any hatred in me, none. If I can’t move, don’t you move either.

And he said all this aloud so he could openly enjoy his own loud moans.

Tell me, my sweet, tell me what you feel now, of me, of my body, what do you feel so strongly.

I have never talked about things like this in Hungarian, never.

But you’ve whispered in the ears of every French slut what you do to them — now I’m doing this, now I’m doing that — or what you plan to do.

Why wouldn’t I have whispered, chuchoter. Remember this, il me chuchoté à l’oreille. Repeat after me.

Please, knock me out like that too. You know I must learn French.

But you still wouldn’t understand this. This comes long after the tenth lesson.

Two brief, staccato shouts escaped from her.

You’re wrong, that’s the only one I do understand, she moaned when she regained her senses, for her own barbaric shouts were distracting her. She was afraid Ágost would find her repulsive. While digging her nails into the wide muscles of the man’s back, she whispered again. She would have liked to satisfy the man’s every need and therefore she seemed to be singing deliberately either above or below every note, showing herself alternately cruder and more refined than she actually was. But this too came to an end. Deathly silence fell on the echoing little room or maybe on the whole world, and now she had to be all ears to ascertain it.

She had not noticed whether her landlady, Dr. Szemző’s widow, had left or already returned. The mute mass of lost time appeared in this deadly silence, though she had no idea where they were in what they were doing, or whether it was the previous evening or the following afternoon.

You’re wrong, a mistake, she gasped, just a mistake, everything’s a mistake.

Hearing her own gasping, she felt truly liberated in her entire being. Her thin body trembled as if someone were shaking her.

Nothing, don’t say anything. As if each spoken word made her colder. And don’t move either. I made the mistake. Now she was not playacting, she was not out to satisfy anything, please anyone, or seem to be anything she was not. Take me away, please, quickly, pick me up and take me away from here.

What she wanted to say, in fact, was that they should die together.

Hot and slippery with perspiration, locked into the hard scissors of each other’s thighs, melted into each other’s arms, they were lying under a light cover on the narrow creaky sofa in Gyöngyvér’s little sublet room. The woman was trembling. As if he could make her wish come true, at least with his arms the man completely surrounded and enwrapped her; that’s how he took her away. In their happiness, they both shut their eyes tight, for a little while did not even breathe. From under the cover, they could hear the wet contacts of their bellies and groins.

Something of the rubescent, stifling summer twilight was still glimmering in the spacious courtyard enclosed within the building’s unfriendly rear floors and bare firewalls.

Let’s lie like this, whispered Gyöngyvér into the man’s neck, just like this, stay still inside me, and as if it were pouring across the shivering skin, she felt her own hot breath skim across the perspiration’s cooler coating. Her shivering would not subside. If you speak, no, don’t speak, because when you do, I feel your voice entering me. She wanted to add that that was terribly good. She could not imagine how she would get up and go to work. In the depth of my body, in my womb I feel the waves of your silky voice coming into me, coming, and I am continually being gratified. But she kept quiet about this because she was afraid. Like a person hoarding something. Maybe it was dread that made her tremble. She felt the increasing pressure of things she could not, that were impossible to say out loud.

From outside, they heard the sharp squeaks of tricycles, shouts of children, bouncing of balls, and various radio programs from open kitchen windows. Their bodies were tossing on the pulsing, intermittent waves of intermingled music and speaking voices. The window of this maid’s room, placed much higher than was usual in buildings of the Újlipótváros section of the city, was open a crack; they felt the aromas of their soaked bodies in the pervasive, pungent smells of fried onions and peppers and sweet tomatoes. Gyöngyvér’s perfume mingled unhindered with the penetrating odor of sausages slowly seething in stewed onions and tomatoes, which the man found repugnant. While the woman was hoping to become familiar with Ágost’s strange fragrance.

Perhaps his hair, matted on his forehead, was the source of this fragrance. Perhaps every pore of his body.

For long minutes Gyöngyvér wormed her way into his armpits, licking the sopping sweat, eating the aroma off the long, dark, sticky hairs. And the man shuddered at every little contact of her tongue and begged her quietly, no, no, don’t do that, which did not necessarily mean that they had entered some forbidden zone and did not mean its opposite either.

They had been keeping each other captive like this for four days; they barely slept, hardly ate or drank anything; parted only for hours, and then continued as if in the next moment, against their will, they’d have to leave each other forever.

They left not a single moment unfulfilled.

Still, Gyöngyvér had not had time to go on a journey of exploration across the man’s body. For that she’d have had to let go of him, if only for a little while, and be at some distance from him. She could not afford to — on the contrary. The man, however, wanted to do a number of things simultaneously with her but had to be content with only one, which he found not enough. They could not tear themselves away from each other’s proximity. With their kisses they kept wrestling each other down, falling or dropping somewhere on the table or bed if they couldn’t stay on their feet; they would plop into a chair or onto the floor, even in the kitchen, and regain their full bodily security only when the man entered her again.

They barely glanced at each other before they were at it again, which made their closeness permanent, yet each time it seemed to them as if it were happening for the first time.

Silence reigned. They held their breath. At most, their blood was circulating.

They had no previous practice or experience with each other and oddly they did not gain anything like it now. Which made them lose not only their sense of time but also any interest in relating to the outside world. They became the only possible external world for each other and thus could not be, in and of themselves, so important to each other that they might, for some trivial reason, interfere with the time of the total occurrence. In fact, neither of them had a precise image of where or of what quality the other one was, because their awareness was in their hands or their lips and tongues or the fine hairs of the nostrils; they only intuited where one of them ended and the other began.

Come on, you could still talk to me about it. And that would divert me, said Gyöngyvér a little later, her voice sounding much deeper.

This was her natural register when singing.

Divert you from what, asked the man, surprised, as if awakened from a vanishing dream.

Oh, from nothing, I don’t know, actually I don’t know, replied Gyöngyvér, though she knew.

She was afraid.

She could not say it out loud because she was afraid there were words with which she might instantly spoil everything. True, she was the one who forbade the man to move, but what she really wanted to say was please for once fuck me properly. Which, according to some higher judgment, might have seemed as if she meant that what they were doing was not the proper thing. If they keep stopping. If they keep talking. And she had no words at all for a whole lot of other things. For example, to explain why she wanted to say this out loud so much. Or, if they were talking already, to ask who had the right to forbid them from saying something.

The worn bedsprings creaked under them. With a single brief twist of his hips, the man thrust farther inside her, as though he understood her mute wish, producing a muffled, soft, rich squelching sound from under the cover; it hurt her; the move was rough. It wasn’t pleasant for him either, because his cock had become too erect during the protracted delay. The ribbed wall of the tight vagina crammed the unusually ample foreskin under the crown of his bulb, pulling harder than the small sensitive frenum could manage. Slowly, hissing a little, he withdrew a bit, backing away with his buttocks, whose taut cheeks were in the woman’s grip, barely letting them budge, he could feel her fingernails, until finally he sensed, on the collar of his bulb, swollen to the limit, the keen, cooler entrance of the vulva.

They could not have known what they wanted.

He remained like that, still inside, on the border of outside. As if somehow he’d gotten caught in her. One little move and he’d either slip out or back in. The frenum was burning under the crown; it might even have ripped a little.

I wanted to tell you something entirely different, said the man in a surprisingly even tone, half aloud and while breathing brief, hasty kisses into the woman’s open lips.

And while he was breathing these tiny kisses, Gyöngyvér’s swollen and protruding clitoris was banging rhythmically against the hard crown of his penis’s bulb. Because of which they had to end the exchange of tiny kisses.

Neither of them knew what to do with these little exaggerations of pain.

But the extraordinary, incredible, and sharp sensation that could extinguish all other sensations was forever seared into both their minds.

And neither was it possible to determine what the man would reveal or conceal, and by what means. Was it because he wanted to get past the little kisses as quickly as he could that he moved so hastily, almost inattentively, or was he hoping to forsake the sobriety of live speech as soon as he could, to evade the quiet reasons of the mind and perhaps find a balance between ecstasy and sanity. A sane mind is praiseworthy, and good for nothing.

This is how it must feel when physical bodies melt into one another.

Their common pain is wrapped in tenderness, but it soothes nothing. He was convinced he found the woman with whom he should live his life. Their parched lips, at any rate, stuck together longer, and parted with short little pops.

Which made them laugh again.

As a matter of fact, this is not what I wanted, he continued, articulating each syllable clearly so as to overcome their giggles. What I wanted to tell you was that I did see everything in advance when I was in the Zurich train station. With words, he wanted to raise himself above their physical madness. That friend of my father, you know, the one I told you about, was waiting for us. But again, try as he might to resist, the face he remembered was not Gustav Grassère’s but that of Lecluse.

He understood himself, and knew why he couldn’t get free of it.

And the silver-gray Delahaye with its black fenders, he said aloud, feeling how dangerously close the two names approached each other. In those days, a car like that cost forty thousand Swiss francs. But you wouldn’t understand what that means. Well, back then that was the price of a large country house.

Why wouldn’t I understand, said the woman very calmly, though she was still trembling a little. Some automobile that immediately made you fall head over heels in love with that wonderful man. The man lay before her like a landscape of the Great Hungarian Plain without a single hidden corner. And that’s how much it cost, she said, her teeth lightly clinking. No big deal, why wouldn’t I understand.

From the surface of her skin, the trembling was sinking into ever-deeper regions.

No, no, protested Ágost instinctively, but, surprised, he fell silent, surprised that the woman had so easily made the connection between objects so far apart and not easily imagined. He perceived this as an ominous, treacherous danger. In fact, he thought it coarse, even blunt; his taste rebelled against this sort of directness. She understands things he doesn’t talk about, in which case where is the border between them.

Their faces lay close together, sunk between the upturned peaks of the pillows, they barely saw each other’s eyes; they each looked from below into the other’s pupils.

He really became more important to me than my own father, that’s true. Some light fell on them from above, as much as the ceiling could reflect of the waning twilight. But what I really wanted to tell you was that not me and him, but the two of them were head over heels in love with each other, he said quickly, as though chastely excusing her.

I’ve seen plenty in my life, Ágost, you can’t surprise me with anything, said the woman, laughing, and this slightly theatrical omniscience caused Ágost’s voice to allow a more indulgent smile to accompany his next sentence.

Still, an unpleasant feeling remained. The woman must have seen through something, must have interfered with something.

The moment they saw each other, they began to talk, quickly, feverishly, quietly, always in German. And they would leave me alone. They put me in the backseat and then forgot about me. Picture for yourself a very tall, very massive, very blond man. How old could he have been then, maybe thirty-eight. He had so much thick curly hair that his daughters could hold on to it and he’d lift them off the ground like that. They’d just hang off him as if he were a tree — isn’t there a Hungarian poem about something like that — I imagine it wasn’t painful for him.

Like fruit on a tree.

Everything about him was strong, and that can impress a boy. Massive. It was good to touch him, to wrestle with him because he was like steel, like stone. His neck, his arms, his thighs, you couldn’t budge his legs. And while he talked he felt he wouldn’t be telling Gyöngyvér all this if she hadn’t already known it. She knew it. Of course you’re right, I really liked his car. It was at least as impressive as he was.

With other people on other occasions, he refrained from speaking much because when speaking one unavoidably conforms to the situation.

Sometimes, all four of us would fall on him, that was the game, but we couldn’t wrestle him down unless he let us, to make his daughters happy. On the whole, a quite attentive, patient man, but sometimes rather hysterical. When he got mad, he wouldn’t scream or roar but screech like a shrew. This trait made him rather amusing. Imagine living with five women. When he screeched, the women simply laughed at him. I saw right away, it was obvious, that this was a good man, what should I say, a reliable man, and really wonderful, and then how would I tell them that I didn’t want to stay there with a stranger.

When I was little, for a long time I couldn’t speak either. Nobody could make me, whispered Gyöngyvér, overcome by her own words, even though girls, as you know, learn to speak much earlier and much more simply than boys. I don’t know, she added, you probably liked your father’s wickedness. Then she quickly stopped, and Ágost felt he might lose her in a moment.

And he did.

She stopped not only because the other one was still talking but because she felt hurt. Still. The pain would not pass. Since they had been regaling each other with stories, day after day, speaking right into each other’s face, many things had occurred to her that she had had no idea were still in her memory. Recollection itself caught her unprepared, all the things the mind keeps in reserve as surprises for just such an occasion.

It still hurt her terribly that she knew what adults were expecting of her, although she understands that she still cannot bring herself to talk. And this hasn’t changed, perhaps because a person doesn’t change. The other person is open, she’s seen that, or at least he willingly opens himself up to her, but she remains closed, which torments her. She’s afraid of punishment, of having to see the vengeful little girl in herself, the one who does not speak.

They were constantly giving, only giving, everybody was giving, and still I felt these strangers were taking away everything I had. To this day, I can’t say that Gustav is my foster father or Clara my foster mother. Even though it is registered in a notarized document that I am their adopted son, and believe me, he pleaded in the voice of the unfamiliar little boy, they are much more familiar to me than my own people.

And now he managed to compose himself.

I was left with nothing, that’s what I sensed in advance. Nobody, I had nobody. That big cold body of water and that big cool house of theirs, the nearby mountains and the brisk air were all stronger than I was. The sun shone right into their dining room, the silverware made gentler noises, maybe that was more impressive.

At home, sun didn’t shine into the house, I know that, but I no longer know what my home was like.

They completely appropriated me.

On the very first afternoon Clara took me along with the girls to ballet school. Upstairs they gave me a room that would be mine during vacations. But where was our dining room at home. Imagine, a few days went by and they still didn’t take me to the school, which they kept promising to me like a big reward because there you will learn everything but absolutely everything, and forget the face of your mother. Which is nothing but revenge, of course. Let her drop dead, be no more. You can’t ask your father to give you her picture from his wallet. How would you know he has such a picture in his wallet in the first place, and you’d have to confess to him that you need the picture because out of revenge you can’t remember your mother, out of sheer revenge.

And me, you know, through all my years as a little girl I couldn’t get free of that thought. Sometimes I thought I’d go out of my mind, like you, Ágost, with that ballet school where they took you. This was an obsession, because I was thinking about it all the time — after all, my mother did see me.

As if to say he should see how lonely I still am. But she did not say this out loud. Gyöngyvér wanted to talk but couldn’t. As though asking herself, where is the knife to cut my breast open with. She was paralyzed by the other person’s life being replete with details she couldn’t even imagine properly. How could she have hated her mother, or what sort of picture could she have asked for, and from what father. Her voice kept stumbling, sliding between different registers. Since she had not had similar experiences of her own, she could not penetrate other people’s thoughts, and that is why she had to keep returning to her obsession.

She is somewhere, she exists, she should remember me, she said, as if suddenly she’d run out of breath. She had seen me, you understand, and I also saw her.

You’re wrong, Gyöngyvér, one can’t remember even the person one loves. So why would they expect one to be faithful. To whom, I ask you, to whom, if one forgets everybody and everything. Tomorrow you won’t remember me. There is no faithfulness. It’s only a word.

I don’t know if you can understand, I have never seen my mother. At least I can’t remember her. I don’t have any kind of picture, and that’s a pretty big difference between you and me. I can’t expect pictures like that from anyone. I should have seen all along that this was very simple. Everyone has a mother. There is no animal in the world that doesn’t have one. Piglets have mothers, calves, colts, she said, our cats licked their kittens to pieces, she said, and licked the man’s attentive eye.

Gyöngyvér.

Yes.

Hush for a while.

Go on.

There is no mother. That is a pitiful illusion. I understand you, but you are longing for something that does not exist. God does not exist either. Sooner or later, one has to come to terms with these illusions. There is neither protection nor authority, autoritás, or however you say it in Hungarian.

I don’t miss God, or my mother, she was an unfortunate woman, my mother. An ingrown toenail torments me more than her fate. I mean it. But I didn’t express myself well. What torments me is that others have something I don’t even miss. That they have somebody I don’t have. Even though my mother is alive, or most likely she is, I can’t be absolutely sure. When she dies, I won’t know about it, I won’t know anything about anything. But then what do I know. Not that it would hurt — how can something you’ve never experienced hurt you. It doesn’t hurt. But I don’t know whom I might be hating because of her. You hate yours and at least you know exactly whom you hate, and that hurts. I’ve got a life, but the whole thing has no shape. I can look at myself in the mirror, yes, she’s probably like this, maybe exactly like this, the way I am, but it’s possible she’s very different. That’s why I need the children so much. I wouldn’t dare think of having one of my own. If I could not see them every day, I’d smash my face in the first mirror.

You’re a very smart girl, Gyöngyvér.

Say that again.

Wanting to hear it twice is a sign not of being smart but of being stupid.

Who’s interested in being smart. I want my name to roll off your lips.

Maybe you still don’t understand, but with my accent I can’t find my way back. It may be something like your mother. She no longer exists even if she still does. The Hungarian intonation got lost somewhere, disappeared, and we no longer know where it is. And it makes no difference that I live here in Budapest again or that you can make fun of me. And I’m not worried about how once, a long time ago, they pushed me out from among them. You’re right, who’d be interested in that. My concern was somehow to find my way to the first place in my life, and in this lies something impermissibly accidental. This is ridiculous, irretrievable. If they’d taken me to China, I would have had to find the Chinese in me there.

But why wouldn’t I understand it. These are the things other people call homeland or homesickness. Far, far away is my homeland, she sang into the man’s face — a song that had once been forbidden. But for some reason you are ashamed of it. And so you rather overdo this too.

I don’t know which of us is more prone to overdoing things. I think it’s you.

Shall I sing it to you?

No, don’t, said the man quickly, I don’t think it has anything to do with homeland, it’s more like the rhythm of life. At least I’m not deaf to it. This is part of every language, has a special place in every one of them. You pick it up in childhood, along with the rhythm of life, and never forget it. At most, you can transfer it once, but then there’s no way back. It can’t be done twice. The needle will get stuck, keep jumping back, play back a different melody, always, which makes everything sound off-key. What always remains are the new overtones, and I’ve chosen those. Anyway, I don’t want to be at home here, I can’t be.

I noticed you can’t remember the names of streets.

Maybe I don’t want to because I’m not interested.

But why take it so much to heart. I think it’s very sweet the way you can’t get your tongue around my name. It disgusts me anyway. Vér. Blood. Blood on the streets of Budapest, in your panties when you menstruate, wherever, I don’t care, but not in one’s name.

You’re saying rather strange things, I don’t understand them, said Ágost patiently, though hearing these phrases brought him to the verge of retching.

And that first part, gyöngy, too, I think gyöngy is disgusting.

And I think you chatter too much. Maybe you should look up the history of the name, stop wriggling.

At least on your tongue you make my ugly name prettier. Especially if I’m not wriggling.

And down there you open up, grow treacherously wide, and properly enfold me inside you, lock me up within you. Maybe that’s how one could say it in Hungarian.

More, yes, go on, please, I beg you. I’m not interested in the history of anything.

The way they do it to birds, to their legs. You put a ring around my cock, the poet would say.

Oh my, how you talk, said Gyöngyvér, and her voice dropped from the top of pleasure’s register to the bottom. Breaking into laughter, they both sneezed and laughed at the same time, showering each other with spittle, which made them laugh more. Don’t you dare fly away, Gyöngyvér squealed. I’ll put my ring around you and catch you.

I won’t give up my independence, don’t raise your hopes.

More, please.

You won’t catch me with anything.

Please say cock one more time, please.

But the man fell silent, and from then on he would have preferred not to say anything. He enjoyed the words around them; it was as if they helped him evoke the atoms of darkness; he felt a strong urge to speak, yet he thought the storyteller in him was strange and naïve. Who wanted to tell everything, absolutely everything. He would have been hard put to find a nondangerous subject in his life, and this may have irritated him. Something unusually childish also appeared in his narration, hovering over every sentence, and it might have been pleasurable to savor it, though until now he hadn’t noticed much of a distance between childhood and adulthood. It was good to tell everything, it would be better to tell even more, even though it was unpleasant to hear what he was saying; his words made him recognize the distance between the events being related and their present recounting.

They were telling their tales directly into each other’s mouth with their eyes wide open, yet their bodies’ center of gravity shifted. They could not hold one position for long, because now an arm, now a leg would go numb from the weight of the other’s body and would have to be liberated. Slowly they’d roll about a bit. This made Gyöngyvér open up more; with her thighs she involuntarily slid up on his thighs and with her strong lower legs embraced his waist, her hands reluctantly let go of the cheeks of his buttocks, taut and dented with the effort, and pressed his wide, relaxed back to cover her. At least her arms felt better. The man’s benumbed arm hesitated as if unsure what to do next. If he wanted to keep something of their symmetry, he could wander downward to grasp the woman’s small ass in both hands, to feed her into himself with his palms, to guide her by her ass.

His hands would have wanted her ass, his loins wanted to be more inside, his cock and testicles wanted him to lift her even more irretrievably into himself, though there was nowhere further to go. At this moment, the issue was indeed his independence. That he shouldn’t have to surrender to the woman’s rhythm, that what they were doing should not become destructively monotonous and should not end with an ordinary unguarded ejaculation, as the woman would like, that it should have no end.

Stupid. How infinitely stupid can this woman be. In the meantime her opened-up lap carried him along, smooth and unhindered, so that he had nothing to do; he had no way to resist. It is probably not by chance that little boys want to marry their mothers. She cheated on me with my father. Monotony, the winding spiral of uniformly increasing speed, was stronger than he. What convinced him was the lightness, smoothness, suppleness of the woman’s body.

A little common, he thought to himself, a bit conventional for my taste, but this disturbed him for only a few moments.

She’s too fast, doesn’t understand her own physical interests, but he enjoyed her greedy impatience.

And now I will take my leave, he thought to himself, and he meant taking leave of the woman’s demanding rhythm.

Yet he did not take his leave.

No doubt Gyöngyvér wanted to get to the end of something they had not even begun. He was not certain there was anything that might restrain this woman in her urgent excitement. She’s on fire, though she is full of inhibitions and being so passionate doesn’t become her. It’s no accident that she’s a contralto, not a soprano. Alto is rarer but she’d like to be like everybody else. She is working on it. This is what they expect of her, and these same conventions hold sway in the theater too; they can’t wait for anything to ripen by itself. And that means she’s completely hopeless with him as well. These sorts of things crossed his mind, but he had little interest in his mind’s activity. And his hands were longing for her weight probably because the woman felt weightless to him, he was making love to a feather. Boorish, has no upbringing, yet she’s not, since boorishness would make her heavy. Dans la grosse paysanne la petite bourgeoise. And she is weightless. With the rhythms of his thrusts, he could not shake the thought that this was a peasant woman, this is a peasant. There were no barriers between them. And that is what tipped the scale.

They were the secret semblances of each other.

If he did not want to slip out of her, he had to get on his knees between her spread thighs.

And if they hit gracefully on this exceedingly advantageous position, then finding it must have been the more important task.

Now he could not slip out of her.

No reason to worry about that: he was deep inside her.

The senses still need some kind of preparedness. And taking into account loose sofa springs, grating squeaks, their delicate and predictable moves when arms would cross and maybe bump into each other, he decided to prop up his arms on the pillows. Even though what he wanted was the woman’s little ass.

He would have preferred to lick everything on it, or out of it.

To enjoy the humiliating service. To mix the saliva accumulated in his mouth with the mucous strong-smelling urine-spiced excretion that overflowed her cunt and in which he was now splashing about with his overhardened, aching cock as in a bottomless swamp full of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom. To reach inside it with his pointed tongue, to slide upward between the strong fleshy labia into her elongated vulva.

He scared himself with the image. He never dared do it for more than brief moments, dip into it quickly, as with a spoon. To make discoveries about a woman via the quality of her cavities.

He had done it with Gyöngyvér once before, for a very short time, and now his mouth longed to repeat it. Meanwhile he was happy that he was finally forgetting she was just a country girl, a peasant. Which of course brought the thought back to mind.

As though with his tongue he could truly understand her fleshy labia. To stumble into the strong pointed arch of the pudendal cleft and then return to her deep vagina, to lick the dense bud of her clitoris all around, everything that is in such contrast to the airy lightness of her limbs and their movements, and where it is so hard to penetrate. To melt it all with his mouth, to dissolve the primal aroma in his mouth. And then to do the most meaningful thing: with a single unexpected movement to turn her around and knock her on her stomach — so that his nose could hang into her arching, sweet little ass. To pry open the cheeks of her ass, lick again her cunt spread open on the sheet, suck in and keep licking the brownish, wrinkled, tightly closed, and mildly shit-tasting asshole, sin itself, to commit the greatest sin, until it would blossom in the warmth of the sticky saliva dragged over from her cunt, so that with his cock he could enter there too. To do violence to the instinct of reproduction and to hand it over to finality, to beautiful death. But he didn’t risk it. Wanting to enter everywhere. To discourage her from even dreaming of this, he brutally pinned her shoulders under him with his sharp elbows. An agitated face with bulging eyes lay on the pillow in the vise of his arms, and in the waning twilight it seemed that her lips were turning blue.

Beautiful she was not.

There was no trace of trembling anymore, but the light body shook and quaked gently to its depths. Her small, domed forehead, with its little-girlish hairs at the edges.

The man was thinking that perhaps his entire life, anybody’s life, was nothing but a constant search for advantageous and ever more advantageous situations. For a situation worth getting into.

This is ridiculous.

Why does one search, at whose command. And how can one compare one situation to another if one doesn’t know what new situation the next step will bring, and if tomorrow one has anyway forgotten the old one. But now he has found it: there’s probably no more advantageous situation than this. Simple physics, this is simple biology, he thought dispassionately and wryly, as if thinking that although this was lovemaking there was nothing personal about it. He heard his own panting. Had nothing to do with his personhood or that of his lovemaking partner, even if she makes me pant or I make her pant. Everything is only physics or mere convention.

For the sake of perfection, he had to cool himself down a little.

Even if he was in the middle of fucking.

It doesn’t happen so often, though by necessity it could happen to anyone.

It rarely becomes perfect, perhaps that much is personal. Nothing more. One aspect of the eternal imperfections. Nothing more. But before the woman could make a fatal or irresistible movement with her head, loins, fingernails, vagina, or any other part, he spoke in a loud voice.

We’ve found the most advantageous position.

Which of course sounded ridiculous. What the hell had they found. And it echoed for a while between the cold walls. A little helplessly, a little threateningly, because his voice was as dispassionate as the way he thought about himself, or at least he believed it was dispassionate. They hadn’t found anything, but they might lose something, and perhaps with his talking too loudly he might have already gambled it away, though all he wanted to do was keep what they had and share his joy with this strange woman, to make at least this moment last.

Yes, came the response from the agitated face, from the depths, from gaping, parched lips, hoarsely, perturbed, yes, what could be better.

But she could not laugh at herself or at the man.

Like a seriously ill person, she signaled — but only with her mouth, her strong eyebrows, the deepening, vertical little furrows of her smooth and domed little-girlish forehead — that she preferred to laugh at such silliness. But Ágost’s declaration troubled her, profoundly shocked her. It opened up an unknown perspective. For the first time in her life, she had to take a deep, hard look at her own bodily phenomena. Not before or after, but right now in the middle of it. No man had ever done this to her.

Maybe with Irénke, when they made their nipples touch and could see what they were feeling; they talked about it, how their nipples grew hard at the same time, look, yours too.

Her breathing became so strong because of this uncalled-for thought, the smell of her breath so pervasive, not unpleasant but hinting of skin, saliva, teeth, and stomach, that for a second the man was shaken by a cold nausea of revulsion and disgust.

I could even make a child for you now.

Indeed, her vagina was ringed around his cock, which, with its swollen head, filled her beyond the brim.

Her hips rose and sank, her vagina convulsed in contrary directions, she wanted to give some rhythm to the spasms but the man kept her down with his arms and elbows, pressing her with his hips, not letting her move, wrestling her down to where he wanted her; she could only thrash about with her head, tossing it from left to right. On her neck a vein bulged and twitched, the vena jugularis externa, running in the muscles under the skin. As though her fears gripped her again precisely when she had managed to get close to the other person. That’s why she was doing it. She wanted to show the man what indignities she had been subjected to, how they had crippled her pleasure, and how unjust it was, as was her entire miserable life.

Which, no matter how hypocritical or self-disciplined she was, she could not endure.

I can’t bear it, I can’t bear this either.

Because she couldn’t tell whether this was happiness or pain.

Can’t get any closer, the man heard too, inside him, in his own voice. It sounded like an interdiction. Don’t try, you’re not supposed to. As if forbidding himself something, and the cosmos would crumble if he did not obey. He eased his hold on her a little so he could withdraw himself a bit, his cock. He felt as if he had fatally miscalculated something at that moment and could not see the situation clearly. Gone was the cool self-assurance, because not only did he not withdraw, but for a withdrawal he’d have to penetrate her even further, and he felt the length of the way he was to make inside the woman’s vagina.

Which his mind conjured up as a cave the color of congealed blood, where he had once before found refuge.

He could not resist forcing his way back to a place from which he should have been withdrawing. He reached a space that was in the time neither of memory nor of imagination. The light summer blanket must have slipped off some time ago.

If that’s the case, then everything happens uncontrollably, unguardedly.

Finally he found it.

Finally he left something in himself uncontrolled.

He saw an unguarded gate in the night.

It could be fatal. I am complaining like a child. Certain segments of time are falling away.

Though the possibility of something fatal made him happy. He had found it, at last.

You might even be able to make a child, yes, now, that’s right, whispered the woman; she seemed to be trembling and struggling for air.

Please, I beg you, she would have wanted to say this clearly.

Finally found it.

He should have taken her whispering, full, flesh-smelling lips into his lips to suppress in himself his idiotic exultation, the uncontrolled times, the open gate, his aversion and his nausea. Moreover, why shouldn’t he be able to complain; after all, he was complaining to a kindergarten teacher. He was ashamed of himself for thinking of such an idiotic thing. And carefully he took into his mouth the woman’s lips, which were still slightly blue, and began cautiously and slowly to withdraw himself. He was still trying to protect, still feared for, his independence. He could not adopt, could not conform to her rhythm, though for a long time he could not avoid it either. He wanted to keep a little reminder of his own.

At least not to let his own pulse dissolve in her throbbing.

But Gyöngyvér denied entry to the fleeing man’s tongue; with her strong tongue, trained in her voice lessons, she shoved it away.

She wanted to talk.

The man tried again. He sank his teeth into her lips, bit her, but the woman shoved out his tongue and pushed him off her so she could talk at last.

The taste of the strong tongue was salty, very salty.

Driven by anger at being rejected, he arched his torso upward, the woman’s arms willingly let him, so with his lips he could leisurely inch across her neck and take a bite of the rearing tip of her breast; he barely reached it and was ready to suck it into himself — softly, not rudely. But the woman hardly felt his thick, parched lips and sharp teeth, she gave her body a yank.

Yanked it out.

Didn’t want to.

Didn’t want anything.

Vainly the man’s tongue snapped after her.

But now it was as if she had to puke out her every stifled word.

I’m flowing away, flowing in every direction. I feel it. For sure, now. Help me, I can’t hold on, I can’t.

Ágost caught sight of the precipice’s edge where the woman could not hold on.

She was wailing.

But he saw it clearly, this was his own precipice, he watched the waves of falling rocks, and somehow he had to back out of this whole thing without letting the enormous weight of the crumbling ground hurl him along with it. This was the sound of cracking bone heard during a tooth extraction. The depth of the precipice rumbled up, the water churned, the hurtling rocks boomed and rattled against the sides of the precipice. And then, slowly, he returned after all. He stopped for a moment. He knew he would be unable to return. Because of the resistance of the vagina’s muscles shuddering, no matter how slippery the vagina was he needed more force.

This was not without danger.

Before he reached the deepest reachable point, he stopped again, couldn’t tell where he was, grew rigid, immobile, and several times against his will lowered himself into her; and to put an end to the struggle and not to ejaculate into the woman’s open womb, he squeezed the cheeks of his buttocks together with a single powerful jerk. The move threw his rectum into a spasm, the spasm applied pressure on his prostate, and with the stimulus of this pressure he disrupted the arc of his pleasure. For this to happen, it’s enough briefly to shut off the sperm duct, ductus ejaculatorius, located just above the prostate gland. The upward arc of pleasure plunges drastically, but the stimulus remains, and everything can start all over again. He broke the rhythms for both of them, which were becoming united in an even acceleration.

Gyöngyvér, however, experienced this as mounting tension while feeling there was no room to increase it further. As if she had been jolted to a higher region from which she saw a landscape she had never seen before. Luckily for her, she had not said what she wanted. And she realized she shouldn’t dare say she’d like to have a child. That would mean she loves him. And she cannot reveal that. She has come to love him. Simply because this is a handsome man. Such a handsome man is not right for her. I shall fall in love with you. But not yet, no. Were she to say this aloud, she’d reach her climax, not because of him but because of herself. Because of that image of desire for a man she always carried with her, but then she would have to say good-bye to this man, to his handsomeness. Like a superstitious person who knows what to avoid, she said nothing, remained cautious. Just this once, not to ruin everything.

She appeared to be protesting vehemently, hysterically, which Ágost immediately misunderstood.

You don’t have to be afraid of me, he whispered not without a hint of pride, I’m telling you I can be careful.

But the woman wanted to feel impersonality in his words, wanted to hear words from someone who wasn’t careful.

His voice reached her from afar.

She grasped the words but not their meaning.

Still, doubt seeped into her regarding the man’s sanity. As though everything was taking place on different levels and it was impossible to reach the summit of pleasure. But amid her moaning and wailing, for four days she had been waiting for the end of the man’s death rattle, wishing for her own death, and for his. She could not understand how one could make sane sounds. Even though she herself was making them.

To convince the woman physically too, of what perhaps she could no longer comprehend or could not hear because of the whistling of their ever-faster, crisscrossing breaths, he returned from the rough bumpy road, faster and forcefully, all the way to the exit, as if to signal his intention to break away, as if flooding his path with spotlights.

And as if seeing something he had never seen before, though the image had always accompanied him, stayed close to him, familiar. He did not feel his cock anymore, or what he might have felt with his cock. Self-sensation and indirect sensation had become a single image, which held his attention and kept him occupied at least as much as his cock had before. He knew from experience that he had to be very reserved about images. It would be hard to acknowledge that the fantasized images caused greater pleasure than live people did.

But this was not the work of imagination, which was stronger and could have extinguished the sensation.

To observe everything, to touch nothing. His caution was at work. Not to get into her. Only from a distance, more on the outside.

Which that instant the woman felt as if it were keeping her from approaching her own imminent death.

For some reason the man is asking for some kind of delay, which she cannot possibly grant him.

And the man, who thought he still had some self-control and saw the situation clearly, kept reassuring himself in his great excitement that after all he didn’t want to leave her, no, not at all, he was coming right back. But on this uneven terrain he already saw the floodlit pulsating wall of the abandoned cave, and he must not take a single false step. By then he had no idea just how long his eyes had been closed, but it had been quite a while. But because he was still keeping his distance, still reserving for himself the need to keep his distance, which others deliberately and much sooner long to lose, the obstinate pain of physical exertion did not contort his face.

Other people always hasten toward some destination.

He saw a fence, again the open gate, and strong headlights of a car speeding into the night. He was seeing the headlights of his own car.

And it flashed through his mind that in live deployments, when suddenly everything turns very risky, he followed the same pattern of behavior he did in lovemaking. Before his death, he’d like to gain one more moment for his consciousness. Maybe two, some amount of time, a whole day, because he hadn’t put things in order.

The little room was now wrapped in dimness, though the ceiling retained some of the waning twilight; their bodies kept their darkness enclosed and at the same time they were illuminated, now faintly, now more strongly but continuously, by their inner vision.

In the dazzling summer light, the river’s waves, murky with mud and sand, were crashing over Gyöngyvér’s head.

She was being dragged into the depths as if by her feet and ankles, and could not resist. Whirlpool. She would have shouted with her last breath, as if finally realizing what had happened to her in the past, but she could not shout because her mouth was stopped up with water, heavy water that smelled of mud, fish, and shells. So that’s why I have to take him to the Tisza, she thought suddenly, to kill him.

Then I shall die, she said to herself contentedly and a bit surprised.

Long pieces of silk caressed her body. But she did not die.

At the bottom of the sandy, silkily ruffled riverbed, another, more slippery, cooler dry land awaited her. She was free to set her feet firmly on it or to drift away, as she liked. The depths glittered as though the sun breaking through the water were afloat and aflame. And as dazzling as the world she had left behind for the sake of being mute. When in the dead center of the dazzle they put her down in the middle of the courtyard covered with chicken shit. The chicken stretches its tail feathers and the hole can be seen only in the instant when the chicken squirts its load. They were pecking all around her and she stopped crying. They did not come close.

Crying didn’t get her anywhere, anyway.

Instead she began cautiously to crawl away; no matter how many times they put her back, she would start again, to reach the brimming trough in which the water sparkled enchantingly.

Before she had a chance to grab the old cracked wood of the trough warmed by the sun, to pull herself up and to hide her face in the sparkling water — she didn’t know it was not for drinking and she wanted to make her face disappear in the water — two hands dripping with soft soap and water picked her up. All she could do was kick and bite.

Don’t be scared, yuh ugly worm, I said don’t be flustered, she hissed, beside herself, swearing in foul language, cursing mother and god, as she hauled her back to the middle of the courtyard, where under the merciless sun both soap and sand burned on her face.

Plague eat yer guts, yuh worm.

She protested, kicked.

Y’think, yuh little worm, y’really think what yuh want is what’s gonna happen.

And again she was carried in the air and slammed into the dust, the air knocked out of her; not only could she not speak for long seconds but she could not even breathe; she lost the guiding rhythm of life.

Yuh’ll drop dead right here unless yuh open yer trap. Hey, y’hear me, I’ll lock yuh up again with the chickens, or where in holy hell should I lock yuh in, yuh stubborn mule, yuh. Yuh’ll choke to death when I stuff soap in yuh.

Gyöngyvér still would not speak. She heard herself whimpering or, more precisely, along with her whimpering returned the quondam crying and, with the crying, the courtyard, its dazzling light, the glimmering gray shades of the acacias reaching to infinity, the unquenchable thirst, the taste of the soft soap, and the choking. From this she understood that the moment had come. When she would finally take her revenge.

All she had to do now, to keep the man from making even the slightest move inside her, was to raise one hip. She fastened herself to the root of his cock. Me, me. Don’t. And no longer heard her own hateful whimpering. At last. She’d have to choke, after all.

But at least not for lack of air, but because of the water, that would do it, she’d choke on the water; she’d been thirsty for so long.

In the water I’ll get lost, finally. And when she thought about this and really wished it, she saw how sane and cold the outside world was.

The familiar ceiling of her room.

They were scratching and stroking the pig, kept slapping and patting the horse’s neck, she really remembered this. The young bride pressed the goose under her enormous thighs and hacked away at the bird’s windpipe, everything crunching under the knife, and then tore, ripped, and scraped at the gristle. She closed her eyes while the blood poured into the bowl and the bird was kicking and convulsing under her with its slippery large white feathers. And then she pushed it off the stool. Spoke to it gently, calm down now, stop kicking your mistress so much, cooed to it more emphatically, it’ll be all right, little goosey, you’ll see, you’ll be all right, while the headless bird thrashed about until it bled to death.

The young woman was silent for a good long while. Feathers were flying.

In the meantime it probably turned evening.

And this is not something she imagines but is a memory she doesn’t really remember. How interesting. The hog they killed at dawn, the small livestock at sundown. She didn’t know when it might have been morning, if now it was evening. Until she grew up, she would have preferred to be an animal like a hog or any other beast.

Not this kind.

The children must have already been sent indoors, for they were no longer making noise in the courtyard. From somewhere a radio could be heard, and the sound of someone tenderizing meat or of some other muffled pounding.

Luckily, she wasn’t the one being beaten. Smack, thundered the raw meat.

That is how loud the pounding of her heart seemed to her, and on the ceiling she saw the mute, reflected lights of the warm summer evening. But in that instant it also became clear that somebody else was in the room. A sudden current of air and a strange smell could be felt.

A slight clink on the window. Her heart skipped a beat. Quickly she raised her head — oh my god — to look out over the man’s tensed-up shoulder.

The maid’s room was barely longer than the bed. Only now did she come to her senses enough to see where she was. This was not a trick played on her senses.

Mrs. Szemző, Dr. Irma Arnót, had indeed opened the door on them. Her white lace glove glowed on the doorknob; her white face hovered in the shadow of her hat and at the same time seemed to be nodding approvingly with each of her words. This means something entirely different. Indeed, this must mean something very different. Yes, that’s how it is. I’ve opened the door and now I am here.

Gyöngyvér made desperate belated moves. She would have wanted to pull the cover over them but it had slipped off some time ago. She found a corner, but the cover was stuck in or on something, and she had to yank and tug before it freed up enough to cover only partially the bottom of the man kneeling over her. There was not enough to hide his broad, sopping back, flashing in the light now entering the room, or the shoulders, the tousled hair and dark head.

She could not make him disappear.

My dear Gyöngyvér, my sweet, said Mrs. Szemző from the doorway, her voice at once grating and sugary, I just dropped in to tell you I’m leaving now.

She spoke in such a natural conversational tone, perhaps a bit higher than necessary because of the darkness, as if she hadn’t seen anything or didn’t want to acknowledge what she was seeing or perhaps did not believe her eyes.

I definitely won’t be back before two, she added more softly.

But with these words she destroyed the confidence with which she had entered the room, and it was as if, after all, she should acknowledge something of the sight and the vaporous smells that assailed her. Genuine alarm stole into her voice.

If I’d thought you were asleep I wouldn’t have come in. To tell you the truth, oh god, I thought you were listening to the radio.

She regretted this foolishness the moment she uttered it. As one exposing herself. After all, I did see it was dark in here.

Yes, I could have sworn you were listening to the radio, she added quickly. Please forgive me.

Oh, please, no need to worry, go ahead and leave if you have to, Gyöngyvér replied, her voice barely audible, as if still hoping that this was nothing but a hallucination or dream, and that if she behaved properly and produced appropriate sounds to indicate that nothing was going on everything would turn out well.

The old lady would evaporate, vanish. And she would unexpectedly wake up and forget the whole thing. But how could she produce acceptable sounds. The man was stiffened into himself, as if he had turned into a piece of furniture. Because of his incredible weight and mass, she could neither budge nor breathe properly, could not speak as if he were not inside her.

At the same time, there was a touch of indecent flirtation and derisiveness in his immobility. And why not, seeing that his face was concealed. However alarmed he may have been, he was enjoying the embarrassing situation.

Obeying some incomprehensible command, he had to behave like a bug; he became motionless, stiff, as though he understood the limitations of anthropoidal behavior. Yet he did not mind that his naked body was revealed to someone he’d never seen before and, to his great good fortune, was not seeing now.

In fact he was sorry Gyöngyvér had so quickly and adroitly covered at least his ass.

In his rectum, in his swollen testicles, drawn up high in excitement, there slumbered the wish and the pleasure of exhibitionism, as well as its recurring concomitant shame.

In truth he didn’t know why he did what he did and why he desired his own shame. In the boarding-school shower room it had reached his consciousness, what was expected of him and what commercial value a shameless exhibition had, and, realizing how high a price the sight of his body was quoted at on the secret stock exchange of his inmates, he accepted their undisguised glances; he ceased to have serious doubts about his naked body’s effect on others. His self-confidence was reinforced by the interest not of women but of men. However, liberating and slightly hasty waves of lovemaking had barely flooded his body when, at the threshold of his youth, he was surprised by a depressing fantasy that refused to leave him and accompanied him into manhood. The harder he objected to it, the deeper the fantasy cut into him. And it came with a powerful sensation; the larger his doubts as to whether all this fucking was worth anything, the stronger the pleasure became, or at least the painful imagination of great pleasure. Which made him sink even deeper into depression.

Even in the most conventional position, he always worked rhythmically, almost inattentively, at least pretending to be aloof, or, conversely, he’d put everything into it, get on his knees to hold the woman’s vagina captive, yet leave enough freedom to slide smoothly between clitoris and the orifice of the uterus, keeping his movements strong and finely detailed so the woman would reach her first major climax as soon as possible and not be demanding, surrendering herself to a continuous gratification; and in this labor, his ass would inevitably spread, open wide, and he would be surprised by a good friend.

All he needed for this was to feel the coolness of the room in the crack of his buttocks, to have a current of air stroke his cleft. A close friend. Though he had no such close friend and normally would not even want one.

This fantasy spoke more of his naïve inexperience than anything else.

The friend had no face.

He put up with him though he abhorred him, did not see what was happening yet had to endure the violence.

So much for friendship.

Although he could easily sublimate this ungratified desire and secret dread of his excited anus, he tamed it. When with his mouth and tongue bathed in prodigal amounts of saliva, he slid from women’s vaginas to their tight assholes and they cried out in surprise. It was as if he were calming his own anus, as if he were searching for his own.

He didn’t think much of friendships.

He had no idea that feeling ashamed about this was unnecessary; after all, the tight bundled muscle curling back on itself, the musculus levator ani, closely binds genitals and anus together in everyone.

You probably have to get up early, said Mrs. Szemző apprehensively in the dark, as if she had not seen that someone was lying on top of Gyöngyvér.

Yes, unfortunately, I do, very early, replied Gyöngyvér, and despite all her efforts, her words sounded like gasps.

And here I am, so heartless, waking you up. Don’t worry, when I come back I’ll try harder not to wake you again. And now I really won’t bother you anymore.

Filling up someone must feel very different from being filled up by someone, these feelings are not interchangeable; yet, halfway between the anus and the genitals, at the point where the powerful dual self-enclosed muscles meet and cross in a figure eight, the image men and women have of themselves do not differ.

Go on, and have a good time.

I just wanted to tell you that I left the light on in the hallway on purpose.

I know, dear Irmuska, answered Gyöngyvér emphatically, as if she were talking to a slow-witted child. She’s still not leaving. And she felt like screaming. Get this old hag out of here. What’s she doing spying on me. She had no strength to scream, because insidious little vibrations and tremors were pouring into her from the man, and she shuddered with helpless fury. With the effort not to feel them.

They should not spread to her vaginal muscles, should not even come close.

With which she inadvertently took on Ágost’s preventive attitude.

Though she would have found it very amusing, a worthy revenge, to reach her orgasms mutely, right in front of the old hag.

Actually, wasn’t she basically trying to conform to the situation and satisfy everyone as best she could. The effort she was making to have it not be like that now only filled her pelvis the more powerfully with painful pleasure. She tightened up, she couldn’t do otherwise, she tightened her anus and the tightening immediately returned to the oval muscles of her vagina and spread in all directions.

This is how she returned it, amplified by her own strength, to the man; thus, the spreading not only didn’t stop at but brimmed over the sandy shores in ever greater volume.

She saw before her those not-too-distant shores.

Don’t turn it off.

Oh, no, I won’t turn it off.

It was as if her pleasure would make her give birth; her pelvis widened, ready to burst. She herself was the bed of the mighty river, which the water filled with its surging mass.

But yesterday you did turn it off.

By mistake, Irmuska, I promise I won’t this time.

For a moment Mrs. Szemző stared at her quietly. It’s one thing to have something in mind, to think about something, and it’s a whole other thing to see it right in front of us.

Over the man’s shoulder, virtually steaming with heat, she stared back at Mrs. Szemző, as if pleading with her.

But she did not budge.

There was no longer enough light in the small room for them to see each other, yet their looks were as if glued together. As though one of them used this look, wrested from the darkness, to spirit away what the other did not want to show; oddly, this impossibility became their compromise.

Well then, go back to sleep, said Mrs. Szemző. And thank you, it’s very kind of you, she added fleetingly. Pleasant dreams.

Yes, I thank you, Irmuska, came the hesitant answer from the darkness. Good night, she said loudly.

The door of the maid’s room closed, the draft it created made the window above them clink, but they could not move, because Mrs. Szemző still wasn’t leaving, was still rummaging in the hallway.

They didn’t dare open their mouths.

As if the wall between the maid’s room and the hallway had been broken through and they could feel on their skin the little noises of her rummaging. They didn’t dare laugh or express alarm or displeasure. And wild joy burst out. But they had to stifle it. They grabbed, held on to each other on the narrow bed with the bad springs. But this solved nothing. Because in the woman’s pelvis the trembling kept on radiating, with intermittent silent vibrations slashing through; it had no rhythm, she returned what she received, or she gave it and received it back and then, as if pushed along, it coursed through her spine and thighs; it would unexpectedly make her knees jerk, her brain jouncing painfully with every jerk. Which made her unable to speak. Oh.

So good. More, it hurts, oh, but it’s good. How it hurts. She knew nothing else, wanted nothing else; more, it hurts, oh, that was all she wanted. Though she had pangs of conscience; why did she have to bring here a man who weighed a ton.

And that is why she wanted to stop, slow down, absorb the jerking with her muscles. She might have been ashamed of the sounds she made, of her own stupidity, of her pain, of being busy with her own gratification even in such an impossible situation. She could not stop the jerks, not the trembling, nothing. They kept coming. They hurt. She wanted them. Her orgasms came. She could not reject any of this, her brain was rattling.

In the dim hallway, Mrs. Szemző discovered that for months she hadn’t put away her winter gloves.

As if to say, that’s the limit. As if profoundly upset by her own carelessness.

She found herself alone in the unventilated hallway crammed with furniture, and this felt like a slap in the face that could not have been avoided or mitigated. And the walls were indeed not so thick that she couldn’t have heard them, but she kept to the recent compromise. Those two inside didn’t want to make a sound, so she wouldn’t hear them. If she left right away, she’d be breaching the compromise she had made. And their bodies went on working whether they liked it or not, they did it several times, in succession, the bed creaking under them. It was becoming uncomfortable. If they hadn’t been making selfish little moves the bodies simply couldn’t have endured it.

Mrs. Szemző did not hear much of all this because she was busy with her anger, but her anger had painful fissures in it. She loved her gloves. It was not a question, not for a moment, whether or not she knew what her soul was or wasn’t doing to her. She needed to avoid unnecessary dramas, yet she was in them up to her neck, and she could not deny that perhaps she wanted to be in them.

It would be ridiculous to think she was unaware of all this since for two decades, until her practice ended, she had been one of the most celebrated and best-paid psychoanalysts in Budapest.

Her gloves had to be finely lined, the kind that cling snugly to the fingers. To feel the root of the fingers in them was an exceptional, almost insolent, pleasure.

Impossible, this forgetfulness really makes things impossible, she said to herself; she was unfazed by these alleged impossibilities of hers, though she was keenly aware of them too.

Her forgetfulness was her only refuge.

She was so upset about having left her gloves for months on various pieces of furniture in the hallway that she blushed in the darkness. Which managed to surprise her. She felt hot in her two-piece pearl-colored dress patterned with blue stripes. She tried to dismiss the feeling with a wave of her hand: she was not about to deceive herself with blushing and hot flashes. She was outnumbered by these subtle bodily actions, though, and she had to repeat for the third time what she had said to curb her upset self and satisfy the controlling one. Her head was nodding vigorously; in her excitement, this otherwise hardly noticeable and cleverly hidden little tic grew stronger. It’s really impossible the way I’ve been leaving things all over the place and then forgetting them. And all the time, she observed disinterestedly, she was regaining her composure.

The truth was that everything existed simultaneously in her mind, and she couldn’t forget anything, because she purposefully did not remind herself of anything. And in fact she brought about her forgetfulness artificially.

Yes, she was now going to put away those miserable winter gloves. Her famous glove collection had survived the devastation. She did not remember how handy a pair of gloves could be in certain situations. She had been taken away, along with her two sons, in the middle of summer. Instead of real objects, she invented objects and filled her memory with them, or she smuggled objects out of her memory and pretended they’d never existed; she freed her memory of everything depressing. She could not bear this anymore. She had to upset herself with all sorts of meaningless and invented triviality to allow her mind to run on empty. But it should have something to go on. She kept saying things to herself, continually, so as not to allow a single interjection concerning anything she thought improper or incorrect to acknowledge. She did not feign being deaf or blind: she truly did not see or hear what she did not think she should see or hear.

She let her body and soul play tricks on her. She knew how to please both of them, keep them calm.

Not for a moment would she leave herself without strict supervision.

By himself or herself, each human being is a relatively transparent, mechanical system — she firmly believed this. Only when together with others do the systems become complicated, and that’s bad enough. Living together with a subtenant includes several generations of Sozialgeschichte; the soul and all its mechanical tricks lie somewhere beyond this. Stories about the soul and about social relations scarcely touch each other; rarely is there a direct connection between them; they are two different categories written side by side. At every moment they must be peeled apart. Which is what everybody does, all the time. This she firmly believed. Mrs. Szemző always thought very abstractly; if she wished to lighten up, she’d smirk and simper to conform to other people’s tastes. Only after this thought did she slam down her handbag. Right into the drawer. Making a loud thump.

There were two large cardboard boxes in the drawer, one for winter gloves, the other for summer ones.

The ceiling lamp’s gray light filtered through the panes of the glass door.

Hallways in Budapest apartments are usually pitifully shapeless. As though Hungarian architects had said, it makes no difference how you enter or what you find when you do. And in this apartment, the hallway was jam-packed with pieces of furniture much too large for the space. One could barely get past them, and they cast chaotic shadows, which made it worse. As if everything was temporary when in fact nothing had changed in ten years.

Just as the movers had put them down.

She kept deferring, pushing the task before her from day to day like a lifeless object, as though the one who’d do the job in her stead were still alive. One spring morning, ten years earlier, in the sunny bathroom of their house on Orbán Mountain, Dr. Szemző, a reputable dermatologist, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Which event, since then, had claimed for itself an eternal yesterday.

Szemző collapsed, letting out a single surprised shout. In those years, many of those who had survived the earlier devastation died like this, suddenly. With his death he displaced every last little tomorrow.

He had managed to slink out of the marching column at the corner of Személynök and Balaton streets.

He learned much later where they had shot the rest of them into the Danube.

After her husband’s funeral, for a token sum Mrs. Szemző turned over the rental rights of their already nationalized villa to a high-ranking national security officer, a timid blond man, father of several children, whose family had been hastily moved to the capital and whom the authorities would have foisted on her as a co-tenant no matter what. Had she insisted on staying in the villa on Orbán Mountain, she’d have had to move down to the basement, and she wasn’t willing to do that. She moved into the apartment on Pozsonyi Road that she was no longer allowed to use as her office. This was the essential part of the transaction, which the ÁVH officer arranged for her, allowing her as a favor to hold on to the right of ownership in the villa in exchange for moving out of it. That is when the furniture was crammed into the apartment, along with many meaningless objects she could not bring herself to throw out, even though she was not expecting or waiting for anything. The crammed furniture was something she permitted, and not unconsciously, one of her selves to have. If she could not create in her apartment a new order like the old one, at least she could more easily conceal from others how much this existence humiliated her.

Not from this one or that one, but from everyone she had been dragging along with her.

She felt as if all her pores suddenly opened up.

What will happen now.

Ágost barely breathed his words on the other side of the wall, whispering like a low fire.

Eyes wide open, they stared into each other’s face, grinning like children after a prank gone awry, hiding to avoid the dreaded consequences.

I don’t know, Gyöngyvér breathed her reply.

Skin shone in the dark, eyes were on fire. They were beautiful, wild, and strong. And they had been waiting for an entirely different storm than the one that now caught them.

I’m afraid you’ll get in big trouble for this.

I don’t think so, maybe she didn’t notice.

Why does she need the light.

Scared. I don’t know.

What is she scared of.

Of you. I don’t know what she’s scared of. Maybe burglars.

Then where the hell is she going.

She plays bridge with her girlfriends.

I see. What time is it anyway.

I think nine thirty, I’m pretty sure.

How do you know.

She leaves before the main entrance gate is locked, before they lock the gate there. The old girls can’t sleep.

They laughed at this remark.

You’re kidding.

Why would I, they play into the wee hours, sometimes she comes home the next morning. But shut up already. They stay awake together. Can’t you hear her, she’s still dawdling in the hallway.

Of course I can hear her.

A movement that took place only inside their bodies followed this. And they laughed happily.

Why, who died.

How should I know. Everybody. Nobody.

Laughter would have overtaken them if they hadn’t stopped up each other’s mouth.

Get a hold of yourself, until she leaves.

Their tongues glided inside each other’s mouth and they thrust them in deep. In place of one forcible pleasure, they found themselves another. There was nothing to fear, they could trust themselves because they were intertwined, they could not be torn away from each other, and this seemed to be an unexpected, unhoped-for, very pleasant bonus. They could not be tamed. Their tongues linked, embraced and danced, each very considerate of the other. They were retching at this depth and sank lower, becoming aware of things turning into sharp pain as they trembled, freely, unashamedly, rhythmically, as the bed bounced, creaking, under them.

She’s going, I know, she’s going right away.

And again they held themselves back a little.

Though they did not exactly know what they were holding back, they did, along with their breath. One shouldn’t do such a thing. Absolutely not. Except that the brave decision made both of them feel, and they felt the strength of the feeling, that their bodies might become completely independent of their will. This was something neither of them had ever experienced.

Everything is falling and tumbling and pouring and running; running, though they are lying here as quietly as you please, waiting politely for the old woman to leave so they can finally lose their sanity.

Maybe she’s gone already. But she’s not, she’s still fiddling about in the hallway.

Oh heavens, she has no intention of going, the pest is eavesdropping.

No, I know her, she wouldn’t do that.

They kept whispering and listening.

She’s looking for something she can’t find.

Again they laughed.

It would be impossible to tell which of their worlds was more uninviting or more vulgar — the world admitted by their faces, mutually blinded by their wide-eyed proximity, a nearby world that alternately brings the twilight-colored walls closer and moves them farther away; or the world that sternly conjures up, in minute detail from head to toe, the impersonal acts of male-female copulation and mercilessly compels them to perform them.

There is probably no perfect symmetry in the world; it would be insanely utopian, vain, to hope for one, yet they might have come close to it precisely because at this moment, even with the indifferent imaginations, they succeeded in complementing each other harmoniously. No, not quite yet, the last obstacle would be overcome in a moment. They were pushing it before them and rolling along with it.

Their body positions did not change yet did not remain as before.

Cautiously, just a bit, as if he were not doing it at all, the man began to slide, as if he had to keep this little action a secret not only from the old woman making noises in the hallway but also from himself and the woman in bed with him. After a brief pause that was more like a brief surprise, he slid back to his former position, and because of the sharp clash of the two merging sensations, he had to reconsider everything. Which the woman’s countermoves and carelessness did not permit.

He could not resist repeating it.

Again and again.

But exact repetitions didn’t work, because the woman’s challenges grew longer and her almost arbitrary carelessness sharpened the clash of merging sensations. What they were doing made no sound because it could not. They and they alone could hear the dim thuds of their thrusts, the slurps of sucking, the sloshing of slimy secretions, the resounding thumps of their colliding abdominal walls. But the knot that tied to each other what they saw and heard was loosening. Being surprised at themselves seemed to fix their eyes and glue their eyelashes in one position. They saw things from different places.

The sounds around them receded and slid down beneath the horizon.

A face in ecstasy is frightening; the reason one can look at it without aversion and disgust is that in the distortions of another person’s face one can catch a glimpse of what one’s own greediness and selfishness look like. It is like stepping into a hall of mirrors. A person can see his or her own visage even if it is stronger and more violent, or perhaps weaker and gentler, than their own self-image. At the same time, their inner pictures were becoming so powerful that looking at each other steadfastly was to no avail; seeing each other so exposed, so devoid of dignity, beauty, and charm; they couldn’t keep their independent inner pictures from ceasing to refer to — no, almost completely excluding — each other. And there was more. They were both thinking very actively and clearly, and this also seemed to have little to do with their amorous activities, or in any case they could no longer locate and secure the contact points of thoughts and sensations. The redoubled double worlds of sensation and thinking, which otherwise blend, seep, flow, soar, vanish, or absorb each other, so that one can make way for the other or, put another way, so that the stronger may gain ascendancy and the weaker humbly relinquish its position, these worlds were progressing by clambering over each other, making their way forward over and inside each other like a coarse greased cogwheel, or like fine clockwork whose gears and levers unconsciously drive a system much larger than itself, something with no name, something the mind cannot comprehend, whose boundaries are invisible and whose enormous mass cannot be measured.

From a very short distance, Gyöngyvér could see into the depths of two strange dark eyes, or rather, she could look out to an abyss with no physical dimensions or light of its own, if only because it blended into the lighter sight of her own nose. No matter how strange the man’s childhood had been, she still managed to find something mutual at the bottom of their differences, in the face dripping with perspiration that shone around her darkly, or brightly, along the steep line of his sparkling eyebrows.

His eyebrows, she said to herself. And that could have been one explanation. Because their eyebrows were indeed as similar as if they had been siblings.

And she was thinking about this with her tongue while spreading and pressing herself over him and licking the beads of sweat dripping off his brow, because what she tasted was very different from what she’d anticipated from the smell of his sweat. Which, translated into normal human language, meant that she probably didn’t understand or misunderstood the other person after all, and was again chasing an illusion of her desires. And the ceiling was arching over her more imperiously than ever, which brought on another thought association — the ceiling’s little cracks and ominous reflections of light.

A fine time for the ceiling of her rotten little room to come crashing down; let it, let the whole rotten room fall apart. It would too, if she let it, if she didn’t cheer herself up, find an antidote. Every little interior movement was a protest. A place she couldn’t break out of; they wouldn’t let her. Because she’s not happy, because she ruins everything.

She was pushing it, stretching it; let her room crack wide open, its walls have always been too confining and have always chafed her skin. If only the old woman would drop dead soon, she could put in a request for the whole apartment.

She sank a little, and then rose a bit, all right, let it be, the way he wants it, all right; she yielded to the man again.

It will never end.

But she couldn’t tell where her glances, thoughts, furtive looks, her very countenance roamed; where, on which level of sights or sensations, she was with those fractions of words and sentences. She was floating in the glittering water murky with mud, and was sitting in the dusty courtyard, sitting where they dumped her, and she could hardly breathe.

It was almost completely dark.

She didn’t know where she was.

She had been looking for this place or this sensation. Now she couldn’t see any cracks in the ceiling. I’ve always been looking for them, she thought, though she had no idea what she was referring to. Surely not to the man. Strangely enough this man no longer interested her. A moment just after twilight yet before evening descended, and the man had become part of that moment. Perhaps with her countenance she had brought something to a halt, thus lighting up for herself an otherwise invisible landscape.

I love you: she would have loved to shout that into the landscape. Though she didn’t know to whom. As if for a moment everyone who had ever been inside her made an appearance. To keep the night from crashing down on her, she would have to stop the earth from spinning. She could not return to the person who was filling her up.

She didn’t know who he was.

She still didn’t know.

Like the mouth of her womb, the little room grew gigantic from this loud desire, as if to devour the entire apartment with all its odds and ends.

Rhythmically, they breathed into each other’s mouth.

The man concentrated on her cautious movements, guided by the rhythms of two mouths breathing into each other and not by sensations and certainly not by her feelings. He had an inner countenance with which he saw her. He saw that the relatively long vagina’s angle of inflection and that of his cock, shortened and thickened by excitement, were in virtual opposition. The vagina arced upward while the cock, as if pulled downward by the mass and weight of its blood-filled head, bowed willfully.

They were wedged into each other sternly and stubbornly. With his every thrust forward and every retreat, they mutually increased the tension in each other.

He was managing things economically. Such a tiny movement mustn’t make a noise that could be heard through the wall. Another reason to be on the alert. As if he were controlling two worlds at once. And they were not equally elastic. He knew where he was, and what he had to do if he did not want to injure the real world. He saw how far he had penetrated, the road behind him and the stretch that was still ahead. He could not give in to the woman, who, if he did, would writhe under him in spasmodically interrupted, hysterical rhythms that would not match his. She would pretend dutifully to demonstrate how good it was for her, and with that it’s impossible to get anywhere.

Their hips collided several times, almost unpleasantly. Actually, it was the first thing he had noticed at the swimming pool, the woman’s hips.

How her torso became elongated when she came out of the pool and drops of water rolled down, sticking to her cold brown skin, around the hip bone. Now the pain claimed his attention. Although he could see with his eyes, he was seeing better with his skin and cock; his body no longer had a separate bulk, independent parts, limbs of its own; and with their parts and limbs thus shared, they could not separate and their mutual sensations could not become independent.

White was the strongest.

He should have pulled his cock out of her at least for a moment, to see it, to delight in it; he missed his sense of ownership. Pain is darkness. The white pillowcase illumined all his senses, its sunken wrinkles and shadows almost irritatingly bright around the expanding and contracting face. Lips opening to the sound of breathing; flaring, finely opening and closing nostrils; a barely audible, painful whistling in his ear.

And she is still doing it.

She’s always doing it, he thought, exasperated. As if she’d been trying to convince him. Or herself. And the enlightening decision was right at hand. I won’t let her. He no longer felt skin, only the heat filtering through it, and he didn’t feel the flesh under the skin either. This was the only remaining task, which was somehow familiar from somewhere. He entered into darkness, into the pervasive odor of the cunt, with its sloshing sounds at every little movement. He must face the task, or at least find appropriate means to deal with it, if he had failed until now. To outwit the woman.

He also saw the white stones sticking or popping out of and falling back into the ground bubbling under him. The water was boiling, producing bubbles on its surface, which was exactly like the sensation of crumbling under his body. He was watching her as the other boys had watched him through the swirling steam. He had to watch his every move to counter the woman’s simulations, to find a small crack. But he felt this more as a challenge to break through to something. He even thought, I should break through to her because alone she cannot free herself or take care of herself.

The probability of succeeding in this was very low.

Or at least someone might call down from the third floor, in an unfamiliar voice, before he’d topple over. You know what I mean. Of course he knew, because the dried-up shrubs he could hold on to only moments earlier were now bending away and disappearing, one after the other, in the depths. Now he couldn’t cling to anything.

When his father left him there alone, the first thing the school principal said was that this area was very lovely, sans doute, but he shouldn’t let it dazzle him, because it wasn’t without dangers, therefore he should never, not in winter or summer, not during the day or at night, take a single step by himself.

And he had understood this.

There was only the ground that was going to swallow him now as it caved in and crumbled. How could he have understood, what could he understand if he had never before seen a landslide or avalanche. He was thinking what enviable images a child has of danger. He did not ask where he wanted to arrive at, where he would like to go or how he would like to go back home from here. Now I’ll be home, he thought when the earth moved under him, even though he couldn’t have understood why it moved. Whenever he’s in trouble, his mind rears in fright but his body acts calmly. He grasped a pillow, but the incredible sensation of crumbling stayed in his hand.

I can break through, of course, but only if I let myself.

The keys clinked in Mrs. Szemző’s hand, but she hadn’t gone out the door.

He kept moving up the ribbing of the vagina, and the higher he moved, the greater the tension became, which he was yet to conquer.

He could see the gray stone steps in front of him, the ones he ran on when he escaped from the boarding school; he followed their lead. He always thought that the safety and decisiveness of his thrusts were more important than their strength, and that they should be free of selfish motive but contain, rather, an alertness, based on being aware of the surroundings, and why he was on the alert.

Critical situations demand the greatest circumspection.

Circumspection, however, has an unavoidably high price.

These time-pitted steps were unusually steep. As if forcing his tumescent cock to touch the vaginal wall, but just barely, just barely to draw his cock across it, seemingly to make it contract but in reality to fill it to the hilt and, in addition, to mark with special emphases the starting and concluding points of each thrust. They were not worn down, these steps, as if no one had ever stepped on them, that is what was so interesting about them, they had become somewhat spongy. Which meant that time chewed rather than eroded the stone. He quivered himself into the vagina, an act that managed to double the sensation of being inside and of being stiff. He also realized it wasn’t infinity he should try to traverse.

The distances to be traveled are short.

He calmly noted a smooth top, the last of the steps. I am taking off now, he signaled, and gave a ritual emphasis to each thrust, wresting it from the general monotony. He also signaled, I could go further inside you, though in fact there was no moving further, but he had to open the way for imagination. If he wanted to, he could have counted the stairs. The top step reached into the deep gray sky and touched thick clouds, without moving. To meet the requirements of the steps, not to miss them, he had to stretch out the length of the thrusts and unexpectedly change their speed.

They hooked their hurried lips into each other roughly, for which neither of them was prepared.

When Mrs. Szemző stepped out on the seventh-floor gallery, still glimmering in the twilight, they were slipping and sliding over each other’s lips, holding on with their teeth, biting to remain still. Their full-mouthed, slippery kisses made their lips slide up their gums, as if they were eating up the path before them and there was no tomorrow. The two hollows stiffened into one and stuck together. But if they didn’t want to suffocate, their lips had to be pulled apart. By the time Mrs. Szemző, Dr. Irma Arnót, had shut the smooth dark oak door behind her on the silent gallery, airless after a sweltering day, in the maid’s room they were already screaming at the top of their voices.

The bleak walls absorbed nothing.

Quickly, though fumbling, she inserted the key; the nervous double click of the lock reverberated in the glass belly of the stairwell.

With disconnected little rhythms, the woman was slipping from whimpering into screaming in steadily rising tones and increasing volume. She threatened to tear something in her throat. But then she faltered, tried again, now from a much deeper register, with more concentration, while the man matched and covered her sounds evenly with a flat and endless howl; for a while they continued together and then it all turned into bellowing. This was so strong, spreading from the soles of her feet to her chest, his sperm battered her with such powerful thrusts, pounding the swollen gullet of her womb, that she had to toss her head from side to side again, which for a while interrupted her vocal broadcast.

The second impact was the strongest.

The third one came later, after a pause, and somehow managed, fairly benevolently, almost gently, to set the previous two aright, made it natural that earlier it had been swept away and was now becoming part of the current.

It turned into a pebble, a light skiff, a stalk of straw.

She was perhaps most grateful for this. As if it had proved to her that the previous two had indeed happened.

She was screaming, yelling, and this time she could hear herself. Brief shouts, close to bubbling staccato panting, which she so much wanted from herself as well as from the man.

But this could not be heard in the stairwell. Mrs. Szemző’s small steps echoed loudly on the chessboard of black and white tiles.

Anyway, it was as if she were demonstratively reaching, calling after a lost pleasure. No. As if responding to the lost rhythm of the world before tumbling into the dark yawning depths. The sucking and thrusting persisted in her consciousness, but nothing else. In response, the man’s bellowing also ceased.

He was buried in the dark, dumb earth. The price of being ever on the alert was that he saw himself much too clearly. But even with that he could not give meaning to his existence. As if he were being compelled to review all aspects of his life’s futility. La tristesse qui régnait dans la maison vide. He got stuck, was brought to a halt in the midst of producing deep sounds in his throat, the same sounds that only a moment ago were expanding his ribs, inflating his chest to the full.

This whole business of fucking made no sense to him; nothing did. Why was he doing it. Why had he ever done it, and why does he keep repeating it.

In the heat of his skin, he felt the woman’s breasts, because out of this disgusting nothingness, out of this world turned to emptiness, began to appear details he still could not resist. The weakness of the soul. Or perhaps the huge nipples, stiffened to scabrous hardness, made him feel his skin again.

The weakness of his will.

Their bodies were flowing, sliding on and in each other; suddenly they collapsed into each other and breathed aloud in the darkness of the bleak room.

The heat stung and burned them; every part of their bodies was ablaze inside. From the several days of rubbing, the woman’s labia were burning, her vagina ached, and the man again felt the pain of the torn frenum under the tip of his penis. Open sore rubbing against open sore.

They were moaning again because it felt good to give evidence of the pain. They were crying, choking, sighing, panting haltingly, whining, sniveling, wailing, sobbing, whimpering, hissing, and mewling into each other’s ears, unable to subside. And the man kept on thrusting, lazily, filled with his own emptiness and desperation.

They could neither guide nor control what they were doing, though they had regained enough consciousness to see the new impending torrent.

They were biting each other’s ears, nose, lips, even teeth. They were grasping, hugging, stroking, scratching, pressing each other’s back, and prompting each other to go on pressing everything that was so smooth and had dissolved in their heat: bones to press the flesh or flesh to press the bones. As if saying to each other I shall crush you. As if telling each other, oh, why haven’t I eaten you up, I’ll eat you up now, I’ll chew dry all your bones and gristle. But of course they did not have enough air to do this all at once or even to say it. This was, rather, pure joy cleansed by wild desire. And they had good reason. As if after all the pain and finesse of four long days they had finally succeeded in hurdling an incredible obstacle.

They looked back from the other side. Painfully they reveled and sloshed about in their success, which in the final analysis fell into their lap as a blessing of coincidences.

If only Mrs. Szemző hadn’t walked in on them.

It flashed through their minds that yes, she had been there, but it seemed an improbable phenomenon, and they quickly shoved it aside, because they heard their own insane screaming. God, maybe she hasn’t left and is still listening to them.

In fact, thanks to unfathomable providence and destiny, she had actually left. As their pulses returned to normal, their awareness of their bodies’ success became stronger. With its outlines and its pale and confused images, the past reappeared, ready to separate them.

In their contented arrhythmic sounds, slamming into and reborn out of each other, they deepened, increased, and tried to delay the eternal present, somehow to impede its disintegration.

Tension does not decrease at an even pace when the pulse suddenly drops, but rather, seeking the place of the previous contraction, goes back up; not finding it, it drops a bit more, hesitates nervously, trying to steady itself at this lower level. The eternal present, however, snaps in the effort, yet still prevents the past or the future from encroaching on it. And this is happiness, the famed happiness that cannot be independent of physiology though it is not identical with it. Heartbeats extend between the various possibilities afforded by the changing use and genetically defined rhythms of the carotid sinus. On the one side, there is the possibility which the heart is always ready to follow, and on the other side is the ability from which the heart cannot separate itself, the basic rhythm of personality to which it always returns.

And now it was trembling and sliding in both of them, between the different rhythms and levels.

When sensing happiness in another person’s breathing, one’s own breathing becomes happier, and not by chance does one feel that perishing of happiness is imminent. I’m going to die, I love you so much I’ll die of it.

Expanded and sodden pores, their limbs sliding on one another, loosened muscles, memory breaking through in flashes, barely visible outlines, their burning painful loins melted into each other, the penetrating smells.

Outside, evening was coming to life, now pushing shut, now opening wide the window above their heads, sending a lazy, fresh current of air lightly across their naked sweat-covered bodies.

It brought along a typically urban odor in which they recognized the vagina’s abundant ejaculatum and the dripping sperm’s strange, heady smell and their intermingled perspiration. It warned them of something that remained permanent around them, with hardly any changes.

The darkness no longer smelled of sausages in stewed onion and tomatoes, that was certain. The redolence of the cooling walls and watered plants, the sugary smell of decomposing garbage steaming up from the courtyard bins grew stronger.

Ecstatically, intoxicated with admiration for the man, Gyöngyvér was the first to speak in this exceptional, somewhat strange summer night. Because she did not exactly know to whom she was now talking, she wound up sounding a shade too distant.

You were like, she panted, her eyes wide and round in the strange darkness and a bit out of focus because of the closeness of his face, you are like a technician.

And as she spoke she rather forcefully hooked her graceful feet into the crooks of his knees.

Her relaxed limbs seemed to be gathering some indefinable, cheerful, unbridled strength. Her strange, separate spirit was in a frenzy. She was especially glad to have finally said this. Even though it couldn’t have occurred to her earlier, because she hadn’t yet had enough experience to give the man shape with words for herself. Perhaps the word felt appropriate because she surprised herself with them. She tightened her loins, thrust her hips forward, her whole body arching upward. In her slackened vagina, she already felt him as an immovable keel.

She will sing.

With it she could sail out to the open sea. Without it she would sink. He’s yours, her soul whispered to her playfully and extravagantly. And with a single vigorous movement she flipped and turned the body so much larger and heavier than her own, and now it was under her.

The bed creaked again, but it no longer mattered; their bodies were banging and thudding on each other. The complete turnabout was almost successful.

Perhaps the man unconsciously yet firmly helped her; still, they slipped a bit off the bed. To keep from slipping out of each other, Gyöngyvér had to kneel above him, opening her lap completely. Perhaps from the sudden change of position, the general physical exhaustion, the protracted excitement, or from something entirely different, she felt nauseated. Although she managed to suppress it, the cavity of her mouth filled up with a sour taste. Her entire body convulsed with the effort, her stiffened body, especially her arms, back, and breasts broke out in goose bumps, as if she were realizing in retrospect what had happened in the previous hours. As someone whose hairs stand on end, she shuddered at what was happening.

Holding on to the bed frame with both hands, she literally sat into him.

Just as she had done earlier with words, she was now overcoming him with her body and looking down on him from somewhere very far away. As if they hadn’t reached a final destination, she did not lower her full weight, only kept sinking and rising. She also opened her mouth; let the unpleasant smell leave, even if through a loud belch; she yawned into him with her pelvis, with her expanded loins.

The entire woman was a surprising revelation.

Ágost could not avoid her and could not get enough of her, though he felt sated. He felt sick, did not really want her, wanted to urinate, was thirsty, ached all over, wanted to flee from and out of her, his mouth was dry, and it would have been good to move his limbs around a little.

Simultaneously, they broke into deep laughter. They both felt at the same time that in their common satiety they were now each other’s prisoner.

You’re completely out of your mind, said the man, recovering from the laughter, which is all right, but why say something so stupid.

Say what.

That technician thing.

What’s the matter with that.

Shallow.

I like it. On the nail, that’s all.

You wouldn’t say it if you didn’t like it, replied the man, taking on her clipped rhythm. What I want to know is how you think of such a thing in the first place.

He was thrusting more strongly; at last, again he knew what he was doing.

He saw that Gyöngyvér shrugged her shoulders slightly. And strangely, it was in this slight shrug of hers, more than in anything else, that he recognized himself.

Her hot, odorous, slushy, softened loin stubbornly stuck to its own rhythm, which did not abate. They were similar in their stubbornness too. She made a deep circular pass, and when she reached the end of the circle, the man should have thrust into her, but then she was already rising.

Did not wait for him.

It’s very simple, she said languidly. I feel I am always being serviced. Nothing more.

It was strange she did not need to decide to say it like that, to characterize the situation with such hurtfully emotionless words. And since the surprised man could not respond, though he was also always ready for dry and illusion-free responses, the woman added, after a while, well, that’s why I said it.

It’s a good thing I’m not a fitter.

What is that.

You can’t be serious. You mean you really don’t know.

How would I know.

It means a mechanic, if you really think I’m some kind of technician. And in our case, I’d have to be a pipe fitter.

They both giggled at this and attentively, almost distrustfully, a little incredulously, scrutinized each other in the darkness.

Strictly speaking, they were already past everything anyway.

It was impossible to spoil retroactively the pleasure they’d gained from each other or to take it completely away.

The way the man saw it, this strange being was unattainably far from him. As before, he still hadn’t understood how anyone, from another world so different from his, could get so close to him, and a woman to boot. She was swaying above him like a dark stain, with her tousled short-cropped hair, a wild medusa head. A moon dweller.

And in the woman’s face the sharp glitters of his similarly unattainable features; down in the hot depths the thick mouth, the cleft chin, the forehead, and the strong ridge of the nose. What could she possibly expect from someone like that. Then why is this constant desire of hers, if from women, if only for a brief moment, she would always get more.

Nothing bad, nothing hostile; they were both being very careful to say nothing excessive or final.

All right, then, make it an engineer, and I humbly beg your pardon.

You can’t make it up like that.

Chief engineer then, she shouted cheerfully, that’s my last offer.

No, don’t. Think carefully about what you’re saying.

This must mean I really hurt your feelings badly. But that’s the truth.

She let go of him with her vagina, though the man hoped she would mend things with attacks of tenderness.

But what she seemed to be saying was that if he was going to be so unreasonably touchy about the truth, he might as well leave, go wherever he wants.

His aching member slipped out. It literally jumped out into the air, shaking in its regained freedom.

He would have reached for it right away, mercifully to pull the foreskin over the head because even contact with the cool air was painful, but he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t calculate the length of this motion, couldn’t calculate anything.

Gyöngyvér threw herself headlong on his body, their contact ending in a loud thud. She clutched his shoulders with her sharp fingernails, her fine featherweight torso and pelvis pressing down on him. The cock became stuck between their slippery bellies. He could barely retrieve his hand so it wouldn’t get stuck there too. There was a slight cool breeze. Ágost with his heels, Gyöngyvér with her toes made contact with the cool, sobering, and indifferent floor.

A breeze came off the Danube, bringing with it a smell of dampness that over Margit Island had gathered the fragrances of various plants and flowers. They listened as the number 15 streetcar started off with a clatter on the other side of the building, and its bell rang twice at Sziget Street.

Of course, in this building too the tenants neglected to close the main entrance gate behind them, and the glass-covered tubular shape of the stairwell amplified the street sounds.

Mrs. Szemző stepped through the gate just as the lit-up empty streetcar moved on between the trees of Pozsonyi Road, mottled in the spotty light from the streetlamps.

Don’t be angry, but this way it hurts a bit, said the man a little more loudly, but he did nothing to free himself of the weight.

Oh, it hurts me too, the woman whimpered. I think you’re too big for me. Which sounded like fawning that concealed a strong rebuke. She knew what men liked to hear about themselves.

What is that supposed to mean, asked the man, irritated and cool.

It means you’ve rubbed me completely raw. It hurts. One day, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you my most interesting memory. And, after a breath, she asked if he’d like to hear it.

As if, in the meantime, the man had somehow been told by some secret source what she meant to tell him.

No, I don’t want hear it now. Let’s be quiet for a while. I don’t want anything.

Which means that in spite of everything I’ve seriously offended you again.

No you haven’t, replied the man. Only most of your statements make no sense. For example, the color of my eyes is not blue. What can one say to that. And if you really want to know, you are the demanding, impulsive one. I think that’s the cause of your problem.

Moreover, you don’t give anything enough time.

Gyöngyvér froze for a second in surprise. She did not understand the unexpected iciness in his voice. That she wasn’t willing to give time to things. She, whose voice teacher never stopped praising her for her sense of timing. She felt she had tried her best but could not understand what the man was saying, so she shouldn’t bother with him.

Listen, she continued heatedly, once — this is what I want to tell you — once I was left all alone in the empty boarding school.

The man tried to interrupt. That’s what I mean. As if you’re afraid you’ll lose something forever unless you tell me what you think you have to tell me this very minute. I don’t want to hear it.

But I will tell you, whether you want to hear it or not. For two days, I pretended to be doing nothing else except read, but I was continually rubbing myself. She stopped because, despite their previous exchange, she counted on the man’s interest to help her tell the story.

But the man truly wasn’t interested just then in what she had done at boarding school. He wanted to get to his cock at last. And not any more because of the pain especially. His wounded pride was making him angry and he had to pull the foreskin back into place to make his erection subside.

And there was a connection between these two things.

As if deciding enough was enough. He had already given too much of himself. He was depressed by realizing he couldn’t avoid the woman physically, could not properly overcome her or nonchalantly extricate himself from her, and also must suffer physical and mental losses. An abundant and forceful ejaculation was not so desirable for him anyway. At least he allowed it only infrequently. He was convinced his ejaculations were too strong, and they made him deeply depressed.

But if he held them back he could control his mood fluctuations.

He could not admit to himself that communality, or any exaggerated human proximity resulting from mutual and simultaneous ejaculation, repelled and disgusted him.

From now on, nothing would happen against his will. But Gyöngyvér clung to him stubbornly, ardently; and she relaxed her limbs so he wouldn’t find her clinging offensive, and gently, carefully rubbed against him, kept rubbing against him. She was making an effort, mindful not to hurt him too much, but, to be honest with herself, she did not understand what on earth could hurt a man.

No man had ever told her that some part of his body was hurting or could hurt. She anyway thought of them as less sensitive than she.

In the meantime, they were sliding on the bountiful slippery sweat of their bodies, and they both liked this.

Rather as he had enjoyed himself in the dark boarding-school dormitory full of muffled noises; because of the other body’s ceaseless slipping and sliding, his own down-curved cock slowly became flattened against the base of his thigh.

Which made his erection not diminish but increase. His denuded glans continually felt the familiar thigh pressure and at the same time, in unpredictable rhythms, the woman’s taut belly and the prickles of her thick pubic hair; his cock was sliding on her turned-out slippery labia. The air conveys the sounds of a partner’s pleasures. As for him, he could put up with no more of this sharing, this human proximity, at least not in the long run. While Gyöngyvér, on the contrary, could not get enough of there being another human being in the world; she rubbed against him with her breasts, her shoulders, with her neck, her wide-open lap and, leaving nothing out, her hard little belly. Which was at once ritualistic and hysterical. And then, as if the pinnacle of pampering were in order, she wanted to take the cock into her mouth to swallow it completely with her tongue and saliva.

She was aching too.

If she could, she’d have submerged herself in it, rolled around in it, taken on its substance, its odor. But she only stared at it as it was rearing demandingly in front of her mouth. She would have preferred to insert both her hands between her legs, or to rinse herself out with lukewarm water. Or train a shower head on herself, but not from too close. And she didn’t dare touch it, not even with the tip of her tongue, because she felt she would immediately drink it up, would bite into it, would have to suck his blood from it. Although she felt better, she still hadn’t told the whole story she had started telling him, and she had cramps in her womb. The story continued in the empty shower room of her boarding school.

Another time.

When Irénke returned.

She was brushing him with her thick pubic hair, rubbed her clitoris against him, plastered herself on him, but then decided to use her tongue and dug and swept around and into the testicles, with her lips smearing saliva and their other, intermingled excretions, but she did not take the cock into her mouth.

She licked it all around, as if her tongue were taking a stroll. This was no game and did not seem playful. Two sorts of compulsions were appearing at once and with equal force.

She feared for him and she feared her own bloodthirsty desire. And for long, hysterically intense seconds, like a leech, she stuck firmly to the man’s flesh. The truth was that, if only because of Irénke, she didn’t dare take this cock into her mouth. Instead, she bit into the man’s shoulder, at several places into his hard stomach and in the crook of his thigh; she was chewing on him.

And, as if returning to his weakest point, which she had discovered for herself ages ago, she took little bites in the firm chest muscles at the base of his armpit.

Stimulated by the bites, the chest muscles grew taut, the man kept wincing, the muscles of his ass and shoulders contracted spasmodically, his entire body was rebelling, except for the soles of his feet, his loins, and the marrow of his spine. As if begging for mercy, he shouted, no, don’t, and to curb his volume he bit his lip. He would have found it shameful to admit to so much pleasure. He failed to notice that what was happening was the very opposite of what he had decided should be happening. Because, though he did not surrender to the sensual pain and he managed to regain his cock for a moment, which felt very good, with his cock in the powerful heat of his palm, after a long absence, he found his way back to himself. He wanted to keep it, be able to control it, pamper it, cover it, protect it, but in the next instant it became clear he had to grab it and hold it in his fist so the woman, its real possessor, could lower herself on it more safely.

Though she barely touched it.

She could open herself that wide. Then what was she talking about his being too big for her.

And she didn’t let him go completely inside her, as if her intense heat, smoothness, and depth could not possibly be filled up.

At this moment, they both seemed preoccupied more with themselves than with each other. They were sharply separated, maintaining only their contact points; they barely had anything to do with each other even though, in effect, their autonomy had dissolved completely, had ceased to exist. They consciously followed what was happening to them, but the person or persons involved in whatever was occurring seemed far ahead, with them following at a distance. As if they both had a hitherto unknown other self. Their wills also preceded them; only afterward would they say that that was exactly, precisely, how they wanted it. Now they both clearly understood that their own separate bodies were for the most part incapable of union, and something entirely different had, independently of them, already managed to unite.

That is what they both now comprehended.

Listen, this is painful, really, not pleasant at all, the man kept repeating; he would have gladly fled the sight before him, but for now could only paw and finger helplessly the light, hard, incredibly flexible and nimble body in his search for a handhold on something he considered familiar.

Why not put it on my mouth instead, he moaned. I probably did wreck you, I’m sorry about that. Forgive me, he moaned desperately. Please, give it here, I’ll make it all better.

But Gyöngyvér could not be stopped. As if she hadn’t understood what the other one wanted.

Or perhaps she really did not hear him because her body, home of hearing and seeing, was already very far from her. After all, it was the first time that something she wanted had happened, she had initiated, or would have wanted from a man. Or she remained in the boarding-school shower room with her memories, and used Irénke’s sweet tongue and sharp little teeth to penetrate herself and the man. For years, if she wanted to, this little tongue could make her feel like a princess; her devoted servants never looked, because they never had to, for what she wanted, they always knew her wishes. This awareness made her open up, rise high above him, with her labia barely touching the swelling crown of his penis as she arched over and bent down from the heights toward the man’s darkly shining upper body.

She gave back to the man what she had received from the girl.

The man’s beauty filled her eyes, a kind of pleasing proportion her loins could find by themselves. She was brimming with burgeoning praise. She just reached him with her lips. She sucked and patted his strong nipples with her tongue. That’s how she extracted an advance on his cock. She bit down, pulled on him, twice, quickly, which made the defenseless man cry out again. And he would have thrust into her harder but she did not let him. Like a spring, she was bouncing above him, enjoying his obstinacy. She was conducting him with a triple-beat rhythm that radiated humor and jollity.

This brave jollity, for which there was no substitute, she had also borrowed from Irénke.

It certainly wasn’t usual for her, and never with a man. She barely allowed the stubborn head of his cock to touch her clitoris — the second beat; it could just slip inside her vagina — the third, closing cadence. She was filling herself up not with his physical bigness, but with a rhythm of sharply separable beats and chords.

And then it started from the beginning, mercilessly, brutally; everything all over again. She became like a martinet who enjoys depriving a person in her charge of all means of resistance. Later it became clear why she hadn’t taken it into her mouth.

Come on, let me have it, repeated the man impatiently, give it here, as if he were truly thirsty for it, though he knew he had no hope his wish would be granted. Please, I want to do it with my tongue, my mouth, I’ll heal it for you.

He was also driven by a wish, a secret unavoidable thought like a visionary promise of relief, to take back some of his sperm from the woman. To suck and swallow some of it, while it was still possible, to scoop out the last drops with his tongue.

But Gyöngyvér had no intention of obeying him. For some reason she was certain the man was merely trying to trick her. And she was enjoying the hitherto unknown circumstance. She had the upper hand.

She wanted to hear him say he wanted her cunt. She wanted to force the word out of him.

Tell me what you want so much, come on, spell it out.

I won’t say it, moaned the man, I won’t.

Then how would I know what you want to heal.

Don’t tell me you don’t understand.

I don’t care how, in Italian, German, any language, just please say it. And she added angrily, in a low voice, like a person taking her full revenge, if it’s all the same to you.

Her sudden anger, which she underscored with a movement deviating from the guiding rhythm of her vagina, might have had to do with her lack of diligence in learning foreign languages; she’d begun to dabble in German and simultaneously studied Italian, but she bogged down around the tenth lesson. She didn’t even know what cunt was in Italian or German, though she could hardly expect to have a singer’s career without mastery of these languages.

If I’m doing something you don’t like, let me up, replied the man, who didn’t understand what was going on and would have liked to shove her off. If it’s all the same to you, find somebody else, and right away too. Or let’s see what you can do on your own.

A little while ago you wouldn’t let me talk. But this is what I wanted to tell you.

I prefer watching it to listening to it.

She did not respond. Unlike their aroused emotions and urge to quarrel, their loins remained indifferent. And it had never occurred to her to touch herself while a man was watching. Things like that were among her most closely guarded secrets, and she was about to share one with him. And she had never before talked, or been talked to, in the midst of lovemaking, about anything. Suddenly she was gripped by the unexpected realization that for hours, for days, or for who knows how long they’d been talking while making love without her truly noticing it. She didn’t understand herself or the situation; she had no idea who this other person was with whom everything became so distorted and transformed. It seemed impossible that everything could be so different. She thought it was positively repulsive.

She rose along with him, as if fleeing, wanting at the same time to lean over him. And while she sucked his nipple again and cautiously bit its hardened tip, she very lightly drew her vagina across the head of his penis. She was being careful that the man should feel nothing of what was coursing through her own body, the many unsettling thoughts, the alternating hot and cold excitement in her back and thigh muscles. Still, she gave the man the impression that she was bidding farewell to him gently and discreetly. At the same time, he couldn’t possibly penetrate her more deeply or fiercely; alarmed, he realized there was nothing he could do. He wanted to catch up with her; she mustn’t go away. Now he wanted to cause pain. With his entire body, with his hips, with the huge raised and contracted muscles of his buttocks, he jerked, convulsed, and thrust himself into her several times in succession. Several decades of fear and anxiety would have been concentrated in these spasms if the pleasure of violence had not dissolved them. And the woman understood this, precisely: he found himself very close to the moment when standing on the sunny steps at the boarding school he had called after his father, begging him not to leave him there alone. Because she felt the importance of that moment, she did not allow the man’s violent thrusts to enter her. She sensed unerringly the peaks of his unassimilated torments, the heights he aspired to, his frustrated desires. And as if propelling herself up from the familiar depths of sunshine-illuminated water, with her taut body spanning the distance between the riverbed and the faraway surface, she found, among her own images, a simile for what she felt emanating from the man. With a ready-to-bounce straddle above him, she was protecting him, giving him a home, and opening an umbrella over him, but when the man approached she moved away; if he wanted to withdraw she lowered herself on him a little, but never sat completely into him.

Ágost grasped her waist with both his hands roughly to yank her back.

I don’t want to force you, don’t make me, he hissed.

If you’re not going to say it, don’t expect anything.

You mean anything good.

That’s right, nothing good.

We can check who has more power over the other. Who’s stronger.

That’s all we need.

For a fraction of a second they looked at each other as enemies. In this look, the woman was stronger; no doubt about it. Which revealed many things both retroactively and in advance. And this sensation destroyed many illusions, bringing them crashing down from their heights, yet everything was made lighter by the prevailing state of swoonlike unconsciousness. Still they wrestled, as if fighting for their lives. Their bodies were pervaded by the trembling and pulsing of the earth’s bowels, which slowly began to shake the house, the air, the walls, windowpanes, bed, vibrating above their skin and throbbing painfully in their eardrums. They both unleashed their forces: their wounded pride, their loneliness, all the offenses suffered and everything that during four days had accumulated like waste in their muscles and strained their nerves; like dogs, they set on each other in their mutual admiration, but this had nothing to do with fighting.

Devour it all, if you still can.

Their beastliness opened up new liberating and unknown layers of pleasure. And a huge open throat was approaching them, gaping and belching, infernally rattling, coming from far away with an even, continuous clatter, a persistent hum.

It will swallow them. Gyöngyvér knew the noise well, which Ágost could not have known.

Still, in this situation she found herself unprepared. As if, with its terrifying teeth, it were crawling out of the deepest bottom of the night now covering the entire world. An infernal signal to which she had paid no heed until now. A heavenly signal. Their limbs and other parts were merging and submerging in one another. With their tongues, wide-open lips, teeth, and gums they were inching forward in each other and they not only searched but also found, yet couldn’t say just what.

The major bombardments during the siege of Budapest fortunately spared the buildings of Újlipótváros, there were hardly any direct artillery hits in the area, though during the intense street fighting the building fronts with their balconies, loggias, and conservatories did suffer some damage.*

Now, in the light of streetlamps, shaded by the foliage of large trees, the many small marks of the damage could not be seen.

Mrs. Szemző enjoyed the familiar summer fragrances and could see the scene as if she were walking through it twenty-five years before. Friendly lights shone in the windows. At this hour, traffic was still busy here. Around open entrance gates youngsters were idling, couples were strolling hand in hand, or were just returning from Margit Island with their noisy children armed with scooters, rubber balls, and small tricycles. Gyöngyvér had erred somewhat, it was just past nine o’clock. The number 15 streetcar, which never had more than one car as far as anyone could remember, made its rounds between Váci Road and Lipót Boulevard, which later became Szent István Boulevard. It still made the same loud clatter on the tracks embedded in hard ceramic bricks, and the noise still reverberated between the unadorned, smooth walls of the surrounding buildings.

However, this approaching deep rumble did not come from the passing streetcar.

On the far side of the massive blocks of the Palatinus buildings, built in the teens of the century, somewhere from the direction of Margit Island a tugboat was approaching, and its dreadful noise spread across the water, shaking even the stone-lined riverbed, and filtered through the side streets and between the buildings. Anyone living in this quarter of the city had become used to the noises that came from, passed across, and slowly died away over the river.

In the evening, in this section of the city, people went for walks either down to the river or to window-shop on Lipót Boulevard. Mrs. Szemző did not mind having missed the streetcar. She often crossed the bridge to Buda, went along the chestnut-tree-lined Margit dock, and made her way back on the Lánc Bridge. In the evenings, she usually took a leisurely walk to Szent István Park nearby, where one of her friends, like herself, had had a large apartment since the mid-1930s. She took the streetcar only if it rained. Back in those ancient days, their company would meet once a week in Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment; after the war they met more often and since the 1956 revolution almost every evening, except when they went to a concert or the opera, together or separately, but never fewer than four times a week. The concierge had warned them, bickering with them every early morning, that begging the countess’s pardon, but he wasn’t willing to go on with this gate-opening at the crack of dawn, and he would report to the housing authority that he wouldn’t go on with it. This was considered a rather serious threat, but they enjoyed the fact that no one could tell them what to do anymore, not even the concierge, or at least that his complaint would result in nothing because those days were over or perhaps soon would be over.

Yet the countess did not forgive him his early-morning unpleasantnesses. Occasionally, and bluntly, she gave him a piece of her mind.

Listen to me, Varga, she would say, thrusting a twenty-forint bill into the man’s hand. I’ve already told you, you have two choices. Either you politely open the gate for my guests, no grumbling, or you give me a key and I’ll open the gate myself.

Which the concierge would not risk, and not necessarily for the reason he gave the countess.

It was indeed strictly forbidden to let tenants have a key to the main entrance or the elevator.

He could have ignored this prohibition, but he feared losing the extra twenty- and hundred-forint bills he managed to extort with his grumbles.

Who needs a gin fizz, asked Mária Szapáry casually as she came in from the kitchen.

She stopped under the too-bright ceiling lamp.

I’ve got a lemon, for a change.

The two women whom she was addressing were deep in conversation outside in the dark, by the railing of the enormous rooftop terrace.

One of them, wearing a blue, abundantly shirred calico skirt, a rather rustic starched snow-white blouse with leg-of-mutton-sleeves, with a red coral necklace on her daring décolletage and a wide soft-leather belt at her waist, the ensemble giving her a strongly theatrical appearance, turned irritably and, with her eternal smile, replied.

We don’t need anything, that’s for sure, Mária, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t mind a gin fizz.

Same here, called the other woman, who, despite her finely patterned, richly cascading dark silk dress, seemed a more modest and insignificant person.

The gin fizz meant that they were again living the way one should live in peaceful conditions.

They could afford all sorts of superfluous things.

Their bare elbows touched lightly on the railing. Until now they had been talking not to each other but into the darkness, to themselves. They were both past sixty, but their postures retained their former elegance, in which there was not only diligently invested hard work — they exercised, hiked, swam at the Lukács Baths in the morning — but also some deception. They began their evening easily and always saw to their appearances, but the tension between them was noticeable. That peculiar antagonism or irritability that aging people provoke in one another. The strict rules of card-playing kept them from speaking much. They spared each other their daily worries and, to reveal as little as possible of these efforts, paid great attention to their attire and their enduring smiles. By the wee hours, however, they grew heavy, their makeup wore off, and in the heat of the card games their hair became mussed, which they didn’t even bother to fix. By then it would have been superfluous to talk about anything.

They looked at the third woman, without having to be ashamed of anything.

The glass wall of their hostess’s big living room was kept wide open from spring to fall.

Surrendering to the splendid view, every evening they would stroll out on the terrace for some fresh air and to exchange a few confidential words. Now, however, they paid no attention to the city, which with its glittering lamps and bridges barely registered on their absentmindedly contemplative countenances. Southward, one could see all the way to Gellért Mountain; to the north, though, past the island sunk in darkness, the bleak shadow of the Árpád Bridge was hovering above the river, shining metallically with the reflection of arc lights, and beyond that was nocturnal wilderness. The lowlands of Fót, where artillery fires had first flared in December 1944 and seemed so close that people hadn’t known whether to be hopeful or fearful. They were talking quietly into the space before them, cutting into each other’s monologue with unguarded words and sweet, almost dutiful smiles; their gaze roamed over the ridges of the Buda hills, resting occasionally on the range’s distant peaks blending softly into one another.

There, in the west, where later the front moved on, something of the twilight red was still shining, making the mass of mountains glimmer in dark blue; their eyes were drawn to the meeting of light and darkness.

The noisy little tugboat, towing at least six linked and fully loaded barges upstream, had just reached the pillars of the Margit Bridge, and there, between the pillars, the engine noise was so compacted and amplified that involuntarily the two women raised their voices.

A truly brilliant idea, Mária, continued the woman in the silk dress, almost shouting, but I think we should wait for Irma. We could invent a little holiday for her. Let’s say the festival of lemon blossoms or something like that.

The card table waited for them at the open terrace door; around it, four hard-backed and probably not very comfortable chairs, to the side a tea trolley on which Mária Szapáry put a pastry tray as she raised her eyes, surprised and mistrustful, to the two women on the terrace.

The faience clinked on the glass surface.

Is something wrong, she asked. You probably came with bad news again, didn’t you.

The two women on the terrace exchanged glances, losing their smiles. They had no secrets from each other, and if they did they couldn’t keep them. But with Mária Szapáry they had to communicate differently.

No, nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong, nothing whatsoever, replied the woman in the silk dress, her voice rather colorless. We were just mulling over something that has to do with Irma, actually.

I don’t really know what to do, added the other woman, who, because of strong French cigarettes or perhaps naturally, had a slightly rasping voice but a most contagious smile.

The breeze coming off the river caught the tiny funnels of the freshly watered white and mauve petunias hanging in abundance from the terrace railing and gently wafted the sweet fragrance into the spacious, almost empty apartment. Mária Szapáry would be put out if her friends spoiled her good mood. The summer evening was too lovely.

The fragrance of the petunias did not overwhelm the stench of carrion that, try as she might, she could not but imagine smelling. Neither could she pretend she did not sense the tension in the other women.

I’d be grateful if you shared it with me, she said, slightly irritated at her own politeness, as if declaring right off that maybe they shouldn’t and please don’t expect any advice from me, she couldn’t offer advice about anything, anyway. She wore wide, gray linen trousers that seemed rather tight across her belly, and white, yellow-soled, down-at-heel linen shoes. Her white blouse, with long sleeves rolled up to her elbows, looked more like a well-worn man’s shirt. In her nonchalant appearance, there was something quite masculine, strong and free, or, at least by common conventional standards, something blatantly not feminine. As if nothing compulsory in her wider surroundings had ever affected her. She took a step toward the other two. Never a piece of jewelry on her, never any makeup. They weren’t to think she wanted to stick her nose into things. She had two quick and characteristic movements for fixing her heavily graying short-cropped hair, parted in the middle: constantly brushing it off her forehead, and tucking it behind her ears to keep it from falling forward, which it always did, immediately. Perhaps this was her only visibly compulsive habit.

She wouldn’t want to know more than required by common courtesy.

If the name Erna Demén means anything to you, said the woman of festive appearance and contagious smile with her deep, rasping voice. The belt on her surprisingly slim waist was fiery red; her name was Margit Huber, though among themselves the women called her Médi.

Oh but it does, cried Mária Szapáry, surprised. If we are speaking of the same secondhand junk dealer.

Your memory is rather selective as to her human qualities, noted the woman in the silk dress, who, though no shorter than the other two, was ethereal, slight, delicate, all nervous tendons and fine long muscles.

They all laughed.

Sometimes one is too vulnerable out of self-interest, en fait, came Szapáry’s contrite reply.

Supposedly, Irma as a little girl was often their guest. In their manor house in Jászhanta or some such place.

Yes, the Deméns did have a place like that as far as I know, Szapáry replied wryly.

But your family had no contact with them.

There was a brief silence. This your family was a topic that they, for lack of a shared background, could not touch. Or rather, that caused certain difficulties, created unspoken tensions among them.

I don’t think there was an opportunity, replied Szapáry in a tone that forbade more inquiry.

Irmuska would stay with them only a few days, added Margit Huber quickly, to take the edge off the embarrassment.

The question was indeed improper; how could they have had any contact with a Jewish landowner.

At least that was Erna’s story, that they really knew each other. Still, Margit Huber did not want to force the issue.

You must have been puzzled by such an unexpected telephone call, interjected the woman in the silk dress, hoping to clarify the situation. She’d quickly seen that their hostess was furious.

Her transparently blue eyes grew dark, she strained her thick neck, on her aggressively white skin red splotches appeared.

For god’s sake, what on earth are we talking about anyway, she thundered. I don’t understand anything, and now she blushed from her neck to her forehead. I have the feeling you’re being incoherent on purpose.

What we’re talking about is that Erna had a daughter who was taken away in October 1944, said the friend with the rasping voice in the softest possible tone. I guess during the same days when they took you away too. And the girl never turned up.

I see. I didn’t know about that, forgive me. I seem to remember she had a son in Switzerland.

The clattering and puffing of the tugboat on the river could be heard coming closer and closer.

For a few long seconds she sensed in her eardrums, in her loins, and in her throat that it wasn’t just some clattering and puffing she was hearing, but a steady, unavoidable throbbing. All her self-discipline was inadequate; she could not bear them — these unexpected blows. Just when she thought it was going to be a nice summer evening. In truth, she was surrounded and could resist no longer, she’d be swallowed up for good. This insane throbbing was nothing but a new yet long-familiar warning.

She was a first-year student at the faculty of arts, had her hair in braids, wore knee socks, continued Margit Huber, her raspy voice easily rising over the dreadful din of the tugboat, as if only she, with her smile, could trek safely across this difficult terrain.

Erna thought it was important to mention the braids and knee-socks, but I can’t tell you why, I really can’t. I myself knew nothing of all this. What can I tell you: the last time I saw them must have been in ’thirty-eight, when I came back here from Berlin. And even then it was only for a few minutes. Yes, her daughter refused to cut off her braids even after finishing school. She was a deeply devout soul, preferred to wear pleated skirts with her middy blouse.

She was arrested along with four others for some insignificant matter about organizing a few people, some childish thing, and she was taken to the Majestic.

She wanted to sound casual when mentioning this Majestic because she knew that Mária Szapáry too, after her arrest in 1944, had been taken to this Gestapo villa on Sváb Mountain.

Through the boarded-up window of her cell, she heard the cogwheel train when it stopped at the Művész Road station and then moved on. On the second day, judging by the sounds, she figured out where she was. Margit Huber waited a moment, watching, mesmerized, the features of their hostess. She had been beaten there, in the Majestic, several times. But she said nothing. Filled with indifferent anticipation, her lips trembling uncooperatively, she raised her strong eyebrows.

A week later, they took them to Berlin, as Erna Demén tells it, straight to Alexanderplatz. They wanted to make a big deal of the whole thing. Until Berlin, there were others, but afterward there was only one eyewitness, she continued, according to whom Erna’s daughter was sent off in a transport to Ravensbrück. They left no stone unturned. Dr. Lehr, of course, had connections with everybody, including the Nazis.

That’s the girl’s story in a nutshell.

But now there’s new information, said the woman in the silk dress, taking over the story, that the girl and Irmus were together, allegedly, in the Helmbrecht death march.

Oh, no.

Yes.

It must be a misunderstanding, or a fatal error.

And now all three of them realized it would be important to come up with some plan before Irma Szemző arrived. Whether they should burden her with this news, or should wait, perhaps slowly preparing her for the task that for humanitarian reasons could not be avoided, or should hold their peace. Mária Szapáry turned stubborn; not only was the matter not that urgent, but she did not even understand it. As if saying both yes and no, she swayed her large head, consolidating her stubborn silence.

Whenever conversation strayed to such topics, she’d keep quiet. Immediately after the siege of Budapest, they had giggled together about the most absurd things. But as the years passed, although nothing changed she found it harder and harder to talk about old issues; no matter whether some receded and some she forgot, she couldn’t do it. Her throat, her nose, perhaps the mucous membrane on the roof of her mouth preserved the stench of carrion. Her mind filled only with things one could not possibly speak about in a normal voice.

The sled with the ropes, whatever happened to the sled which they’d used to move the frozen Russian corpses. And she had never told anyone — except Médi, once — that she had raised her reflex camera above her head, hadn’t even leaned over the terrace railing, had clung to the wall sheathed in smooth cream-colored sheets of artificial stone so that nobody would see her, and had taken pictures for three consecutive days.

The pictures included ones of the dry pool of Szent István Park into which people were herded, and the yellow-tiled roadway on which the different groups were led away. What occurred to her now was that perhaps she had seen a girl with braids in the cellar of the Majestic, even though she’d seen no girl there with or without braids. I did not see her. I only saw the crudely whitewashed brick wall in the corridor. As though she had to keep apologizing. She’d never developed the negative, but kept them in the false-bottom drawer of the huge warped, buckling baroque escritoire.

She could not fathom what this miserable Démen woman could possibly want to know about these events, what she was so curious about. What would she do with her knowledge if she gained any, how would she gain. Why should she be helped. But one could not say this out loud, and because she knew she couldn’t say anything, not even to these friends, she could once again smell the sweet fragrance of the petunias. She said nothing about the sweet stench of carrion. And she also remained silent about how every year she compulsively planted, nurtured, and watered her flowers, but then at the end ripped them out of the dirt by their roots.

This has been the only trace she’s managed to come upon for years. I shouldn’t think she’s obsessed, but for her this is at least something practical to hold on to.

This is a colossal stupidity. What practical, what hold on to. This woman, this Erna of yours, she may not be a nutcase, but she’s not bright. No point in deceiving her, which you also know very well, my dear Médi, she said, speaking loudly to counter Margit Huber’s strong voice.

What can I do, she asked me to bring them together. I too think it’s stupid, but how can I get out of it. Ravensbrück is only an hour from Berlin. But from there she should have gotten first to Flossenbürg, or anywhere. All this sounds rather improbable, as she well knows. She’s asked many questions and looked into the matter in many places, no such transports appeared on any train schedules, still she has to hear it with her own ears.

Well, that’s what she said, and I can’t say more.

If we were to bring them together, and that’s what we were talking about, interjected the woman in the silk dress, who had a harder time overcoming the tugboat noise, then we’ll never dig Irmuska out of the pit.

Don’t be so sure. Sometimes she speaks of her own free will and you can hardly make her stop.

Simultaneously Mária Szapáry kept repeating, no, no, there’s nothing left but nonexistent cases. After twenty years there’s not a single trace left, nothing. Let’s understand each other, my love, this may well end up being one of the nonexistent cases. That’s what we’re looking at. You should have told her, listen, dear Erna, I understand you, but Irmuska doesn’t remember a thing. Nothing. And don’t worry, my dear Belluka, we won’t have to dig her out of anything. I won’t have her remembering anything. There is no pit. It’s all over. Twenty years later, there’s no need to remember.

Math was never your strong point, Mária. Let’s stay with fifteen.

All right, but what should we do, asked the worried friend in the silk dress, that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to come up with, what to do.

Oh come on, let’s not be ridiculous.

Well, I tell you, sweet Belluka, replied Mária Szapáry slowly, as if addressing a retarded person.

She wasn’t beautiful even when young, but she made many conquests with her smile and the power emanating from her body. With her healthy, pretty teeth, the well-defined arc of her lips, and the domed shiny forehead that commanded her entire face.

Let’s go to the kitchen and make gin fizzes. That’s all we can do, and, just as you’ve suggested, we’ll celebrate the festival of lemon blossoms or squash blossoms or whatever.

Nonetheless, she could not curb her seething and unaccountable anger, directed alternately against the others and herself, with these remarks. She burst out; she was beside herself; a horrific grin remained from her laughter when she began to yell, bringing sounds up from the depths. The vehemence of which surprised the two other women.

Would you just shut up, just this once, would you. Am I understood. I won’t have you screaming all sorts of nonsense in this infernal noise.

I beg your pardon, no one was screaming.

Besides, no one asked permission to scream.

Is it impossible for you to grasp that I can’t stand this noise, she asked, hissing. And you’ll do as I tell you to, she yelled, I hope that’s clear.

She turned on her heel and took off at a run in her huge apartment, the footfalls of her yellow-soled steps resounding. If the doors had not been open, she might have bashed into one or cracked her head on another. And sheepishly the two others followed. This made Margit Huber really angry. Ahead of her went the frightened woman in the silk dress, whom Mária Szapáry liked to call either my sweet or Belluka when she wanted to convey criticism of the slender woman’s mental abilities; the woman’s actual name was Izabella Dobrovan. Hungarians, full of their own language, were often nonplussed when hearing this decidedly un-Hungarian name, and Izabella was used to this response, which she’d observed even as a child. Slovak was her mother tongue, and she still had an accent, though only people who knew she wasn’t Hungarian would notice how she made her vowels a bit too large; to forestall questions or jests about her name, when being introduced she would often remark, my family is from the Felvidék*; sometimes she’d give this explanation even before saying her name.

But then at least tell us what on earth you want, she kept exclaiming irritably, loud enough to be heard over the pounding footsteps and creaking parquet floors, how on earth should we know what you want.

Making such a senseless scene for no good reason, Margit Huber shouted after them, but she could not stop them and did not want to. If she had no explanation for what they’d gone through in the past decades, if there was no explanation for even a single day, how could there be a sensible reason for this angry outburst. Still, they followed each other across all sorts of emotional swamps because they understood each other better than they did others. To the extent, of course, that one can follow another person or see into her soul. From which it did not follow, given her upbringing, that she would accept everything. She should have resisted, perhaps even with her body, the offended yet forgiving effusion with which Dobrovan had taken off after their friend. She felt they were both repugnant, as was the entire scene, including the role she had cast herself in. One of them was too impetuous and aggressive, the other unbearably emotional.

First, they hurried across a large room that Mária Szapáry used as a workshop, then across the foyer that led to a rather narrow, long connecting corridor where, in the trapped warm air of summer evening, they could smell a dense stale odor of food coming from the kitchen. Wherever they went the lights were on, which particularly irritated Margit Huber. But she usually didn’t let herself turn off the lights to appease her penchant for frugality, and the opportunities for doing so were rare, because every evening Mária Szapáry herded them into her living room with broad and inviting movements and clearly did not take kindly to anyone leaving it for any reason.

She was very strange about this. They laughed at her, saying she suffered from a persecution complex.

She always left all the doors open, the lights on everywhere, and though she never told anyone what to do or where not to go, she kept the other well-seen, well-lit, bare rooms strictly off-limits. If someone showed some independence or had to go to the toilet, she’d get nervous and follow the delinquent with her eyes through the empty rooms; worse, she’d keep calling after her.

No matter how good friends they were, they only laughed or teased each other about such peculiarities, and they never dug down deep, never asked questions. Not only did they refrain from kissing or hugging each other, ever, but they also weren’t keen on telling other people that they were good friends.

Perhaps they didn’t think they were.

Their noses were assailed not only by the odor of stale food but also by that of a brimming garbage can left uncovered and dirty dishes unwashed for days, perhaps weeks, which took up every horizontal surface in the kitchen; they towered on top of the stove, filled the sink, and were piled in wobbly pyramids on the kitchen stools and the huge, hewn kitchen table, which must have come from a liquidated country estate.

Excuse me, but this is outrageous. What is going on here, asked Margit Huber, greatly surprised, as she stood in the doorway.

The tugboat noise reached this far into the apartment with its rapid little throbs.

You don’t have a cleaning woman again, I presume, said Izabella, as if to express indignation.

Not only that, but the beast with her smelly flesh left me without a word of good-bye, grumbled Mária, and, finding no appropriate glasses in the cabinets, she began rummaging in the sink, full of dirty dishes. So don’t aggravate me with this too, now.

A good two weeks have gone by since then, if I’m not mistaken.

It’s rather dangerous in such heat.

She hadn’t before, but now she knew where to look for the glasses. Still, because of her anger, the task was beyond her strength. Though evidently she had worked herself artificially into this state, there appeared no way out of it, and she did not quite understand this. She was playing a role for the others’ benefit, which helped a bit to protect her from them. At such times, one appears to oneself as a stranger within oneself.

She must break through herself.

They’re here, of course they’re here, rotten little things, on the bottom, she kept exclaiming, to help control herself, where else would they be, but she could restrain her outburst only with another one. Why in the name of heaven and hell haven’t I moved out of this damn apartment.

I don’t myself understand it.

The two women still in the doorway said nothing; this new turn of events silenced them. Because they both knew there was someone else besides them in the apartment, a woman much younger than they. She either lay in bed or, wrapped in a blanket, sat on the terrace, living an unchanging vegetative existence. The door of her room was closed most of the time, and if there was a reason why after the war Mária Szapáry could not move from the apartment, it was this sick woman or, as others referred to her, her sick girlfriend.

They came here every evening so Mária wouldn’t have to leave the young woman alone.

The dirty dishes in the sink clattered and slid about under her hands. Bella started to make a move to help her but then changed her mind.

Maybe because of Elisa, Margit Huber started to say, cautiously yet emphatically, in a different voice; she knew she was going too far with this tentative comment.

Perhaps it would cause a change in her condition. I mean a negative change, if I may say.

She had barely spoken when Mária Szapáry was ready with a withering look. But that couldn’t stop her, so Margit Huber quieted down only gradually. Two such rotten women. Daring to stick their noses into her most jealously guarded secrets.

In fact, she had no guarded secrets from them. At most there were certain things they never talked about, and their mutual silence had its own strict logic and a well-founded moral base.

I’m going to burst.

The meaning of so many things in this world is simply incomprehensible, and very little can be comprehended with the help of knowledge.

She was raving, but not without method, which dictated the clatter and clinking of dishes under her hands, enamel knocking against metal, glass against china. She continued to carry on in a small, almost shrunken voice, which of course could be construed as a seal of their friendship, and she finally found two tall glasses. She could never have let herself do anything like this in front of other people. She knew she was being unjust, but with whom else might she be unjust. The glasses had dried shreds of lemon on their opaque sides, lemon pits embedded in ossified sugar on the bottoms. She had to permit this injustice in order to feel the pain of what hurt so much and of what she could never really share with anyone ever. In her lucid moments, she was very grateful. That they were here, around her, these increasingly vulnerable women, still like little girls in their pain. One after the other, she fished out the two glasses with one hand and, remembering exactly where the third one was in the pile, supported the raised dishes with her other hand.

Elisa has no condition, please understand that once and for all, she muttered. She never had and will not have a condition. Condition, ha. And there can be no change in her condition either. Besides, she’s the last person who gives me trouble or any reason to worry.

I don’t understand how an innocent question can be so misunderstood.

Unless it’s done intentionally.

Only you two give me anything to worry about. Or the simple fact that I haven’t moved out of this rotten apartment. Why can’t I get free. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand this infernal noise.

Why am I still here.

Rotten would have been a valid and justified word to describe other parts of Budapest, but not the clean, well-landscaped, and relatively well maintained Újlipótváros. And the adjective was inappropriate even if one hadn’t forgotten the terrible things that happened in Szent István Park and on the Újpest docks in the winter of 1944. Or how they unloaded frozen bodies from the bed of a truck at the same place in November 1956, yes, at the very same place. And it wasn’t the noise, not by a long shot. And moved out means out of the country, and the apartment means, perhaps, this miserable world. And her anger is her way of asking where would she go.

At this moment, Margit Huber finally understood that Mária was tormented by a compassion that had grown to gigantic proportions. As soon as she understood this, she knew instantly how to respond. Although first she once again had to overcome her stifling jealousy of Irma and, mainly, Elisa. She was always having to overcome it. Mária hadn’t had two children who were murdered. This burden she does not bear. She wasn’t taken away, but only watched helplessly when others were. The burden had been not intended for her. She hadn’t had a cerebral hemorrhage in her youth, needed no medical care, and therefore she cannot count on anybody’s compassion.

Of course, what she said out loud was not what she was thinking. If only because her jealousy was the least important element in the situation.

For eight years she had worked as a vocal coach at the Berlin Opera and then for twenty at the Budapest Opera House. She had firm notions about the inner logic of hysterical outbursts of temper; about how, with the help of her own smile, she might guide the singers in her charge along the path of first taming and eventually controlling their emotions. Only with maniacal repetition can they uncover the dark depths of their fears, and when there is no way back from a repetition, one must pounce. They explicitly expect, wish, and demand that she go with them; they want to pull her in, entangle her nerves in their own, and with the strength of their frenzy pull her down to the depths with them. She’d smile, though she felt no sympathy for them. In this, she was helped by the fact that people instinctively want to be free of the little pains that others cause, and she helped herself with the unbroken armor of her smile. She rarely came close to succeeding, but when she did, she was able to explode her hysteria, which filled her with bursts of satisfaction and gave her smile added meaning.

But the professional, technical means of arresting and utilizing hysteria were for her almost more important. The connections between dramatic strength and breathing, their effects, credibility, proportions, expressive techniques — these means that were exclusively her and the singers’ domain.

Later, these studied components could be consulted as a professionally developed collection of paradigms.

When she stopped, lowered and condensed the column of air inside her, it changed the posture of her impressive body.

Among themselves, her friends referred to her as Brünhilde or Krimhilde, expressing their adverse admiration for her, their yearning fear. They had become inseparable friends on Veres Pálné Street, at the most venerable girls’ school in Budapest, famed for its liberalism; and they also knew Erna Demén from this school. Where in classes of fifty, poor girls and rich, middle-class and aristocrat, German and Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish, all studied together; already then they admired Margit, in whom lurked a strange, large-bodied woman blessed with an enormous smile. In summer, her blondness turned literally to whiteness, but the sun did not harm her skin, and the girls had much to delight in when looking at her.

Starting in the late 1920s, when women began to sunbathe freely, she shed her clothes and pranced about wildly in the joy of absorbing the sunshine, tanning her bare body to dark brown. Men had very little to do with this, just as earlier she had not been charmed by the shy stares of boys. Today, the crown of snow-white hair that radiated above her shiny brown forehead had of course lost some of its firmness. Her eyes glittered brightly when she — carefully, from a lower register, hitting her warmest timbre, with deep resonance and increasing power — made her column of air sing out.

You know, don’t you, Mária, that you’re talking nonsense. How could you move out of here, and where could you move to with Elisa, for God’s sake. But all that aside, why on earth do you have to move from here anyway. You can’t be moving all the time just because your house fills up with dirty dishes. Just wash them, damn it.

After the last phrase, which hung in the air between them, and there was no stronger swearword than this among these friends, Margit allowed a short pause. In her next sentence she meant to raise the volume considerably and give the timbre another twist. The sentence would be long, complicated, the loudness making the articulation harder. In such cases, tongue and lips must shape each and every syllable most precisely.

The only reason you may have pangs of conscience, and there’s no other reason, is that you don’t talk decently to your servants.

To this dramatically enunciated declaration, Mária responded with a laugh. How do you know that. She was giggling.

How do I know, I’ve heard you enough. If you learned how to talk to them, they wouldn’t be leaving you all the time. Damn it, why can’t you make the effort. That’s the only thing you should have qualms about.

She wanted to take the burden off her shoulders.

Though she became ridiculous with these voice-coach techniques.

And indeed she did remove it.

The way she meted out, artificially increased, and then reduced the volume of her voice, the way she puckered her lips vertically to give shape to the words, and the way she never ran out of air, all this held Mária’s attention. Margit flooded Mária with her anxiety, carefully formed in her loins and belly, and the loud, even, slightly rasping throb of her voice involuntarily played counterpoint to the tugboat’s increasing and insidious beats, which reverberated on cobblestones, along subterranean walls, and in dull cellar cavities. As if she were demonstrating the means by which drama can be both intensified and extinguished.

Even when she unashamedly put her substantial, deeply tanned and wrinkled breasts on display as she lifted them and pressed them together, in her bearing there was something profoundly ascetic and humble. Her moral attitude, her appearance, and her work had anointed her as the priestess of her profession, and she elicited devout reverence from her students. Though they couldn’t understand why she smoked so much. When she dispensed those precise portions of air, her feverish flesh undulated and trembled in the frame of her richly embroidered, lace-trimmed, and pleated blouse. To Mária’s critical eyes the more sensual, steamy image proved stronger, even though her resisting body, unnoticed, relaxed and grew peaceful in the currents of that intimately deep voice.

The red, eyelike coral beads danced on the finely trembling necklace.

Delight made her giggle like a little girl. She thought she was laughing at what she was seeing, though in fact it was because of what she was feeling.

To gauge properly one’s actions, one needs a bit of emotional perspective.

She was tittering, enjoying immensely the distance that Médi could open up and then throw a bridge over with her voice.

Being a costume designer, she observed the theatrical banality of Médi’s temperament from the viewpoint of a sister profession; to provide some extra income for herself and Elisa, she worked as a cutter and seamstress for all sorts of minor stars. It was as if she were suddenly saying to herself, but this is great, a white lace blouse over a wrinkled bosom tanned to brown.

But her laughing made the pile of dishes, raised and supported by her arm on the edge of the sink, lose balance and slip.

A red enamel lid was first to slide off, and it seemed to set in motion the rest of the variously sized platters and dessert plates. Clumsily, from the bottom, she reached for the moving dishes with her other hand. She missed, and the dishes went on sliding, gaining momentum on the big chased surfaces of trays. And under all this, a glass broke in her hand, of course; when it cut her finger she cried out and involuntarily gave a forceful shove to the entire pile. Which was followed by a deafening noise. The two women in the doorway moved to jump forward. The clatter, clang, and clangor, and the sliding that in a single second strewed a profusion of bouncing, rolling colorful shards all over the kitchen floor could not be stopped.

Now there was no clear space to which they might jump or advance.

And just as quickly, silence fell over the battlefield.

Rooted, mesmerized, all three stared at the wretched result. Mária, her wounded finger in her mouth, backed away from the shards all the way to the open door to the maid’s room, and the moment she leaned on it, the door slammed against the wall. But what was this sight compared to the devastation they had already seen in their lives. For a few seconds, until the three of them began to laugh, glad that this was nothing compared to the sights in their memory, they could hear the deep, pulsating sound of the tugboat. Though they could also hear in it — in the meantime it had absorbed — another pulsing rhythm. Perhaps another tugboat was approaching. Probably from the opposite direction, from the Árpád Bridge, and the rhythms of the two tugs differed. Mária slid slowly down the smooth door as if pulled by her own weight. And she could have told them that the tugboat has just come abreast of the empty section of the shore in front of the Protestant church on Pozsonyi Road, where it does not echo so loudly.

The only time it was quiet over the river was when it was either frozen or full of drift ice.

You see, Margit Huber bellowed, you see, she chortled, I could have told you it would happen, I saw it, I swear I did.

Oh, let’s see your finger, cried Izabella Dobrovan anxiously, wanting to turn their unsuppressed laughter quickly into sentimental empathy.

It may be a deep cut.

From behind her finger, which she kept sucking, Mária Szapáry cried along with the other two, while shaking with laughter or weeping.

Oh, my entire sixteenth century.

Her mouth filled with the taste of blood. She slid down the door until her buttocks reached the floor. She was clowning for them because she was a little ashamed of her clumsiness and the condition of her kitchen.

My entire sixteenth century is gone.

There she was, legs spread on the kitchen’s checkered tiles, in the midst of the shards that were all that was left of her majolica dishes, true museum-quality dishes from an Urbino workshop, and it was hard to believe that this was, once again, the end of the story.

It wasn’t her finger that hurt.

When someone rang the bell outside, once, briefly, she was thinking that this really wasn’t an act of fate, and it wouldn’t be worth her while to resist it.

Anybody heard the elevator, she asked, and was amazed that she hadn’t heard something she should have.

I haven’t.

No, nothing.

Could she have walked up.

It seems that way.

Should I open it, if you’d like me to, asked Dobrovan politely.

I’ll get it, came Mária’s firm response, but she was in no hurry.

She wouldn’t have trusted them with opening the door; she needed this opportunity.

That evening, Irma Szemző had made it up the stairs very slowly indeed.

She stopped on all the landings, her thoughts repeatedly carrying her away, or more precisely, for long moments she forgot where she was or where she was going. The higher she climbed, the warmer she felt, even though the gallery windows facing the inner courtyard were wide open. The white marble walls were mottled with yellow- and blue-grained pink spots, and there was silence and cleanliness. Today she hadn’t wanted to look at the concierge’s face, swollen by alcohol — and not just because he disgusted her in general. Ultimately, she was one of those people who, though unwilling to be absolutely honest, battle with themselves to become dishonest since they lack the talent for it. Every evening in the spacious, mirrored elevator cabin, Mrs. Szemző would impassively observe the uncertain, soft, slightly flat profile of this man struggling with melancholy; his eternally bowed head, his short, retracted neck, his strong, well-built body which nevertheless projected weakness and from which the sour odor of mental fustiness emanated; when he spoke, the emanation was overwhelmed by his powerfully foul breath.

She observed the essence of his neurosis, scanned his constitution, which accommodated a strangeness bordering on madness, where, one might say, neurosis found an appropriate breeding ground.

Each time she had to tell herself that he was a borderline case, she could not help him.

In 1944, Varga had helped Mária Szapáry, which had meant taking considerable risks. However, he loathed himself for this as if for some weakness.

He hadn’t done it out of conviction.

He had nothing but contempt for the suspicious characters that turned up at Countess Szapáry’s place: wandering Jews, communists and socialists forced to live and work underground, various kinds of deserters; he thought of them as nothing but riffraff. The reason Hungarians are always divided is that they always have these kinds of people among them. People who, like weeds, should be extirpated down to the last one. Varga was an advocate of a firm hand, strict social order, and Hungarian unity. The Germans, their manners smoothed by their racial brutality, and the screeching Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross men, impressed him. After all, they both meant to do only good: to make permanent order at last in this Jewish whorehouse. He himself was a member of a secret patriotic organization that has gone on operating to this day. But Countess Szapáry simply paid him off, bribed him, overwhelmed him, would not let him choose another way. That was his weakness — money and aristocrats of various ranks and orders who in his eyes, after all, did symbolize everything Hungarian, and against whom he felt defenseless.

He couldn’t very well denounce them to the authorities when at the same time, out of greed, he was helping them save the riffraff.

Two apartments opened from the gallery on each floor, on the top floor only one. Here, stepping out of the elevator, one found oneself in a space made coolly brilliant by marble all around, illuminated during the day by natural light coming through the loophole-like windows; opposite the elevator, one faced a heavy oak door. From a steel door behind the elevator one could, on an uncomfortable steel ladder, climb up to the elevator housing and gain the flat rooftop, but very few people knew about this.

In her slightly damp two-piece pearl-colored dress, Mrs. Szemző waited patiently at the oak door, on her face a wry smile that she had prepared for Mária. She had to breathe more deeply. She wanted to tell her about it right away, the whole thing. When she heard no footsteps within the apartment, she opened her handbag, took out the clean white batiste handkerchief, and blotted up the invisible pearls of her perspiration above her lips.

So what now, what should we do, asked Dobrovan in the apartment.

We haven’t decided.

Of course we have. I’ve decided, replied Mária Szapáry. Adroitly pressing one good finger on the injured one, she made a fist with which she wiped the tears from her eyes, and scrambled to her feet.

Oh, my, she moaned as she straightened up, words addressed to the other women as a new excuse and explanation, my ankles swelled up again. The most natural thing is for us to be quiet about it. We simply won’t tell her anything. As for the secondhand-art dealer, just leave her to me, she said as she left the kitchen.

I’ll call on her, I’ll take care of it, don’t worry, at least I’ll have a chance to avenge everything properly.

In the next few minutes, they forgot what they were supposed to be quiet about.

The feminine bedlam took on the air of a preparation for carnival in anticipation of Irma Arnót’s arrival.

She observed them suspiciously, with a bit of reserve, as she put down her hat and handbag and slowly pulled off her lace gloves and they rushed out into the hallway, interrupting one another with huge explosions of giggling and laughter, to explain about the great catastrophe and whose negligence had caused it. Pushing and shoving, they went back into the apartment. One could not miss the great exaggerations; they were all too talkative, too loud, too aggressive for some reason; their bones were much too large; they looked like awful human robots.

They headed for the foyer and then, led by Dobrovan, returned to the kitchen to clean up the debris.

Somewhere behind Eskü Square there’s a porcelain expert, he deals with just such cases.

And what should I do, take this mess to him in sacks. I couldn’t look at patched-up dishes.

Come, come, Margit Huber protested quickly, how can you say that, Dobrovan, that place is at the beginning of Veres Pálné Street, almost at the corner of Kúria Street.

Throw it all out and forget about it, that’s what I should do, wailed Mária Szapáry.

That’s why I’m telling you, behind Eskü Square.

It’d be more accurate to say behind the Tiszti Casino.

Why are you quibbling.

They slowly picked up everything, quieted down, swept up what they could, and all without quarreling; an ominous peace reigned in the kitchen.

I’m so sorry, I really am, Irma kept saying quietly as she helped Mária.

And while Mária amused herself finding still more pieces of china almost everywhere in the kitchen, Margit and Bella took up positions by the sink and began to wash glasses.

Maybe one day I’ll tell you, Irmuska, why those few pieces meant so much to me.

If we’re going to make some for Elisa too, called Margit Huber from the sink, would you get another glass, Mária.

But only irrepressible jealousy sounded real in this request, at least in retrospect — the wish to keep the two women from being together while picking up the shards.

Bella added a little giggle to the remark, though she was not a party to Médi’s jealousy game.

Watch it, I’m telling you, she said, as if to exacerbate Margit Huber’s hurt, there won’t be anywhere to put those broken dishes in all this mess.

And indeed, Mária had to make excuses about the overflowing trash can. What should she do if she forgot to put it out every night.

What do you mean what should you do.

Just don’t forget. It’s that simple.

Anyway, wait a bit with the fizz until I ask Elisa if she wants any.

But first she had to wash off her injured finger in the bathroom and Irma had to bandage it.

Silently they sat on the edge of the tub, not even looking at each other. Behind them the faucet dripped persistently; and since it had been dripping for months, it had left a yellowish streak on the tub’s enamel. This wasn’t rust but a sulfurous deposit from thermal water — the most ordinary brimstone, usually considered the symbol of hell. Twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, Újlipótváros received its hot water from the thermal springs on Margit Island, and not only did this water leave visible traces but a smell reminiscent of rotten eggs pervaded apartments and stairwells.

Whenever they could, they stole brief, quiet moments like these for themselves, though they also feared them. As if something irreversible might happen, and it did happen, but nevertheless for decades they had been unable to give it up.

The relationship among the four friends had its own etiquette, and whether they liked it or not, it hadn’t changed since their school days. Not even during the long separations. Perhaps the deepest affection existed between Mária and Irma, though they observed each other from a great distance, not with aversion but, on the contrary, with enduring curiosity. They found in each other or in each other’s behavior something extremely engaging, so they did not deny their affection, yet, because it grew beyond normal social boundaries in their worlds, they could not reduce the distance between them.

During the summer after their graduation, they all went abroad, and when, after more than a decade’s absence, they all began to return to Budapest, with children, or divorced, or widowed, they could see in one another frightening changes in every pore; but this made no difference. Irma came back from Vienna with her husband and sturdy little twin boys; she was soon followed by Mária from Rome; and a year later, from Paris, also with a little boy, Bella showed up in a very poor state of mind; last to arrive, from Berlin, was Margit.

If she has changed so much, then I must show some change too. They had become insufferably self-willed, deceived, cheated on, abandoned, and very disillusioned women, but never, not with a single deliberate word would they admit their disillusionment to one another or to anyone else. Only to themselves. And this sufficed for them to notice everything about one another, to make fun of one another and be aware of their profoundly guarded, amusing similarities.

Nothing could undo the security of their independence.

They informed one another of the shifting elements of their lives only with casually dropped words or hints, and then stepped back — somewhat reluctantly, but acceding to liberal demands about keeping a distance — into an emotional dimension where nothing had changed.

Mária and Margit naturally quarreled constantly, argued, broke off, made up, just as they had done when they were girls; the relationship between Izabella and Irma, despite their mutual and nonbinding goodwill, remained formal, that always being its defining trait, since without the characteristically bourgeois formalities the relationship would have been impossible to make enjoyable or keep alive. Inanity, a value that served only itself, was something they both enjoyed. These bourgeois formalities were precisely what annoyed Mária most. Her upbringing allowed her to be eccentric, purposely encouraged her sarcasm, and gave her no need to conceal the supreme powers of her personality. She was crude. She thought Izabella was a dizzy hen, a silly goose, her politeness unfathomable, her sentimentality tedious, though she was also a vocal admirer of her exceptional talents.

Irma slightly opened the wound in the pad of Mária’s finger and peered at it closely, amazed.

You pressed it together quite cleverly, she said gently and quietly.

I don’t know why, but lately blood disgusts me more and more. Just the very thought that it is constantly flowing and beating inside you.

Yes, a quite unpleasant feeling. Irma looked up from the wound.

She loved the coarse and ill-proportioned features of this face so much that occasionally love stopped her breath.

Just now, when I really sucked it hard, I thought I’d throw up.

Something you don’t know what to do about, alone.

What do you mean I don’t know, asked Mária, surprised, like someone touched at a sensitive point. How do you know what I know or don’t know.

It’s not exceptional, I mean. You are not alone in feeling that way.

Even though it’s not like me, I mean feeling the disgust, aversion. At least I hope it’s not like me, she continued, sounding uncertain.

For example, I used to like roast blood on larded onions. Now I can’t even look at it.

We had a cook who added a little green pepper and sliced apple to the onions. Or pheasant blood with cranberries, heavenly, I must say.

Luckily, I’ve never had any. In a normal Jewish family one doesn’t prepare something like that. It sounds quite brutal.

And when I think how I went hunting regularly, not to mention that one keeps menstruating regularly as long as one can.

If not irregularly.

Stay a little while.

This isn’t going to bleed any more, and you probably have some healing powder in your medicine cabinet. We’ll just disinfect it, that’s all. Maybe I haven’t told you this, but in the camps we simply stopped menstruating.

One doesn’t need a camp for that, Irmuska. I left off that pretty habit of mine in the Majestic.

Except for the kapos, they kept on having their periods, and not only because they had food. And the Blockälteste, the head of the barracks, she menstruated too. They had permanent lovers, they had so-called normal sex lives and got extra portions of margarine. These are elementary conditions. All I need now is a piece of plaster and a pair of scissors and you’ll be properly taken care of.

The attention felt good to Mária, who was praying that Irma would go no further with her story, but whom she wanted to have close because, to be not the caregiver but the recipient of care was a treat she rarely had a chance to enjoy.

And telling a story was part of the care.

Mária had been taking care of Elisa night and day for more than two decades, and this period included air raids, bombings, living in the cellar, arrests during which she had no idea whether anyone was looking after Elisa in her stead, the endless days of the siege, the war. She should have interrupted, found another topic, but could think of nothing else to distract Irma with, until she remembered that when they couldn’t carry Elisa down to the cellar during air raids she took the girl’s head on her lap, right here in this bathroom. If anything should happen, at least she wouldn’t see it.

It happened, they couldn’t resist it; this is where, in their fear, they kissed and licked each other all over, surrounded by the shaking walls and bottles, they acted as two people who had reason to hurry. In her confusion, a little awkwardly, with her good hand she again twirled and then tucked behind her ear a strand of her straight gray hair.

You might even find some antiseptic pills there, she said. Médi is right: my whole apartment is one big mess.

And this is probably so, said Irma, continuing what she’d been saying before, as she found what she needed in the mirrored medicine cabinet, because in the end one’s left with nothing but one’s admirable or not so admirable traits. Don’t you think. There can’t be that many surprises. Or there can be, but nobody wants more injuries. The way your heart beats, that’s personal. But your blood is not, blood is impersonal.

Maybe that’s what you find repulsive. When one is young, one simply doesn’t acknowledge such embarrassing things.

You don’t mean to tell me that the same kind of blood circulates inside everybody.

Not in you, of course, you are the big blue-blooded exception. But think about it, she went on, her wry smile still on her lips. Your blood has its substance and its type, but even according to its substance or type, it doesn’t taste differently from other blood. Bókay always made the students in Andor’s class taste one another’s blood, a pretty hair-raising idea, wouldn’t you say, but in those days they had different ideas about hygiene. Blut is ein besonders Saft, jedenfalls, a special juice that’s not part of your character but exactly the other way ’round, you’re a part of it, along with your famous character, because you are one of the warm-blooded creatures, and I’m putting it mildly. This is annoying and insulting. What’s the good of all those original independent thoughts, what’s the point of this glorious individuality of ours. It means that you are also ruled by this enormous rabble, and who is to stop the janitors and dictators from following behind.

She sat back down on the rim of the bathtub and again carefully took hold of and raised Mária’s strong hand with its injured finger.

You know damn well I don’t know what to do with such concentrated social psychology, replied Mária quickly. She judged these dictators to be very dangerous and they might take Irma away from her.

She shrugged a little, as if to indicate that she was aware of the riskiness of her own moral relativism.

They can follow right behind or go where they please for all I care. My starting point is that there is a given surface and if I want something, I should be moving inward on that surface. Or downward, or upward, hell-bound or heavenward to the angels, anywhere.

And you are always doing the very opposite.

I can’t presume that people have character or can possess any traits. What I have to follow is a man’s shape. For me that is his only trait — the surfaces, curves, configurations, the limbs. All of which is flesh, only flesh, and form. What might happen, at best, is that after a while you discover that another human being has something you wouldn’t mind being attached to, has, let’s say, something properly constituted that determines his behavior, that has some sort of permanence and keeps making him repeat some sentence or gesture. But this is rare. In other cases, what you discover is that the person’s behavior has no iconography at all, and then that becomes the person’s characteristic feature. That’s what makes people adaptable, my dear. Whatever happens, they must remain flexible.

Nothing can compel them, or at least they feel no moral compulsion. That’s what produces their blissful chaos. You can stare at me like that all you want, but yes, this is your average human being. You talk as if everything had been already decided, and that’s why everything can be arranged. Well, nothing is decided.

No, no, generally, I talk about two things at once, but people usually hear only one.

Two is too many for me too.

Your monologue is very nice, maybe a bit much even for you.

It sometimes happened that one of them offended the other.

They were watching something on the surfaces of each other’s eyes that in good conscience could not be called personal yet was not impersonal.

Like lamplight reflected in the eyes.

At which both could change course. Mária could get over being offended, and they could both hear from the other side of the door Elisa’s odd, rhythmically repeated little whimpers. They never wanted to reach a conclusion in their conversations, never, and perhaps that is why their contact was so powerful.

The moments they bestowed on each other kept them captive, but this did not explain why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

Why must they part again and again.

Just look at it, look right into it, continued Mrs. Szemző, in a seemingly indifferent voice, cleansed of all passion.

You’ll understand what I’m talking about.

But under the influence of some unnamed shame, she was the one who had to turn away from Mária’s wide-open eyes. She didn’t want to betray Elisa, whimpering on the other side of the door, with Mária, not even symbolically.

And if she had to leave the illuminated surface of Mária’s eyes, she peered at her open flesh again.

Her head had a tendency to tremble, lowering and adjusting itself to spoken words, but she did not let this tic have free rein. It was an embarrassing, uncomfortable matter. When alone with it before a mirror, she would study the tic for a long time, trying to find ways to eliminate or tame it, to make this little professional fiasco of hers as unnoticeable as possible.

The flesh itself is what’s strange, she said quietly. Even though she was thinking of something other than what they were talking about.

Mária couldn’t divine how closely connected everything Irma was saying was to everything that she herself was ruminating on. Most people are unsuspecting toward each other in this way.

Irma was busy thinking about that strange man’s tightly packed back muscles shining with perspiration, the coiling grooves of his spine, his surprisingly round, powerful buttocks with its cleft open all the way to his anus and immersed in slow-moving thrusts, its sides at the base of his thighs made concave by tension, she was thinking about his straining thighs and his hard testicles flashing in their slipperiness.

For a single instant, he even rolled his head back over his well-defined shoulder to see who had surprised him.

Because in itself, perhaps it’s not so interesting that humans are the only beings whose behavior and thinking are completely imbued with the continuous, relentless desire for possible copulation, along with all the attendant fantasies, that’s what she was thinking about, that’s what she was weighing while talking with her friend about something else entirely. The image was sharp and immovable, but the fantasy or memory of it was probably more important for her than the reality of the act. This only shows how unlikely it is that one can individualize the actual act. Acknowledging this might be a turning point in one’s life.

Everyone strives to individualize the act of lovemaking because otherwise one would miss the proper share of its pleasures, and everyone fails at this because the act exists only in reciprocity. If there’s enough mutual pleasure in the act, one will not find one’s own person; if one strives for the personal, one becomes stuck on the other person’s personality and the pleasure is broken, uneven, or perhaps totally inadequate.

The search for the act, then, is directed not by instinct alone, but by the need to individualize and, at least equally, by the inevitable failure, big or small depending on the level of individualization.

One must move on, hoping that the individualization will succeed with someone else.

Religions and myths are not mistaken on this question, she continued aloud, your own flesh is impersonal, only the imagination is personal. Though frankly I don’t know why your cut from that stupid glass is so deep.

I’m not going to look at it, so you might as well stop trying to make me.

But you could, said Irma, with obvious relish. There are ugly wounds, but this one is handsome, an extremely well turned-out injury.

I believe you.

It probably doesn’t hurt now, but it may throb later.

Please forgive me, but we must look in on Elisa, I may have alarmed her with that racket. She’ll keep up this whimpering until I kick her around a little.

Keep pressing on it a little longer.

It feels too tight.

Don’t worry, that’s how it has to be.

They stood up simultaneously, to put an end to their unpredictable shared moment.

Mária was ready to withdraw her decision, however, even though she had been the one to suggest it.

Irmuska, I’d like to ask you something, she said suddenly, and, very uncharacteristically, she blushed.

Come on, out with it, and then I’ll tell you something I have a hard time keeping to myself.

Something one doesn’t like to talk about, or ask. But this I just can’t swallow.

Before she spoke, for a flash it occurred to her that maybe this was the moment to tell Irma about Erna Demén’s request.

This would be the most favorable moment.

Why didn’t you want, she said aloud — and with these words she silenced her other sentence — why didn’t you let them take you away, I don’t even remember now from where, the name of that city, what was it. In other words, why did you come home, that’s what I’d like to know, why on earth didn’t you go away with them.

What are you looking for here.

Could you answer that for me.

Irma needed a moment to catch her breath and throw her mind back.

Why indeed.

But why are you asking such an awkward thing.

The question was like a shout for help. After a few days, when she could finally walk on both feet without leaning on anything, she had managed to get hold of a coat. She did not know what Mária was planning to do but had a premonition it was something fatal. She was cold, always cold and shivering, and she took off in her coat, heading who knows where.

It was hard to carry the coat.

How can you ask such a stupid thing, she moaned.

I can’t live without knowing. Answer me.

But how can I answer, for God’s sake. You could exercise a bit of Christian humility.

Mária laughed warmly, which did not mean she was ready to forgo an answer.

In less than a half hour on the empty sunny road, an armed patrol took her back to the hospital barracks.

Mária stood in front of her, motionless in the doorway, and Elisa kept on whimpering.

And then for days she could do nothing but lie on her pallet, helpless and fevered.

The second time, it was the bumpy ride on a wagon with two Czech peasants that took her back. The peasants had set out to plow their field and now had to lose time dealing with her; they were cursing her Jew-whore mother in their unfamiliar language. Ty skurvená židovská děvko. She had to be careful in the bouncing wagon not to let her already injured body slide into the sharp plowshare. They called her rotten Jewish bitch or something like that. She had a hard time arranging these images.

Should have dropped dead, bitch.

They must have been saying something like that when they carefully lifted her off the wagon. Mělas radši zdechnout. First she remembered the coat and the smell of the coarse fabric, and then the servant’s room in whose door not so much the sight but the beastly exhalations of the two bodies held her back, and that is why she wouldn’t let them, did not wait for them to take her away with the others.

Do you have any idea why you are asking me this, she inquired cautiously and quietly. By the way, it’s Prachatice, she said, that’s the name of the place. I’m really interested in why you are so interested in this.

Where on earth is Prachatice, asked Mária in a tone that suggested she found the name itself outrageous. She has this compensation coming to her. After all these years, she has the right to punish Irma a little bit.

How can I tell you.

In her gentle way, Irma Arnót would have been more than willing to answer Mária Szapáry.

From what I can see on the map, and I’ve checked it several times since, the border is about fifty kilometers east of Regensburg.

But her willingness was also nothing but a quiet revenge. As if she were saying in advance to Mária, you’ll regret having asked this question.

They were herding us across the Regen valley, you know, over the pass, I mean the ones who could make it. I don’t remember the name of the pass. Maybe not very far from there. A little bit closer to Budweis, if that means anything to you. It was called Aussig in the good old days of the monarchy. They herded the rest into the hay barn, those who could barely move, and then set the barn on fire. This happened on the next to last day, can you imagine that. And we were allowed to move on.

This sounds familiar to me, this Budweis, maybe from Schweik.*

With this remark they were virtually submerged in a shared smile shining and spreading across both their faces, evoked by and paying homage to the hero of the book they’d read before the war; they even laughed briefly.

Later, that’s where the Czech doctors came from to see us, from Aussig, continued Irma with a cheerfulness left over from the laughter. But I’d really like to know why you’re asking about this.

Mária kept swaying her head.

Actually, I don’t know why I came home, she went on evasively. Of course, that’s a whole different thing, I know, the two things can’t be compared. I can’t give you an honest answer. In the final analysis, historically, we’re both in the place where we belong. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. Some kind of instinct to escape. Raging in me. As though accepting the premise that whatever happens is what should happen, natural the way it is — I can’t accept that.

Maybe that’s what I can’t assimilate — because it isn’t like that.

But she felt it would be useless to insist. Mária would not answer her sincerely, and that hurt.

She relented, let her go.

I’m only asking, she said softly, because I have two kinds of answer.

Well then, tell me the first one and then the second.

No, don’t laugh. I also have a third one, yes, I do.

And when she said this, for the first time the wry smile she had sustained for Mária disappeared from her lips.

And this made her lips tremble painfully.

Those Swedish nurses were not very nice, you know. Or maybe I just didn’t like my shitty life being so dependent on others. They would have taken me in exactly the opposite direction. That bothered me too. It was nothing but a primitive kind of resistance, that’s all. In your big new freedom you realize you have a will of your own, which means you are again your own master, and you don’t want to see the Swedish nurses anymore. You lash out, make repeated accusations because you can’t even stand up. Now I should drop dead, now, because of them, just when I’d almost managed to get through everything.

In retrospect, though, I must add that they were tackling an impossible job, that’s true. There were so many cases of gangrene, purulence, necrosis, whole limbs rotting away on live people. They just had too much to do, much too much. The warmer the weather, the more unbearable the stench became, there was never any water, no surgeon for I don’t know how long, maybe weeks, and no supplies or equipment. Sometimes they got hold of some soldiers to cut firewood, the nights were frightfully cold, or prisoners of war, among whom there were some Hungarians, but most of the time the nurses had to chop the wood. Decent middle-class Swedish women, you know, and they had not the slightest notion what they were up against. And there was some cold fury in them. Maybe that was the way the ordeal affected them, I don’t know. In my barracks we had a very small window opposite where I lay, and I could see from the darkness how hopelessly the sun was shining outside.

But how can you say that, it was spring then, wasn’t it.

It shone despondently. You keep waking up, going to sleep, waking up.

It shone even during the night, but that was the moon.

I don’t know if you ever paid any attention to it, but spring sunshine in our country, and that’s what I know about, is always so stark, so bare, just bare.

You’ll understand in a minute why I want to tell you about this.

But there are these weeks, these spring weeks that don’t exist in other places.

It’s a little incoherent, the way I’m speaking, you’ll forgive me, but all I want to tell you, if we’re already talking about it, is that in other places, from the very first moment it starts, spring is pure brilliance.

In our part of the world it isn’t. There’s something hazy in our spring.

When I was first able to go outdoors and realized we were in the mountains, I saw that it wasn’t so there. The barracks window was dusty, maybe you understand, she said hesitantly. But not a single muscle in Mária’s face responded.

Then how could she explain it to her.

I’m thinking of early spring, she said, close to desperation, before budding time. And just imagine, the first thing I did was clean the window.

It was also like that in Vienna, tired and hopeless, you can see there, too, that winter destroys everything. This is probably not so in places that don’t have such long, dry freezing periods. I thought — and this is going to be my third answer, though it is strange, very strange, that it’s only the third one. One recovers slowly. The two boys — I must find them somehow. As if they were lying about there, in front of the building, and they should be told to get up, the ground is too cold. As if I couldn’t remember anything.

Believe me, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else, because one shouldn’t say things like this for others to hear.

I knew very well they were no more.

The big difference is that mountain grass doesn’t give out in the winter, on the contrary. I’d say that was a kind of fixed and certain bit of knowledge about the essence of the world. I may be absurd, and it’s risky to say, but the moment a single person goes missing, the essence of the world changes. But it was not completely unimaginable that I might find Andor back home.

Because until then I myself wouldn’t have believed, and I didn’t, that they were no more.

I understand.

But that’s only the logic of things.

Now I do. I’ve never understood it completely.

Probably not completely, but maybe you understand some of it. Don’t imagine it as if you remembered either one or both of them, or anyone else. If anyone, I’d remember Andor more because he caused me more grief, and that has a shadow, or leaves long shadows behind, the grief and pain. Let’s be clear: lovers’ pain. But there is this: my sons, these two naked words, the possessive and the plural noun, together comprised all one’s knowledge. Or rather, it’s a place that has not remained empty, though you feel its emptiness. But there is no memory, and this must be very strange for you to hear from my mouth, but there isn’t, one does not remember. That is the big stinking truth.

Damn this rotten life, I beg you, please give it a little time. Of course I understand, it would be so good to understand.

Everything I had done earlier was nothing but hubris, crude maneuvers. Only my perfect lack of guile could excuse it, and we were all guileless. Anyway, it had a lot more to do with brute force than with consciousness. And while she seemed relaxed and impassive as she went on talking, she recognized that Mária was growing restless and resistant, a response that might have been intensified by the noise of the two tugboats passing each other, and she realized that she had to finish up, bring things to a close. No, memory is something entirely different, I had to discover that, she said, defying Mária’s restlessness, impolite but not unjustified — after all, it was Mária who had wanted to hear, who had asked to be told — and that was the reason that after a while I would have given up my practice even if they hadn’t shut it down. That is why I couldn’t do it properly anymore. The work can be done only if one believes there is memory, but not only is there no memory, it’s also better that way. It seems that in the overall scheme of Creation it was decided not to include memory. But now I also think we should drop this whole subject.

For long seconds, as they arranged the delicate proportions of fairness and politeness between themselves, they stood silently in the light of the opaque lampshades, their eyes wandering over each other’s features.

Two figures of almost equal height only an arm’s length apart, but without the expectation of touching each other. No empathy, no murderous impulse, neither such love nor such understanding. Everything they felt was either more or less than necessary. One woman was strong and solid, with a weighty body; the other was delicate, extremely thin, down to her bones and tendons, yet not with the air of someone whom the next gust of wind would blow away.

One lamp hung from the ceiling, the other was above the sink; their bleak light was fractured by the unusually large white wall tiles and aging surfaces of the mirrors.

Now let’s take a deep breath, said Mária, her words accompanied by one of her loveliest smiles, forget that I asked you, or what I asked, as if nothing had happened, don’t be angry with me. And now we’ll go in to see Elisa. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, believe me I don’t, Irma, but I feel such hate.

For what.

Myself.

I feel it.

If you feel like seeing her at all.

Why wouldn’t I, Mária, answered Irma lightly, even though what she wanted to say was, why harbor so much hatred, there’s no reason for it. It’s hard to hear something like that. She really couldn’t have had a good reason, at least no personal reason, or maybe only a little. Still, Irma couldn’t say this out loud. She could not absolve Mária because of the dead ones, though her sons were not on her mind now. No. She couldn’t. Just as Mária could not go farther than she had.

This was the last word that could be uttered.

And we’ll drop the story, at least for today, she continued, well disciplined and composed, because she understood correctly the stubborn silence emanating from the other woman. If I may say so, we’re going to forget it.

They both laughed a little at this, and found it mutually enjoyable to intertwine their laughter.

It’s correct, that’s right, it is, Irma replied. If there is no remembering, how can there be forgetting. There is no forgetting either.

One of them had to continue with her loveliest, most attractive laugh suffused with suffering, the other with the pleasure provided by the workings of the mind, both of them neutral toward each other.

In truth, they both felt bad about this brief conversation and impulsively concealed their bad feelings from each other.

With your permission, I’ll go first.

Of course.

And while she unsparingly reproached herself, she could not help being happy about Irma’s coming with her. She treated her friends cautiously; she did not burden them overmuch with the sick woman. Irma was the only one to whom she had entrusted, albeit under pressure, the story of her and Elisa. Which, for quite a time in the late 1930s was the topic of avid, excited gossip in upper-crust circles.

Irma did not follow her in right away; politeness and consideration demanded that she hang back a little in the bathroom doorway. Which was useful, because she needed time to forbid herself to think of her sons. Although she would witness the scene, she should leave some time to be shared by just the two of them.

But her hesitation had another, no less delicate reason.

According to the rules of her profession, she couldn’t feel repugnance for anything or anyone in theory, because repugnance, again in theory and in the parlance of her profession, would indicate that she’d been unable to analyze something, that there was something in that other person or in herself she could not see or perhaps deliberately tried to avoid. No matter how often she rehearsed these reasons and arguments, she had to admit that from the moment she laid eyes on her, as they say, she felt a most profound physical aversion to Elisa Koháry, whom she had known slightly when the younger woman was still healthy.

By the time Irma returned from Vienna, this woman was simply there, belonging to Mária, and there was no way to get around her or to separate her from Mária.

Mária had been taken away from her.

There were hardly any opportunities for brief, private conversations, and for this reason she simply loathed Elisa.

Although with her mind she comprehended the real reasons for her aversion and fear, she could not change her emotions with her intellect.

The moment the door opened, she could see the hapless woman; she sat at the edge of a swan-necked divan in the brightly lit room wearing a faded, floral-patterned print dress. She was whimpering, evenly and persistently, swaying her head to the rhythm of her sounds, to the right, to the left, frighteningly, untiringly, while she kept hitting her paralyzed knees with a fist.

This was the only decently furnished room in the large apartment, or more correctly, Mária had made sure that no valuable object in this room was sold, even in periods of great privation. The room was just as it had been when they set it up, according to Elisa’s taste, during the first, not exactly blissful weeks of their living together.

The repeated gesture was understandable at first sight. She must have been doing it for a long time. It was easy to see she was punishing herself, was passionately dissatisfied with herself, her miserable knees not moving and she being unable to get up from where she was sitting. And it was impossible to forget how well proportioned and shapely these legs had been in their fine silk stockings, with fashionably graceful, thin-soled, indecently high-heeled shoes showing off her ankles, calves, and thighs. Now her swollen feet were forced into two down-at-heel, checkered felt slippers. Her downy blond, naturally wavy hair, richly interlaced with gray, which made her blondness even more exciting, fell into her face because of her continuous, practiced gesture of passionate self-punishment. She looked like a lunatic, but this exaggeration was a part of that particular language of gestures with which she could still express her will and feelings, and for which she mobilized incredible reserves of strength.

Her left shoulder and arm were partially and her lower body completely paralyzed as a result of hereditary arteriosclerosis, which can afflict young people. This diagnosis was well supported by the facts that her grandfather, Baron Dénes Koháry, chief counselor for hunting matters to the minister of agriculture, had died following an unsuccessful treatment of his syphilis, and her father had had a long bout with serious circulatory problems. Elisa’s anus and vagina retained their full sensitivity, however; she felt her needs and could to a certain extent take care of them herself. She could no longer formulate intelligible sentences except for one, though with great effort she could produce sounds that for practiced ears were not completely indecipherable.

A person who, according to all medical prognoses, should have been dead long ago.

Mária hurried to help her up. Relax, patience, she called out coolly. Calm yourself, stop making such a ruckus, for God’s sake. I’m not completely deaf. But she had barely touched her when the blond woman, with the same rage with which she had been hitting herself, now, throwing her head high, freeing her oval face from the dense mass of her blond hair with its silvery highlights, rudely shoved her away.

I don’t know, she shouted in English several times, I don’t know, quickly, angrily, plaintively, passionately. Or so it could be interpreted.

I see you didn’t make any kaka and you didn’t pee, exclaimed Mária, glancing impassively at the bedpan lying in front of the swan-necked divan in which there was nothing but a little water. Then tell me what’s up, but a bit more clearly, what do you need.

I don’t know, Elisa kept shouting, now more desperately, reproachfully, I don’t know, her enormous blue eyes all but throwing sparks as they darted, rolled, and flashed.

Elisa never failed to surprise Irma each time anew with her sorely ravaged beauty. As if, despite all her misery, she was radiating it still, as she had done long ago when Irma saw her for the first time, at twenty, from a distance. And later, to be honest, she had had grave doubts about Professor Bókay’s diagnosis when he’d been called in as a consultant. She would never have told anyone, but her decided impression was that, independent of her grandfather’s youthful syphilis and her father’s wildly fluctuating blood pressure, Elisa’s cerebral hemorrhage had successfully thwarted the breakout of a well-developed schizophrenia.

She couldn’t forget that a week before that catastrophic event they had had lunch together on Margit Island on the terrace of Palatinus Strand, and by then everything about the latent disease was visibly present. Could schizophrenia induce the same process in arteries that arteriosclerosis or syphilis did, that was the question. She was with her children, which required that she divide her attention, but during the short quarter hour when Mária was getting dressed in her cabin, Irma observed something in the seemingly gentle but in fact ruthlessly icy blond woman, something that would have been hard to put into words.

It was becoming overcast.

She would have liked to warn Mária, but kept her peace.

Above them, the wind gently flapped the giant blue-and-white-striped canvas umbrella; still, the air seemed not to move.

A light-music orchestra was playing on the terrace, which the young woman found too loud, and the smell of bacon too strong. It is possible that she was indeed suffering from a constantly changing accumulation of impressions that she could not process properly, from the strength of those impressions, from the incredible fact that everything in the world is present at the same time and with great force; nevertheless, what emanated from her was a benumbing indifference and icy tranquillity. She spoke of herself excitedly and with great agitation as if representing another person, a complete stranger. Which made the blood run cold in the veins of everyone around her; the boys were especially alarmed by her. First, she had a problem with the soup, which she said was sour, then she claimed that the smell of the cucumber salad was unbearable, the vinegar in it, and she asked the two boys not to squeeze any more lemon on their fried veal cutlets in her presence.

I want to tell you, she said, smiling enchantingly, everything around me is too rich in acid reaction.

She issued such reports about her impressions in precise, impassively spoken sentences.

This may be understandable, but she didn’t want people neutralizing her own personal chemical reaction.

Otherwise, she had nothing to say or ask anyone, she talked continually about herself, this other person, or she sat quietly observing this other person in herself.

Usually it was hard to restrain the two lively boys, but now, without a word and looking frightened, they placed the half-squeezed lemon slices on the rims of their plates. This woman is far from being as ready to smile as she tries to pretend she is; she is busy with that grim self of hers, whom she treats as a stranger to be indulged.

She has taken on the dark loveliness of this stranger, though in none of her parts or traits is she identical with that stranger.

The combined din of the tugboats was becoming unbearable; the air shook and vibrated above the terrace restaurant. A pervasive odor of crude oil overwhelmed the river’s evening coolness; heat and the engines’ nauseating, stinking particles of combustion filled the air.

One tugboat was pulling some loud dance music upstream, maybe that’s what reminded her of the orchestra playing light music.

Yes, I know, you’re right, damn my rotten forgetfulness. I forgot again to put your chair here for you, shouted Mária over the noise, giving the impression that despite her contrition, she would not be rattled by the other woman’s agitation.

Since those days, of course, Mrs. Szemző too has looked at everything differently.

If only because misery had fundamentally changed the blond woman, making her attentive, almost humble, which meant that not merely did she suffer but she also managed her suffering. She has softened and warmed up because of her terrible illness; heat emanated from her bare neck and naked arms. But Irma dreaded the very sight, the proximity of this change. She could not rid herself of the notion that in certain cases only at the expense of a physical catastrophe can the human constitution avoid a mental catastrophe. And if this were indeed so, then occurrences in this world must have not only reasons but probably purposes as well. But then she was faced again with the stupid question of who was at the helm, or what could be the thing that had a purpose. And she should also ask who took her children away, why, and why had she been left alive.

And that she’d rather not be.

Which may have been easy to say, but its consequences were unbearable, and then her mind began the cycle all over again, like a squirrel in a cage.

The wheeled armchair was there but out of reach, that is to say unreachable but close enough to annoy the sick woman greatly. She must have made unsuccessful attempts with her cane somehow to yank it closer. The chair was a beautiful museum piece, from Steindl’s famous early nineteenth-century carpentry workshop, now in rather poor condition.

Varga had attached a tip-up footrest to it.

I don’t know, replied Elisa, I don’t know, she kept repeating, though this time very differently, the yells sounding at once satisfied, almost cheerful, and also irritated. She was making her voice bend, rock, and sway in an unusual way but very sensitively and understandably. Which meant, on the one hand, that Mária understood and with satisfaction acknowledged Elisa’s response as splendid, and, on the other hand, that many things were still to be clarified.

There, Mária said, as you see, there’s not a problem in the world. I broke the dishes from Urbino, every last piece, but that’s all it was, not an air raid. We threw them all out. I cut my finger a little.

That made Elisa stare at her, frightened and at a loss.

And Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, felt it was not nice to lead Elisa astray and the time had come to intervene.

Sometimes Elisa’s face showed that she did not know what to do with what she had heard, or that she could sort out even the simplest things only very slowly if at all. Her reflexes had recovered almost completely after her cerebral hemorrhage, she followed every movement with her eyes, lazily but accurately, and it seemed that she comprehended everything immediately. She remembered and could be reminded at any time of events in the distant past. But some parts of her brain had been irreparably damaged. Mária’s experience had taught her that there were no longer reliable passages between certain brain areas, or that direct communication between them had ceased completely. Elisa could probably locate the areas that still communicated, this was visible on her face, but she could not make the other connections. It was interesting to watch her facial features when she tried; at such times she appeared to be searching more than suffering. Or, as if it were possible to make the missing contact via a different approach, one could see in her heightened attention that she was trying out different detours and hoping to reach her goal. Something was missing, something was not functioning, but obviously she had no conscious reflex to deal with this lack. And once she realized she could not find her way between two or more things, she became quite oafish. On such occasions, her back had to be tapped and her face gently slapped. Which returned fatigued calm to her face, though she seemed to have forgotten what it was she’d been trying to find.

In addition, something else shut down, heavily and ominously.

Empty space in a transparent system.

Futile effort exhausted and disheartened her; for half a day or sometimes for days, her face remained gloomy.

Now, at Irma Arnót’s unexpected appearance, she gave a start and roared like an animal, stretched out her arms like a child offering itself to its mother, please hug me. This gave the impression that the connection between fear and joy was unreasonably strong; the waiting time necessarily attached to every emotion had ceased to exist.

At the same moment something happened that unexpectedly distracted Irma. Roused by the animal-like roar, Elisa’s huge, long-haired, flaming red Persian tomcat plopped down to the floor from the divan’s bentwood back and, as if fleeing from mortal danger, padded off on his fuzzy paws, flitting between the furniture legs until he reached the open terrace door. Using the large oak bucket of a richly branched ceiling-high ficus as protection, he looked back at Irma with a glance of fright mixed with wonder, and then vanished in the dark outside.

When something like this happened, the cat would jump up on the handrail of the terrace, from there to the flat rooftop and the elevator shaft. From there he would slink to other elevator shafts and even steal brazenly into strange apartments; through distant stairwells he would make it to the street, into the world of automobiles, streetcars, strange smells, dogs, and pissed-on trees, moving along his dangerous routes; and the women always feared that he might never come back.

Elisa’s movement was particularly poignant because to give someone a hug, she had to use her good arm to lift the paralyzed one.

Her tone of voice and the play of her features also changed completely.

She says, I haven’t seen you for a long time, Mária called over the noise, a little humorously, a little instructively. In other people’s company, she would quickly translate Elisa’s gestures into words. She did it out of consideration, so that the guest or unsuspecting stranger who had strayed into their lives did not have to struggle. In another sense, she seemed to be not so much obliging the stranger with a translation as sharing something with Elisa in their most secret language. Elisa was begging, entreating, with the single more or less coherent sentence, I don’t know, that she cried, she sang, to Irma. They weren’t even sure whether she was repeating the English phrase for its meaning in that language, or whether her paralyzed speech organs could only form sounds reminiscent of the English phrase, in which case the syllables were arbitrary and void of meaning.

If they asked her about it, she irresistibly broke out laughing.

I don’t know, she’d answer playfully, her head tilted to the side, as if she understood the humor. Now, however, she used the phrase to beseech and extort, as an indignant beggar woman would, and when Irma resignedly hugged her, she clung to her neck and kept kissing her.

My sweet, my darling, Irma whispered, very feelingly despite her own intentions, and momentarily lost her balance; when her knees buckled a bit under Elisa’s weight, she could not but think of being hugged by her own children.

She says you’re an unfaithful pig, Mária Szapáry interpreted; on hearing this, Elisa with bubbly sounds laughed sensually into the creases crisscrossing Irma’s naked scraggy neck. With both her arms, she continued her insistent clinging, entwining, and clasping movements, partly because she was holding her half-paralyzed arm around Irma’s neck with her own good arm. As if she were wanting to climb up on Irma, to wrap her in her body, she offered up her thin body and her light, quivering, little-girl breasts.

And since you’re here, Mária continued her somewhat arbitrary translation, please help me get up.

Irma had to lift Elisa’s helpless body by holding it under the arms, to pull it up onto her, to cushion it, as it were, while Mária shoved the antique wheelchair under her.

She called me an unfaithful pig, did she, Irma was ready to burst out.

Mária keeps Elisa under lock and key, and if someone happens to ask about her condition, she considers the very question a lèse-majesté. And while she was holding the blond woman’s light body, she could not but suspect that they were engaged not in doing what they were talking about but, rather, playacting again, in their well-practiced way, for each other’s benefit.

Elisa offers herself up almost as if she were complying with Mária’s silent consent or express wish. Those two continue to weave and carry on their secret nocturnal interplay at her, Irma’s, expense.

She fought against these paranoid thoughts, she had to be sly with them, give these twisted notions a bit of air, a little chance, and, when they began to breathe, pitilessly strangle them.

But this time she was not mistaken.

When thin bodies touch this closely, they are capable of incredibly profound sensitivity.

This was not the first time she had illicitly experienced Elisa’s thin body or the exceptionally powerful flavor of their nights.

Fuller bodies may be hot and more passionate, but thin bodies are unerringly accurate in sensing things. She could not ignore the feeling that Mária used Elisa, that through her thin body she avenged herself for all her injuries.

The two tugboats were receding, and as they carried their sounds with them, echoing above the Danube and penetrating the water, their throbbing, puffing, and pulsing again separated and became independent.

I don’t mind telling you, you’ve been pretty unfair with me, remarked Irma quietly, and with a little groan she placed Elisa’s body in the wheelchair.

And as if to corroborate her earlier suspicion, Elisa and Mária laughed together, conspiratorially, shamelessly.

For them to get going, along with the chair, Irma had to squat down in front of Elisa and put her inertly dangling outturned feet on the folding footrest. The immobile feet were surprisingly heavy.

With whom else could I be as unfair as I can be with you, Irmuska, replied Mária from above her.

You mean you’re taking your revenge.

Except for you, Irmuska, on whom could I take my revenge, for God’s sake. And if I have a good reason or at least a good motive for it, why shouldn’t I.

I’ll do it.

Which Mrs. Szemző thought was a funny enough remark to laugh. She may have laughed a bit too hard, factitiously and demurely.

With which she meant to excuse herself for her own cruelty. But she had no intention of retreating.

She took the offense more seriously than if it had actually touched her.

Mária quickly pushed the chair forward so forcefully that Mrs. Szemző barely had time to straighten up and jump out of the way.

It’s high time to be at the table, she exclaimed. Please open the door. And put her blanket on her knees.

They had done this before, wasting a little time before the card game, which filled them with pleasant impatience.

Mrs. Szemző opened both wings of the door. Since one of the women would always become impatient during this little interlude, this too belonged to their well-refined routine. In the large space called the workshop, an atelier with a northern exposure originally designed for a famous sculptor, large wooden dummies in various stages of dress or undress were standing around a huge drafting table under the bare lamplight. Nothing shone or glittered, and nothing cast a shadow. On another large table, its surface dotted with myriad holes made by thumbtacks and sewing pins, and with several burn holes left by unattended irons, lay pieces of fabric, cut and waiting to be sewn, stacked neatly in layered piles, blue and claret lining material spread under red and purple silks, measuring tapes, scissors, horseshoe magnets, tailor’s chalks, pin cushions full of pins and attached to rubber bands, which Mária or occasional seamstresses would wear on their arms as they worked, so as to have pins always at the ready. Wheeled clothes racks stood along the bare walls and in front of the very deep, floor-to-ceiling closets, most of whose doors were open. On these racks, in a picturesque jumble, hung basted or finished theatrical costumes along with all sorts of civilian clothes.

Three or four people could hide in those closets at the same time. And not only was it possible to move freely from one closet section to the next, but one could easily move the back panel of the last closet aside and, through the steel door behind it, gain the elevator shaft, from which it was easy to escape to the roof. In theory, Varga was unaware of this at the time; more precisely, he pretended to this day that he was.

On the parquet floor, gray and dry with neglect, so many fabric samples were collected in oversize albums and stacked in teetering layered columns, along with art books, manuscripts, and fashion magazines everywhere, that there was barely room to get by them. Narrow paths led from one door to another, from the tables to the ironing boards and from the clothes racks to the sewing machines. Mária wheeled Elisa very carefully along one of these creaking paths to reach the living room. She wheeled her everywhere, which is why there were neither rugs nor door saddles anywhere in the large apartment. When they got there, the drinks in the tall hazed-over glasses were waiting for them on the table, and the two women were again talking together on the terrace.

At last.

Well, finally.

I see you found everything.

They pushed themselves away from the terrace handrail and hurried inside. They kept interrupting each other, as if each was intent only on what she wanted to say.

Elisa, my dove, what wonderful color you have.

Finding things was the least of it. We uncovered all your dark little secrets.

This terrace is a great blessing.

How pretty that print dress is.

But look at Irma’s new two-piece outfit. I think the material is typical Dobrovan.

And there’s a little bolero to go with it too.

You don’t say.

I had to undo some of the stitches because of all things she had to pick a material that’d been washed a million times.

You, on the other hand, haven’t washed anything since Elisa’s birthday, and your refrigerator is full of leftovers gone bad.

Voilà, everyone grab your glasses and be quiet.

It stinks.

As miserly as old Demeter Lapusa. Where, now? In which novel? Oh, of course, Poor Rich People.

No it’s not, you little fool, it’s not in Poor Rich People.*

Now, we shall put the chair over here and if we ask Irmus very nicely she will put the blanket over her knees.

How many times have I asked you to stop finding fault with everything I say.

You’d better believe I know Jókai’s novels.

Where the hell did I put it. If you paid a little more attention to me, I’d like to tell you something.

If you sit like that, you’ll see right into my cards.

Irmuska, this is your glass.

Just a second.

Don’t give any to Elisa.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be coming with Boriska, that’s the decision of the Party. We’ll toe the party line relentlessly.

I really don’t understand why she needs alcohol.

It seems you’ve forgotten that today is the beginning of the first festival of lemon blossoms.

Santé, santé.

Come on, girls, let’s drink, and then it’s really time we sat down.

A ta santé, ma chérie.

But what kind of holiday is that, for heaven’s sake, I’ve never heard of it.

Forget it, at times like this, no one’s paying attention to you.

This holiday is for the Jews what cherry blossoms are for the Japanese.

A pagan jubilee.

I see.

Or like the famous squash-blossom holiday in Slovakia.

That means it has its own time, like Yom Kippur.

Exactly.

The Dobrovans would never have missed celebrating it.

For a change, they ate maize pudding with onion, because it’s such a festive meal.

Ever since they were girls, they had been enthusiastically touching on these delicate points, and now all four were laughing hard.

Elisa looked at them sheepishly, quiet, listening like an animal.

When there was a sudden, finely self-conscious silence, they could hear the soft puffing of the receding tugboats on the river, from farther and farther away, softer and softer with every puff. One of them, to the north, must have been passing the public baths in Dagály Street, the other, to the south, near the Lánc Bridge.

This is how a hog wallows in a sunlit puddle when peace returns to its soul.

They refused to acknowledge that these jesting little remarks no longer had any effect.

Seven flights below, in the dark Szent István Park, crickets were chirring peacefully in the grass among the trees. Occasionally they could also hear the sound of strolling lovers’ footsteps creaking on the pebble paths and echoing on the walls of nearby buildings. They looked at one another, slightly moved by their own embarrassment. Their broadminded liberalism, with all its historical instability, had become like a grandmother’s well-proven recipe for which, in truth, they could not find the ingredients.

They simply pretended that everything could be still set aright; with this pretence, at least, they kept their attitudes.

It was a little empty, but not mendacious.

They raised their glasses, silently, took sips of the sweet-and-sour drink with the fragrance of juniper.

Before we sit down, said Mária Szapáry, inspired by a sudden idea but speaking rather lazily, we should take the time to tell Irmus that, with Médi’s help, the famous Mrs. Lehr, this Erna Demén, is looking to make contact with her.

While she spoke, she looked in front of her rather than at anyone.

Hearing the name, Mrs. Szemző’s heart skipped a beat and then throbbed much faster than before. The quiet creaks of pebbles made her glance down seven floors, and she desired no continuation, she did not want to hear it.

So this will not be a party, then, but a storytelling evening, she said in the frozen silence, and the stubborn decision made a wry smile tremble on her lips.

Because I also have something to tell you, she continued. She absentmindedly picked up one of the two packs of cards and then put it down.

I think it would be best, said Mária Szapáry, virtually ignoring what Irma had said, if Médi told you about this. After all, she’s the one who spoke to Mrs. Lehr.

Imagine, said Irma quickly, as if interrupting not only Mária’s but her own words, before I left to come here, I was already near the door, and in the foyer—

She could not finish the sentence because at that moment Margit Huber, at the opposite end of the table, angrily shook her loosely pinned crown of hair and, ignoring Izabella Dobrovan, who tried to stop her with a belated movement and a commanding whisper, stepped closer to them, glass in hand, and in a raw penetrating tone cut in. Médi, Médi.

No, oh no, this, this cannot be. You can’t seriously mean this.

The flesh under the tanned skin on her open chest quivered. With her large hand she slammed her glass on the table so hard that the drink spilled out and lemon pulp stuck to the green felt tablecloth in a small flat opalescent puddle.

You’ve lost your marbles, Mária.

What’s that supposed to mean, snapped Mária Szapáry. Your style is atrocious.

Atrocious style. You think it’s atrocious. You dare mention style. Oh, this will kill me. You, of all people, for whom everything is rotten and always has been.

She would have sent her voice into the safety of hysterical laughter, her helpless limbs in a spasm of rage, but then she decided to end this tactlessness and suppressed her laugh.

You’re telling me this. You have the nerve to tell me a thing like that, she cried frantically. You know what you are, you are a born traitor, and you dare lecture me on style. You. Lecture me. You should be ashamed of yourself. Lecture me. Me. Me.

In her inconceivable excitement, she was casting about helplessly for words.

And then something peculiar happened. She suddenly felt unspeakably sorry for herself, for all the things Mária had done to her over their lifetimes, and they weren’t minor. Not only could she not stop saying me, me, me, me, but simultaneously she turned against herself the fire-red nails of three pressed-together fingers; and while, ever more loudly and in ever higher tones, as if gliding upward on an infinite scale, she shouted the one-syllable word reproachfully, unappeasably, and unstoppably, soaring so high that her lungs failed to support the sound with the proper volume of air, she mercilessly lunged those fingernails, to the rhythm of her screaming, into her firmly resisting breastbone.

She seemed to be transforming herself into a giant colorful bird that, in the moment of metamorphosis, was destroying itself with its own beak.

With the tall glasses in their hands, they all stood frozen in place.

Perhaps, in the first moment, with the vain hope or thought that they might somehow stop her.

But they had neither the strength nor the ability to do anything but stare at her with parted lips and eyes wide.

Yet in the next moment they couldn’t have said what they were staring at, or whether there was a next moment, or what might have been the subject of the conflict provoking such a mythically proportioned fury.

Anger died out in Mária too, even though it was she whom Margit Huber’s outburst touched most personally.

They saw her living flesh as she was tearing it off herself, or as if she were ripping her soul off the bones to which it had clung. There was no human experience on the basis of which they could have predicted with certainty that this, and no other, was the nature of their friend.

But when these many self-lacerating utterances of me, me, me reached the top of the scale and her injured self could no longer hope for more self-pity, her voice unexpectedly slumped back to its original register and stopped bleating, cooled off to its normal temperature, jounced back to its usual dimension, which, to the ears of the others, was no more credible than all her former sounds; vision and hallucination.

Didn’t we agree, you miserable creature, said Margit Huber in a sober everyday tone, speaking directly to Mária over the green felt tablecloth, that we wouldn’t say anything about this.

At virtually the same moment Mrs. Szemző dryly asked what wouldn’t you say anything about, for god’s sake, about what.

Something happened that overwhelmed and then completely swept away this reasonable question. Elisa broke into an ugly laugh — harsh, irritating, and vulgar, and not without justification.

For a moment they all looked at her. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be so gloating, so harsh, so unfeeling, they protested to themselves about this interference.

Elisa was laughing at how the women had given Mária what was coming to her; her laugh could not be misunderstood.

Mária must have been ashamed that the other woman’s commonness always managed to show its face through some hole, aperture. And Médi, in whom the struggle between anger and self-pity continued, made sounds as if something had gotten stuck in her throat and then she burst into tears, choking on the unspoken accusations. As if with the last remnant of her strength, she staggered to the bulky leather couch, torn at several places, and fell on it as if on a warm living being, a mother or a friend, hugging the stuffed armrest, which responded with a whiff of the strange, strong odor of cowhide.

You look down at everybody, with no exception, everybody, she bellowed and howled into the brown leather, which was quickly warming under her mouth. Tu me méprises, tu nous méprises, with no mercy, you wipe your feet on everybody.

What is it you were going to keep quiet about, if I may ask.

Mrs. Szemző couldn’t possibly outshout these two females behaving so outrageously, but she kept inquiring.

Again behind my back, right behind my back.

Which also turned into a shrill screech.

She regretted that such selfish sounds, recalling bad memories, were bursting from her throat. But it was no longer possible to withdraw from the air her delusion of persecution, for it needed to be in the light of day, and in that case, she too was nothing more, yes, nothing more than a common hysterical woman.

Like them.

Time to admit it.

In a weak voice Bella tried to intervene. Erna Demén claims, at least she had been so informed, that you were together with her daughter, her big girl whom the Gestapo took away from Kerepesi Cemetery, where the poor things were holding a silent demonstration at Pál Teleki’s grave.* We thought there was no need to tell you about such a silly thing.

Yet as you can see it became a matter of contention, whether to tell you or not.

While she was talking, she expected Mária to help her, at least with a few words.

In difficult situations, Mária always remained stubbornly silent.

And Bella did not dare mention the name of the place where they might have been together.

But in fact that’s exactly right, Mrs. Szemző remarked quietly.

For a few weeks, I was indeed together with her, with her big girl.

Which was something none of the women had expected to hear, though no surprise was visible on their faces. They simply looked at her as they might some idol.

Mária Szapáry was going up the steps of a dim rear stairwell. She did not know why she was reminded of this now. She came home not through the main entrance, from the direction of Via della Lungara, but through a side door, from Via dei Riari.

It must have been the third time they got soaked to their bones that afternoon, and again they were running to get inside, away from the soft warm rain, a man was holding Margit Huber’s hand, and then somewhere between rue Réaumur and rue de Vert bois they ran under the striped awning of a café.

She did not know where exactly they were in their lives then.

These human monsters, having shed their erstwhile stature and character, were standing in pale lamplight and looking back at her with the immeasurable indifference of outsiders. She could expect nothing else, least of all from those closest to her.

Their faces clearly showed they understood, after all, they were not stupid, yet were unable to move a hand or foot or single facial feature. Mrs. Szemző also realized they couldn’t do otherwise because it follows from the cult of crime that crimes will be committed.

Which nevertheless caused something profoundly childish to burst from her mouth.

And now what am I supposed to do with this bad behavior, she asked loudly, frightened and frightening. What am I to do with you, with your lack of compassion.

They did not know this side of her.

These were the lonely nights.

During the day she had to overcome and rise above things, but at night she could at least count on the body’s fatigue. Or she might have killed herself. That had remained her most ardent wish. She was vigorously nodding at each of her words; her discipline lapsing, her usually cleverly concealed tic was defeating her. Now they could see something of this too, have a taste of it.

What should they do with their own stories and with those of the others.

They were all carrying their own losses, their total, all-encompassing failures. No human on earth could answer their questions, and they found no god to whom they could entrust them. The nocturnal breeze, the heartwarming chirring of crickets, the puffing of tugboats receding in the distance, and the fragrance of sweet petunias barely grazed their silence.

If that’s really so, began Mária Szapáry a moment later, more curious than reproachful, why haven’t you looked her up before. Or, oh, I don’t know, you might have figured something out, after all, it was her child she had lost.

What, what could I have figured out.

And what exactly could I have said, and where, to whom, and why. That’s the main thing, why would I have said anything.

How should I have known she did not know.

Nobody asked me. When would I have told anyone, yes, when. One cannot just tell it at any old time, and one doesn’t think about it all of the time.

They remained silent again, as if contemplating the ways one could get around relating such a story if this entire thing, the situation in which they found themselves, had no time, place, or genre.

But I’d be very happy to tell you, and I shall, said Mrs. Szemző, who with this frivolous turn tried to restrain her tic. She pulled herself back from the opposite shore, bounced back to her usual passionless vocal range.

And you can simply tell Erna Demén to give me a call, period. You don’t have to bother your heads about this. All evening I’ve been trying to tell you that before coming here, by chance, I don’t know, though I’m sure I didn’t do it on purpose, I opened the door on my subtenant, that woman.

You don’t say, responded Mária, her voice filled with muted resentment.

Really, very interesting.

At the same time Margit Huber rose, somewhat indignant.

What are you saying, she asked, elongating her vowels, what do you mean you opened the door on her, what is that supposed to mean.

The leather squeaked under her body, the sofa’s worn-out springs moaned, and as she sat up her huge crown of white hair became unfastened and fell unattractively to her shoulders.

I assume it’s clear she wasn’t alone. It was like watching copulating caterpillars or something like that.

They spoke of such things very rarely and, when they did, very cautiously.

As if she were saying to them, keep out of my experiences.

She excluded them from their common past, punished the dumb goyim who understood nothing of the creation of the world, whose great compassion was also a fiasco.

Mária Szapáry, as a person interrupted in exercising her hereditary superiority, stepped closer to the table and, to make order out of the chaos of the story, lifted her glass out of the puddle of the drink. But this was no improvement because she did not understand what had happened. Sugary liquid dripped from the bottom of the glass back onto the green felt. In the meantime, she ostentatiously avoided Elisa’s eyes.

She did not want to see her.

If I understand correctly, you mean she was with somebody, in flagrante, is that right, asked Margit Huber, and with two quick twists of her fists she rubbed tears from her eyes.

Like caterpillars, as I’ve said, earthworms, but there was enough light for me to have no serious doubt about what I was seeing.

But what did you do, for God’s sake.

What could I do, that’s what was so interesting, that’s why I want to tell you about it. I pretended I didn’t see it.

I see.

It couldn’t have gone better.

Izabella Dobrovan decided she had to step in before the battling fronts froze into immovable positions.

She had been a dancer in her younger years but her burgeoning career ended with a serious onstage accident. She probably owed her imperceptible, modest decisiveness to her dance training. With her barely graying black hair brushed straight back and gathered in a bun, with her thin limbs, dry white skin, and ramrod-straight carriage, she was the most impressive-looking among the four women to this day, even though her looks were not particularly striking.

Her dark silk dress rustled across the room.

They had been observing one another for decades; they could see even when they closed their eyes.

Certain things they would talk over, occasionally, briefly, and preferably in private, but they would refrain from making the kind of judgment that only a little while earlier Margit Huber had allowed herself to make. Although in a weak moment she had entrusted Mrs. Szemző with the great secret of her life, of which even Izabella Dobrovan had no knowledge. Although Izabella had followed the lines of the secret story as sensitively as she was now helping Mária return from her temporary embarrassment to the bastions of her superiority.

But the reason Mrs. Szemző’s news affected Margit Huber as it did was that Gyöngyvér Mózes was her pupil.

She had helped her obtain the maid’s room in Mrs. Szemző’s apartment, though Irma did not really need the rent of a subtenant.

Any way one cared to look at it, their lives were well intertwined.

In addition, Margit Huber loved to organize other people’s lives and to hold all the strings in her hands, as it were. Since Irma had a concert piano in her hallway, she might, who could tell, occasionally feel like accompanying Gyöngyvér, or so Margit had thought. Irma was not a brilliant pianist, but she would do. There was nothing affected about her playing. And she wouldn’t be so alone all the time.

Kick her out, she said.

I wouldn’t think of it.

Don’t misunderstand, I gave up on her a long time ago. As far as I’m concerned, you can kick her out.

Give me that glass, said Dobrovan, and she took the dripping glass from Mária Szapáry’s hand. I’ll get a rag to clean up this mess, if I may.

I’m rather annoyed with myself, replied Mrs. Szemző. A pretty young woman, why shouldn’t she live her life.

A hopeless slut, take my word for it. Hopeless, despite all our efforts.

Why is she hopeless, and what does hopeless mean, anyway.

You can’t be the judge of that.

I never claimed I could.

It’s not her voice, it’s that she has no psychological reserves. She herself is hopeless. And luckily she doesn’t know it.

The moment she starts singing, she is very convincing, especially with her concentration and her passion.

If someone’s foundation is shaky, then it’s all in vain.

She has presence, she can fill the space with herself.

Regrettably, passion is more of a danger, it carries her away, regrettably, and that’s when you can see she has no background, no depth. And when you consider that for someone who is almost too old to be a beginner, she is lazy and uneducated.

Lazy.

Elisa was whining in the armchair, but she was really begging for forgiveness.

Mária could not see how upset she was.

And Bella, in her imperceptible and passionless way, started off with the glass toward the door.

Wait, Mária called after her, I’ll do it myself.

No, no, my dear Médi, this is a suppressed, concealed, strictly controlled passion. Take no offense, but I’ve more experience in this. The situation is that she is blocked by something very strong, and whatever it is, it should be eliminated first.

Irma was talking as if secretly she feared for Gyöngyvér and wanted to save her for herself.

And this, in turn, could not escape Margit Huber’s attention because she feared for Gyöngyvér even more passionately, and she also dreaded her own failure, which Irma clearly recognized; she inveighed against her so she could then take her under her protection.

She is blocked, you say, all right, but what can I do with that. These are empty psychological commonplaces. I need to know what is blocking her. I wouldn’t say it’s her low origin, some people can overcome that, some can’t, and it’s not a question of talent. She has no more time for preparation, she’s the one who hasn’t got another five years, not I.

They all felt again that what was happening went on being something other than what they were actually talking about, which stretched every moment dangerously beyond acceptable limits.

What’s the point of behaving in a certain way, even normally, if what they’re trying to conceal with their behavior is visible, and each one of them can sense that they all see through these efforts.

They aren’t in protective trenches anymore.

Dobrovan chose to wait a moment, and Mária hadn’t left the room either. They were tarrying not only because they had to split their attention in so many directions at once, not wanting to be left out of anything or to miss anything, not a single word, but also because Margit Huber’s emotional tactics were becoming clear to them. Not only did she not want Mrs. Szemző to throw out this unknown Gyöngyvér, but she was obviously fighting for her, hoping ardently that Irma would take her under her wing.

Which was something Mrs. Szemző would no longer do for anyone, not for anything. After she’d given up her practice, she’d found work in the district clinic as a medical clerk.

For ten years, until her retirement, she insisted on being a medical clerk and nothing else.

But now she was wavering.

Similarly, Mária Szapáry felt it would be better to keep silent about all this, that it was too perilous, but she would not prevent them from talking. Yet she could not tear herself away from them. All she wanted was not to confuse things more with her own words, and she could not have said what they should clarify or how that could be done. In the meantime, the two other women were not only talking but also watching Bella help Mária, who had fallen out of her role, and trying to figure out how all this was connected to Elisa’s whining.

Which Mária cannot bear, which is the reason she must leave the room. As if they are raking through her nerves.

They all led different and less personal lives; still, there were moments when the air filled up to the point where nothing more could be accommodated.

They are locked into one another.

A force, functioning independently of them, condemned them to one another; they must break out of one another.

The question has become this, who will begin tonight, and who can bring about her breakout with the smallest sacrifice.

Of course, the warm evening had cooler edges, currents, breezes, brief thrusts and puffs from above the heavy, darkly rolling water, which the body unconsciously absorbed. The many sensations and fragrances of early summer colored their feelings, imperceptibly came between them, occasionally modified the measure and direction of their emotions. On Margit Island during these days, the yellow clusters of Japanese acacias burst into bloom among the ruins of the Dominican cloister, where human urine and feces stank and burning cigarettes glowed and died off in the darkness.

In the light of distant gas lamps, lonely men roamed, showing themselves to one another, and then stopped in one of the ruins’ impenetrable shadows and cautiously opened their flies.

The fragrance of the heavy, dense acacia clusters is not sweet but forbidding and scabrous, like chipped metal, or like raw beef.




VOLUME II: In the Very Depth of the Night





Margit Island


I’ve got another life.

Kristóf ran headlong into the bushes, flowery branches hitting him in the face.

Yes, he did have another life.

He was fleeing.

He heard the long, hurrying steps pounding behind him, the wild breathing of his pursuer; the tightly packed footpath through the trees and bushes reverberated under their feet.

I’ve gone too far, he whimpered to himself, much too far. He could not help going too far, no matter how much he admonished himself, because he was far from everything and everybody. He was playing with danger to feel he was alive, though his other self weighed everything soberly.

I stretched things past the breaking point, I truly got on their nerves.

In the fragrant darkness, in the balmy breeze, there was also the danger of muggers, pickpockets, possibly murderers or a police roundup. Let them kill me, I don’t care; that was not what he was dreading. He increased his excitement with the dangers of the night to the pleasure of intolerability. He had discovered this place four nights earlier, and though he’d returned home at dawn he could barely wait for nightfall to come again; he was spending his fifth night here. As if he were deep in ethnological research and was having difficulties finding his way among the tribe’s strict rules.

There was hardly any talking here; at most one could hear hisses and brief whistles. People suddenly appeared and disappeared. He could recognize some now familiar figures, shapes who looked for and followed him, or whom he followed, but the night would swallow them up without a trace.

There were too many of them.

They were on their guard, fleeting, sneaking, prowling, as if they could see in the dense darkness filled with little noises, sighs, moans. He discovered that he too could see in the dark and he especially enjoyed that. His mind recorded, gauged, established contact, combined data, and stored urgent questions; in short, it functioned at full capacity. After a while he understood or seemed to understand the intentions of those shadows and silhouettes, and he comprehended their passions, condemned to silence and mutual dependence. He was happy with his scientific discoveries. At the sight of different figures and the abundance of various desires, his lips, which he licked excitedly, became parched and his mouthy.

The younger man, the one with the mustache, will now make a wide detour, and, before one can get out of the park, with his enormous limbs he will block passage on the trail. Because sometimes he not only planted himself before him but roughly pulled him to himself, hugging him gently, and when this happened the first time he planted a kiss on his neck, so he remembered with his skin the touch of his limbs — and longed for it. He could anticipate this younger man’s grinning mug, his large meaty nose and the bushy Hungarian mustache overwhelming his lips; he felt his breath, with its commingling odor of alcohol and tobacco, a particularly repulsive mixture. Let him plant a kiss on his neck. He nearly fainted at the mere thought of it, the fear. The two worked as a team; he’d be caught between these two large-bodied men. Kristóf realized that the two used the older one as bait, because on this turf other men, mainly the young ones close to Kristóf in age, considered him more attractive. They fancied him; all their lives they’d dreamed of physical strength, of greater size and perfection, and with his sheer presence he embodied this dream. The two of them are waiting for him to walk unsuspecting into their trap. They’ve built their strategy on the physical perfection of the older one; regarding the temptation, there is total harmony between them. Neither of them wants to catch him alone, they want to do it together; and realizing this has made him suspicious of them. But he also realized that his continuing flight from them is part of the lure and serves to increase tension; he’s become a toy of his own permanent desire for greater physical perfection. Everything is preordained, and whatever he now discovers or foresees happens several times a night. There’s no longer any difference between the inner and outer worlds, everything was prepared during Creation, and now only the resolution, the cadenza, is lacking: the death rattle, or ejaculation. If he let them, they’d torture him mercilessly, tear his muscles apart with their sharp teeth and instantly devour his flesh.

That’s all he could think of; he could not imagine it any other way, or he did not want to imagine his pleasure any other way, the pleasure these two had treacherously been preparing for him.

The trembling darkness, mottled by lights from distant gas lamps, was full of hard-packed paths and trails. The men who stepped off the trails and headed into thickets were the ones who wanted to offer up their bodies as free prey, or who wanted someone who would mutely and willingly offer up his. This was one of the general rules of the place. Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening, when unsuspecting strolling lovers disappeared, naked limbs and other body parts flashed in the depths of the darkness that neither gaslight nor reflections of the city’s sky could penetrate. No one who must mature from being an unripe boy to being a ripe, full-fledged male could deny himself the curiosity, the urge to know what other men were like. Insanely, he tried to become like the others. He liked to imagine himself in their place as they offered themselves to anyone, or took possession of a total stranger’s naked body, though he kept telling himself he only wanted to watch, to see.

Mutual imagination became their aphrodisiac, and this made the darkness vibrate and tremble in a state of excited expectation that no mortal man could have gratified.

It was as if he had acquired forbidden knowledge, the city’s ultimate secret.

If he approached them very carefully, minding the slightest crackling sound, they would fly apart, continue elsewhere, and look for different partners for their games, or they’d call him, signal to him, gesturing and hissing for him to come and join them, be the third or fourth among them. It was all the same to them. They offered him their lips, opened for kissing or sucking, or their asses, or simply their erect cocks for a blowjob. They ridiculed the desire for married life or any sentimental notion about mating.

Anything could happen. And he was the one who had to bolt, frightened.

Yet they were not indifferent to everything and everyone, not always.

In general no one was faithful to anyone, nothing could be considered permanent, not even for a moment, every occasional relationship could be dissolved at any time because everyone possessed a certain amount of manliness, so it was always possible to make, with anyone or in any way, a defensive or offensive alliance based on the cult of manliness. But even these strict basic rules were constantly being rewritten and modified.

I can’t decipher it, that’s what he felt, and he went after them, dazed.

Some among them would suddenly find his one and only and leave with him, laughing happily. Some among these returned after a few minutes and, as if nothing meaningful had happened, would go back, indifferently or disappointedly, to searching for someone else. To be more conspicuous and provocative with their nakedness, some men hid their clothes among the ruins of the Szent Margit monastery,* some in the niches of statues, or in portal arches and jambs, or behind dismantled Gothic corbels; others made them into small packets that they strapped to their waists or lower legs. Formidable tribal warriors. He envied them, in his heart he felt great warmth for them, though they were the ones he had to be most chary of: they were wild, merciless, tough, and unpredictable. Sometimes they’d attack as a group. Hissing and snickering like children, they’d make stinging remarks, behavior that was artificial and, despite the manly display of muscles, very feminine. They left behind a scent of cheap cologne and the strong smell of sweat. Without a thought they kissed, sucked, and pummeled. They must have decided at some point to live their lives in this unrestrained and licentious manner.

But I could not decide.

I couldn’t imagine what role I could possibly have in such an insane game designed for more than two people. I wasn’t ready to make a decision about anything. First, I wanted to watch, to see everything with my own eyes, to see through these appearances; everything these men did with one another seemed like sheer humiliation or self-abasement to me, and I simply could not comprehend it. As if I were watching, repelled and estranged, my own inadequacy for submissiveness.

As if I were watching the readiness of someone whose life, despite ceaseless self-rebuke, was one long temporizing. It would have been better to decide right off, especially if this thing was hereditary anyway. But this someone had no idea what to do to bring about a decision. That is why he’d better stay on the trail.

Not step off it.

According to local custom, the trail provided a measure of safety, respite, and protection; staying on it meant, for the others, that I hadn’t yet decided. As if I were saying to them, hold your horses, I’m still searching, waiting for the great unknown, and I’d like not to be touched by you until I find my right to self-determination or voluntarily relinquish it.

I also feared stepping into shit, another reason it was dangerous to go off the trail.

There were others also, who, driven by unrealizable desires, roamed the trails endlessly, went away, and then came back — quite a few like that.

They searched in vain, all in vain; they found no one.

The reason was not necessarily their timidity but rather their squeamishness or their exceptional needs.

It was impossible to understand everything.

Perhaps this was one reason he’d have been glad to exchange his life for that of the bravest ones, so as to understand at least something of the indifference of those who didn’t care whom they were with so long as they could go on being with someone. If only he could accept every stranger’s approach and understand it; if only he could let them have his way with him but without his touching anyone. Which would mean remaining untouched himself.

If only he did not suffer so shamelessly from lack of bodily contact.

He could not touch himself, because here that gesture’s meaning was unequivocal: it meant that you were offering up your body as free prey, and your every move would be watched from every direction, just as he was watching others. One enticing signal was all that was needed for two men to fall on each other and quickly satisfy each other, or to engage in the act for a while, careful not to reach gratification, and then part — with a gesture a little like a thank-you or good-bye — and vanish without a trace into the very depth of the night, only to resume with others. As though they believed permanent attachments to be superfluous and mawkish. They were conspirators, ready to initiate him into their most jealously guarded and dangerous secrets, but only if he first swore to uphold their principles. He probably should have turned his body over then and there. But he could not find the required submissiveness or this kind of self-abasement in himself. Yet the situation was not unpleasant, even though he was excluded and inexperienced, because the fear and trembling kept him in a constant state of excitement. He’d have liked to become completely shut up in himself, but he had to keep himself open. It was important to behave as if he belonged with them, to show that if he wanted to he could give up this tenacious defense of his body’s integrity at any time. Otherwise they wouldn’t put up with him. His sperm kept on seeping. His erection referred not to just anyone but precisely to that someone who might pop up at any moment, that someone whom everyone here idolized and worshipped, that someone whom he too was looking for but hadn’t yet found. Or rather, though he did profoundly understand them, it would be better and he’d complete his knowledge if he sacrificed himself; but — and here’s the rub — he does not understand that here no one is looking for a real person; everyone is chasing his own imagination.

His desire was directed at all of them, almost all of them, but the moment one man stepped forward and approached him, his desire no longer focused on a single person; it focused on no one.

And that is why he would then flee.

He ran from the encroaching figures, from having to respond to this magical attraction; his feet pounding on the hard trail, he ran ahead of them like a wild animal, trusting himself to his sharpened senses, his feet carrying him blindly. Shrubs with branches like sharp arms hit him in the face and wrapped themselves around his body, cracking and snapping as he dragged them along and broke free of them. They were embracing him with their tendrils and tentacles, meaning to pull him back and punish him for refusing to surrender to reality as he must for even the shortest moment of gratification.

He found their roughness, avidity, and brutality frightening; in fact he was not so much frightened as painfully sober when near them. Yet he appreciated the insane bravery with which, if only for a moment, they offered up their entire ecstatic being along with their secret desires, or served other men’s ecstasies with their mouths, their attentive hands, or their carefully lubricated and open rectums.

Their freedom seemed beautiful and dazzling to him. He saw himself as tied down by tethers of convention.

He despised himself for his servility; he was repelled not by them but by himself. Yet he was the one who had done so much against himself, almost everything. He quickly realized that one couldn’t sink lower than this to attain freedom, or at least he hoped he wouldn’t have to sink lower. His heart, beating happily and anxiously, now almost exploded in his chest; from the inner tension of fear and stupefaction he nearly stopped breathing. He probably couldn’t have endured sinking deeper, though he knew that now there was no stopping, he was sliding ever lower. He couldn’t possibly touch anyone like that, not as the others did, he kept telling himself scornfully. He excused himself for not reaching a climax in such wretched circumstances; he couldn’t, even if he found out that every man did it this way. Because then he’d have to give up his frenzied search. He needs affection, he told himself. Out of cowardice he couldn’t accept the ecstatic affections, and he reproved himself for this. Or came to terms with the thought that there was no human being in the world he was looking for. No such man and no such woman either. Yet he couldn’t give up the notion of mating, he couldn’t relinquish the vain or naïve idea that, like a songbird, he’d find his mate, for his sentimental hope had not left him.

Very vaguely, timorously, he hoped that fate would summon someone here, the right person, just as it had sent him here, that fate would not abandon him here. At the same time, he felt that he, with his petit-bourgeois sentimentality, was ridiculous. To imagine that he would meet his total-stranger doppelganger, differing from him only proportionately. He couldn’t imagine this other person except as an exact likeness, which is why it couldn’t be a girl. But this person should be more perfect than he, rather like that giant from whom he’d been fleeing, but not so perfect as to humiliate him with physical and mental superiority.

He couldn’t imagine kissing the giant on the mouth; at most he went as far as envisioning the giant naked, to the point where one naked skin encounters the warmth and exhalations of the other’s naked skin.

Nor did he let the tribal warriors — those strange loud-mouthed beings, all his age or younger — distract him from what he envisioned in his mind. There should be somebody for him, and not just anybody. This is what he thought, even though he always lost his equilibrium when faced with the warriors. He had good reason to fear them, not only because they were quick to come to blows, but because they could see into his most secret intentions, even those still unknown to him, could see into an area he was not too keen to visit by himself.

Let the little prick get lost in a stinking cunt, they hissed when they saw him slinking along the same trail as before, coming closer yet still refusing to let them have their way.

He refuses everything.

Waiting for the knight of his dreams, the little darling, they laughed in a mock chorus.

Indeed, for them, nothing was sacred; the whole world was but a parody of itself, designed solely for their amusement.

You can’t be waiting for the gallant rear admiral Miklós Horthy, my sweetie, there he is on his great white horse, they lisped, giggling into his ear as he passed them.

In the very same tones ladies use in the fancy Café Gerbeaud.

Let him take you on his huge smoking cock, they yelled to his back.

Or maybe Jean Marais.

Boys, I think he is waiting for Mrs. Béla Kun.*

It was impossible to avoid them; still, he didn’t take them very seriously. He quickly discovered that no matter how powerful and fearless they might seem at night, in reality they were pariahs — servants of others’ pleasure, at everyone’s mercy — which is why he could not help loving them.

He was running from them.

He longed for their inner strength, their naked muscles, the nauseating smell of their face powders, their eyes decorated with artificial lashes, their unbridled parodies, their total boldness, but not for their vulnerability.

As he ran he lost his way in the complicated network of paths, lanes, and trails — nothing but the topography of senseless desires, the imprint of pampered fantasies and futile wishes on this filthy planet. Of course, if he could see everything, if he could observe the entire system of their existence, then he’d definitely understand.

And experience the other’s life without giving up anything of yourself, without touching him at all.

On the very first night, he’d decided to return the next day. In daylight, however, his nocturnal decision lost its validity. It was like returning in daytime as an ornithologist to a research area; the birds were screeching, singing, twittering, chirping, billing, and cooing, some of them offering impudent retorts. He might in daylight see into the secret chambers of a stranger’s conscience here, but he didn’t want anything to do with anyone or thing. The ones who had disappeared from his earlier experience were precisely those who in daylight might have guided him to some useful anthropological discovery, but in daylight no special interest linked him here, so he became a total stranger to his nocturnal self. Living his other life, he could make no contact with the requirements of this one. Or would have to exchange one of his lives for the other so that the totality of his existence would not be so intricately false, to turn the two lives into a single one. To attempt that, he felt, would be the end; he’d be playing with madness. Or perhaps he was already in this situation up to his neck and could no longer distinguish among different levels and planes of reality. Something was unavoidably happening, but it immediately and uncontrollably slipped through his fingers.

When he spoke to someone and at the same time made an effort to distract his own attention from the relentless inner speech within him, he did so with a resigned, permanent smile, which is usually enough for people to consider one endearing. But this is what made him aware of his madness’s reality. Not even with the help of his stronger, more reasonable daytime self could he soften the pain of his duality. With his polite daytime smile he promised more and forgot more than he could keep of his nocturnal promises. For a successful coordination of his selves, he’d first have to whisper to one of them which of the two was his other life. He did not succeed in this because neither the nocturnal nor the daytime life was more realistic or more improbable than the other.

In the meantime, it seemed sensible not to deny himself the nights on Margit Island. He would accomplish nothing by forbidding them to himself, anyway. But he’d stay strictly on the trails; he had to prescribe this for himself. To watch, to see, to observe, but not to mingle with those who meant to possess only his nocturnal self; to be on guard, to preserve his daytime self and, in the spirit at least of mating, to keep himself whole. If not exactly sane, at least on this side of insanity.

To trust himself to his sense of smell.

To discern in the darkness the buffeting and the waves of odors — of tobacco, shit, stale urine, sperm, the hostile or friendly emanations of bodies excited or cooling; these signals always steered him aright. Because of them, he became like an animal, following a scent and letting his feet carry him on. He felt more at home as an animal than as a human, because he recorded and preserved his need for objectivity with senses that worked only on an animal level. This smooth feeling of animality was one of the fascinating discoveries of the night — strong enough to absolve him, to neutralize his feeling of guilt and to erase his moral doubts. However, not even his feet or sense of smell could guarantee him total safety on the dark trails.

And it was not enough to be on guard with all of his senses.

Not far from the pebbled walk that separated the grove hiding the ruined cloister from the rose garden, redolent with aromatic and concentrated sweetness, were some polluted areas. During the day, people relieved themselves on its trails and brought their children and dogs, screaming, whimpering with impatience and stamping their feet, to pee and shit; women who needed to would quickly exchange their bloody cottons for clean ones. If in his excitement he did not lose his scent — that is, if an unexpected emotional agitation did not reduce his olfactory alertness — these smells warned him well in advance.

Not that way.

This is where I’ve got to, this is where I am now, he scolded himself in the conventional human way; I’ve immersed myself in the stench of excrement, perspiration, menstruation, and urine; I must discover my only, unvarnished reality while roaming around among shitty papers and bloody bunches of cotton.

Enjoyment of the search and of self-torture replaced pleasure, though he knew that with his constant seeking he was only trying to find a priggish sentimental way around his own brutality. Seeing others’ brutality, he wanted to conjure up his own. Not possible, his body grumbled, dissatisfied; it wouldn’t let him.

His beastly self worked in a system parallel to his emotional self.

The stench of others could not touch him.

At most, he would go not this way but that way. He would not give up discovering and understanding the functional principles of his own body on behalf of mere trifles; he could not relinquish his need to know. Now his beastly self, now his emotional one reported on its painful sense of something lacking, and he could not resolve questions of morality for either of them. He could not accept, could not take possession of something he did not know; yet how could he reject it if he did not even know whether it belonged in his personality, with which he was just becoming acquainted. And what could he do with his frigid self, which had nothing to do with either of his two lives, neither the emotional daytime self nor the bestial nocturnal self, for he had no appropriate sentiments for either, and about pleasure and suffering he remained as indifferent as he had been about generally accepted moral principles.

As if his thinking or his soul had characteristics that were outside his personality. Or characteristics that he sensed or perceived as having little to do with the struggles raging within him that, depending on their final outcome, would form the conditions of his personality’s life.

Hands reached after him from out of the darkness; unexpectedly they were thrust between his legs and thighs to feel the quality of his flesh, the state of his cock, and, mainly, the size of his cock. Somebody gently took hold of his wrist — he couldn’t see the man’s face because he was so close with his hot breath — and quite unexpectedly placed it in his palm while at the same time trying to touch him with his wet lips. He rejected this, quickly brushing everything and everybody off him. Yet he could not reject the surprising feel of the hot, unfamiliar cock — well proportioned, with its swelling veins, taut frenum, and foreskin jammed up before the rim of the bulb — or the intense, profound feeling that another human being had placed his pulsating fate in his hand just like that. Indeed, he grabbed it as a baby would grab a rattle. This he could not forget and therefore could not deny his awareness of the cock’s exceptional qualities or uniqueness either. He learned this from his own cautious, stiff, frightened little hands, and a few overbearing forceful men and happenstance sufficed for the lesson.

Every cock differs from every other cock the way men do from one another, though each cock is always surprisingly different from the man it belongs to. The memory of these oddities kept coming back to him, but he did not know what it meant to uncover them. It was impossible to forget these differences even among fully dressed people. From then on, he knew that clothing concealed something about which everyone wants vital information. As if with men’s cocks the philosopher’s stone had been placed forcefully in his hands but he did not know what to do with it because he was stupid. And it was no help that the very idea of touching a strange person, especially a man, filled him with disgust — touching his lips, his stubbly skin, the first, slippery drops of sperm oozing out after a prolonged erection and leaving stains everywhere. He also refrained from closely inspecting his own prick. While washing, he deliberately looked elsewhere. When erect, his prick became so sensitive that he could no longer separate pain from pleasure. Once, after an erection of several hours, it became stuck in his underpants and he had to pull it free.

Once he’d discovered the playing field, he could not resist returning to it, tempting and challenging the insurmountable disgust he had for his own body no less than for those of all other men. He had no such disgust for women’s bodies — these experiences did not affect his feelings for women — yet even regarding women he could not erase the knowledge culled from his new experiences. As had happened before, it was hard for him not to go down to the subway toilets during the day and not to pay close attention to everything while around him the men pretended to be only urinating.

He did likewise.

The truth is, I had two interrupted lives, he would say later of himself, one proved to be not enough, the other promised to be too much, and in both I felt very much like a stranger. But now I knew it was the end, while I was running from the enormous, athletic older man, his chest and shoulders almost bursting out of his checkered shirt, his fist like a hammer. I must get away from here at any cost, my other self kept repeating desperately to itself like a mantra. If I can get out of the yellow-flowered Japanese acacia grove and reach the riverside promenade, I’m saved.

He ran toward the lights, saw himself running toward the lights.

In no situation in his life could he have escaped this always-watching icy countenance. He will never come back here again, he promised this countenance. It cannot be that I’m repeating my mother’s life.

When he unexpectedly cleared the thicket.

He stopped at the end of the trail and panted, freely, aloud. He was safe.

He inhaled deeply the heavy fragrance of the river water; he had won. And once again he had to acknowledge that the moment contradicted his previous expectations. No one blocked his way and nobody kissed him on his neck. And this he regretted. He could be more ashamed of his ridiculousness, but he could not sink deeper in his shame than this. No one’s steps were heard on the path along the riverbank, packed hard with black slag. An ordinary night on the island, far from both halves of the city, between the two huge arms of the river; if only a huge flood would cover and carry away his body. His stomach, his testicles hurt. It must be very late. Once again long hours must have passed like minutes with meaningless activity; he could never properly gauge the relationship between time and action. He would stay another half hour, he said to himself, and then go home. There is no such thing as good expectations. Again, he’d go home with many experiences, many things lived through, but the repeatedly granted half hours quickly filled the entire night, and he failed to meet a single soul. I have nobody, and I’ll never find anybody either. He was thirsty, sweaty, and hungry, he should have gone to one of the drinking fountains because he was all dried out. One solitary human being, he prayed, begged, and implored, like a monk.

I really can’t go lower than this, he threatened himself.

Still, he could not give up the struggle whose purpose he could not know.

The gas lamps spread their mute and empty light over the deserted promenade. His fate cheated him again, or maybe he wanted to trick his fate. On the Pest shore, the lamps illuminated the empty pier in the same way.

On the Margit Bridge, seen in the cold blue light of distant arc lamps, a sluggish yellow streetcar was crawling upward.

Nobody followed him.

Instead, the older unknown man, who could not have been more than thirty, had followed him for a while, that was certain, he heard him panting behind him but then falling behind. And why shouldn’t he. What a hopeless character I am, really a stupid little prick. He was sorry they hadn’t caught him, wrestled him to the ground, and done it to him. And now here I am, feeling sorry about it. Torn to pieces and bloody, defiled by their sperm, he’d have been rolling in smeared excrement, but at least with his throat cut he’d be past everything, past this whole rotten hopeless life. The cops could have their turn. He had fought off the unknown man; he struggled with himself. It’s not enough that I was born a Jew, not enough that I’m an orphan, must I be a homo too. He did not understand his birth, and he knew he should part with his life for the sake of his happiness, since he couldn’t count on anything. And even this wasn’t quite true. His problem was that his life was stuck at the halfway mark. If only he had been born a Jew, but his mother came from a very Catholic family. If only he could have been an orphan — after all, the Communists had beaten his Jewish father to death — but his mother had simply abandoned her child.

That alone was reason enough to feel sorry for himself, but he thought he was better off without such a miserable mother.

This life he’d received at birth means nothing, and not only to him; it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Never a better opportunity than the present, tomorrow will be too late, I have to do it today. For months, he’s been thinking that out of sheer humanity he should remove himself from among the living. If these shadows, emerging and vanishing in the night, were not around him, still their brutality and mercilessness appeared in his filthy imagination as something highly desirable, as the very last straw. Or they did not exist, not even now. He was not far from realizing that, given the painful lack of gratification, he should consider their existence as pure hallucination. Neither the dark-skinned, slow-moving, marvelous giant, who might be a Gypsy or half-Gypsy, existed, nor did his younger assistant, probably from the suburbs, with his messy hair and his Hungarian mustache hanging down on either side of his mouth; he was only running away from himself into the big empty world. Everything else is sheer imagination. He imagined the somber buildings with their tin domes on the other shore, which the weak lights of the Újpest docks barely illuminated. Lights were still on in some of the apartments, it seemed, and from the partly cloudy sky the city’s reflecting lights, rich in reds and yellows, were spraying down in a steady drizzle.

Scenery, that’s all it was, somber scenery; in reality, he stands alone on this empty island between the two waters.

Protected somewhat by his imagination.

A deluge that keeps overcoming and carrying him away but he’ll never have anybody, and that’s all human life is worth.

Breezes fingered his sweaty skin under the black shirt.

I don’t exist, he said half aloud, and I shall not exist either, he added.

If I want to stay alive, he added to himself, I have to get used to the idea that I don’t exist, he said again half aloud.

With long trembling lights on its back, the large, fragrant, swelling river rolled along darkly. It made no sound; the waves had subsided. The tiered riverbanks rose beyond the waves’ last laps. On steps under the water, clinging duckweed made bubbly sounds as it rocked back and forth. The two tugboats that had met here a little while earlier, both with dangerously low-floating barges and a grating din, were now far away, the sound of their horns fading in the distance. The puffing of one could be heard somewhere to the north, from behind the badly lit Árpád Bridge, that of the other from the opposite direction, perhaps from the wartime ruins of the Erzsébet Bridge.

The tugboats’ puffing in different registers lingered in the hazy air, and some of the oil fumes in their wake remained, trapped between the shores.

Sometimes he was convinced that his existence was nothing but hearing, smelling, and seeing — at which he took off after other people. Who perhaps also do not exist or, more precisely, who under the influence of contact instantly lose their dazzling corporeal existence.

The bodily magic of boys or adult males grew dim in the light of day, anyway; it dissipated at the slightest touch.

A rough, taut, resistant material remained in his hand; a strange feeling that soap would not wash off. The magic of girls or mature women lasted longer and penetrated more deeply because he had more confidence in them and this confidence was sanctified. He could even close his eyes so as not to see — with them he could cross the delicate border where body and soul meet — but when he did, he also sobered up. It happened when, after some reluctance, a kiss turned out to go on too long or when with tiny little kisses he returned to a woman only to be dragged back into the body-and-soul convention; but it never happened twice with the same female.

He played his part soberly, and this was painful to recall, or it would have been even more painful to return to its painfulness.

As if he had known in advance that he would trick them. While performing his duty in accordance with generally accepted requirements and rituals, which is to say while trying to discharge a duty about which he knew nothing, he looked with aversion at the female’s distorted features and quivering flesh. He fled from them when they approached again and asked for more of the same. As if he were grasping a peculiar substance that had little to do with oft-mentioned bodily desires and attractions; and the more aggressively they approached with their disgusting physical excitement, the stronger he felt this alienating substance.

From the moment of penetration, it was no longer he they wanted but something they could obtain from anyone with a sense of rhythm and a cock. And he could not even say what other idiotic men kept repeating, that women want only a cock, because in this regard women behaved, compulsively and politely, he had to admit, as if cocks didn’t even exist.

In fact only men dreamed of cocks, which made this whole thing impossible to understand.

He did not want to believe that people make a mistake about one another precisely in their intimate bodily contacts and vehement gratifications.

There was someone in him who with icy calm followed him in his every impulsive movement and sinful thought, but he did not believe this someone either.

Sometimes the presence of this someone was amplified, but it never spoke.

And he did not have enough strength to suspend the enormous gravity of physical existence.

He simply could not believe it.

In fact, he was struggling not with his double vision but with a special trinity. Even now, the third member of the trinity was with him, a little behind him and clinging to his side as he stood near the water thinking; for long minutes, taking cover in the deep shadows of the rowers’ white clubhouse, a boy, older than he by a few years, kept an eye on him.

From the moment he’d crossed the quietly squeaking promenade, sectioned by the pale haloes of gas lamps, still panting hard, he had been followed, naturally, by more than just the eyes of that older boy waiting patiently at his post.

At his arrival, the tips of excited cigarettes caught fire one after the other among the large trees on the promenade.

Four insane glowing tips, far from one another, above the jasmine.

These were all hungry for fresh meat.

The young man in the shadow of the rowers’ white clubhouse could instantly count his rivals and weigh his chances; his heart began to beat hard as the newcomer hesitantly stopped above the water.

He heard but did not understand the sentence said half aloud.

Something menacing radiated from him, and then, I’d rather not want him, he thought to himself. Must be a lunatic, he thought, wandering here aimlessly, mumbling to himself. Stupid little cockbeater, he thought.

One would like to seduce a stupid little cockbeater like him and then leave him alone with his madness. These little idiots think something important is happening to them. And he hadn’t yet decided whether to seduce the boy or let the others take him when, perhaps because of the boy’s back or his straight posture, he thought he recognized him.

That is Demén, Kristóf. And he so surprised himself with the name that he had no doubt as to the correctness of his discovery.

At the same time, something collapsed in him that quietly and unnoticed he had been putting together. This Kristóf is just as miserable as I am except he’s a beginner, and that means he’ll be just as hopeless in this as he’s been in everything else. He had not seen Kristóf for four years but often daydreamed about him, involuntarily and voluntarily. In his own life, an eternity had gone by during those four years. It would be impossible to talk about and he didn’t want to tell anyone about it, yet the first thing that came to mind was how lucky it was that he hadn’t told anyone. He’d always thought of Kristóf during those four years as someone he could trust with his disgusting secrets. Every time he rode by Kristóf’s house in the streetcar and looked up at the windows, he thought of going upstairs and opening up his soul to him; this was something he desired more than Kristóf’s body. He did not do it, because he was afraid of what might happen afterward.

One looks for a psychological garbage can, and then, it turns out, it always turns out, that all one has found is a prattling person; that had been his experience.

Kristóf was the only one in whose case he was still tempted; he’d be the only one, and realizing this made him shudder, but anyway this vain hope was now gone. He too was nothing but a stupid little homo. In fact there was really nobody to whom one could tell anything.

That night Kristóf was wearing a black shirt, black pants, black shoes, and, big idiot that he was, thought the older boy, probably black socks too. In the camp in Wiesenbad where they spent the summer of 1957 together, from his bed he had watched Kristóf’s fastidious dressing ritual every morning. His silhouette made him recognizable in the darkness, his unmistakable posture, bare neck, bodily proportions, and the outline of his shapely head.

He was dressed all in black not because of the latest fashion, though fashion had something to do with it, but because with an all-black outfit he’d prepared to be invisible in the night.

Which also belonged to this recently discovered animality.

The other boy remembered, however, that standing in front of his locker, Kristóf always picked colors to go with other colors.

Let nothing more than his hands and face at the very most show against his all-black outfit.

But the young man spying on him could not have thought of this, because he necessarily had different ideas about his own nights.

He wore clinging T-shirts, usually yellow or white, never dark ones, matched by exceptionally small, thigh-hugger shorts. He never put on underpants. He wore only the kind of clothes in which he could easily show himself, could offer himself up, and which, when the occasion arose, he could shed quickly and effortlessly. With rawhide sandals on his feet, hardly more than a few straps, he gave the impression of being practically naked. Nobody in his right mind would ever wear black here because everything makes visible stains on black.

He was deeply shocked at inadvertently seeing this shy upper-class boy in such a place, the boy he had taken under his wing from the moment he’d first seen him.

What sort of mess has he gotten himself into again, what a blockhead. Or maybe he’s really lost his marbles, and look, now he’s talking to himself again.

Could he have been so shy and peculiar back then, with madness already brewing in him. Suddenly he felt the urge to be rid of him, mad or not, he had to get this blockhead out of here. He had to prevent what was being prepared, or has always been in preparation, from becoming reality. To protect him from knowledge that has nothing to do with him and for which he is not cut out. He quickly realized that this idiot was experimenting with himself, and even if he dabbled with what was going on here, he’d still remain an outsider. The best thing would be to throw him into the Danube. Let him swim; he’d never be the real thing anyway.

Perhaps he thought of such a drastic solution so quickly because his discovery, instead of increasing, considerably decreased the value of his own life.

As if he were saying, no, it cannot be, Kristóf cannot be a faggot.

After all, he wouldn’t do it either if they hadn’t forced him to. Ultimately, the world functions normally, and this faggot life is only one of its aberrations, about which nobody should know anything except for the initiates. Shielding his cigarette with his palm, he took a long drag and then with the heel of his sandal ground the burning butt into the black dirt.

He didn’t want to give himself away ahead of time. Which is to say, he didn’t at all want to reveal himself to Kristóf.

Or only at the appropriate moment, when his action would bring him some profit. As if he had a ready-made plan for how to put the boy to work. The firm would be very grateful for it; what a great catch. They’d rub their hands together. This boy may be a baby in some ways, but he speaks several languages and there isn’t a book or encyclopedia he hasn’t read.

Of course, his current rivals hiding under the trees noticed the fall of the burning cigarette butt. Most of those who frequented this area knew one another by sight; fresh meat was very rare.

What’s the new consignment like, the new arrivals asked every night.

Even if they didn’t know one another, they still knew why the others did something and why they did it this way and not some other way. The abilities of the young man in the tight shorts were highly respected in other hunting grounds of the city: in People’s Park, the Népliget; in City Park, the Városliget; in the Little Flask, or Kiskulacs, Canteen; in the subway toilets, in all the steambaths, at the Old Parade Ground, Vérmező; or in the City Gate coffee bar, Városkapu Espresso. Whenever he appeared, they had reason to be anxious because with his devilish and merciless finesse he managed to knock out his rivals.

Now, with their cigarettes under the trees, they did not understand why Pisti wasn’t going after the boy.

Maybe he’d let one of them have this small-balled little angel.

He knew this was how his four rivals were interpreting his motionlessness, but it never occurred to him to step out of the shadow of the clubhouse.

Let them take him if they want to; let them deal with him.

He was waiting for Kristóf to make a move, any way he wanted to or with anyone, so he could follow him secretly. He wouldn’t let him get away. Not a cell in his body desired him anymore, even though during the last four years he’d thought of him frequently, and whenever he recalled his lips, his awkward nakedness, and his hard little ass, it was indeed a sweet feeling to rub himself to sleep against the background of these images. However, the object of the ritual and its real-life embodiment could no longer have anything to do with each other.

He turned icy cold toward him in the warm early summer night as he realized he had secretly loved him and still did. There was a possible life ahead of them that he would gladly spend with Kristóf.

He would make use of him.

He would wait until somebody else finished with him and only then would he talk to him.

When liberated and pursued by his own shame he would run home to his sweet little auntie.

It would be best to accost him on the empty bridge. He’d expose him, annihilate him. Even the tip of your black shoe shows jism, my sweet, that’s all he’d say. I just thought I’d call your attention to it, with your permission, of course. Because of the long wait and the anticipated excitement of betrayal, his beautiful naked thighs became covered with goose bumps. He had never hoped for so precious a prey at so late an hour. Glad of his discovery, he imagined himself rubbing his hands together in anticipation of huge profits. He wanted to take revenge on him immediately; and he had reasons.

He hated him from the depths of his soul exactly the way he hated himself, and that is why the other man’s vulnerability made him happy.

Now I’ve got you in my claws, you rotten little Jew.

In the meantime, Kristóf was unsuspectingly enjoying the deadly silence and wrestling with the different persons living within himself.

His other self living within him did not tell him to go down to the water, where on the grayly gleaming steps the rocking duckweed made bubbly sounds.

True, that self did not say not to go either.

It’s safer to jump from the bridge. Neither did his other self say he should hurl himself to the depths from the bridge, even though he picked a good spot on the bridge from which it would be most advantageous to jump. Without slamming into the pier while falling; that’s how he wanted to end it. The water would carry him away as it had carried away the dead and wounded shot into the river by Arrow Cross men.

Without a trace.

It may have been a third person thinking like this within him, this is no longer me, he thought, because this person had no empathy, even though at other times it mutely signaled what feelings it harbored for him in connection with anyone.

At any rate, for some time now he has suspected the presence of someone with some sort of design on him.

He did not look at his watch, even though he felt like leaving, not because he meant to keep things from happening tonight, or to keep the giant from luring him away, but because he felt that time was running short.

Quickly away from here and let him finally finish himself off.

He concluded at last that he did not need to wait any longer. In this other life of his, it was inadvisable to acknowledge the passage of time.

These nights could not end in glimmering semi-darkness because they had no dawns.




The Other Shore


Please, I don’t want you putting down roots, said Mária Szapáry quietly, and took the glass from Irma Arnót’s hand. Today it’s your turn to cut.

This made Elisa fall silent in the wheelchair, and Margit also understood Mária’s stern warning. She had to get ahold of herself. Wildly she began to look for her hairpins. First in the mass of her undone hair and then with her fingers searching blindly in the leather sofa’s folds and gaps. Now Izabella’s silk dress swished as she got up, almost as a response to Médi’s efforts, but before she left the room she tipped her head like a little girl, pretending to do it absentmindedly, and called back to them.

While I’m getting a washcloth, Médi will have time to apologize to Mária. Tout de suite, she said warningly, et pas d’histoires.

I can do that right away, of course, if you want me to, replied Margit Huber almost indifferently, and one after the other snapped up the found hairpins with her lips so that with her free hand she could pin up the crown of hair again. I beg your pardon, she said rather mockingly, speaking through hairpins and clenched lips. Je te demande bien pardon. But if you allow me, I’d love to have a repentant smoke.

Please, je t’ai pardonné il y a longtemps, answered Mária Szapáry. Go ahead, no problem at all.

Margit Huber had stood up from the leather sofa; they looked into each other’s eyes, long and cold, and did not know what to do with their mutual hatred. Everything turned cool. Médi kept herself busy with her hair, pinning it back with blasé nervous little movements, but she realized there weren’t enough pins; she was observing herself with Szapáry’s critical eyes. Her flame-red thick soft-leather belt was askew, her blouse had slipped out from under it, she had rumpled her snow-white petticoat, which somehow was stuck to the calico skirt, and with her tears she had smeared her makeup.

Before you tell me I look ridiculous I’ll go tidy up.

It won’t do you any harm, replied Mária Szapáry.

Médi, offended, hurried to the bathroom while Mária Szapáry and Irma Arnót remained, awkwardly, at the table. Elisa, hungry and jealous, was watching them. They could not know whose partners they would be in the card game or where they should sit. The spilled drink did not spread on the green felt table cover nor did the felt absorb it. It lay before them on the table, convex and opaque, like an antique cameo waiting to be worked on. This image occurred to Mária Szapáry because only a few weeks ago she had pawned her penultimate cameo and had been waiting for the mailman every day to see if they could make it on that money until the end of the summer. Now she has only one left, the most beautiful of her cameos. They neither said anything nor looked at each other. Elisa again injected a little whimper into their silence, slyly and quietly. Perhaps the tension in the wordless moments hurt her. Long minutes went by until Margit Huber returned and offered a cigarette to Irma, who smoked occasionally. On top of it all, Margit smoked Gauloises, and when people asked her how she could be so inconsistent she would answer, moving not a muscle in her face, that she did not have to sing, her students did, and she wasn’t teaching them with her throat — and she’d tap her forehead with her fingers. She’d obviously given herself only as much time in the bathroom as it took to tidy up her clothes and makeup. She did not want them to wait so long that they might have the impression she’d fought with Dobrovan in the bathroom.

Which, of course, she had.

Singers and dancers brought her Gauloises from distant cities and airports, sometimes from places where none of them had ever been or ever would be.

The two women lit up with great pleasure, both of them longing for the first deep puffs.

In the silence not only the clicking of the gilded leather-covered lighter could be heard but also the burst of its flame and then the crackling of the tiny tobacco embers. Mária Szapáry could not bear cigarette smoke, but every night she politely placed an ashtray on the tea trolley for the two neurasthenics. She glanced at the trolley and was surprised to see that a small Urbino dish used as an ashtray was still intact. If she wanted them to come to her house she had to be lenient in matters that were not quite to her liking.

Finally Dobrovan came back too, swishing in her silk dress, but she was equally silent. She held out a wet washcloth for Mária to wipe her sticky fingers on. When that was done, with quick, surprising, and unjustified agitation she blotted up the opaquely glistening cameo. In her swishing silks she hurried out with the washcloth. She walked as if carrying an important object. She heard the shout, as if hearing it again over the distance of several decades. The other women stared after her. Suddenly she felt herself inside the brilliant plum-blue silk costume with shoulder straps, her knees bare. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, then rose on point and with rapid little steps hurried forward and became blinded by the footlights. Pas de bourrée with the feet lightly alternating devant, derrière. She stretched her arms ahead of her; on turned-up palms she was carrying the bluebird of happiness. It took wing. Left her here on earth but with the strength of flight she was on her toes again. She’d love to fly away with it, how she’d love to. She gazed at her empty hands en désespoire. She did not understand how she could so sharply recall that shout of long ago, et c’est fini.

She was barely twenty-one years old when at a rehearsal for her first major role a loosened batten crashed down on her.

It happened that in those days she was with a man — who took care of her, of whom her family knew nothing of course, who taught her how to talk again, but whom she did not take seriously until this accident, or rather whose proximity she did not want to acknowledge. She took him for one of those people who hang around theaters, a very good-looking penniless nobody who attached himself to her as he would to someone else tomorrow, and until then she deigned to accept his services but did not think much of him. In the evenings, during longer breaks in rehearsals or on endless spring Sundays, it would have been devastating to remain alone in the huge city.

Loneliness had eaten away at her suppleness and the smoothness of her style.

And she couldn’t commit herself to this sad young man because she was always, hysterically, on guard lest he make her pregnant.

He or anyone else.

Not to get pregnant, not that, for God’s sake, and certainly not by this character. Let him have his gratification on his own account; let him squirt his fluids somewhere else, anywhere, in any way.

The small puddle usually wound up on her belly or became long stripes running down her neck, into her face, her hair; she didn’t care where.

He was a frail, sickeningly white-skinned, easily injured person whose dark hair, twisting in little waves and curls, continually fell over his shiny, large, pale forehead. She had never met anyone so poor as this man and listened to his stories with aversion, though this made her feel ashamed because a poor man was, after all, still a man. It seemed as if his poverty also meant that he had all sorts of venereal diseases. She was always anxious, worried about catching some of them, she constantly observed herself, stuck out her tongue in front of the mirror or, with the help of another mirror, studied the roof of her mouth, her throat, to ascertain that fatal blisters had not appeared. He might be Lithuanian, maybe half Polish, even Russian, she couldn’t tell. He’d run away from a Warsaw orphanage when he was sixteen, and except for his grandmother, who had raised him until he was ten, didn’t know anyone.

At most she loved his mouth strictly for aesthetic reasons, but she was ready to forgo his kisses.

She was afraid of minor infections, even the common cold, anything that might take her off her feet. She liked his eyes too, somewhat, his deeply melancholic countenance, a little disguised by his way of retreating under the protection of his eyelashes or by the unexpected vehemence of the movements with which he straightened the myriad curls of his hair. She looked for no lasting relationship with anyone because every little change disturbed her concentration.

Once a week she would wait for Médi in front of the Conservatoire, or the two of them together waited on the quai Malaquais for Médi’s love, another destitute young man, ramrod-straight, with a bad stutter, who was also Hungarian and studied painting in a studio at the École des Beaux Arts or was a model at other ones. Frankly, she didn’t want to see even these people, especially not Médi and her boyfriend, because their presence drew her attention to her lack of romantic feelings for anyone. Not even the man with whom she reached her gratification.

She was aware that her behavior was unusual or downright scandalous.

She had to be careful not to be conspicuous about it with her colleagues. Any reasonable girl would rather seek than avoid company; after all, she’d want to get married and would obviously adjust her conduct to her plans and intentions. But no, not she, not in the least. To some extent she had to keep her intentions a secret even from herself.

But this Korsakas managed to meet her most secret requirements. He satisfied her, nourished the suppleness and stylistic polish that otherwise loneliness would have consumed; and this was the most important thing for her career.

She practically begged his pardon when she too reached her climax.

And he did not want to rob Bella of all her time, because he worried about losing her. He did not demand her attention and did not even insist on penetrating her. Actually, there was something rather neutral in his behavior. And when he did penetrate her a bit, he did it carefully and with consideration, didn’t go too deeply, only filled the bays of the labia with his amazingly round bulb, which turned almost completely black with excitement. A powerful odor rose from down there, that’s where he stroked it and kept pulling it between the smells of the two of them, though in a way that let him yank it out anytime he wanted to.

With considerable effort she might have been able to deny herself the man’s body, but she always felt a renewed desire for his smell in hers.

Which was such a strange thought; as if she had said, yes, I caught a scent, and therefore I am a wild beast.

To suit their interests and needs, they developed a particular technique of communication, the sort of relationship that was not unusual in such a merciless big city. Bella did not ask herself about the source of the man’s polite neutrality. She had a cool calculation in her mind: this is what I give, this is what I get, neither more nor less.

I’m calculating and selfish, she told herself reproachfully, an egoistic beast, that’s what I am, she said to herself, as if waiting for someone to contradict her, but this was the truth.

Yet she felt that if things went on this way, if she failed to tame her egoism or relinquish her slyly extracted, selfish little gratifications, which differed from those produced in her own solitary smell and by her own hands, she’d become more and more like her father and mother, and her rebellion against them would be rendered meaningless.

She thought that she was deceiving the other person and that that was why her behavior was morally unacceptable, but she was only fooling herself, which made her very anxious, and she suffered greatly. Perhaps the man had more experience in making order of such calculations; he was ten years older than she.

Bella told herself that the business relationship would last as long as its benefit to her body remained greater than the loss or harm she might create with her infection phobias. She feared that frequent autoeroticism would leave some trace on her gestures and become obvious on the stage. She did not notice that the more efficient their calculations became, their techniques of gratification more studied and deliberate, the deeper they went into the areas where they became acquainted, in which case why would she belittle or disdain him.

She could not take seriously a body so poorly built as his, so crude and ill proportioned, and not in terms of professional considerations either. She would involuntarily close her eyes because she did not like to look at him naked. Perhaps that is why the image of what she did see remained so sharp in her memory. It was no use saying that the sight of a perfect body was boring and she’d had enough of it; for her it was as hard to accept this explanation as to accept its opposite. She would have withdrawn from the embrace of thin, long, weak arms, but the sharp sensation produced by sensitive fingers became more profound and more important than what she saw. What settled in her mind was the cautious encounter of their loneliness. And the man’s feet, his long legs and thighs, surprisingly well developed compared to the infirmity of his body as a whole.

Quite nice legs and thighs with thick black hair. All right, she didn’t love him, but she wished at least to accept his body a little.

She was most averse to his penis, which is to say she didn’t want to see it erect or withdrawn into itself, when with its dark round head it looked out of the thick pubic hair. She found his testicles positively ridiculous, undeveloped, like a child’s; she didn’t understand why a man like that didn’t sink into the ground for shame.

The man controlled the writhing of her loins, which she tried to restrain, with the convex edge of his fingernails, with the tip of his tongue, or with his taut shiny testicles. The latter, when excited, became a single red globe, with which he’d keep touching the woman’s labia very gently.

A maniac, she should really be afraid of him, the man is a maniac.

He kept on touching her organ, gently hitting and bumping it, maniacally, until she opened up, and from then on he seemed to be pounding inside, could even slide inside her, or at least that is what Bella felt, that is what she saw of him inside herself. As if he too had not testicles but a pair of labia, and the two meat-eating flowers, his and hers, were opening into each other, one devouring the other. And when she threw the washcloth angrily into the sink, she fondly remembered this too.

Along with her shame.

She felt ashamed and watched Médi; leaning out of her duplicity, she watched what was happening between Médi and her handsome stuttering Hungarian man to see if there was any similarity. She felt there wasn’t. No, what was happening to her was not legitimate at all. She thought Médi was untouched by these things, by all these raging abominations. She feared that her people at home might find out about her. She must not become pregnant. But the abomination was good. In the endless rhythmic pounding, the physical pain was wonderful, but certainly it would end. To strengthen her memory, with her loins she touched the hard ledge of the sink, a strange collision at the edge of her gently sloping mons veneris, twice in succession. Frugally she portioned out the sounds she produced, with which she also punished herself. She was afraid of breaking into hysterical screams. The man did not allow himself loud sighs or moans either, which helped deepen the feeling of their movements and shifting positions.

If this stranger’s exterior repelled or irritated her so much, she shouldn’t be loud when he helped her reach her climax.

This was the logic of self-punishment, and certainly without justification.

The man’s pitiable, almost hollow chest with its ridiculously short little ribs, and his awkward shoulders from which every little bone separately protruded, gave her a most disgusting feeling that she was not a grown woman but a little girl playing with a stupid doll. The stomach wall flattened by much starvation, and below it the childlike, protruding, somewhat puffed-up belly; I must be mad, she kept saying to herself, going to bed with a man like this when I could do it with much better ones.

But he was the one she went to bed with; others could not get this close to her. Which logically could not be comprehended. Why it was like this and not like that.

Or what about his pale bony little buttocks, which didn’t have enough flesh for its cleft to close properly under the volume and pressure of muscles; just touching it filled her with irritation.

She had no way of embracing or molding this body to her own. She kept telling this to herself, as if to apologize or accuse.

She chose to let happen what could not but happen, and in her stabbing, throbbing climaxes she considered herself deaf, blind, and dead.

Quickly she turned on the hot water, which instantly filled the bathroom with a sulfurous odor. She didn’t want to stay by herself for long, and she washed the washcloth so angrily it was as if she had to remove sperm from it. She was not comfortable about the physical characteristics of sperm. Given its consistency, she thought of it as snot. She was always surprised anew when it didn’t have little knots in it and its thick body easily dispersed in water; it was not snot after all, but an embodiment of her dread, anxiety, and fear that she’d ruin her life with her dissoluteness.

Fulfilling the prophecy of her parents.

Not to get pregnant.

Sometimes she left a strongly outlined, yellowish stain on the sheet, though she wasn’t sure that it was not copious vaginal discharge flowing out during orgasm. Because it was so dark, she took it to be the first sign of syphilis. There’s blood in it. Or it left a stain on the handkerchief she used to wipe it off; in worse cases stains were left on her clothes, or it dried and turned white in her black hair, which to her shame she noticed only in the rehearsal hall’s mirror.

She kept rinsing and squeezing the washcloth, as if worrying that she couldn’t get rid of the stains. After she hung it up and quickly, with a bad conscience, returned to the others, she still did not know what to do with her agitation; in Mária’s living room, everything appeared to be the way she remembered the hotel room to which Vladas Korsakas took her after her release from the hospital.

As if there had been no operation and no anesthesia, he was standing there before her, alive, warm, and real in his white corkscrew-patterned wool sweater. And it didn’t matter that so many things were happening in her head. The three women were still in the same positions around the table; their every little move made the layers of smoke around them flutter slightly. In his thick, white, high-necked sweater, Korsakas looked more athletic than he was, and he wore no shirt under the sweater. The bed, the heavy curtains on the window, and the Japanese sitz bath in the corner behind the screen were just as she had left them; the accident had caused no change in her hotel room. She saw no signs of joy, pain, or empathy on any of the objects.

Nobody had taken the glass from Elisa even though she’d been whimpering and begging for who knows how long, stretching out her arms to get attention, to demand something.

But the object of her wish was not easy to determine.

Beyond the open glass doors, above the petunias’ fluttering funnels, the urban night was dazzling, motionless. Wet tree branches were swinging icily in the wind; the maid had to be called in to put more wood on the fire, the room was too cold, and then to bring more hot water.

Elisa did not relinquish her glass; on the contrary she was signaling that she wanted something, and she kept pointing at another glass. Her eyes flashed wildly, she definitely wanted something, and her eyes, as Bella followed them with hers, were on Irma’s almost untouched drink.

She wanted — no, seemed to demand — that she be given it; give me what Irma hasn’t drunk. Obviously it wasn’t the drink she wanted so much; jealousy was raging within her.

In response Szapáry puckered her lips slightly and angrily shrugged her shoulders. What do I care, she answered Bella’s mute question. Let her get drunk if she wants to so much.

The empty glass clacked on the tea trolley.

They could still have talked, but at this phase of the evening they wouldn’t.

Dobrovan in her dark silk dress, amply gathered over her breasts and at her waist, stopped behind the empty chair, making the smoke flutter again in the air; the excitement froze.

This is what they had been waiting for.

The card game relieved them of the burdensome, highly responsible obligation of conversing, but it took a long time before their concentration on the run of cards made them forget what was constantly on their minds, what had been overstraining their nerves. Once again they reached the point where, despite their intentions, each woman found herself face-to-face with each of the others. Mrs. Szemző smartly tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and kept blinking because the smoke irritated her eyes. She picked up a deck, shuffled it, and then spread the cards on the table in a large fanlike arc.

Each of the four women picked a card, twanging it under her fingers as she flipped it. The value of the cards they picked determined the order of their turns, which also assigned their seating arrangement. To which they responded with little hisses, clicking tongues, giggles, sounds they could produce with almost-closed lips.

The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.

Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.

It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemző; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.

Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.

According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemző will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemző, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.

Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.

Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.

And those two in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor apartment realized that it had been quiet for a long time, that their bodies had been cooling off in the silence and that no more streetcar noises were coming from below.

Above their heads a draft was slowly swinging the window giving on the dark sky.

Tonight, luck arranged it so that Mária Szapáry again sat facing the terrace.

That was the place they all liked most.

Looking up from the cards from this position, one could see the pale dim lights of the gas lamps, like a flawed string of pearls along the promenade on the other shore of the softly rolling dark river, and the deep shadows of the Buda mountains, sliding in and out of each other above the flat block of the rowers’ clubhouse illuminated by reflected lights.

From here, of course, they could not have seen what was happening on the island, around the clubhouse, or under the gaslights, but in the city, people knew in general what kind of place it was.

It wasn’t proper to talk about things like that.

As if the promenade were empty.

Occasionally, however, one could see, even with the naked eye, solitary little figures stepping out from among the bushes and trees, waiting for someone or hurrying to escape someone else, all but fleeing on the promenade, and then, a few meters farther on, casting furtive looks about, disappearing into the sparse grove of yellow acacias and then returning to the trails cut in the meager undergrowth to the ruined medieval cloister, stinking with human excrement, where the gently swaying light of gas lamps could barely reach.

Over Izabella Dobrovan’s silk-clad shoulders Mária Szapáry glanced at the other shore.

It was like a victory that fell into her lap; she was waiting for her cards.

She was deliberately avoiding Elisa’s eyes. Neurasthenia was visible on the features of the other three women. Try as she might to appear as a person of democratic persuasion, she considered everyone below her rank neurotic. She always saw their exasperation showing through their disciplined behavior.

They were not free people.

They were not sufficiently self-disciplined; they could not provide an acceptable framework for a base emotion.

She despised them.

The three despised women, however, were busy wondering whether Elisa’s behavior truly left Mária Szapáry cold.

She seemed neither interested in nor touched by it, but merely to be waiting for the cards to be dealt.

The mutual anger lasted into the next day. After their friends left Mária severely reproached Elisa, though by then she had managed to calm herself down; she knew, idiot that she was, that she’d forgive Elisa. And that Elisa would throw a fit, slap at things, cry, rave and rant. I always forgive, she said to herself, as if hypnotizing herself to forgive, yes, forgive her, but it was becoming harder and harder to force forgiveness out of herself.

There will come a moment when the accumulated pardons will keep her from any further forgiveness.

She will kill her and then herself. But she laughed to herself about this, remembering she had another choice.

She could go to confession.

The question was whether to kill first and then confess or the other way around.

To confess and then not kill.

They all had a way of covering one illusion with another; a tiny bit of reality would show through only when they had lost their way among the illusions or failed to hide themselves in time behind another illusion.




Informed of Her Own Existence


I did feel it on my back.

They had been watching me, flaring up now here, now there with their cigarettes under the blooming trees. There might have been four of them altogether, maybe more.

I did not recognize them, though the older one might have been among them, the marvelous giant with his mustached assistant. Sometimes they pretended not to belong to each other. The older one is very excited in his gingham shirt that’s too small for his chest and his dark-blue, much-laundered overalls. When I walked past him, something exceptional emanated from him along with the strong odor of his sweat.

It reminded me most of hot tar.

They stood quite far apart from each other but about the same distance into the flowering grove.

From where they could see the wide promenade on the riverbank, who came or went on it, but where the darkness kept their figures incognito. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t identify any of them. Something showed of their shirts, but the greens, yellows, and blacks of his shirt’s little squares I could of course only hope to see; this marvelous man had disappeared. There were those who always returned to the same places, like me, and others who appeared only once and then disappeared for good.

From the depths of the foliage’s shadows, strangers called out with the flaring embers of their cigarettes.

The night whispered with light breezes; the water made bubbly sounds on the stones.

What I understood of this was that they were intentionally revealing their presence with their cigarettes.

As if they were saying, pay attention to me, I am watching you, and at the same time they were competing with each other, watch me, I’m here. With their insistent glances they almost reached across the promenade, I almost understood their words on my body. More correctly, they weren’t talking to or reaching for just anybody above the jasmines, not at all. First, for a long time they observed everything from behind the mask of darkness, and when they finally selected someone, they took a brief drag on a cigarette. I’m here for you, that’s what that means. I’m waiting for you, come to me.

And if the other one replied to this signal with a signal of his own, then they took a longer, deeper puff, with which they prolonged the duration of the embers’ flaring and their faces glowed a little, and thus they strengthened the alluring promise of their devotion and fervent wishes.

These four, under the trees there, probably couldn’t even see one another’s silhouettess. The jasmine along the promenade covered lots of things; maybe they could see one another with their embers hovering above the white budding bushes. They took care, or so it seemed, not to signal simultaneously, to be understood each in his own language. One would make his cigarette flare up for me very briefly, another would do it rhythmically or lazily, or maybe in a more leisurely way. It was flattering to know that four of them were courting me at the same time. Because of that leisurely signal, I thought the older man was among them in his awful checkered gingham shirt that somehow looked good on him.

It’s possible that the cigarette flares signaled something whose meaning I did not grasp. If they hid the embers in the palms of their hands, that meant they weren’t interested in contact. Get lost. In which case their mute signals had an offensive edge. Scram, skedaddle. Something that made a person stay away in his other life too. You’re ugly was the verdict.

What are you bothering me for with your puny prick.

Don’t spoil the air around me.

I’ll keep my secrets for somebody else.

I myself would never have risked smoking, because even the act of lighting up has a heavy meaning. Not even in my nervousness dared I light up, no matter how much I wanted the heat of the bitter smoke in my mouth and throat, because if I did I’d declare that it wasn’t by chance I was taking it deep into my lungs and heart but because of someone who happened to be watching me from somewhere, and I was watching him too, hungering for him. I did not urinate either, except in secret, and I walked far away from this dangerous place to do it.

Or it would have been like declaring that I’d finally come home, that I was at home among you, and what I wish is that someone, anyone, in any way and at any time will make me his own. Which I could not have declared, least of all to myself. Because it wasn’t true.

Sometimes, someone would stop me in the dark or I’d stop on my own because I saw his bare cock staring at me, and he’d ask in a whisper, what would you like. This was the conventional question. I couldn’t answer it or, if I wanted to be truthful, I would have said, don’t know, nothing.

They had two kinds of answer.

To suck you, they’d say, becoming emotional with excitement and the words melting in their mouths, or, for you to suck me, they would say, disinterestedly and dryly; and one kind of man, with the first answer, could not be mistaken for another with the second answer. Everyone dreaded rejection even though it was unavoidable. Very cautiously, they would say, if you want to, I’ll make an exception with you and let you put it in me. Or they said, if you love it so much, I’ll put it in you.

Or they said hoarsely, reaching in between each other’s legs, we’ll do everything, everything.

I could not have accepted this; thinking reasonably, I could not accept that contact between humans ultimately boiled down to a series of such primitive movements and crude gestures which I saw with my own eyes. But there was no doubt about the credibility of their actions. I could not take my eyes off them. I spied on them, I followed them, and because of them I became like a soft cat’s paw. The more hair-raising the sight, the more eager I became for newer and newer surprises.

I could not gauge the boundaries in the darkness.

It surprised me and filled me with abhorrence that middle-aged or older men almost without exception right away pursued me, followed me; it meant they must have found something attractive in me. These men with their dark faces, incredible outfits, and richly tattooed bodies were criminals thirsting for tenderness; there was one whose curly chest hair pierced through his purple lace shirt; there were superannuated sportsmen with still-trim figures, and sickly government clerks with their briefcases, who found no place to put the Panama hats they wore with their summer suits; you might also see some old-fashioned forever-finicky dandies ceaselessly pampering themselves, bursting with the sour dread of their loneliness, sporting heavy gold chains on their sunbaked skin and huge signet rings on their fingers; or burly, balding tradesmen in sweat-stained shirts worn outside their pants, their brand-new welted shoes creaking painfully, their faces prettified with thin mustaches and their heads with frizzled remnants of hair; there were also bums reeking of alcohol and tobacco, and aging catamites; and once, an army colonel showed up in his parade uniform replete with gold braiding; he stood among the ruins stinking with urine, indifferent to everything and everybody, his briefcase at his feet and his cock fully erect, marveled at by a veritable procession of admirers, many of whom took several turns because he let anyone hold it or suck it for a while, but he, rooted firmly to his spot with his red-striped pants lowered to his ankles, neither budged from his briefcase nor answered questions addressed to him by anyone about anything, and he did not seem to enjoy what was happening.

In the eyes of others, he must have been something like a devotional object promising healing and absolution to which people in large numbers make pilgrimages.

The men came and went, spied and hunted, kept searching, and, if they did not find a prey who pleased them, often settled for one another. For me, their hesitant yet aggressive approach was like a fatal stab, because in their eyes I was prey. I watched what they were doing and I fled. It seemed probable that they wanted their youth back for at least a few moments, to grasp my firm, pliant flesh, which had little to do with my personal traits. As if the very impersonal slumbering in me had set them on fire. I was longing for someone who would find my personality suitable, while they wanted anyone who with his body would satisfy their obsessions.

And I was similarly surprised that boys my age or a little younger steered clear of me. Of course, some of these boys made older men pay for the services they rendered, and they looked through me as if I were made of glass because I wasn’t going to pay them; but others must have smelled on my body’s scent that I was a complicated case. They gave me a wide berth or deliberately fished in the darkness for someone else, anybody, while making disgusting faces at me; in fact, they beamed with excitement as they made sure I watched what they were doing, in sheer revenge, right before my eyes, and this truly surprised me. I don’t know what I was supposed to see, but I saw that when they were having their pleasure with others for my sake, they were staying more indifferent to their own pleasures than to the pleasure they meant to provide for me.

The measure of things, the moral of their passions, was the most mysterious thing.

There was a square-built, very strong-looking boy with a large reddish boil on his neck who actually spat whenever we passed each other on the silent trail. He looked depraved, his nose and ears mangled; he might have been a boxer or wrestler. As we passed each other he said in a muffled tone that it was shit-faced guys like me whom he hated most, from the bottom of his heart. He said this even though he could barely have seen me in the dark. When we passed each other again under the flickering bluish-yellowish gas-lamp light, he spat again and asked me aloud how much time I had left of my working hours.

So maybe he thought I was a stool pigeon, and probably there were some real ones among us.

Don’t you worry; the guys will fix your mug but good.

I was rooted to the spot, but I also felt like laughing because hearing his threat it occurred to me that police informers here would have to show their pricks while on duty.

Without exception, every one of them showed a huge and insatiable interest in the others’ cocks, in their attributes and especially in their size.

I did too, but tried not to evaluate myself according to these standards.

However passionate the mutual emotional or bodily interest may have been, judging by what I saw I don’t think any relationship could develop without the introductory showing. This too was exactly the opposite of what happens with women. The men had to show a calling card, an invitation, some sign of the relationship’s preliminary condition. Perhaps they noticed that I wasn’t doing this, which would make me suspicious.

Cut the crap, come on, show it to me.

In most cases they offered it up in a stiff or at least semi-stiff condition — first from a respectable distance, then at a different location but a little closer — and only then was the fateful decision made. Sometimes I too tried to show it from a good distance, but it was no use because my heart wasn’t in it.

You see, I am showing it to you.

My knees would start to shake and I’d grow weak, unable to calm my fear. My hands shook so that my fingers couldn’t undo the concealed buttons in the fly of my well-tailored pants. My decision to do it, to let it happen that once, was in vain.

What the fuck are you waiting for.

Another reason I couldn’t do it was my tight-fitting, slippery wool pants. They used to call them tube trousers. The men begged me, they whispered from the bushes; with my tight pants and fumbling fingers, I must have raised hopes I couldn’t deliver on.

Here, you can grab hold of mine.

My senseless reticence made them impatient.

Then what in hell’s cunt do you want.

And they surprised me by how willingly and excitedly they showed them, how meticulously they prepared their cocks for the showing and, at the same time, how furiously and jealously they’d hide them from unwanted eyes. Everything that had to do with this particular activity sent shivers up and down my spine.

Don’t be afraid. You can show me your little one.

It was like a foreign language I’d never heard before yet understood from the first syllable, with all its phrases and expressions. It was also very surprising that I wanted to show mine too; maybe not like this, not to these men or not to everybody, but to somebody, not just anybody; it also was a surprise to me that all these penises, including mine, whether erect or semi-erect, seemed rather ungainly and repulsive. In all my searches I saw not one about which I could have said, now this, yes, let this be the one. And no less surprising was the most familiar, profound tolerance and empathy I had for them. As if I were saying, it’s all the same to me, it could be any one of them. Nevertheless, I had to realize I had no idea what to do with my insatiable curiosity.

Perhaps I was excited by the process of erection, the untraceable transformation of a cool body, which changes only with aging and then only imperceptibly. Erections kept surprising me with their inevitability as I continued to be motivated by the chance I might see yet another cock, no matter what kind, and compare its condition and substance with the sight of the man it belonged to. In my other life, it would have been inappropriate to imagine there were so many people as passionately curious about this as I.

They were practically treading on one another’s heels in the early hours of the night.

No wonder they’d trampled and sullied everything around the ruins of the Dominican cloister.

Although I understood their curiosity, its depth and pervasiveness still shocked me and had me in thrall; I felt I could never be free of it or conquer it. And because of this feeling, everything seemed to be the other way around in this life of mine — one of my two lives — the opposite of what I’d ever thought or should have thought, with a man’s cock more important than the man himself. Since a man’s cock was unlike the man or his body. I was surprised by the lack of conformity in the visible physiological marks; there was no sameness between body and cock. Every person is put together out of several people. I too differed from my cock; perhaps my penchant for humiliation and self-lacerating brooding originated in this shameful truth. Not to mention that the nature of my thinking differed substantially from the nature of my instinctual life; seeing so many different cocks gave me the impression that this extreme disparity characterized others no less than it did me. One person differs from all others physiologically, but one also carries distinguishing marks that show how one differs from one’s own self. It surprised me that I drew a conclusion from this multifaceted differentiation, which could be said to be general, but I don’t know what the conclusion was. As if it were the kind of knowledge which one can never get enough of or reach the end of. In the eyes of the men, the cock might have been the emblem of this knowledge of unknown character. Perhaps it meant that there is no I or, more correctly, that the I is only part of a larger, undiscoverable whole, or one might say that a man’s exterior, psychological makeup, way of thinking, or character won’t reveal what kind of cock he has, even though his cock is no less defining than his soul or mind. Of course, I can’t say what I mean by soul, or in what way exactly a cock would be defining, and mainly what could rationally justify men’s elementary interest in other men’s cocks if women and their procreative capacity were excluded from their considerations.

It surprised me even more that no matter what they did with their cocks and though I did nothing with mine, from the depths of my soul I approved of the way they did it and not some other way, and that they did it with one another and without initiating women into the business. And perhaps the reason I don’t do it is not because I’m not hot-blooded, impulsive, or implacably manly enough, but rather, in harmony with the dictates of my spirit, I am a woman because of my horrible mother. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw — and even later it took my breath away, made me tremble helplessly with excitement — one man finally grasp another man’s cock, saw the two of them elegantly thrust their hips forward with their cocks sticking out of their hands, saw them lean on each other’s shoulders and, each staring attentively at the other’s cock and both of them rubbing against each other’s thighs and legs, almost coolly, seeking a common rhythm, bring each other off.

They would start slowly, but their sperm quickly spouted up.

With the men I would have loved, I’d have loved to do it too.

It happened that one of them, before the spouting started or bubbled up onto his hand, would duck down to take it into his mouth, caress it with his tongue, suck and swallow the lilac ugliness rearing before him with its purplish head. To eat it, devour it, retching deep down into the back of his throat; sometimes they spat out the sperm. Others, excited by mutual desire, would fall to the filthy ground already fouled by others — they didn’t care where they fell — and mutually took into their mouths the other’s cock. Two silent pieces of flesh. Writhing on each other’s body like epileptics. Heaving, gagging, hurrying and gasping for air. The last moment before the end of the world. They weren’t bothered if they rolled around in other men’s excrement. To save myself I pretended to be disgusted, and that’s how I became disgusted. But with my countenance gazing into the darkness, I approved. They kissed into the other’s mouth the other man’s sperm.

I nearly fainted but I approved.

Or what about the naked tribal warriors in the darkest thickets, with their clothes fastened to their waists or strapped to their legs, arching their butts upward, opening their star-patterned sphincters, free of humiliation, abjection, or servility, falling on their knees and letting themselves be pounded; reaching back very adroitly with tentacle-like arms to grasp the pounding body by its thighs or hairy ass lest it slip out, and even giving little counterthrusts, slyly, helpfully, until the other man, whose name they don’t know, withholding his screams, quickly and forcefully ejaculates into them.

There were those who pulled it out before their climax, wanting to see the gushing geyser sprinkle into the darkness, into something that could not be seen, into nothingness.

There may be people whom even shit won’t stop from screwing a stranger’s ass, because for them it’s nothing more than a bit of swallowing that nobody keeps track of or judges morally; anyway, I still wouldn’t want this to be my life.

With such loathsomeness in it.

All right, I watched it, I saw it, though I don’t know why I had to; I’ve done it, that’s all I know, I’m leaving. True, I went back the next day, couldn’t stay away. And again I stayed until dawn.

And not only that, but also my own sentimental self, longing for brotherhood, would not let go of me; that was my problem, being buffeted by these different intertwined selves that I could not separate. Because of my birth I wound up in a world where in certain cases yes might mean no or no could mean yes. Yet I simply couldn’t imagine or accept about myself that I might have anything to do with these repugnant characters and what I saw them do. I wished myself back in the time when I knew nothing of this. There must be some people fortunate enough to go through life without ever being aware of this world. And if this is the way things are in the end, and I’m too craven to admit that I’m just like these people and have been looking in vain for the real world behind the appearances, now that I’ve found it and see that every other kind of life is but a gross illusion of this ungainly reality, then I must opt for the bridge.

But if my desire is to grasp a cock, anybody’s I can, then why on earth should I kill myself, I asked, rattling and panting with carnal desire and self-hatred.

I would have preferred, with the same effort, to laugh at myself for being so ridiculous.

How ridiculous and ignoble, and willing to sink even lower.

I had no place where I could get away from tormenting doubt. I knew no one with whom I could share any of this. I could just as easily have taken it into my mouth, mutely, anyone’s, so that when the hot sperm was ejected from the depth of his body I could feel at least once what I’d be like as the other man. But I didn’t have enough power of imagination to think this thought through to the end. Even though I stated clearly why I would not want to do it. I did not want to be the way I was, as defined by my natural qualities.

Only God could see things correctly, if there was a God and if he could see. But the no stayed stronger in me.

Whether I reject or approve and adopt a life like that, I can’t endure it for long.

I had to get to that point from here.

Out of the darkness and onto the lit-up bridge. Let the cold of the water swallow me forever, and let no one ever find me either, being a person of such miserable birth. I cursed my mother, whom I did not know, of whom I barely had memories, who left me for a large, bony, pale, blond Frenchwoman. And because my father didn’t notice any signs of this in my mother’s behavior and because he did not keep her from leaving, I cursed him too, a man stupid enough to want to fuck a woman like that. But he was taken away one ordinary early summer morning, in unknown circumstances and for unfathomable reasons, maybe killed by mistake, so my curse could not settle on him as I wanted it to. I was the accursed one. Because I did remember what this dead man’s reproductive organ was like, how it rested on his testicles, I had the brains to remember a thing like that, what his belly was like and his pubic hair when the water rained down on him from the showerhead.

I remember the hair on his body, long and black, how it clung to the deep brown skin of that marvelous body; yes, I remember that very precisely.

By the time I grew up mine became just like that of the murdered man, even though I was blond like my mother and blue-eyed like a pure-blooded German. I wore a perfectly strange cock on my body; the skin had a different consistency and color, but the only real difference between our cocks was that for this brief transition called life I was not circumcised, so that I could reveal our sameness in the mirror only if I pulled back the dark foreskin from the bulb and in that state laid the hanging cock on the testicles, which appeared almost black under the blond pubic hair. All right, so I have a Jewish cock, though I always tried to console myself with the thought that my body at least was like my mother’s and completely Christian. The wrinkled beak of the foreskin remained very narrow because I did things like this only very rarely, preferring to stroke it through pajama pants or underwear, so that when I did pull it back, the pain was greater than the pleasure.

From this I learned that I too was condemned to a terrible death.

I wanted to follow him faithfully, so that it would happen as soon as possible.

I heard in advance the grating noise my footsteps would make. It wouldn’t make sense to waste more time on sentimental thoughts. I felt like a person who in his sleep has lost all his clothes and is now made to appear stark naked in public. I had no choice. My impending death did not upset me, it was like a fait accompli; what bothered me were stupid trivialities such as the question why I couldn’t stay with them now that I had turned around and noticed them trying to get my attention with the glowing embers of their cigarettes. In this place every movement and gesture, or their absence, had an agreed-upon order and meaning, and just as I could haltingly read and find my way among their signals after a few days, they could already read me fluently. It was impossible to avoid being an open book that the eyes of these men could read. It was exactly the opposite of what happened in my other life, where nothing was uncovered, where behind the appropriate concealment of customs and rules, within the flexible frameworks of appearances, a person was sustained by his or her intentions.

I shuddered when I realized that since I was unaware of my own intentions, I must be even less aware of other people’s.

In our other life, something must happen to us that slips through the cracks between obstinacy and dissembling. In fact, darkness must have lurked behind everything all along. In which case, however, reality made visible must also have something behind it, and I can’t get to the end of either one, I can’t see their boundaries. I can’t decide which of my two real lives, so trickily covering each other, is the more robust one. Everyone has another life that must be kept hidden, I knew that, but in the concealed background of a life hiding behind appearances or brutality there is yet another life, and that one I didn’t know. Because while what men did to and with one another was rough, common, and brutal, the language of their communication was exceedingly refined, more complex, civilized, and flexible than spoken language and at the same time very clear and practical.

I enjoyed their knowing more about me than, for lack of experience, I did myself. Whatever I did or didn’t do instantly became a decipherable signal for them, whether it was my silence or motionlessness; and therefore no matter how hard I might try, I stood before them more naked than I could have ever seen myself in my other life. If I understood anything of their language, I understood something of myself that I had once chastely concealed or covered with lies. Appearances could not cover my real being. Not only was I observing them, but I was beginning to see myself with the experienced eyes of those who listened constantly from their place in the darkness and, in accordance with their undisguised intentions, were keenly evaluating and grading my behavior.

To carry out my plan and gain the bridge, I had to walk along the creaky stretch of the promenade in front of the rowers’ clubhouse, or cut across the dense thicket with a few short steps and take the trail to return to the island’s lit-up interior, which at this hour was completely deserted.

Nothing moved.

Sometimes from the Pest shore, sometimes from the Buda shore, I could hear creaks turning into shrieks. Streetcar wheels make the metal rails shriek like that when they round a bend. And then there’d be nothing again, only the wind fingering the trees or a human step crackling in the thicket. One could tell by the sounds where a night streetcar on either side of the city happened to be. There were more places on the Buda shore where streetcars would shriek — in the great bend of Margit Boulevard or, farther on, at different points on Moszkva Square. On the Pest side, the number 2 streetcar might shriek before the Parliament or the number 6 on Marx Square, or it could be another night line, the number 3, making a wide two-part turn at Visegrád Street where it opens into Grand Boulevard to return to Váci Road.

Beyond the Árpád Bridge, where the industrial quarter of Angyalföld illuminated the vaporous nocturnal sky with its reflectors fastened above barbed-wire fences and brick walls, a steam hammer rumbled occasionally, would strike and pound; for a short while its battering would resound through the city, making eardrums, walls, and ground quiver, and then it would fall silent again.

I had been thirsty for hours, I felt completely dehydrated and slightly nauseated; I chose the latter route.

Under the giant plane trees was a quietly bubbling drinking fountain. If it hadn’t been for an occasional light breeze, I might have fainted; my knees had grown weak with exhaustion and excitement.

It bubbled among the stones.

If you leaned over and pushed a button, the water, flavored by rust, would shoot up to the roof of your mouth.

I couldn’t wait much longer with my urge to urinate.

I wanted to die, yet I had no place to run to from the eyes around me that hoped to discover my intentions. Unnoticed, they weaved through the night darkness and tore it to shreds; I had no tactics to outwit them with. Which made my decision laughable; it made me seem frivolous even to myself.

The place itself was tragic, yet many things here that were meant to appear very personal or tragic became comical in the eyes of an observer. If, for example, I chose the shorter route and with my suicidal intentions went along that irritatingly creaky section of the promenade between the trees and the echoing wall of the smooth white building, where ominous darkness seemed literally to be trapped and anything might happen, that would be construed as my reply to any of the men standing by, ready for anything, and would be interpreted as saying, come on, follow me, I want to be yours. That stretch of the promenade was an attention-grabbing area, where the tribal warriors did their business with their wide-open buttocks in the air and where the boys for sale sold themselves. Anyone going there had to count on the possibility of his own death. But if I went past them without signaling to anyone in particular, all four would follow me, each telling himself, let’s just go and see what happens, because they did not generally insist on doing it in pairs. That also made my jaw drop. In my other life I imagined that this was something impossible to do except in pairs. I’d have to shake them off, one after the other, before I could kill myself in peace. Or first I could drink to my heart’s content from the rusty water, then drown myself in the Danube.

And it would be embarrassing, too, if I simply swam out of the water.

And that is why about ten minutes before my planned death, when all of this occurred to me, I could barely restrain my jubilant good mood.

And indeed I failed to restrain it; the sheer idea of how the mind herds together so many opposing, disparate thoughts made me laugh out loud in the darkness, how far a decision is taken from one’s guiding instincts, how far the intent of an action from its pure effects. Out loud I laughed into the darkness, like a lunatic. Wildly, involuntarily, too loud, even though the reason I laughed was that I couldn’t have been more somber and sober.

And the response was whistles from various places.

Again I did not understand.

They could see from under the trees that the young gentleman in black, before taking off for anywhere, was frozen in his tracks and listening like an animal.

I saw myself as a young man gone crazy who nevertheless deliberately chooses death over his undisguised fate.

They warned one another of some danger with their whistles.

From the sinister darkness, from the depth of the shadow cast by the white building came the first whistle, but I didn’t see anyone there. Three of the four figures instantly vanished in the blooming grove. Or maybe they just withdrew into the thicket, I don’t know. As if, along with themselves, they had drawn their own whistling into some echoing space.

The silence thickened.

Anything might happen in it. These people were defenseless against one another.

Irresponsibly I hoped that the one man left was after all the marvelous giant who had pursued me, who despite the whistles did not take off and who stuck to his place. And a possible danger was the police too.

At the moment, no danger fazed me. I was ready to do great things.

I started toward the Árpád Bridge and I knew exactly why. I was in no hurry. I copped the method from them. And I stayed close to the water so that my leisurely steps would make no noise, on the narrow edge of the paved riverbank where the slag and whinstone strips met. One missed step would be enough for me to lose my balance and fall off the steep embankment, but I did not even look down at my feet. I had never felt my body to be so safe. As someone who has suddenly grown above himself. And sees the surrounding world from a higher viewpoint. The soles of my feet barely touched the creaking slag and uneven stones, my steps carried me rhythmically, almost melodiously forward. My neck lengthened too, the butterfly wings of my shoulder bones did not hold it back. I no longer had the feeling that I was not myself and that all this was happening to someone else. Still, I did have the peculiar feeling that there were people accompanying me. In fact, it was for them that I showed what I knew, how complete and light I felt my slender body to be. I became elongated in the waist, my shoulder blades and collarbones adjusted themselves, conformed to the new shape. Every one of my joints and muscles defied the dangers waiting for me. I showed my bodily safety to him, to the giant. I showed him my shirt, taut across my chest, clinging to my waist, my hard ass inside my shamelessly cut pants, and in the much-too-small underpants my semi-erect prick, shoved to the side at its base and adhering to the crook of the thigh, on which the too-tight foreskin now slid painfully back in all the excitement. In my way of walking I demonstrated all the good feelings nourished by my physical being.

With my walking I also showed him the sensation of the cool breezes as they pleasantly chilled my hot skin, and I showed this together with the taste of sweat. I showed it to the giant, who — with his massive, thick, and closely shaved neck, with his stubborn head and pitch-black hair, which kept falling on his forehead — was staying, I thought, under the trees where the trail and the promenade intersect.

What could this man be, I didn’t know.

One could guess the enormous configuration of his loins through his overalls; his powerful ass protruded abruptly. He had thick, dense eyebrows that met above his nose, his nose was short and strong, and on his jutting cheekbones the dark brown skin was so taut it seemed bluish. A navvy — this old-fashioned obsolescent word came to mind for him, the weight of dirt and its autumnal wet fragrance. Or perhaps a carpenter, a stonecutter, a cutter of wood or stone or something that must be grasped by hand. I couldn’t take my eyes off his head, his limbs, his face, his jaws, while we walked around or pursued each other on the trails. I could not forget, either, his suddenly flashing, suddenly vanishing smile.

It was a quick, mute smile.

I could even imagine that he was unable to read or write. I’d stay with him anyway; I didn’t care if he was illiterate. He must be staring at me now, with his dumb head, his partly open, fleshy lips and his eyes with their metallic luster, but in showing myself to him, I was also showing myself to anybody who was looking.

I knew what I was doing; I knew he understood, or several of them did.

I’ll go as far as the next lamp.

That was the second sentence in the mute language of attraction.

I resolved to speak their secret language. The gas flame imprisoned in its glass globe emitted a strong sharp light that turned from yellow to white and white to blue, but the moment the light left the globe it lost its blue, and its yellow grew tired as the night filled it with various hues of gray.

Between two gas lamps, one blended into the mist-filled dimness of the riverbank.

I could hardly wait to reach the next lamp and pronounce the second sentence of the secret language. If someone didn’t stop at the next lamp, that had a very different meaning. That was where I would cross over to the other side of the promenade, making my intention obvious. Then I’d slowly stroll back, and that would be seen as a confession, an advance on my body offered up in sacrifice.

In his excitement, he’s already stamped out his cigarette and stepped a little way out from the shadow of the trees. This would be his response. He’ll open the fly of his loose pants so I can see it: I’ve opened my fly for you.

I had a feeling it might not be him after all, that I had made a mistake. Just a figure partly concealed behind the budding jasmine. We no longer had doubts about each other; we understood each other. Even though I obviously couldn’t exchange more than two sentences with this marvelous man; what would we talk about anyway. He too should right away gauge the distance between us. So much comfort and reassurance emanated from him, such mute laughter, that I was ready to spend the rest of my life with him, no doubt of it.

Or at least my imagination had a comfortable niche in which this too seemed possible.

Until I return, he won’t whip his prick into an erection for someone else. As I approach, I can see on his shoulders and neck how brutally he is working at it under cover of the bushes. I stop at a respectable distance, turn my back to the water, the jasmine conceals me too, from everyone else. I knew how it would be, I wanted to do it the way they did it; there must be no misunderstanding between us. What we do should mean that we want each other and nobody else; for my sake, he should leave his mustached assistant too. I also open my fly, at last we can stare into each other’s face over the bushes hiding our bodies, I reach into my underwear and lift out my cock, which had shriveled, I felt, in my abject fear.

It happened exactly as I imagined it would, only it was not the older man standing on the other side of the bushes, not the black-haired giant in his ugly gingham shirt two sizes too small. I should have noticed earlier that this was a coarse sailor’s shirt with horizontal stripes. Sometimes one sees simultaneously what one sees and what one would like to see. Two darkly brilliant, frightened, slightly amazed little eyes in a bright face shone on me.

I could not leave, though in my disappointment I wanted to get away instantly.

As if he were still a child, at least his countenance was childish, but sharp dark grooves sat in his features; on his dented forehead two vertical grooves cut across three horizontal ones. His small lips, red and swollen with blood, fitted between two grooves that sliced his stubbly chin in two, and one sole groove ran across his thin face. As if his face were a surface on which two human beings had been drawn. His matted dark hair, divided in long individual curls, clung in waves to his forehead and fell in unkempt batches on the frail, childlike nape of his neck.

He undoubtedly captured me with his exterior, though I knew right away that I’d leave him on the spot for the giant.

He had a long thin nose, a powerful Adam’s apple, and in his excitement he kept swallowing. The long sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to the elbows of his strong, long arms.

It was not attraction but rather pity that I felt for him, but this feeling filled me completely.

I was still shivering a little with the animal excitement I felt for this older man, with my attraction for him, with fear of what he might do to me and whether he would accept me for a whole long life, but the boy on the other side of the bushes could notice none of this because I kept my agitation under control. The trembling did not get out of hand or become as vehement as it had been before. Stealthily I looked around again to see whether my man wasn’t nearby after all. I was actually glad that the trembling, which had to do with his size and beauty, no longer hindered me in what I was now ready to do.

With anyone and at any time.

If he wasn’t here, well, he wasn’t. He didn’t seem to be around anywhere. Either he willfully deceived me or my imagination had played a dirty trick on me. I felt my body drying out; when I blinked or swallowed, my eyelids and my esophagus literally clicked. My trembling for him was coursing through my flesh; though not strong, it was becoming permanent.

I could not see behind the bushes but I could discern that with his milk-white, thickly veined arm he was working more slowly now. His prick must have filled and become distended. With his arm movements he deliberately showed, or even exaggerated, the proportions of his member to make it seem even more imposing. Every man tried to show himself in the most favorable position so the one watching would imagine him as strong and mighty as possible. Actually, they hoped to captivate one another not as real humans but as parts of secretly nurtured fantasies, which is what ritualized their encounters. They knew what fantasies the others were nurturing.

They built their secret language with different dialects of their shared imagination.

He also wanted to see what I was doing with mine; that’s why he kept standing on tiptoe. It would have been terrifying to think that in this very instant everything would be decided. I was gripped by my empathy for him, but my burning excitement completely vanished because my interest was not directed at him. I had nothing more to do. It was enough to see how his arm and shoulder moved, to discover in the position of his white, fuzzy-haired neck the pleasure of his erection, and my imagination disloyally abandoned the older giant and willingly followed the boy.

It grew stone-stiff in my hand, rearing up impetuously, aggressively and painfully, I was holding the beak of the foreskin so as not to let it slip back in, for the sensitivity of the naked bulb would inevitably have resulted in an ejaculation. For the same reason, to hide it from him no matter how hard he tried to see it, I covered it with my other hand. Which was an exceptionally important expression in the ritual language. He was requesting an advance from me, so the sight of my cock would strengthen his erection, which my presence would make perfect when the most propitious moment arrived and he revealed his to me. I should feel the strength of my seduction in him, and be completely unable to avoid the perfection of his penis.

I was striving for unconditional mutuality, however, nothing else, and therefore imagined that the ceremonial introductions should occur not separately but simultaneously. I could not give him an advance that he might forge into a business advantage.

The lack of mutuality offended my taste. I wanted him to understand that.

Otherwise I was going to leave.

In the words of the sign language, the relationship would then still retain an exciting business condition. I would not budge from my position.

This in turn created a shared question: which of us could impose his will on the other, or, to put it in my terms, would my sentimental desire for fraternity prove stronger than my primitive curiosity. This turned out to be such a nerve-racking question in the motionless summer night — which of us would first show his to the other — that I could feel my suicidal intentions evaporating along with the black-haired, dark-skinned giant.

The hyperemia in my mind left no room for him.

I grew so weak it no longer mattered whether I showed it to him.

Look at that, look what a pecker he’s got, he cried enthusiastically, goodness gracious.

His reddish fleshy lips, a little offended and excited, trembled in amazement.

Jesus, he prayed, how lovely your pecker is.

His voice sounded as if it came, flutelike, from a third person trying to hum and sing in various falsettos.

His surprising adjective touched me because until then I’d never thought of anybody’s pecker as lovely, least of all of my own. As if he were speaking not to me but to a third person like me, perhaps standing behind me; or the whole thing wasn’t true at all, only flattery. Something crackled in the thicket, letting me know we weren’t alone, somebody else had also heard what had been said, somebody or somebodies had been spying on us.

Not only did he not reciprocate my confidence but he used the crackling sound as an excuse to hide his own instantly.

He was doing everything too fast. He stepped out from behind the bush while still buttoning his fly. His movements made clear that he was only a dumb little faker who couldn’t get it up.

He couldn’t possibly have put it away so fast if it had been stiff.

He whispered into my face that we should get out of here but quick.

His breath was as sweet as that of a suckling babe. These dumb fairies, he said, as I could hear for myself, won’t leave us alone, such a rotten bunch. I was eager to hide my own too, but it took some doing. He reached for it while sweetly whispering into my mouth, but I wouldn’t let him.

They’re so jealous, believe me. They always want what somebody else has. He laughed.

There was something explosive about him, merry and playful. I probably know that rotten jerk from Újpest — such a dumb fairy, he thinks he’s queen of the whole place. His name is Pisti. He must be the one who managed to wind up somewhere behind us, come on, hurry up, damn it. I think he wants to separate us. He always wants everyone to suck him off, but don’t think he ever comes.

And I mean never, he said indignantly, with nobody.

He asked me if I had a place to go to, which I did not immediately understand because I was having trouble buttoning up my fly. I did not answer him.

Because he had no place of his own, he added by way of explanation, he was only on leave. He did have a grandmother in Pestimre, but we can’t go there even if the streetcars are running. His grandmother found out about him a long time ago when she caught him with one of his buddies, and then he quickly added that with him I could do everything but absolutely everything I was used to doing with girls.

I was amazed, watching his face, his eyes and his lips; how would he know what I was used to doing with girls or whether I had done anything with them at all.

He liked Mohács more because there you just go to the upper sandbank or even by the lime-burning factory and somebody will pick you up. Several times his grandmother made a fuss, throwing things around, slapping and beating and breaking everything she could get her hands on. He wants no more scandals, and not because of the neighbors, they can kiss his ass, but the old girl really has nobody in the world except him. I should understand.

Unexpectedly he sniggered, interrupting himself to say he shouldn’t have told me the whole story, because at this time of night there isn’t a single rotten streetcar to take them to Pestimre. We could walk, but by the time we get there, his short leave will be over.

For some reason, this too he found irresistibly funny.

There I was with this total stranger in the middle of an early summer night, his sentences bubbling out cheerfully and I not believing a single word. And not because he was lying; he wasn’t. What was unbelievable was how convincing I found his whole being; yet I had to refuse him, and I would too.

As it turned out on that early summer night, I simply could not believe that this might possibly be my life, or that such a strange being as this boy could be part of either of my lives or share any part with me in any way, or that I could fit him into one of my lives just as he was, along with his entire life and his grandmother, without upsetting my other life. But neither could I imagine, nor was it morally acceptable, that I’d abandon this man just like that, when he’d shown such enormous confidence in me. Frankly, a man of this sort was all in all too much for me. Even if I decided to take him home to my room on the boulevard, how could I navigate him past Balter without being seen.

Balter would come out with his dislocated hip, open the gate, moaning aloud, checking out both of us; a single glance would be enough for him to assess the situation and seal my fate. My upbringing gave no instruction as to what one was supposed to do in a situation like that, but I did have instructions that the best thing to do with unusual situations was to avoid them. Hearing about his grandmother sent me reeling to the edge of madness, if only because of my own grandmother. I shuddered at the thought of two people meeting in a summer night who had never had and never would have anyone in this world except their grandmothers, and that this was far from a coincidence.

This thought hurt, and it also filled me with painful hope, but the hurt was stronger.

Standing before me was an entire man with his irresistible warmth, unfathomable indifference, intrusive odor, living grandmother, obviously unwashed hair, and everything else that was his, presenting me with his unbelievable exhortation that I should go with him because with him I could do everything I had ever done with girls, and I did not understand, it made no sense.

Perhaps all these things together in a single human being was what was too much for me.

I wanted to say something to him, something encouraging that would also help me extricate myself from the situation, but I couldn’t think of anything. According to social conventions, I needed to respond, so as to remain the master of my predicament. I felt my entire upbringing had been nothing but a framework that, although it specified the character of verbal responses to various events, hadn’t given specific instructions as to their true and genuine content. My grandmother was whispering to me even now, as she had until the last minute of her life, passing on to me and doing for me everything she could, though her words had made no sense when she uttered them. Not the least sense in the world. Neither her son nor her daughter took her seriously, though the pattern and structure of what she had to say enthralled me and never left me.

So I set off again on the creaky promenade; I had no idea what to do with such a strange human life as this boy’s.

For lack of direction I headed toward the Árpád Bridge, as if one could begin again at the beginning. Which the boy of course interpreted according to the rules of the secret language.

If you haven’t got a place, he said flatly, as he came along, keeping up with me like a sweet child, we can go to the water tower. Really. I know a nice little spot there.

He wanted to take my hand.

Whenever he has no other place to go to, because nobody has a rotten pad to himself, he holes up there with anyone until dawn.

Much as I wanted to, I didn’t give him my hand. He responded to this by putting his arms around my waist and coiling around me, holding back my hurrying steps a bit, steps that turned out to be very long, so we’d be like lovers strolling on clouds, so he could kiss me.

I felt an instant disgust when he looked up at me, his lips open in a circle, like one film star staring at another. He not only did something but overdid it, as if he wanted to announce, loud and clear, that he was doing this or that and doing it according to this or that model. I didn’t let him lean his head on my shoulder and I brushed off his arms too. My own cruelty hurt me. I didn’t want to see his falsities. He wanted to withdraw some emotional capital from me until we reached the place where he hoped we could really run wild, but I kept walking steadily, I’d had enough of this playacting, and how would he guess that I wasn’t letting myself be led anywhere.

He has to be back by six in the morning, that’s when his leave is over.

But what kind of leave, I asked in an unreasonably irritated tone, for God’s sake, from what place are you on leave.

He was quiet for a moment, looked at me, seriously wondering what I hadn’t understood or to what I was objecting so strongly.

Well, this is where they dock, he answered eagerly, his head motioning to the very spot.

He serves in the river forces branch of the army, stationed in Mohács, he’s reenlisted. Once a week they come up with their ships, sometimes twice, but instead of tying up at the flotilla docks in Újpest they tie up at that something-or-other square.

In other words they dock at some square.

He can find it from anywhere, but damn it, he always forgets the name of the fucking square.

I didn’t have a place to take him to either, no matter how much I pitied him, and that’s the truth. I should have realized I had no place here, in the city of my birth.

I asked him if it was Bem Square.

No, but the fucking square was on the Pest side.

The irritating noises our steps were making were not only too loud but also senseless, completely senseless.

Maybe the Belgrád pier.

Not really, that’s where passenger boats dock, you know.

Then Dimitrov Square, I replied, irritated, maybe Vigadó Square.

I hated the black sand under my dirtied-up shoes and all the drivel we were hurling at each other.

He has this thing with Dimitrov; it’s like doing a crossword puzzle. What pops into his mind every time he comes across the name is that the man was a Communist martyr. He grinned. Eight letters. He memorized it so he wouldn’t forget the name of the square, but then he forgets this fucking martyr. Every week he buys a copy of Füles, the crossword magazine.

Then his face became serious.

Do you do crossword puzzles, he asked.

I did not reply, but I felt insane willingness and devotion emanating from his body.

He was putting me through various tests, licking me all over with his words and gestures.

Actually he was behaving like a normal, lovable human being.

I was the one who wasn’t normal; never in my life had I solved a crossword puzzle; and he hadn’t yet realized that he would find nothing lovable about me.

He was easy, light, his words smooth and caressing; he altered his gestures and turned them all inside out yet remained helpless with me. I was rather intrigued as to why he’d put away his cock so quickly and what it must be like. Just as, in his eyes, I had won my exceptional position in the unfathomable hierarchy of the night with my cock. But it was senseless, completely senseless — the way I was making obnoxious sounds at the side of such a profoundly witless stranger. This depressing knowledge was stronger than my curiosity. I didn’t want to hear that our irritating jabber had anything in common. To my left I saw a path among the trees leading back to the thicket where I might find the giant with his mustached assistant. I can’t imagine what I wanted from the giant; he too probably had a disgusting life.

A little farther off I saw the paved promenade that would lead me, in a more civilized way, back to the interior of the island, where at last I could drink and urinate, but I didn’t think I could endure a long stroll with this loquacious little idiot by my side. I figured that at the next well-trodden but not too clear split in the trail, I’d lose him with a single fast turn.

As if fleeing I left him without a word because I couldn’t think of anything to say. After such a brief, odd acquaintance I didn’t know how to take my leave; I knew no formula for such an occasion. I turned at a virtual run into the dully thudding path, where the gas-lamp light still managed to penetrate the dark.

He followed me.

His lack of suspicion was unequivocal.

After a few steps I turned around to face him and tell him in no uncertain terms what I was thinking. He literally recoiled from my raging fury. He was somewhat shorter than I; our bodies nearly collided. He gazed at me with his bright childlike countenance — a person ready for anything, ready to do anything for me. Surprising myself too, I hugged him, he clung to me like a suction cup and I glued my reluctant body to his. A huge sigh escaped him, followed by numerous shorter, lighter, relieved sighs and moans. Our loins could not meet, but I thought I felt something of his warmth on my thighs. I planted my lips on his neck and on his nape covered with childlike fuzz, and I too held him as if, or almost as if, I had found what I’d been looking for. I’d have liked to find someone. Somewhere above his loins, he must have felt on his belly my cock restrained by the buttons of my fly.

I would have liked to feel the warmth of his loins or his hand taking hold of my cock.

Yet the feel of his body remained so strange and distant, its scent and tension so alien, that I thought it would instantly sober me up.

To make this happen, I pushed him away by his shoulders and looked into his face, close up. In the dappled lamplight his milk-white skin glowed, showing its dark and ancient grooves. There, before me, stood a railway man of Tiszahát whose fate had brought him to the city a hundred years ago and who begot several children with a servant girl from northern Hungary.

Forgive me, I said quietly, there is some misunderstanding between us.

Swallowing my shame, I got stuck.

Don’t be offended, but this is not what I had in mind, and please, I stuttered, let’s leave it at that.

How could he understand what I was talking about; if that was not what I had in mind, then what did I have in mind, what was I thinking of. I did not think of anything.

His face, radiant from the pleasure of our touching, looked up at me, terrified. I could also hear that I was speaking a foreign language, issuing from my body and in my own voice.

At his marvelous incomprehension, my heart filled with profound gratitude.

Unthinking, I bent over him, I wanted to thank him and take my leave; I kissed his sweet, milk-tasting lips.

He would have instantly opened them to me; in an incredibly short time he would have been unbelievably cruel with his lips, his teeth, tongue, and saliva.

For the first time in my life, I was filled completely with the fragrance of a male face, the fragrance of stubble, the fragrance of a man’s saliva, and the fragrance emanating from the coarsely woven shirt on the ill-groomed male body.

But I did not let him plunge his tongue into my mouth.

His legs tried to entwine me, his arms tired to clasp me, he was aggressive, with his experienced fingers he quickly explored, assessed, and then scooped up my ass; I was defending myself.

With an incredible feather lightness he pervaded my tense, stone-hard body, which resisted the fragrances and grew rigid in dread. His fingers raced in all directions. He was all lightness, and I raw fear itself. I would not let him; my muscles resisted him.

Which made him literally sob on my chest.

I should have realized earlier that I was not meant to be a human being, even though that realization would not have helped either of us.

You’re so sweet, oh, your body is so strong, he kept squealing, why don’t you let me. What should I promise you of myself, he asked, he begged, he flashed and sparkled.

Don’t promise anything, promise nothing of yourself because I’m not curious about anything, and sweet I’m definitely not, those were the words I wanted to throw in his unprotected face. But I could not deflect my feelings about him; he was the one who had declared feelings. Simply a sweet man, he was the sweet one, that’s what I thought. But without his words I wouldn’t have dared think such a thing of a male person.

I was sorry I couldn’t do it for him, sorry that he misunderstood me, but I couldn’t do it, because something like a team of horses was holding me back.

No matter how you protest, I want to be yours, he whimpered, and since he felt precisely what I was thinking, he smiled, and I will be yours, you’ll see.

And at that moment I believed it.

He reared up so our loins could make contact with both their heat and the sensitive sensation of hardness.

Can’t you see, he whispered, haven’t you noticed, I’ve been following you all evening, he asked. This surprised me greatly; if he had he must have done it very cautiously. More cleverly than I had followed others. His fingers were plowing up both my thighs, dangerously close to my groin.

I walked my feet off for you. I’m hustling after you and you just keep walking as if you were blind. He was cooing at me. You could have been inside me a long time ago, oh, he squealed, I can already feel your big cock, but all evening you kept running from me on your little feet.

He was talking nonsense and his words felt like punches.

My feet are not little, they’re positively large, and how could he have convinced me that I should take him for a woman when what I loathed and enjoyed so much at the same time was that such a sweet little man fell into my clutches, and that is why I felt so much tenderness and cruelty for him. This whole thing could not be understood by normal standards.

He overwhelmed me because he could allow himself to mouth these insanities, such as how I could have been inside him a long time ago, while I didn’t allow myself anything.

As if only half of my self understood what he was saying while the other half was buffeted by doubts that made it vulnerable.

There was a man in the night whom I learned to love, along with his stupidities, which made him even more precious. And I right away wanted to protect him, perhaps from his own dark obtuseness, even though I was the weaker one. I did not recognize myself in him but was instantly infatuated with his lightness, his daring, and his openness, traits I must have lacked and wished for. It would have been wonderful to live with these traits. I was envious of his terrible freedom, for which I did not have the courage or maybe not the talent. At least in the water tower I could have a secure little hiding place with him every night.

I foresaw that I would not forget for a long time to come the stormy presentiment of passion I was at once experiencing and restraining.

By tomorrow it would turn into pain and longing, regret and bitterness that would torture me terribly.

Yet something was carrying me onward. I had to turn him away, peel him off me.

Listen to me, I said, and he must have felt the tenderness in my voice because he did listen and his cheerful, happy-go-lucky, little-boyish, and ancient being opened up even more toward me; this is a fatal misunderstanding, I continued insistently and soberly. I shall now leave you, please don’t follow me again. Let’s leave this between us just as it is.

But what kind, he wondered, what kind of misunderstanding, he cried, alarmed; he grasped my arm, I could feel his animal-like strength. You must have lost your marbles. We didn’t even have time to ruin anything. He was looking at me but I did not respond. What have I done wrong, he whispered, enraged, because he had no patience for my silence. You think the world came out of your ass, he cried tearfully, is that what you believe. I didn’t imagine anyone could be so rotten.

Why are you ruining it, don’t, I begged him.

Me, ruining it; this shithead has the nerve to say I’m ruining it. He says I, I.

His wounded pride and his wrath set his words on fire; they lit up everything in the darkness and made him look like one of the furies.

He was right; I could not say he wasn’t.

I was afraid he’d hit me; he hypnotized me with his wrath. And this made me realize, unexpectedly again, that in fact we were not in my imagination but at a very dangerous place where I had done something to another human being.

Only a few paces from us an unbelievable figure was standing in the bushes, his pants half lowered.

In full preparedness, he was spying on us, waiting for us to continue, which would increase his excitement, a parasite, a voyeur. I could not ignore him. His arms were like huge hams, his short-sleeved shirt very tight on them and open to the waist, letting me see massive, hairy, rippling layers of fat hanging low and luminous in the darkness. With one hand he was holding up his pants on his enormous sausagelike thighs, with the other he was yanking something under his shiny belly protruding tautly from the layers of fat that luckily could not be seen for all the hair, skin, and darkness.

At the same time at the opening of the footpath a strange couple appeared among the bushes, partly penetrated by the light of the gas lamps.

They were exchanging excited words as they approached, yet something restrained them, so I could not make out what they were saying.

One was obviously a burden to his partner; he was one of the tribal warriors and I happened to know that his name was Robi Königer. He lived on Eötvös Street, in the house we reached after we had managed to break through the firewall, when the boulevard was on fire.

In our neighborhood most everybody treated him as a fool.

Robika is like this, Robika is like that; maybe he’s a little weak in the brain. Come on, sweet Robika, carry my basket for a spell, you won’t regret it.

He did not strip like the others; on the contrary, he was all buttoned up because he could not possibly put his shapelessness on public display.

He wore white surgeon’s trousers and a white shirt; he worked for the ambulance service of a clinic on Üllői Road. When he had no money, and everyone in our neighborhoood seemed to know what he spent his money on, he would go to the open market on Hunyadi Square and help housewives carry home their live chickens tied by the legs, their tomatoes to be preserved, or heavy sacks of potatoes.

His skin must have been bluish white to begin with, every little blood vessel close to the skin’s surface, yet he covered his face, I cannot imagine why, maybe because of some injury, with a thick, blinding white layer of powder. Dread sat on this strange, motionless face. That is how he roamed the streets, white and frightened; in the winter, he wore a black cape. Even in my childhood I had been frightened of him because of the way he carried the struggling chickens, tied together in pairs, Szófia Street reverberating with their squawking, and I could not help thinking that I’d wind up just like that for my secret sins. He was very tall, and because of the constant bending over, his back subserviently developed a hump; he gave the impression that he was forever being forced to go through doors too low for him. He was going through doors we could not see with our naked eyes. Whoever touches himself too much will develop a back like that because too much sinful pleasure eventually attacks the spinal marrow. He had to bend down to everyone he talked to. All his clothes were too small for him, his ankles showed under the cuffs of his pants, one could see he wore red or blue socks most of the time, white only rarely, and his shirtsleeves left not only his bony wrists but a good section of his lower arms uncovered.

The entire man was so thin it was as if he had no flesh on his bones, or as if his bones were made of glass.

The other man was coming faster toward me on the path.

Königer was following him, upset and mesmerized, and one could hear they couldn’t end the tune of their irritation. This other man wore short pants and very spare sandals on indecently naked and strong feet.

As they came along the darkening path, one could not tell which of them was telling the other the more important things, or rather, which of them disdained the other more, and which of them should have controlled his temper.

But this was enough for me.

Seeing their fast approach, I lost my self-control and was left with nothing but the will to get away.

I burst into the thicket without looking at what I was stepping into, at what I would come up against.

Branches slapped my face with their metallic-tasting flowers, I bumped against tree trunks, I scraped my skin, under my feet everything crackled, I also heard the sailor’s shouts.

Idiot garbage pail, he shouted into the softly fragrant mute night, and then in an even more mournful tone he yelled that I was a stupid little prick.

You are a big stupid garbage pail.

I did not have to run far to clear the trees, but I couldn’t stop running, I was pounding on the naked earth, clattering on paved and pebbled paths, and making grating noises with my fine, pointed, filthy black shoes.

The sailor was not talking utter nonsense.

The kid from Újpest who thought himself queen of the whole place — he wasn’t just anybody, he wasn’t some unknown person from Újpest whose name just happened to be Pisti.

I felt as if my soul had been stabbed.

I didn’t know by whom.

But I could see with my own eyes that it was indeed Pisti. The sharp pain and disturbing light of this unexpected discovery at least in retrospect illuminated many things I had not understood before.

Running was making my sides hurt because I paid attention to everything except proper breathing, but I kept running, which at least was familiar and felt good.

And then I collapsed and tripped over something, or maybe the other way around. I didn’t know where I was. The grass was dewy; I buried my face in it.

But I felt that something too warm was running down my leg.




Those Two


On the bed of the maid’s room in the apartment on Pozsonyi Road, neither of them remembered how and when they might finally have fallen asleep, or what had happened between them and when before they fell asleep.

And why they awakened at all in the unfamiliar night, when first they had to find their own limbs in the cooled-off tangle of flesh so that then they could feel the other’s limbs, distinguishing them from their own.

With their senses filled to the brim with each other, this is how they perceived their mutuality, though they did not realize how exceptional this moment was. They couldn’t have named the other person, whose body had soaked up and absorbed every iota of their self-image, and for a good while they remained ignorant of their own names as well. The other person’s intrusive self streamed into the place of their own self-image, just as the other body’s sensation and substance dissolved the shape and sense of their own body. They saw nothing but darkness and only darkness, nothing but darkness, while, submerged in the persona of the other, they sensed they should find their way back to certain characteristics of their own.

They each failed to conjure up their own individual memories.

The window, swinging slowly in a current of air, made squeaky little sounds.

Gyöngyvér spoke first. Quietly yet very excitedly, as if being informed of her own existence by her own strange voice. This surprises her. She still cannot understand herself, because someone else within her is thinking faster or, rather, is thinking ahead of what she will say.

Listen, she said, though she had no idea of another person there or who it might be. Now, listen to me very carefully.

But the other one did not understand the request — neither its content nor who was making it in the dark. The strangely exciting instruction was a mere acoustic experience. He wanted to absorb it, but he had no idea to whom the excitement belonged. A piece of knowledge was missing. As if he were reaching down into a painful darkness where once, a long time ago, all this had already happened. The way pain shoots into well-embedded roots of teeth.

I’ll tell you quickly what I’ve been dreaming, continued the female voice, full of suppressed excitement and whispering from very close up. Listen, please.

As if she were speaking out of the warm inside of the darkness and with this strange voice of hers managing to reach and stroke the cool surface of flesh. But she couldn’t have said whose flesh had cooled and in whose flesh she sensed the voice’s contact.

This time I have it, she exclaimed hoarsely, now I can tell you. Which also made the man wonder — no, alarmed him, he didn’t know — who was this person, within or without him, who either knew or wanted something so much.

And she felt that in the unfriendly outside world her exclamation sounded stupid. How could the other person understand, if she herself had no idea what it was she had. On the contrary, there wasn’t anything, nothing, there were only these cold walls, much too close, this rotten little room. Nothing palpable. After all, I’m dreaming all this. I only feel there’s something I should be able to tell, share with someone, a wish, an empty longing.

She saw all around her a diaphanous yet brilliant and unfamiliar view, glowing with lights, which she had seen before yet could not identify completely with what she was feeling, given the sight before her. Thoughts and objects were incongruous, and so were the objects of her thoughts; everything was a little out of joint. The other one now admitted her into him, or she admitted him into her; she definitely felt this. While with open eyes she observed that they were admitting each other, she saw out from between the disjointed parts, and she found herself alone at the bottom of the water; the water was moving, running, smoothing over her body, carrying it along as if it would tear it apart and rip off her clothes. She was admitted by an enormous, caressing hollowness suffused and seared by the vibrating, glittering, midday summer sun. Something ominous was pulling, dragging her downward, no matter how strongly she protested. She did not protest. She was overwhelmed by happiness. And she could say of this, with absolute certainty, that it wasn’t a dream; she always knew it wasn’t, not a recurring dream. Still, she couldn’t speak of it to the other person because every time she opened her mouth to say something, the water rushed in and she kept having to swallow it.

I don’t know, said the man, and he also didn’t know what it was he didn’t know. I don’t know when we fell asleep. Which sounded a little more like a question than a statement. But he wasn’t certain there was someone else in this darkness, someone he could ask. He had doubts; maybe he was dreaming all this. Or maybe he was dreaming that he was dreaming, and then it would make no sense to ask questions. I can’t, I don’t know what I’m dreaming, he added more loudly.

His own voice made him more awake.

But he couldn’t be sure it was his own voice. Nagging doubt persisted. He found nothing that could convince him of anything.

I think I’ve finally figured it out, listen, I think we’re in a whirlpool.

Well, that’s interesting.

I mean it, a whirlpool, pulling you down, Gyöngyvér continued loudly, almost shouting, which made the other one feel ill at ease. This is a whirlpool, I figured that out, it can’t be anything else. That is to say, I keep on dreaming it again and again, you know, you understand, I keep dreaming that the water is burying me.

And while she was talking, myriad parts of the shining silkiness of the water flooded her, and its enormous weight pressed down on her, and still she managed to speak.

Yet it was gratitude that gathered and hoisted her up from the depths of the water, a feeling that made her float, a feeling that she would carry the other person away within her. Fortunately she didn’t say this aloud. That would have been like announcing that she wanted to drown the other person within her.

Funny, you’re saying it’s a whirlpool, the man continued, and his tone was as if he were rushing into her. And you say it is burying you. He heard his questions, simultaneously understanding and resisting them. No, that can’t be, he said aloud. Or perhaps I’ve gone mad, but this he did not say out loud.

Whirlpool, yes, whirlpool, believe me, the woman insisted. The reason I can tell you about it is that — I’m telling you, you understand, I couldn’t tell it to anyone else — if I tell you, the water doesn’t come in my mouth when I talk.

What she heard echoing from her words was the gratitude she felt for the other person, and although she could see the outline of his face she did not remember exactly who he was, this person so close to her, so familiar. Which strengthened her gratitude and allowed happiness to grip her by the hair so strongly that she almost lost her breath. But this condition included all her insecurities.

She knew that now she’d be pulled out of the water. Everything grew dark and gaped before her. The sun shone into her face.

Interesting, this is indeed very strange and interesting, replied the other person in the darkness, a hoarse and familiar other voice. He remembered at last. Now I also know, he continued more loudly, using the strength of his own voice to convince himself. He was not dreaming, no. And he had not gone mad. They were telling their dreams to each other. I’ll tell you my dream too, what I’ve dreamed so suddenly.

No, don’t, the woman protested. If you do, I’ll wake up and then I won’t be able to tell you any more. I’ll drown then, she exclaimed desperately.

They were both startled at this, or rather, this too became part of their long, smooth, slowly unfolding awakening. They saw each other, heard each other’s laughter, noticed from close up the astonishment on each other’s face, and this calmed them both.

Hey, we’re completely nuts, laughed the woman. We imagine we’re dreaming when we just can’t wake up — or something like that.

I’m not clear about when we could have fallen so fast asleep, the man said, growing somber. I really don’t remember anything.

He was afraid that in his sleep he might have said something that betrayed him. Again he remembered the open garden gate as the powerful beam of his car’s headlights swept across it. I don’t understand when, he repeated aloud. And what was this strong buzzing, or someone’s loud shouting.

Laughter bubbled up from the woman. How can one shout and not be noisy. Maybe you dreamed of me shouting once. Oh, you’re so sweet, and how much I love you. But this made her laugh falter — it was the first time she’d uttered the phrase.

No, no, replied the man, as if not even registering the confession; he was like a gigantic engine coming ever closer.

How should I know what you dream. I don’t even know who I am or where I am.

No, I distinctly remember the buzzing, the man insisted, watching the woman’s features carefully, hoping to detect a telltale sign. He saw her enthusiasm and saw dread passing in front of her like a dark cloud. And on top of it all, he said, I’m sorry, forgive me for bothering you with this, but I have to pee; I’ve had to for hours, I really don’t know for how long.

Go then, my feet are quite cold too.

But where is the place.

And if that wasn’t enough, I feel mildly nauseated. Maybe I’m pregnant. I swear it feels like it. And as soon as she said this, not only did she instantly remember the man’s remark about how advantageous the position of their bodies was if he wanted to impregnate her, but she also realized she might forever have missed out on something when she failed to voice her wish, and by now she’d be trying the man’s patience beyond all limits, which meant she was messing things up again.

I startled you, the man giggled, I’m sorry.

I’m fucking it up again, the woman thought.

One feels nausea when forcibly startled awake, the man continued, as if he knew well what this woman reminded him of; but amply gratifying as they might be, such old-fashioned sentences had no validity. Which caused a sharp pang of fear to course through him. They might have no validity, but they might have abundant consequences, which women can feel after a few hours. No matter how much he had promised, he had not been careful enough. Not only had he been careless but he must have emptied himself of every drop of his sperm. It’s really mean to startle someone, he said aloud, and because the thought was depressing, his loud remorse sounded quite credible. You know, I also woke up because of shouting or something. And before that there was buzzing, he went on, it sounded like a big car coming closer, now I remember its headlights.

He indeed remembered the headlights of his car when they passed through the villa’s entrance gate hidden among tropical shrubs and trees, but he did not tell the woman that the reason he remembered was that he had had someone murdered in that villa, a person who happened to be a childhood friend.

To forget this, he’d need continuous strong stimuli. But ever since he’d been ordered home because of the murder, he’d found his surroundings unbearably void of stimuli, or rather, the unpleasant memory always surprised him precisely when he’d finally managed to find a bit of stimulus that might help him to forget. Murder seemed to cause a more powerful excitement than lovemaking.

You didn’t wake me up, not at all, said the woman, but she was influenced by her bad conscience, it was probably thirst. Believe me. That’s why I probably dreamed so much about water, I was dying of thirst and my feet were so cold. There was dead silence under the water.

Come on, let go of me, said the man.

But I’m not holding you, said the woman, amazed.

Their torsos barely touched; in fact, they were leaning away from each other, keeping each other captive not with their hands but with their strong thighs.

The realization was strange in this darkness stabbed through with reflected darts and specks of city light while they stared at the dim outlines of each other’s features, lengthening along with the shadows.

As if they were late in becoming aware of their bodies’ existence. Or as if they couldn’t properly match the sensations of their bodies with the sight of them or with their words. Only now did they notice that they were lying almost crosswise on the bed, all but falling off under the weight of their numb, intertwined lower parts. One of the man’s legs, hanging down to the floor, was supporting their combined weight, the entire mass resting on his heel. This meant that in their sleep they’d had to find their balance by holding on to each other at the edge of the bed. They couldn’t understand how they had done that. With one hand the woman grasped the painted bed frame.

Their cool skin glimmered in the draft; on the intricately convoluted surfaces of their noses and ears their zeal cooled off.

It now became clear that they must have fallen asleep in the middle of a semi-consciously executed involuntary movement.

The man felt that he was not merely pressed against her but in fact still inside her; he had, by chance, with righteous indifference, overstayed his welcome. Humiliating. Frightened at having been unconscious, his entire body shuddered. The woman realized he was still stiffly inside her not because of the movements that rippled through her body but because of his odor. As if for the duration of their sleep she had sinfully forgotten the acrid fragrance of the man’s body, now permeated with the scent of his sperm intermingled with cooled-off exudations, saliva, and vaginal secretions. She was filled with them again. Which is what made her realize that the man was still taking up her inner space. She had not let go of him. She won’t let go of him. And she quickly promised herself — very quickly because she feared she was losing her mind — that at the first opportunity she would seek out the source of this fragrance on his body, she would smell and taste every little pore, bend, and curve of it.

So we must have fallen asleep like this, but this is wonderful, she whispered rapturously, her voice expressing contentment. Something like this had never happened before. And she was frightened too, that with her enthusiasm she’d do something wrong, lose him.

It would be interesting, wait, don’t be in such a hurry, the man responded, though he’d have liked to withdraw himself, stand up, and at last go to the toilet. But that would have required his cock to set out on a long, complicated journey. I’ll just explain this one thing before I go.

He fell silent and did the opposite of what he wanted to do: he pushed and penetrated a little bit more deeply.

Which was part of his explanation. At least that was the impression he gave for the other person and for himself.

Yet he had no explanation. The strong sensation of his cock was disturbing him in many ways. Not so much the enduring pleasure, of which he had become aware a moment before, but the fact of his erection, for which he saw no reason or motivation. And this, in turn, reminded him of their profound gratification, left behind somewhere in the depth of time, which someone might even have heard when it occurred. He attributed his enduring erection to the need to urinate — the most convenient explanation — but it made him a little ashamed. Why was he lying to himself. Why was he defending himself, or going on the offense; why couldn’t he give himself over to the feeling that this is how things are right now and no other way, and his cock couldn’t be calmed down. And he was misleading the other person too, but certainly not intentionally. Put another way, he had an organ that had decided to be independent or at least was behaving unexpectedly. And contemplating this, he concluded that in all their playacting, the leading role had been assigned to a deceptive maneuver. Nothing surprising would ever happen again, everything would simply repeat itself. He made contact with the woman only at a tiny point, though he wished it were otherwise. He did not feel her on his cock, not even close to it, but rather at the spot where he should be feeling his cock; through a single point, he felt the entirety of the other person. Through the little point, no larger than the head of a pin, everything streamed into the other person. He was taking in everything from the other person that until now he could not have seen or felt or had sensed only dimly. But starting now, he would be aware of everything that had happened or was happening in the other person, including things of which the woman was unaware or about which she was not yet ready to talk.

He perceived her among her double-dealings, trickery, exaggerations, lies, sins, intrigues, infantilisms, indecencies, and painful inhibitions.

Wrapped in her dark velvety skin, untouched by these unfavorable disturbing characteristics, she stood before him.

The image glowed so brightly in his mind that it threatened to burn out the tiny point of contact. It hurt. He wanted to say that in his view they were now mutually dreaming each other’s dream into each other. One person’s dream is somehow penetrating or flowing or seeping into the other’s, because just a moment earlier, when Gyöngyvér mentioned her stupid whirlpool, he dreamed that water bubbling up was reaching the boiling point.

Except that he could not have said what sort of water was bubbling up. Because it was not water but Gyöngyvér’s passionate voice bubbling in his ear. And there was that crumbling: the moment the precipice opened and there was no place to reach out to anymore, nothing to hold on to. Or he might be dreaming what the woman was dreaming because he had to urinate and could barely hold it in anymore, and the woman’s thirsty cunt, this slippery, pale-blood-colored, loosened, and boundless interior space that nevertheless might be too narrow for him, would not let him. After all, he couldn’t piss in her. He knew what he had to do with her. Such a perfect being cannot fall by the wayside. He had to open her up, awaken her with a few movements. Save her from destruction. He felt himself to be a magician capable of freeing the other person from all sorts of burdens. At the same time, his fear did not leave him. He could not shake the thought that his erection had become permanent, would never subside, the blood in his penis had clotted, he had to get medical help. Indeed, he did not desire her anymore. His imagination was increasingly taken over by the image of this clotted, thickened blood. What more could he have wished for after such a gigantic gratification but to piss, to eat and piss. He would continue to open up, shape, and mold this woman until nothing strange, nothing false remained in her.

When you told me about the whirlpool just a moment ago, you know, he said too loudly, as if raising his voice over the volume of his inner monologue, I was just dreaming that water was bubbling up and coming to a boil. But I know, get this, I knew I wasn’t really dreaming this, that it was something that had happened to me before, that it was a memory. Maybe I told you about it yesterday, the crumbling, or maybe some other time. This was just a repetition.

It was a memory for me too.

But what kind of memory could this be for you if I am the one who’s telling about it, what kind of memory of yours is that, I don’t understand, said the man incredulously, as if Gyöngyvér was thwarting his plans. He was thinking, no, maybe I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t open anything. Maybe he should stop his stupid plans to reform people, because if he let the woman so close to him he’d be lost. This could work only if he were ready to reveal his secrets. Then I am lost. He could not have revealed his secrets retroactively to anyone. That was strictly forbidden. He could not do that even if he married her.

That was just what I wanted to tell you, that I really don’t remember anything about this water business, said the woman, a little offended and unsuspecting, but I should remember something. Something’s there, in my mind, but its essence is gone.

How do you know if it’s gone, asked the man, irritated, and knowing they were becoming entangled in a useless argument. After all, he couldn’t dispute what the other person did or did not remember.

I don’t understand, why are you so irritated.

I’m not in the least irritated.

You must not be hearing yourself.

That’s exactly why I’m telling you about this, Ágost continued, against his strongest conviction, because you don’t remember and I do. Maybe I’m irritated, but why aren’t you a little more patient.

I’m completely patient.

Well, I did tell you about the crumbling. I told you about it yesterday.

I do remember precisely that I was supposed to remember something, Gyöngyvér said, continuing her own argument, undaunted. Something terrible happened. Something that was good for me. But I can’t get to it, I can’t reach it. Whenever I feel I’ve reached it, that’s a sure sign I haven’t. Don’t you understand, she shouted, growing uncertain, desperate, as if realizing that despite all her efforts, despite all her hopes, the other person would never understand her.

Yet in the same instant that she pressed both her hands on the man’s chest, thrusting him away to show she didn’t need him if he was so incapable of understanding anything and instead kept bringing up his stupid memories, let him get the hell out of here, the man’s large hands grasped her shoulders and, evidently driven by a similar emotion, shook her angrily.

But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you too, he cried in wild anger, that I am remembering. But you don’t listen to me. Isn’t it enough for you that I remember? Can’t your little brain take in that what I remember is your dream, or I don’t even know what I wanted to say, because I’m so angry I feel like exploding.

Let go of me, shouted the woman, agitated.

I will not. I’ll flatten you.

If you don’t let me up I won’t be responsible for what I do.

Then you don’t understand, really don’t understand why I’m telling you things and why I can’t let you up. You just don’t understand.

Ágost was raging, like a child whose mother doesn’t understand him and whom only the act of murder can calm. Whenever he was upset, his accent grew stronger. He seemed to be speaking Hungarian words as if they were French. Not his senses but his awareness was running wild. He heard his own accent becoming more pronounced and he knew it was time to stop. He had gone too far. Coolly he asked his senses whether it was truly possible that this woman didn’t understand him and there was nothing left to do but to commit murder. Which, for him, was not a rhetorical question since he had already killed several people, though not in the heat of anger.

What do you want from me? What?

Gyöngyvér was shouting and shaking hysterically as if she were truly afraid of being murdered.

They pulled themselves apart simultaneously, neither of them could remain intertwined for another second with so unforgivably insensitive a partner, and as they slipped out of each other they lost their balance and fell off the bed.

Their bodies slammed together; with great thumps they fell on each other like sacks, and then they continued their tussle on the floor.

Helpless fury drove them both to the brink of tears, of childish bawling. Neither of them could accept defeat, or, more precisely, the strength of their rage rose in direct proportion to their urge to weep. The energy spent on suppressing their tears was terribly painful, and their need hurt them greatly as it gaped open with all the devastating experiences of their lost, horror-filled childhoods, compared with which the physical pain caused by falling out of bed was hardly noticeable; it only created incredible physical chaos — a head banging against the door, the warmth and softness of the blanket they yanked around them, hiding the treacherous cracks and splinters in the uneven floor, where skin grazed under the weight and pressure of the other’s body, jabs of salient body parts, hard angles of elbows, chins, and knees. No doubt something had happened, but it could scarcely reach consciousness via the senses. Compared to the pain of the soul, physical pain is but a sobering realization, calming in its simplicity. Its sobriety is short-lived. They both felt and sensed the blows and bruises, that is to say, they both comprehended instantly the complete senselessness of their attraction and their scuffle, summed up in the question, what am I doing.

Naked in the sunshine.

Yet they continued to scuffle because they didn’t know what to do with their feelings for each other. They wanted both to stay where they were and to peel away from the other one.

They could have gotten up; why not let go of each other; why not give up the insane attempts at uniting; why not just continue on with their lives where they had left off a few hours or days earlier. Ágost should really go home, or at least telephone his mother, so they wouldn’t wait for him in vain or look for him at his friends’, there was nothing to worry about, he had something to do. Again, he had gone out to do some senseless fucking; he’d be coming home soon.

The strictly confidential text he had been translating from the Italian remained by his typewriter just as he had left it when four days ago he got up and went to the swimming pool. To comply with regulations, he should have locked it up. And Gyöngyvér should go to sleep, she must sleep, because she had to get up at five in the morning to begin her work at the kindergarten at six. It would have been a lie to claim they didn’t see the sober, gray workaday life ahead of them. But they couldn’t deal with it correctly. To get up now because I have to make a phone call. Or to say, oh, I think I’d better get some sleep. When either of them said or did something, it was impossible for the other to abandon the rhythm created by the first one. Even though their physical proximity no longer had a calming effect but, rather, frighteningly increased their sense of frustration. And this indefinable something had no arms for hugging or lips for kissing. Nothing with which to soothe the raw pain of emptiness.

While busy with these thoughts, he felt the strange female body shivering in his arms; someone he had nothing to do with, whom he did not know and with whom he had no reason to become acquainted. It was as if he were pressing to or thrusting away from himself a helpless being, trembling from head to toe. He could not possibly do that. Now that he had ruined her. But if he did not thrust her away, his own muscles would take on the strange trembling. And he did not let that happen. Such gentleness would make him falter. He set his protective armor in place.

It wasn’t the first time that Gyöngyvér had trembled during that evening and night.

It seemed, rather, that the trembling kept sending her back to her more treacherous and unpredictable ways, squeezing barely audible little whimpers out of her.

My sweet, my darling, what have I done, I’ve ruined you.

As he uttered these tender and emotional words, surprising himself with them, and as he put his arms around the woman’s strong shoulders, he broke into a sob.

No, don’t mind me, he said, choking. I don’t know what this is.

The words came from the very depths of his chest, one might say from an unknown, primal time.

It was like two consecutive bellows from an animal. He didn’t hold back; he had neither the time nor the presence of mind for that. Perhaps his back muscles, or his tautening abdominal muscles, didn’t let it break free. The invisible armor under his skin would not let it out, would not allow others to penetrate him with their superfluous emotions, but also would no longer let him out. He must live and die locked into himself. Which, to his shame and without producing another sound, made tears burst from his eyes and flow down his face.

Which felt good.

Mortified, he felt he had to be ashamed of his muscles holding him back. He had had, once, a more vulnerable life, and that was the reason he’d told the woman so much about those ancient times, which he himself did not remember, no matter how much he looked for them, and which, even if he’d found them, he could never get close to. His hardness and much forgetting would not let him.

And this hurt more than anything else. He shuddered, but did not want to allow himself even that.

As if he were saying, no, I won’t allow anything.

Which made Gyöngyvér break down too, bubble over. As when at the sight of one another’s trembling shoulders, every girl in a boarding-school dormitory cries, under the covers.

She had never seen a man cry, and now, of all men, to see this one cry.

In her joy she accompanied him with tiny bursts of laughter, which is what brings on hysterical, happiness-filled bawling in a dormitory. She was grateful to him — after all, he was crying because of her — but this also frightened her. Her entire body trembled and her teeth chattered, as if she had a high fever. She mourned someone while laughing at her own sorrow. She mourned someone unknown who should have perished long ago. I will destroy my mother.

To tell the truth, you know, I have a twin, she said, sobbing inconsolably.

She had just invented this so as to have something to say.

Where is this sibling, how would I know you had one. You’ve never mentioned it, sniffled the man.

She invented the twin to avoid thinking of her mother. Who, truth to tell, should have perished long ago in her daughter. Otherwise the daughter cannot love this man either. Her mother was the deceased twin. These things were as clear to her as given elements in a formula.

Ever since I was born, she said aloud, I’ve been carrying this other one inside me. She’s the only one I love, nobody else. There are such things, you know, you can wonder all you want.

Forgive me, but you’re talking drivel, you’ve gone out of your mind.

One can feel this, believe me, I am never alone. It’s been proven scientifically that in the womb one ovum can absorb, digest the other one.

Oh right, that means I’m here not with one woman but with two, obvious, isn’t it, the only thing is I can’t see the other one with the naked eye.

Never, I am always two women; with me, you can never be with one woman, for that you must look for somebody else.

She alternated between using the thread-thin voice of a mischievous, affected little girl bent on embellishing her flowery text, and her natural register, the warm mournful alto; it was as her latter self that she giggled.

This reminds me, you’ll have to meet my two good friends, the man continued, sniffling with a pleasure that surprised him. You’ll love them, at least I’d like you to love them because they’re really good boys.

As if he were consoling the woman by saying, don’t be so afraid of yourself, I am not alone either; the three of us are one. Even though this time he felt that he’d never had and could never have anyone, and that made him feel sorry for himself. His self-pity became his sole consolation.

They both understood themselves; to some extent, they even saw themselves from the outside, but they did not understand each other.

They stared at each other; it would have been good to understand truly and profoundly the subject of their admiration and aversion.

Gyöngyvér instantly tried to lick and with her tongue spoon into her mouth the tears rolling down the man’s face.

To lower her tongue to their source.

At the same time, she saw how distorted, frightening, and coarse the man’s beautiful head had become.

But why are you crying now, really, please tell me.

I don’t know.

Then she began to cry too, she felt so sorry for the man.

At the same time she thought to herself, why did I lie to him, why do I have to lie to him, why must I be such a rotten whore.

I don’t know either, she wailed aloud, maybe because of you, maybe I am lying and I’m really crying for myself, because of me, but I can’t express anything either, nothing, believe me.

Her trembling made it hard for her tongue to find the tears rolling down the man’s distorted face.

Her tongue fluttered, slurped around on his velvety skin pierced with new stubble; she kept on licking, searching for tears.

They were sitting on the wrinkled bedcover, tucked in many layers under their limbs. They yanked at each other but could not budge. Ágost was sitting on his pulled-up legs so as to support the woman with his tight thigh muscles, while his arms were around her shoulders; she had her arms around his neck.

Their torsos did not touch, the woman was trembling and shaking and her breasts with their gigantic nipples shook. Tears and mainly the inner expansion that came with the flow of tears seemed to have loosened up the man a little.

He loosened up enough to try with his tight-skinned full lips to catch the tongue hovering in front of his nose or at least the woman’s trembling lips.

Their bodies slipped over each other; they sought support with their tongues in the hot hollows of each other’s mouth.

The heat, the smoothness, the delicately nuanced aroma of the strange hollow opened another entrance before them.

As the woman kept on trembling and did nothing but tremble, all of her being, everything, trembling with her, evenly and unstoppably.

The man understood the trembling to mean that he could never satisfy this woman; perhaps it was impossible. Parallel to this realization, there appeared to him André Rott’s thin body with its hard long slabs of muscle and sinew, with the dark fountains of hair on his belly and chest. Because Ágost was convinced that with André no woman could ever wind up in such an embarrassing situation. André was the only man Ágost considered better than himself, and therefore wanted to make love to him or at least to find a woman as good as he. No matter how carefully and tenderly he tried to absorb the woman’s frightful trembling with his lips on hers, they could not gain new entrance. Or maybe for once he’ d like to be a woman so he could try out a man like his friend.

They collided painfully; the edges of their teeth clicked comically.

Which would mean that they were trying in vain. They’ll never get to the end of anything.

Maybe if I licked it for her.

André would have done it a long time ago, for sure.

Not in this order either; he would have started with that.

That’s how I’ll do it, I’ll work on her clit. I’d have gotten further if I hadn’t always tried to stick my rotten prick in. André is better because he doesn’t need women at all. He doesn’t need anybody, and every woman is hooked by his indifference.

He doesn’t need to pay attention to himself, André needs no self-discipline, he has no reason to gratify himself.

He held the woman while considering whether he needed the whole circus that would come about with a new relationship, with the proximity of a complete stranger like this.

But no, he could not let the trembling in, just as his musculature would not allow him out anymore. As if he were experiencing the other person’s pains only with his soul.

What does anymore mean.

Never, he thought suddenly.

Women, however voracious or hungry they may be, can sometimes be satisfied. I am one of these satisfying machines, but nobody has ever satisfied me. No reason not to confess that the only time I get a little bit of it is when I make these stupid women scream. That’s the truth. I am sitting in my own jail and I can count, at most, on the fingers of one hand. He found this thought very amusing, but it made him feel even sorrier for himself. As if he realized that not the other person but he was the greatest obstacle to his own existence. He was deeply moved by the thought that he was at the mercy of his own body and, as if this had given him a new idea, perhaps he should share this woman with André.

I’d get my satisfaction while he would take care of her.

Gyöngyvér thrust him away with her tongue, as if she understood every one of his insidious thoughts; she shoved him out while at the same time clinging hard to him.

Something important, I want to tell you something important, she whispered between the man’s lips, articulating clearly in synchrony with her trembles, while their lips and tongues touched again, went on the defense, tried to calm the other, and slurped about.

At times like this, one depends on one’s pores and nerve endings to help understand the other person. And the voice of the other person reaches one more slowly than usual.

It was occurring to him that he was only playing a role, only pretending to be impersonal while André really was impersonal. Soaping each other in the shower, he felt through his fingers no emotions emanating from that hard, stringy male body.

The uric acid poisoned me, Gyöngyvér whispered, I’m sure that’s why I’m shaking, you understand, because the uric acid simply poisoned me.

Where do you get such asinine, idiotic ideas.

I should pee too, you know, take a leak, she added and laughed. Don’t get scared, I’m letting it out now.

Her laughter was ugly, though she retained a warm timbre in her voice.

No, don’t, you’ve gone mad, the man shouted, alarmed.

He shouted as if he were unable to decide whether to give voice to admiration or to dread.

But, but, the woman replied in her deepest register, why shouldn’t I, and the voice she used now needed no support at all.

Don’t, the man protested, but he hadn’t finished saying the one word before he felt it on his thigh, spreading and warming his skin.

You do it too, do it for me. She moaned with pleasure, I’m letting mine out already.

They heard its strong trickle and flow, now hitting the hard floor, now piddling on the wrinkled bedcover tucked under them. With her spread loins on his thighs, she kept trembling and trembling. The man felt somewhat relieved; if it were this easy for him, he too would have let it out, but it was not that simple: nothing was coming.

The bladder would have allowed this but the urine was stopped up because of the enduring mild erection in the urethra.

Gyöngyvér reached in and got hold of his member.

That’s how you do it for the little boys, eh, Ágost asked.

Indeed, Gyöngyvér saw a strange boy whom she did not know, and Ágost saw his dead sister.

When I want them to make peepee, Gyöngyvér replied, exactly like this, you’re right. Boys have to be taught.

Every day.

No. Several times a day.

You take out their little weenies and give them instructions.

I help them.

With your nails you seduce them, ruin them for life.

Their open, hot lips touched.

Her lips were of the same temperature as her amply dribbling urine.

You’re jealous of them, I can hear it in your voice.

On the contrary, I’m happy to share you with them. You don’t yet know this side of me. I’d be happy to share you, he thought. I swear I’ll do it, he said out loud. As he thought to himself, the three of us might be able to satisfy you.

Above their kiss, they did not let go of each other’s eyes.

While they do it, I whisper to them, she whispered later into the man’s ear, when the dribbling continued intermittently, growing now weaker, now stronger; psh, psh, psh, my little one, that’s what I whisper to the little boys.

Again, their lips had to make contact, this time more strongly and for a little longer.

And what do you whisper into the ears of little girls, Ágost asked, excited by the sound of the dribbling urine.

Just a few words.

But what, how, what exactly.

Well, that right now we’re tinkling, little one, tinkle, tinkle, that’s what I say, that’s all. That’s enough for little girls.

I’m jealous of them, said the man and moaned deeply.

There you are, shouted the woman.

The urine spouted up as if from a fountain.

And since with their foreheads touching they were gazing, bewitched, at what might be happening down below, it almost reached their faces.

Instinctively they yanked their heads away.

The yellow stream fell back into itself, flooded the penis’s bare bulb, as if an invisible hand had turned off a faucet.

When in a short while it gushed forth again, bursting through the widened urethra, it reached the woman’s chin. She thrust her torso toward it; she wanted to feel it on her breasts. And she opened her mouth wide to swallow it, but this wish was frustrated. Let it soil the area between her breasts; she wanted to enjoy the warmth of the soiling, as if encountering something very precious.

Whimpering, she turned him over her.

Now it was coming in a big thick stream, steadily, and now it wouldn’t stop.

They looked at it, they whimpered, they moaned and gaped along with the spurt, biting each other’s lips. They felt they were experiencing a great, mutual victory.

And then silently.

They kept nibbling, biting each other’s lips and sliding them around on their flowing saliva.

Until it stopped.

This brought them to the other side of a barrier whose existence neither of them had known about before. They literally submerged themselves in the unfamiliar fragrance of fresh urine and, holding on to each other, spread out in it. As if the sweeter scent of the woman’s urine had overcome the man’s more pungent and bitter one.

They remained lolling in it, awed and motionless, for a long time.




Ilona’s Rice Chicken


I felt nothing in the first few seconds, but then it hurt terribly, I was grabbing my leg, wriggling in the dark. The pain of the tibia reached my brain; I was writhing helplessly.

It was blood, of course it was blood.

And in that case, everything was perhaps over after all, and in a way other than I had planned, I’d bleed to death. Blood was smeared on my fingers, I was writhing, with my knee drawn up to my chest, my whole body swaying on the lawn, soaked wet with the night’s dew, as if I were swinging the pain on my spine.

I still had the presence of mind to listen, from behind the pain, for any noise.

Was somebody coming after me, should I continue to flee; I did hear some very strange clattering on the road.

It seemed to be coming from a different direction, not the one from which I’d have expected the sailor if he had picked up my trail and followed me. But judging by the sounds, it had to be a monster. No human could make such noises. His stride was irregular and the footsteps kept unexpectedly breaking off. It sounded as if somebody were flinging pebbles into the night in short, quick, sharp bursts, then stopping for a while, then starting up again unpredictably.

The black-haired giant had turned into a monster.

I might as well give up hope of his following me, of all people.

I had tumbled over the wrought-iron fence that separated the plane-tree-lined promenades from the enormous smooth lawn behind the Grand Hotel of Margit Island. How could I have forgotten it. The neo-Baroque fence imitated the tendrils, the winding, twisting stems, flowers, and huge round buds of plants. I had banged into the flower petals and the bud knobs with my shin. If only I could bleed to death quietly. I’d weaken and gradually lose consciousness, or blood poisoning would unceremoniously finish me off in a few days. This wasn’t a hopeless wish, since scales of rust were wedged into the leg wound; I felt their edges as my fingers groped around in the pain and slipped in blood.

The ground-floor terraces were empty, the striped sunshades were folded above the tables, and all the windows were dark.

Not a single hotel guest seemed to be awake.

What a strange feeling — that it had to happen at this place. It was as if I were observing, with my old views, from behind the dark window of the corner room on the fourth floor, and saw myself writhing on the lawn in the deep shadow of the plane trees.

Every year during the autumn housecleaning my grandparents would move here from Stefánia Boulevard, always renting the same suite.

It was an exceptional place where nothing ever changed over the years. Always the same breeze in the loose foliage of the plane trees, bringing the smell of the river and carrying the wavering light of the gas lamps; and whenever a stronger wind blew, the branches banged and the heavily veined, five-pointed leaves noisily rubbed and slid over one another. Rain pattering on them sounded like drops falling on stretched leather.

In those years, my grandmother’s women friends still thought that everything should be maintained and well preserved until the Americans came, when the Russians would clear out and life would return to its old routine.

The white funnels of petunia blossoms hanging from the carved clay pots were swinging gently on the rain-beaten balustrades.

Slowly the pain began to subside.

The insane reflected light of the city fell from the cloudy sky like a fine yellow drizzle.

With my writhing on the lawn, my black shirt and pants had gotten wet, but the coolness of the dew eased the pain somewhat. I no longer cared how I looked. I must have looked shocking, but that wouldn’t stop me from getting home somehow. If I hadn’t had to urinate and if I hadn’t been so thirsty, I might have lolled around on the lawn for a while. It was pleasant to hear again the city’s familiar noises and thuds, its closer or more distant shrieks. I felt protected by the night, as if lying under the giant shade of the plane trees I was invisible.

It turned out that nobody was coming down the promenade, neither human nor beast; my ears must have deceived me earlier.

I should have decided to leave as soon as possible and, because of Pisti, never come back again. I’d seen what he was up to; he was indeed at home here. I couldn’t get over this, because he was certainly the darling of girls and women if anyone was. And having seen him here, and not only that other boy, Königer, and I did see him with my own eyes, then I’d never understand anything about what was happening around me, and who knows whom I might meet here tomorrow.

Just about everybody is doing it.

I never imagined that in the nocturnal multitude I’d run into somebody I knew.

I couldn’t tell him that I had wound up here by chance and opened my fly by accident.

But the threatening image of this never come back again, which took hold immediately, was like a hardly feasible self-mutilation.

How can I restrain myself when I see that what I hardly dare dream about, others extravagantly indulge in every night.

Something had revealed itself: a realm of unfamiliar activities and secret compulsions that for the sake of rationality I should have locked up in the world of unfamiliarity forever. It’s over, that’s what I should have yelled. I shall ignore it. Since until now I had had no idea what men did under the cloak of night, I could easily forget it or pretend to know nothing of it.

Nobody’s presence should ever remind me of this again during the day. I’ll walk back to Pest not on the Margit but on the Árpád Bridge, and that way I might get away with it without being exposed.

Never again, never, I kept promising to myself. Maybe one last time I might still get away with it.

That would be the only reward for my self-punishment: that I’d get away with it. A reward one does not receive physically. If somehow one received it in one’s hands and carefully unwrapped the fine rustling paper, one would find something threatening and ominous, something one had managed to avoid or that had avoided one only by accident.

The worst did not happen.

And what sense would it make to wind up in an embarrassing situation because of such a loathsome adventure. Now I knew about Pisti, but maybe he didn’t yet know about me. I couldn’t risk more than that. And not only I but he couldn’t explain this away; nobody could. I went on lying in the cool darkness, full of warm currents. I closed my eyes to listen to the mysterious rustling of leaves and to recall something of the night’s emotion-filled occurrences, which I should have loathed. And to make my escape a certainty, in my imagination I made my crossing between the blackened facades of tenements on the poorly lit, deserted side streets of Pest. Nobody I knew should see me in such a state, especially not Pisti. I quickly planned my route and directions.

It was as if I were constantly crossing to another side of the street, even though the street had only two sides.

I was wading into the deserted jungle of the city, and there was no way back. Because I ardently wished that there would be no way back.

And I probably dozed off as the pain eased, because I awoke to the sound of its stinking panting and the distinct feeling of its presence next to me.

It is panting and puffing right into my face.

I see its black mug with its long, dangling, rhythmically slipping-and-sliding tongue as it stares at me. Its eyes were flashing as it stood above me, dark and colossal.

My first thought was that the black-haired giant had metamorphosed into a black dog, Satan’s dog, which would mean I had gone mad indeed.

Its polite and patient waiting showed that it presumed I’d wake up.

Not much time could have gone by, I told myself, alarmed. I felt I had to account for the wasted time, but at least I knew where I was, which made me crash back into my real life. The period of summer exams had begun, the first two exams toward my doctorate were behind me, and I did not think that, once awake, I owed an explanation to anyone about anything. But somebody inside me kept shouting that for days now I’d been doing nothing but useless things.

It was a smooth-haired stray dog.

Quickly it sniffed into my ear and my hair, all four feet stamping with excitement; then the panting suddenly stopped as it rushed to my feet, its short tail joyfully wagging very fast as if to say, at last I’ve found my master in the empty night, the one I’ve been looking for; it smelled my shoes for a long time, found them familiar, then licked my wound and, if I hadn’t yanked my leg away, it would have lapped up the blood; it sniffed all around my groin very thoroughly, then my hair; I let it, though its long, dangling ears and mustache tickled me. It would have sniffed my eyes too, and the prospect seemed to make it very happy. With a motion of my hand, I shoved it away. It wouldn’t back off, wanted to sniff my mouth, which made me laugh, and I shoved it again, harder than before.

The dog stank; it must have eaten human shit.

Ever since my childhood, the proximity of animals has always set my gums and palate on edge, so that for long minutes I couldn’t swallow properly.

The dog did not wait for the end of my shove; it jumped back instead, its body taut, ready to attack.

I jumped up too, but not because I was afraid of it. Perhaps I felt secure with animals precisely because I could never lower myself to their level.

It was a nice young male, a black, skinny but large-bodied vizsla, probably a crossbreed; under his filthy short hair, his skin was full of sores new and old. Though he bared his teeth, I told him it was all right and patted his hard head, which he let me do, though not the way a dog used to kindness would but resignedly, neutrally attentive. In the meantime I tested my injured leg to see if it would function; the dog put his forelegs on the ground, raised his butt playfully in the air, shook it, and this time showed me not only his full set of teeth, his two terrible fangs, but also his naked frightening gums. Emitting short, angry, and, I’d like to say, ironic grunts, he seemed eager to tell me something that I did not understand.

Truth to tell, I needed this dog more than he needed me, but I did not realize that then.

I set out with him toward the service entrance of the hotel, limping heavily, with the dog snapping at my ankles. Thus we crossed the enormous, dense, close-cropped lawn.

I started in that direction because I thought that with a bit of luck I could feed the starving dog.

And as if he knew what my plan was, he kept running ahead and coming back to me.

There was a big lump on his skull where he must once have been badly hit on the head. His snarling was his laughter; he demonstrated his great joy and trust in me by showing his fangs, though he mightn’t have minded taking a bite out of my ankle. Nevertheless, I couldn’t be sure of what I was doing, so I told him right away to be still, let’s see how things turn out, just come quietly with me but don’t count on anything.

I found the waste bins in exactly the same place they had been ten years earlier. The old system was still working.

The steps leading down to the service entrance were at the end of the left wing of the large building. Garbage collectors or delivery people had to get off the road and back down a fairly steep, ribbed platform all the way to the cellar level. This was the staff’s turf, where produce was carried in and bales and bundles were taken out through strictly separated openings, and where garbage was taken outside. Not only my shoes but also the dog’s feet and toenails made noises on the ramp, noises that echoed between the walls. Occasionally I stopped and the dog did too, raising his head; we both listened and watched, and he stayed at my side.

It became incredibly quiet in the night, all life and labor had fallen silent. In the cool breath of the river I could feel more strongly the sweet scent of the petunias and the smell of gasoline trapped between the walls by the entrance.

There was very little chance of someone noticing us or asking me what I was up to.

Although the lamp above the service entrance was lit, the glass-paned revolving door behind the iron grating had been secured in a safe, entrance-blocking position, and this entrance had no night porter.

It would be opened at exactly 5:30 in the morning for the scullery maids’ noisy arrival.

They’ll be coming from Dömös, Kisoroszi, and Tahitótfalu with the first produce-carrying steamer, getting off on the Buda shore under the Margit Bridge, bringing along all sorts of delicacies and sweet tidbits in small baskets, jars or kerchiefs tied smartly at the corners. They’ll bring sweet cream, strawberries, tarragon, raspberries in little baskets woven from dry corn husk, curd cheese, small bunches of thyme, mushrooms of the season, and everything else the forests and fields can provide, fragrant wild strawberries in enameled containers, quail eggs in crates lined with willow, blackberries, dogwood, rose-hip jam in glazed jars, elder blossoms and chamomile wrapped in kerchiefs. They will hand all this in at the storeroom, the directress will count or weigh each item, enter the data in the large ledger, so that each week, in addition to their salaries, the scullery maids will be paid for what they have brought.

It was they who lowered the heavy corrugated iron shutter over the storeroom entrance. They will raise it when the milk wagon arrives and the white bottles clinking in the iron crates are unloaded wordlessly. Even before this job is done, the bread man will make his delivery. The rear door of the wagon, cushioned on the inside, is opened and the warmly fragrant breads and bakery products are carried into the storeroom.

The workers whistled while they worked, so I assumed that early-dawn bread delivery must be a joyful thing.

I didn’t even have to remember the various tastes of fresh unpasteurized milk, of warm croissants or sweet brioches to distinguish between the hotel’s night and early-dawn activities or to know what sorts of things happened in the morning or in the afternoon. The scullery maids began every day with cleaning vegetables and disemboweling chickens. At 12:30 they turned their freshly whipped cream over to the pastry cooks, who could then complete their cakes and desserts; next they wrapped in blotting paper and then in kitchen towels the evenly sliced potatoes, later to be made into chips, and after that the girls were done. Their return boat would leave the Bem Square station at 1:30. It arrived in Tahi at 4:00, Kisoroszi at 4:40, and Dömös at 6:30, and every day of every year they made the same routine to-and-fro journey until the river became dangerously icy and boat traffic came to a halt.

That was when all the weddings took place in the villages and the young women no longer came to work in the hotel. Barely adolescent girls had to replace them.

Leaning on their baskets and against one another, they slept in the deafening dark bowels of the big paddle steamers.

The staff of the Grand Hotel had specific instructions on how to deal with the children of guests. Very decisively but always kindly and politely, no matter how difficult this might prove to be. Except for me, it was very rare for children to be in the hotel in the early autumn. I was well behaved, polite, and managed quite well in the red-walled living room, empty but for the record player and my picture books for company. I knew what was allowed and what was not; and that described my reputation. He is a nice quiet boy, the adults would say, able to keep himself busy. They had no idea how I abused their trust and confidence. They thought they didn’t have to worry that I might get into an accident or do mischief. The chambermaids, bellboys, and cleaning women competed for my favors; they liked to have me along or waiting for them while they did their chores.

Of my own secret mission, of course nobody knew anything.

I loved to follow the different hotel workers along the corridors on the soft, dark red carpets, which absorbed the sound of footsteps, go downstairs with them via the rear stairwell, then take the elevator, glittering with its cut-glass windows, all the way to the top floor, doing all this to discover the hotel’s secrets. I realized early on that one should not say no to anything. The more willing and polite I was and the more reliably I behaved, the more communicative people became; ultimately grown-ups are rather careless with their secrets.

It never occurred to anyone, for example, to lock the external door of the garbage bay from the inside.

Beggars also had their place and hour; nobody imagined that the beggars might assault the garbage bins. They were supposed to line up just before the kitchen closed. They came one by one out of the night with their worn bags and frayed satchels, waited before the basement window, bathing in the light that filtered through it, in the kitchen stench streaming outward at and in the weakening preclosing kitchen clatter.

If it rained, they stood under umbrellas.

At most they would make courteous little gestures, well understood by others in the line: but of course, go on, your grace; oh no, don’t even mention it. And the chambermaids never ceased boasting that here, fortunately, we hardly have any real beggars. The directress takes this very seriously; she can’t abide smelly or filthy persons and will not suffer Gypsies or drunken louts. As far as she’s concerned, that kind of person can just stand in the rain or snow; she won’t give them a morsel.

One wasn’t to speak of people in this line as beggars. The directress did not want to see a beggar who looked like one. She could not bear such human wrecks. Nobody could tell her that a person couldn’t wash in cold water.

Watch it, little girl, I hear beggar from you again and I’ll rap your mouth for you.

She’d do it too, there’s good reason to be afraid of that big ring of hers, because these people are decent ladies and gentlemen, and every person is entitled to respect. Poor war widows, disabled pensioners, victims of some family disaster. Some of them come for food to take to their gravely ill relatives. These people have been truly robbed of everything. God forbid someone should speak ill of these poor beings or humiliate them. If anybody, the communists should be ashamed of themselves.

Everything’s all right so long as one is healthy and can work.

Anybody can lose his job and wealth, anybody, it’s getting them that’s hard.

You can believe me: nobody’s fate is assured.

Enough misfortune awaits one in this life, may the Virgin Mary or the Lord Jesus protect you.

Szidónia Oltó was the name of the chambermaid who from the very beginning took me under her protection. Because she was also an orphan, she knew what that meant. There was a certain woman among those poor beings, she explained to me, who once had been a permanent guest of the hotel and whose orders had not been easy to carry out. How could one possibly predict the course of one’s fate; one plays the big shot while one can. Such people usually want everything, no matter what it is. And they never run out of orders to give — don’t put it over there, put it here, and how many times do I have to tell you the same thing, and she won’t eat that, won’t touch it at all; what she wants is what’s being served at the next table.

The wheel of fortune is always turning, little boy, don’t ever dare think of humiliating anyone.

And she showed me who that certain woman was.

I was in love with Szidónia Oltó and not only because she said interesting things but also because the skin on her elbows and knees was rough and scaly and she liked it when I rubbed them for her.

The smell coming from her white blouse was quite strong whenever she held me to her breast, saying I was her little son.

That poor thing lost everything, and I mean everything she had, except for that rabbit-fur coat, she’d whisper excitedly while we waited for a snack to be prepared for a guest on the third floor. The collar of that coat is pretty shabby too, look at it. You won’t believe this, but this woman, careful, she’s looking at us, every Easter she and her husband used to spend two weeks here, on the first floor.

They’d take no place else, in the same suite used by Cardinal Pacelli and by the Prince of Wales.

We thought that the man who at the same time was staying in room 11 was her lover, but it turned out that he too was her husband. That’s right, you heard me. There wasn’t another woman in the whole world as cunning as this one. Believe me. Now, of course, she’s drinking like a fish and has to hold on to a railing when she moves. She had to take the interior staircase up to her second husband, who’d wait for her there. Look how she’s wound up. Still, when you look at her today, you see the wife of General Pechl, yes, to this day, but she’s also the widow of Major Bertolini. Today, nobody wants her. When people found out about it, it was all covered up very nicely, even though they published news of the bigamy in the papers.

This husband of hers sent the major to the front line so he’d be killed and there’d be peace and quiet at last. He was right to do it.

You can take their supper for them, that slut.

If her other husband hadn’t done what he did, she’d have rotted in jail.

Put a little lettuce on the bottom, Danika, it looks so pitiful like this.

You can believe me, there’s no justice in the world. But now, it doesn’t matter any more, no point blaming her. The Lord Jesus or the Virgin Mary, if they wanted to, would forgive even someone like her.

I shouldn’t bother my head about their problems. I’d better stop talking about it altogether.

The beggars were given not leftovers exactly but prepared food that guests had not accepted and the waiters, having no alternative, had returned to the kitchen virtually untouched.

You can’t imagine how much I know.

If guests didn’t ask to have the food they’d rejected packed for them, then it was packed for these wretches, but just as carefully as if they were guests. The directress saw to it that this was done properly. Spoiled food was not allowed in any of the packages, at worst only something that would not hold over for the following day.

They owed this not only to notions of Christian charity but also to the hotel’s good name. And the directress would have done it exactly the same way even if her reward had been only the recipients’ gratitude, but, of course, one should have faith in providence.

In the short lulls between the rushing waves of service to the guests, the cooks tossed these choice leftovers onto trays lined with wax paper, nimbly arranged the food to make it look attractive, and then covered the trays with more wax paper. Later scullery maids packed this untouched food not in decorative wrapping paper bearing the hotel’s logo, as they would have done for a guest, but in newspaper, and then handed the parcels out through the barred window.

Not to just anybody.

When they came at night, appearing for a moment with their broken shadows in the slanted beam of light behind the window bars, they had to bend down low to get the packages, which were simply handed out, one after the other. Nobody knew what his or her package might contain.

Maybe even a whole cake.

The packages disappeared into satchels, threadbare leather bags, and no matter how great the directress’s mercy and satisfaction, the recipients carried them as a burning sign of their shame. All the other food that guests left on their plates was thrown into the pig swill. The staff was forbidden to lick, nibble, or try to eat anything on the sly; tasting was the sole privilege of the chef de cuisine, and they could take nothing home. The directress’s view was that generosity had no place in this because to allow any filching would only make the staff greedier.

If you capriciously permitted something today, tomorrow they’d take everything and be insolent about it; the day after tomorrow they’d filch your eyes out of their sockets.

The scullery maids, among whom were the beginners called handy girls because they prepared things to be within reach of their superiors, separated what would be thrown in the liquid pig swill, such as water in which noodles had been boiled, from solid leftovers, within which they further separated out the bones. The dishwashers were supposed to receive completely cleared dishes and plates. However, one could always hear a few disgruntled shouts from the chefs.

Panni, my sweet, have you got a little rice or potato on that tray.

You’d hear something like this whenever something went missing from the paper-lined trays prepared for the beggars.

The most important thing was not to mix solid leftovers with bones or liquids, not for the world. They were to be put in three different barrels, and the barrel lids had to be well clamped down to contain the smell and prevent spilling during transport. Sauces, gravies, and dips had separate regulations. All mustards and leftover horseradish or sour-cherry sauce served with Viennese boiled beef and Alföldi ham went into the liquid slop; gooseberry cream, mayonnaise, and cheese or ham béchamel went into the barrel with the solids. Cranberry served with venison, along with rose hips from the bottom of the sauce bowl, had to be sorted with the liquids, while dill sauce and tomato sauce went into the barrel for solids.

I hope, Jucika, you haven’t forgotten that we don’t put cucumber sauce with the solid leftovers. You can’t be that forgetful.

Oh, please excuse me.

It’s not your movements you should be frugal with, you know.

It wasn’t intentional.

If your head wasn’t wandering elsewhere, your hands would know what to do.

The fat from roasts was collected separately in a large, wide enameled saucepan, and fresh fat was always added to and melted with it, but I don’t know what happened to it. The dregs of the saturated fat in which meatballs, Wiener schnitzels, or breaded chicken legs had been fried didn’t even have a chance to cool off completely; as it was thickening it would be scooped out with slotted ladles and put right in with the solids; they’d snap it up and knock it in hard; it sizzled and spluttered. The burned oil in which they fried fish or doughnuts, lángos, apples in blankets, various croutons and croquettes, marinated elder blossom, palacsinta, or differently sized and shaped soup noodles was definitely thrown into the liquid slop.

And so was salad dressing and all scraps and remnants of vegetables.

The barrels were taken away not by the sanitation people but, every other day, by people from the pig farm in Nagytétény.

I found the black door of the garbage bay ajar or, more precisely, found that it could no longer be closed properly because of the thick layers of grime on it.

In this frightening underground passage, tiled to the ceiling and stinking of chlorine, the light was always on.

It was on now.

Deep inside was another door, but it could be opened only from within the basement. It was considered an emergency exit and the staff was forbidden to obstruct it in any way. This is where they pushed out the barrels and where the various kinds of garbage were brought from the upper floors. Inside, there was not even a knob on the door, only a button. It was locked now. No stranger could enter the building unseen, but when I wanted to leave the building secretly, I could always use this exit.

I could go down to the basement on the staff staircase, where yellow coir matting silenced my foosteps. Sometimes I’d rouse myself in the middle of the night, sometimes at dawn, to carry out my mission; sometimes I wouldn’t even want to go to sleep but I’d wait until the Gypsy band finished playing in the dining hall, until only the soft, caressing dance music in the casino could be heard, until everything slowly closed and quieted down. Out on the terrace the waiters quickly turn over the chairs and place them on the tables, roll in the awnings and fold the sunshades. The last guests take leave of one another, titters and harsh abrupt laughter mixed with bubbling chitchat; car doors slam loudly as taxis and limousines drive off, a tipsy voice is heard along with the creaking of paired footsteps on the pebbled promenade. And then long silence. Only the leaves rustle, which for quite some time one might take for whispering lovers and would like to understand but can’t; it’s only the night and its natural noises. One is free to go at last.

The reddish velour rugs silenced my steps in the corridors made insanely brilliant by the light of sconces adorned with crystals.

I had to be careful not to let the black steel door of the basement close, because then I could return to the building only through the main entrance and my foxiness would be discovered. I could not afford to expose myself. But all I had to do was put a box of matches, a piece of bark, or a pinecone into the crack of the door.

Though many things had changed since then, I still managed to feed the dog.

I was welcomed by the stench of putrefaction, disorder, and filth; grime was smeared on the tiled walls and high up on the lights, and the ceiling was covered with deep layers of cobweb on which dust had settled in clumps. I had barely opened the door when the dog began to bark infernally because with incredible hissing and spitting at least fifteen cats of different colors and sizes jumped out of the lidless bins.

The dog’s bark echoed hellishly along the cold walls.

The cats went sliding on their extended claws across the stone floor strewn with fallen and dug-out garbage and raced between our legs, fur standing up on their spines and vertical tails, out into the open. I smacked the dog’s lumpy head good and hard, but his quieting down must also have been because his fine sense of smell was overcome by the disgusting odor of rotting food.

The cats disappeared in a flash, jumping out over the side of the ramp planted with evergreens.

I listened for a few seconds, making sure we hadn’t woken one of the night watchmen. I could hear nothing but quiet puffing from the boiler room, deep in the ground.

Perhaps another barge was approaching on the Danube: there was a decided if muted trembling, a struggling motor echoing underwater. At times like this, the stokers would be lying on the warm iron bridge above the boiler and, for warm pillows, resting their heads on one another’s shoulders.

After the dog stopped bothering me and no longer cared what I did or didn’t do, and with his whole body trembling, his rear shaking, growling continuously and baring his teeth, he set about wolfing down everything I found for him in the solid-pig-swill barrel and managed with a piece of cardboard to scoop out: raw chicken heads with their forever-closed or forever-open fine-as-breath bluish eyelids, enormous pieces of bone both raw and cooked with invaluable shreds of beef still on them, and a whole plate of burned-at-the-edges potato chips. I quickly stepped outside.

He’d be busy for a long time working on those bones.

I closed the steel door behind me as best I could.

So he couldn’t follow me. Early in the morning, somebody would surely discover him and let him out, or call the dogcatchers on duty.

The filth was so thick in the hinges that I couldn’t close the door completely, no matter how hard I tried. Only a good cleaning, preferably with a strong jet of water followed by generous oiling, would do the job. I did not want the dog to follow me.

Or anybody; I wanted no living being who might cause me pain because I’d fallen in love with him or her.

Fallen in love, yes, I was able to love, no matter how hard I protested; I could fall in love in a minute, with any body or thing. I couldn’t get out of my head the marvelous giant who was probably illiterate. Or the odor of Szidónia Oltó’s armpits, Gyöngyvér Mózes’s fingernail polish, a little cloud in the sky, Ilona Bondor’s red freckles. And for this permanent weakness I despised myself.

Why am I so weak and foolish.

The rotten door closed tight enough for me to be sure the dog wouldn’t break out and follow me.

In the old days, two awful hags used to clean the basement. They came from Pest on the streetcar; they weren’t from the country. Heavy, large-bodied women, they wore rubber aprons and rubber boots and dragged their red water hoses after them everywhere. Wherever they appeared, they’d attach the hoses to a faucet and the ice-cold water went streaming over everything.

They hardly talked, but instead continually moaned and sighed, oh, Lord Jesus, oh, Virgin Mary, help me, save me now. If their bleach bucket tipped over or their thick, willow-twig brooms fell and splashed in spilled water, they would swear in long loops of curses.

The things they told each other were certainly not meant for children’s ears.

I was scared of these huge women. They did not return my greetings, and if I politely asked them something they looked through me as if I were made of air and neither of them replied. The hotel’s strict regulations that exhorted the staff from the ground floor up to politeness and familial courtesy did not reach to the basement. One could not count on them in the lower regions, and looking at things from down there, it seemed to me that what went on above ground level was not so much natural as, rather, exceptional. I had the impression that the world was one big basement with which I was not yet sufficiently familiar. Even in the kitchen one could count only on the personal favor of the cooks or scullery maids, or on the merciless indifference of the directress. The servants would not continue for very much longer to serve the masters on the floors above. And while the women in rubber aprons didn’t even look up from their work when I came near, as if they didn’t see or hear anything, they talked to each other loud and clear, and made sure I heard and understood what they were saying. The least of it was their calling me shitty little kid, snot-nose, little dwarf, and grumbling that I was always underfoot, always loitering. For a long time I did not understand this word loitering, just as I hadn’t understood bigamy, of which the drunken old woman in the rabbit-fur coat was supposed to have been guilty, or phrases like dirty Jew and filthy bourgeois, which referred directly to me and along with me to my entire tribe.

Shove the little bourgeois dwarf into the barrel, what the fuck is he loitering around here for; let the garbage man take him away.

The stokers weren’t exactly friendly either, but at least they didn’t mind if I stood at the top of the steel stairway and watched them work. Maybe they liked having at least one little boy in the world who truly admired their shiny bodies and the work they did.

With the two cleaning women, I tried to pretend I was admiring them, but I failed to convince or deceive them with the seriousness of my interest.

At the water fountain I first washed the wound and then drank a lot of water, I could hardly get enough of it. I had to balance on a brick because the fountain leaked, water trickling down even when no one pushed the release lever, and the drain in front was stopped up.

Shapeless puddles of standing water marked the swamplike vicinity of the fountain.

Bricks had been set down in some of the puddles so one could manage to approach the fountain, but from the wobbly bricks my feet slipped into the water several times. If I really wanted to walk home on the Árpád Bridge instead of taking the night tram, I had a hopelessly long and unpleasant trip ahead of me in wet shoes.

Maybe it would be better to put an end to my life.

The hard lump that had developed on my bruised shin was throbbing and turning blue, a tight pantleg was rubbing against the oozing wound, and I was limping badly.

Once on the other shore, to reach Váci Road, I’d have to make my way across Vizafogó, a jungle of worthless little proletarian housing projects that keep sinking into the sand. From there, the only routes lay along tall fences and cheerless planks of factories all the way to Lehel Square, where, amid a constant noise of shunting and switching, I’d cross the Ferdinánd Bridge over the railway tracks and continue on the endless, sooty Szív Street until I reached Andrássy Road. There, I could choose to go under the plane trees on the promenade lined with salvia, forget-me-nots, pansies, and daisies, where I might be somewhat exposed, or, remaining in the maze of houses, to approach Grand Boulevard from the cover of little side streets.

I hoped to find the main gate open and slip in without Balter’s noticing me.

But in the end I set out on the long trek with two parallel sets of calculations at work in me. It was also possible that I would be unable to hobble home at all.

Jumping off the Árpád Bridge, one could be much more certain of killing oneself than by jumping off the Margit Bridge.

The span between the piers is much greater, the bridge is simple and unadorned, and there’s no chance that one would knock against the steel framework or that the piers would be a hindrance. I wanted to reach the water unharmed. I needed only a single glance to get an idea of the width and depth of the whirlpools and of the current’s strength.

It would be nice this way; at any rate, this bridge was preferable.

But even if I were to go through with it, first I had to urinate. I could barely hold it anymore; I was hurrying, limping, anxious to reach the mysterious darkness of the chestnut grove below the boulders of the Japanese Garden, where I could finally relieve myself.

The promenade along the shore and the thicket around the Dominican cloister had kept me captive for four whole nights, so I hadn’t wandered this far afield, and I had no idea to what sort of place my urge to urinate would bring me.

But I knew the area from my childhood, and a few days earlier I had taken a stroll there with a slightly limping, very elegant young lady from Buda, who in her utter passivity mercifully wanted nothing from me. Whenever I joined her family for an opera or ballet performance at the open-air theater, or in the casino for five o’clock tea and a dance, before and after the event the two of us would go for a walk on the island to about this point. There was nothing interesting past the chestnut grove, except perhaps for the war-damaged ruins of the neoclassic Music Well, soiled and stinking of urine, and the barrenness of the paved ramp leading to the bridge.

An artificial waterfall poured over romantic rocks into a calm little pond.

This is how far we came.

The bodies of plump goldfish glimmered among the water lilies, and one could gaze at the fish even if one had nothing worth saying to one’s companion. The point always arrived when I had nothing to say to girls, or when they didn’t want to talk about Edith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, or Camus. I was not enthusiastic about their favorite topics. What they wanted to talk about was the cooing voice of sweet little Ákos Németh, along with all the gossip about him, which was of very limited interest to me. If they’d wanted me to grasp their breasts and stroke them while gazing into their eyes, or if they’d let my fingers wander under their skirts, there’d have been no problem at all.

But all they wanted was that I passionately return their kisses, nothing more, maybe put my arm around their waist but not slide my hand up the back of their sweater.

You’re doing this only to get me excited, I know. Men do this to make women lose their self-control.

Oh, how awful, how can you do a thing like that.

They’d slap my hand no matter where it sought contact with their bare skin.

Mean boy, they said sulkily; try as you might, I won’t let you do that.

It was quiet now because the taps of the waterfall had been turned off at ten o’clock sharp at the power station, though the steeply rising rock garden with its footpaths remained illuminated by floodlights all night long to make patrolling easier for the police.

Their aggressive lips desensitized mine, and I found no passion in aggressiveness. I wondered whether they had learned this aggressive kissing from one another, whether I should fall on them with the same aggressive vehemence.

Hurrying toward the dark grove, I discovered that the light was on above the urinal and the door had been left wide open. Normally, this should have been closed when they turned off the waterfall.

Inside it was dark.

As I carefully entered the place, which smelled strongly of tar and urine, expecting to step into muck or bump into something unexpected, the beams of floodlights coming through the narrow windows high up on the walls temporarily blinded me and made me stop.

A familiar stench and familiar human tension warmly pervaded the space.

I should have realized immediately that I’d fallen into a trap and would not easily escape; I was in a snare. But from that moment on I was once again standing outside my own personality.

I saw nothing, only heard and felt on my goose-bumped body that many men were standing in front of the tarred wall opposite me. Somehow they seemed to fill the place completely. It was as if the temperature had risen sharply, for it seemed feverishly hot. As if disturbed by my entrance, the men rustled their clothes and made little knocking and shuffling noises on the floor. I stared, opened my eyes wide, wanted to see what was happening, what they had so abruptly interrupted when I came in, but darkness and the light coming straight at me simultaneously blinded me. Then the dark silence became deeper and tenser, and I could hear in it, at arm’s length, directly behind the open door, the solitary dripping of a faucet.

This is how water drips into a broken porcelain sink.

I did not move from the doorway.

This somebody, whom I was observing within me, did not turn on his heels and take off, as he should have. In his terror he did not run away, rather he stepped out of the harsh light and into the feverish darkness that had always tempted him. Dispassionately and almost omnisciently, he glanced around in the new space, though he could not have seen much of it.

Tar and water formed a compound fragrance at once sharp, clear, deep, and dark; it devoured all other odors and threatened the sense of smell.

All the while his abandoned persona could not swallow, and his entire body was trembling gently, mainly in the knees, because of his shaking soul.

He found pleasure in this bodily fright.

He heard the sound of his footsteps, which told him that with his entire being he had once again become like soft cat’s paws on which he would rush to his doom. Although in the empty shell of his persona someone was dissatisfied and sending out danger signals, whispering you cannot do this, you must not do this. As if somebody was still there who could be convinced to do something.

The one now standing in the space abandoned by his corporeal reality was not strong enough to convince himself of anything.

He made his move to do it, for the first time in his life, in any way possible, and with anyone.

And if it is not I talking to myself in this way, to stop the other one inside from going on this risky adventure, and if I am not the other one either, who has already taken his first step, then what should this stranger be afraid of.

There’s good reason to fear pleasure, because pleasure puts one at the mercy of the other person’s pleasure, leaving both personalities defenseless by entrusting them to each other; however, if there is no I, no self, then there is no need for any persuasion, no need for any restraint.

Pleasure is probably one of God’s nicknames.

And personality is nothing more than a bundle of traits whose rich offering is to be used freely according to one’s needs and fancies. And in that case, it could not possibly have anything to do with that senseless struggle with which the stupid petite bourgeoisie, squeezed between prohibitions and obligations, try to ensure their existence, thereby expelling a certain amount of permanence, stability, and security from their bodies’ archaic reality.

I don’t want and do not need such false security.

As if he were saying that he did not need the rough, uncouth proletarian girls or the prim, lisping young ladies teetering on high heels around whom he had made his obligatory reputation as a skirt chaser. And he needed even less the experience-seeking school and college girls, though they permitted everything and in their great curiosity did many things themselves.

I don’t need them either.

I had no idea what was waiting for me at the bottom of this peculiar dark muteness.

With their interrupted frozen movements, the men stood close to one another.

In a solid line they stood, like somber Roman warriors.

Only their shoulders were visible, the lighter spots of their backs, maybe the arcs of their necks a little bit.

Ordine stat.

For the most part, the deep darkness of the pissoir’s tarred wall swallowed their shapes.

He belonged with them.

They all turn in his direction, heads tugged as if by strings, because they want to see him, who it is who’s come, is he really one of them, perhaps it’s someone whose leaving they’ll have to wait out silently and motionless. But they did not turn away from the tarred wall either, because they were not ready to give up their hard-earned privileged places. First the newcomer had to give evidence of where he belonged. He had to take his place among them. The darkness conveyed something of their movements and intentions but very little of their bodies and faces.

At most, the reflected light from above illuminated the edge of their profiles or skulls.

It wasn’t that there were no barriers between these somber, ready-for-anything men, that they had no inhibitions. On the contrary, at the sight of the newcomer they literally froze into their own inhibitions.

Yet they seemed to have been waiting for him as they would for no one but the Messiah.

Their hungry attention and wild imagination converged on the body of the newcomer. They waited for somebody to free them from their inhibitions so that in their mutual muteness they might make a first move. If at a time like this someone had urinated loudly into the common silence, with his clumsy dribbling he’d have had little hope to claim he belonged among these men. They all pretended they had just finished their business and were only shaking the last drops off their pricks so as not to wet their underpants.

Directly opposite the entrance there was a free space in the otherwise solid lineup.

He could step into it if he had the courage.

That spot had the most light, which is perhaps why it remained empty. The two ends of the lineup vanished in the deep darkness stinking of urine and tar.

That’s where he headed, straight into the darkness where, in the very depth of the night, water was dripping on enamel. He chose the more dangerous place, where he could disappear with the personal shame he felt before men but with his impersonal desires could appear before God.

He hoped that the warm darkness would protect him and in his pleasure he would not have to throw himself on the mercy of others, of anyone.

And then he noticed the giant’s mustached assistant in the lineup, with his big head and tousled hair among the other heads turning toward him. Unlike the others, the assistant turned somewhat with his body too, simultaneously presenting, as it were, the emblem of his cock.

The assistant had no doubt he belonged among these men.

He considered his cock as the last argument, in case I still hadn’t made up my mind. After all, one must decide how to shape one’s life. To see the emblem was like seeing an old friend.

And seeing it, icy, fiery dread coursed through him like homesickness; if things were going this well, then the tar-smelling giant with his hammerlike head and the high bare nape of his neck must also be in here somewhere.

The man with whom, he still hoped, he might spend the rest of his life.

He’d fallen in love with this man and was ready to do anything for this love, to step across the boundaries of his own person if need be, or even across the shadow of the gods.

It does not take long for one’s eyes to get used to darkness. He now noticed for the first time that the giant was indeed there, his legs spread casually apart in his insanely relaxed mood, his loosened worker’s pants fallen over his ankles, right next to the vacant spot in the lineup that would be so easy to step into.

The vacant place is his.

He had never been granted such good fortune. As if after long and arduous research he had just discovered an unknown element that, look at the miracle, people, fit perfectly into Mendeleyev’s periodic table. The marvelous giant’s suddenly flashing smile with his wetly glittering teeth illuminated the stinking darkness.

It was a summons, come on, a raw, animal promise of his goodness, a down payment, but at the same time he was exuding an ominous cold, the icy breeze of madness, because the summons meant that you could not avoid your fate in this snare.

Just by looking at this man, I knew I’d walked into a trap. That this was indeed predestined. One place in this dismal universe had been left vacant, entrusted to this marvelous giant, that he should guard it, keep it for me, and not only is it unavoidable, but his goodness and solicitude positively compel me to occupy it.

He listened, wanted to remain cautious, but no one inside him protested this compulsion. He knew he’d give in; still he looked about coolly to see if there were any signs of a conspiracy. A liquid does not protest either, when it slowly fills the cracks and depressions in a vessel, but it fills them slowly. He was afraid that these two were setting a trap for him or would simply make him a laughingstock, or even beat him up when he took their bait.

While his hesitation stemmed rather from the obligatory anxiety of a man in love.

Would this perfect human specimen, blessed with that marvelous smile, really accept my imperfection for an entire life, or am I but one of his many nocturnal adventures whom he’ll forget tomorrow.

Whatever the situation, his smile proved to be a fiat of destiny in the feverish darkness.

In the meantime his mustached assistant also kept watching me from among the heads turned in my direction.

Doubt was pointless if the giant’s proximity was worth any humiliation. At the sight of his checkered shirt, I could already feel the hot whiff of his wild body, his enormous strong limbs, or perhaps I was overwhelmed by the odor of the tarred wall.

Any humiliation, even my entire future, for a single touch from him.

Let it be that way, any way it has to be. I’d do it in front of everybody too. That’s what everyone was trying to see, where I was headed, whether I’d pick someone else, what I was going to do.

But at that moment — perhaps already the moment before, just as he set off to take his designated place in the phalanx of men about to go into the most secret war of the night and, as it were, to fill the gap with his presence during the waiting period — the lineup, as if moved by a gust of wind, began to disperse. Passionate whispering was heard from the far end of the urinal, words of indignation; somebody vehemently protested something that had been done to him, kept swearing, and at the same time a gray-haired old man appeared from the same area, his shirt outside his pants, his hard-on in his hand. His welted shoes squeaked weirdly and in a split second he closed the long line by taking the spot that fate had supposedly allocated and held reserved for the new arrival.

As it turned out, he took away from me what the black-haired giant could not give me after all, because it was destined to happen differently.

Only the loveliness and irony of an eternal promise remained, disappointment, longing, and a measure of consternation instead of an opportunity presented and missed. At the same time, others were also changing places but so quickly it was impossible to fathom what the prearranged plan was, what sort of strategy had brought about the new formation. The single possible vacancy was re-created at an entirely different location between entirely different individuals.

Now there were three men between us.

Actually, this was a characteristic of these nocturnal games: to make use of secret intentions and chance challenges lurking in the depths of the constant shifting of positions, in which one involuntarily lost rather than found and recognized oneself. There was nothing I could do but occupy the vacant spot.

At least that.

I don’t know how else it could have happened, and I understood even less the way it happened. The occurrence itself could be seen with the naked eye, yet the development of things went on being mysterious. Here we were, standing in this long, narrow space with our backs to the illuminated entrance. The lineup was now closed, man next to man. I was trembling among mobilized warriors waiting for orders, clenching my teeth to stop my trembling. It could have been a dream that one luckily forgets the next day, but it was not a dream. We pretended that all of us, precisely at this abandoned spot, precisely at this late hour of the night, were preparing to urinate or had just finished urinating and were ready to leave.

The silence spread once again; one could barely hear a few small unidentifiable noises.

I was staring at a tarred wall and my eyes were becoming more and more used to the darkness. Slowly I distinguished him in the blackness.

At least his mustached assistant is here very close to me, I consoled myself.

The giant must have been from the countryside and made a very strange impression in his blue worker’s overalls, but his assistant seemed to be from Pest, coming here from a distant suburb. Judging by his hands, he must have pursued a more refined trade, that of a turner or toolmaker. Behind his large, meaty nose and big Hungarian mustache, his features were positively childlike and delicate, though not his forehead or chin, which were thick, fleshy, and forceful. There was a tattoo on his lower arm, a coat of arms or bouquet of flowers, I could not make out which. I had stolen quick glances at it during the previous nights. A letter was tattooed on the hairy upper digit of every one of his fingers. Perhaps the letters of a favored woman’s nickname, perhaps of his own. Between us stood a nervous, blindingly blond, ungainly, idiotic-looking young man who once very carefully had approached me under the yellow acacias during one of the previous nights. He had something of the wild boar in him. Short light bristles covered his loins, his short stubby fingers, and his thighs. His hair stood up straight from his head, like gleaming stubble that couldn’t be combed. A disproportionately small, reddish pointy bulb glowed atop his misshapen, thick, short solid cock, swelling with veins and nerves.

He had sneaked up on me unnoticed, startled me, which in turn alarmed him, and he would have collapsed if he hadn’t leaned against the silky trunk of a thin tree and pressed his cock to it.

He pressed it against the tree so as not to come.

Now he alternated between watching the mustached assistant’s cock and mine, and he wanted to get his hand on mine. Then, by the tree trunk, he’d come with loud screams, his sperm shooting up incredibly high, and I’d run away through branches slapping my face. I did not want to look at his face now, either, or see any part of him.

Our shoulders almost touched.

One filled one’s place and became a captive of the somber lineup of men. I didn’t want to see who was standing on my other side. That man was very close to me too. I wanted to remain strictly with the impossible fiction to which all the others also clung.

We’re here to urinate, nothing else. Locked into this fiction, everyone stood there utterly alone.

Everyone was careful to avoid unwarranted glances.

However, everyone peeked out a little from behind his seclusion. Not to dispel solitude but to search for prey and gain some advantage; to keep an eye on the others lest they commit some incautious act. Being able to see someone else’s without showing one’s own was considered an advantage. Which allowed one to gauge and judge the members of others without submitting one’s own to a similar scrutiny. That would keep one’s place open in a virtual hierarchy. At first, most of the men relied on their peripheral vision. The mustached one showed his to me, but the boar-headed man could see it much better, which made him very aggressively proffer his own. The purpose of the jockeying was to see who could stimulate better and therefore emotionally surround the other one, who was the more adroit, the more cunning, the more attractive, the more competitive, who could exercise more power over the other and who would submit first to the secret hierarchy.

The more protracted the preparation, the higher the fever rose and the more general the tension became. Everyone received some of it and everyone helped increase it. It was enjoyed even by those who for some reason had been excluded from seeking a mate or didn’t want to participate actively and instead preferred to take larger gulps from the common source of pleasure.

With little tricks and a constant increase of tension, it was possible to compel a targeted person to leave his foxhole at last and submit to the potential verdict of the phalanx.

This was not an entirely new situation for me because I had conducted serious fieldwork in the subterranean urinals on Grand Boulevard, though I thought the results not quite satisfactory. I had worked there like a thoughtful ethnologist who had to keep a distance from the influence of observed forms of behavior. If one man felt confidence in another or, because of his deep attraction, lost patience and showed a small measure of initiative, it remained an open question whether the second man would be satisfied with what he saw and, abandoning the mutually nurtured polite appearances, reciprocate the confidence, and also who else might profit from this secret dialogue disguised as a chance occurrence, and as a third party might be induced, precisely by what he had seen, to interfere in the adventure.

At any rate, after a while it was possible to know who was or was not curious about someone, whom one feared, who might wind up as a third party, insinuating himself between the initial two and snatching away the chosen one, who was ready to flirt with anyone or everyone, what a person’s cock was like and whether it would fulfill the promise of the man’s body. Or, if it was impossible to answer these questions right then, because the chosen one was too far away and concealed by others, at least one could guess by their behavior where his place might be in the secret hierarchy.

One could also be aware that the subject, direction, and temperature of a person’s interest, despite every visual agreement, even despite the hierarchy, might change very rapidly and sometimes for no good reason.

What happened then was probably something other than what the men had expected even of themselves.

After another bit of time had passed in this seemingly motionless silence, one could sense who were the ones who had already managed to establish contact, how they were flooded by their mutual attraction, how they began to lose their inhibitions and find their way around obstacles. One could also spot the ones who remained hopelessly alone, or guess who’d be scrounging off the sights of developing reciprocity between others. Because there were men who wanted nothing more than to watch and follow others only with their glances. From the beginning these men behaved as if they had no interest at all in the busy activity around them. With their eyes and ears they followed and absorbed the smallest movement and coldly rejected any attempt to approach them. They refrained almost pathologically from direct bodily contact. They must have been satisfied with very little. Peeping was their profession and they had no shame about it. Persistently, for hours at a time, they’d stand in the same spot and, no matter what happened, their faces remained indifferent to everyone and everything.

Of course they never showed their own to anyone.

They took the rich nourishment of their sense organs with a certain reservation, which had a touch of gourmandise.

It was impossible to know when and with what they had their fill, but suddenly they’d button up their flies and, behind countenances transformed into masks with neutral gazes, they’d make their way from the depths of the urinal up the stairs to take home their daily booty.

Occasionally, though, they were denied even this small gain. Not everyone liked having others witness their pleasure. Some were angered or embarrassed by the presence of others, though some were indifferent to voyeurs or even liked the peepers’ quiet indifference, gaining an unexpected boost from the mute witnesses’ enjoyment.

Many things could be clarified in the motionless silence in which the tap kept dripping evenly.

It must have been leaking somewhere, because there were glistening spots of water on the flagstones.

The question of what one’s intentions were regarding the other was left open.

Among these men, intentions had well-defined genres, and they strictly observed the borders between genres. It was impossible to tell by another’s exterior what that person wanted to do, how reserved he was or how far in shamelessness he would be willing to go, where he would want to do it, whether he had a place of his own or would insist on staying here and doing it in front of the others, or what they might do with each other emotionally, whether this connection would last for only a few minutes or possibly for a lifetime, and what the others would make of all this, but, based on a certain amount of practice, everyone could have his own intuition.

There were many questions, but not one of them referred to an entire personality — only to its various characteristics and the ever-shifting basic situation. To how these characteristics could be made to speak without having to exchange a single word with the other man.

To make contact with the other man directly, without an intermediary, and somehow with all the others as well.

Even the most experienced ones kept turning around, like birds, because they feared being exposed and, in their fickleness, had to keep an eye now on this one, now on another one.

Without much effort, I too adjusted my behavior to these rules and open questions, and therefore caught myself doing everything the same way; in the name of pure sensory perception I was just as fickle as the others. Soon there was no situation I didn’t scrutinize and evaluate according solely to my senses, evading morality and reason.

The difference between the two kinds of knowledge became measurable during the night.

I learned continually from and with my sense organs, adding, as it were, to everything I’d learned earlier according to the scales and standards of reason so that I could put each item, sorted by moral viewpoint, in its proper place in my consciousness. But since everything was open, changing continuously, and continuing awkwardly to stay open, I could reach no final knowledge; the most I could do was notice the repetitions, or sense in the rhythm of recurrences vague signs of an elusive natural law. I did not realize it was impossible to find the underlying cause of anything by learning. At best I comprehended it as yet another situation; slowly accepted the reality of occurrences that appeared in parallel within and around me; resigned myself to the possibility that whatever happened within and around me would become a part of my life, after all; and as a result my knees even stopped their humiliating shaking.

But I did not believe we had reached the end of anything.

Several men in the long line showed an immediate interest in me, stretching a bit to see past some of the others, leaning forward, out of the line, but I had to pretend not to notice these summoning signals because I did not belong to these intrusive strangers. They could clearly see that I belonged to this black-haired navvy or stonecutter, to this I don’t-know-who, whose shoulders and chest nearly burst from his checkered shirt, and with whom I had practically nothing in common. I belonged to his mustached assistant also, and to nobody else. With my reticence and obstinacy I signaled to the others that they should expect nothing from me.

But I did not even have to look up to see the cock of the man on the other side of me.

It was exactly my obstinacy, reticence, and hesitation that made him turn in my direction and show me his, immediately.

He was rearing up with it.

He wanted to use his cock to jolt me out of my fickleness. I couldn’t have known what sort of man came with this cock, and he counted on my inability to resist the curiosity that lurks in every single man without exception. Carefully, I did take a good look at it. I decided he wouldn’t have a chance even if I hadn’t been waiting for the giant. Whose black hair falls so flamboyantly on his forehead, and who with his metallically flashing eyes probably follows my every move in the darkness, checking up on my very existence. I had to think quickly of something else to ward off any possible effect of the stranger’s cock on my curiosity. There were no more vacant places, and in the tense silence something had irrevocably ended. Nobody could fit in between the two of us; true, I did not see him and wouldn’t dare look at him by leaning either forward or backward, to see something of him between the strange bodies.

He towered above them all.

I should see his illuminating smile.

At the mere thought, at the mere fancy of the possibility of such proximity, my cock filled my hand and began to grow stiff.

Maybe I should urinate first.

I felt his domination on the nape of my neck, in the roots of my hair. His power gained strength in my hand, my body became the inevitable emblem of his power, and I entered into his service exactly the same way his mustached assistant had. As if my entire life until then had been nothing but a preparation for this nightmare, which caught me while wide awake, with its secret pleasures promising compensation for all my past and future suffering. In the phalanx we stood foot to foot, elbow to elbow, almost touching, shoulders on both sides rubbing against me occasionally, which naturally increased the promise of this unnamable community.

I had no idea how much time passed; it may have been growing light outside.

I had to violate this unnamable common activity because I could not abandon my urge to urinate. Curiously, they watched what I was going to do. For security reasons too, they wanted to know what the newcomer would do because it determined whether they’d continue the games among themselves that they had interrupted at my arrival. I could no longer use some ordinary dissembling to hide the real meaning of my behavior; my overstretched bladder could not relax under such tension, its functioning was also hindered by active waves of hyperemia. It would have been hard to avoid a complete erection. From my left the unknown man offered his own, from the right the blond idiot. Because of bladder tension, I should have avoided an erection and kept to a sensible sequence. Slowly, indulgently, holding their cocks at the root to make them visible in their entirety, both men kept pulling their foreskins over and off their bulbs to steady their strong erections or rather to keep them permanent. With which they not only held themselves in the daze of hyperemia but also showed off to the best advantage the tumescence of their genitals. They were competing with each other but also with the mustached assistant.

They offered a sight from which, theoretically, another man could not escape without excitement. At the very least his eyes would grow round, his pupils would enlarge to take everything in, as if injecting himself into the other man with his look, setting out involuntarily with his head to observe what it would be like to be that other man. And that causes the fragrance of the strange cock to invade his nostrils.

To take that bulb into his mouth, to eat it, to trigger and experience the other man’s pleasure.

The memory of mothers’ breasts surges in the mouths.

He won’t, he cannot do it; some men delay it, defer it throughout a lifetime, but the mere thought of the act makes them breathe faster and hear how the other man’s breath speeds up too. A few steps over, the mustached one was doing the same thing in his own way, while on the other side the gray-haired old man kept turning and busying himself, and next to him stood the giant, but I didn’t know what he was doing.

I didn’t dare look at him.

In a strong, large jet, as if bursting or erupting from me, urine began to gush out. I couldn’t have waited with it even if I had wanted to. It echoed as it hit the tarred wall.

The effect on the others was as if in some polite company I had committed the worst possible faux pas.

I had waited too long and that is why I became de plus en plus incommode.

The strong pressure of the liquid opened the urethra despite the mild erection.

I was making too much noise.

At the sound of so much churlishness, the men on both sides stopped what they were doing and hastened to conceal their erect pricks in the funnels of their palms.

I noticed only moving shadows between dark spots because, aware of my improper behavior and incompetence, I shamefully kept staring in front of me. I could see with my sense of hearing that they had indignantly given up on me and turned away. Hearing the splash of my urine, they right away had to look for different prey.

Sometimes, nothing wants to turn out the way it should.

With the unceasing searching and jockeying, everything stretches out indefinitely even though everyone strives to have things happen without delay. So that no one should have to wait another moment for the daily dose of pleasure. And nobody likes disappointing anyone, because he too might suffer the same disappointment.

Holding awkwardly his thick, short, swollen cock with the reddish, pointy little bulb at its end, the blond young man with his nervous, sometimes irritated movements turned unhesitatingly to the mustached one. Who at this very moment realized the possibilities in his dominant position, and probably made a challenging gesture that confused the fellow so busy offering himself.

These men, offering themselves to each other, often hissed or sent signals whose meaning an outsider could comprehend, if at all, only when seeing the resulting action in progress.

They quickly changed places and unexpectedly the mustached one was now next to me.

Something similar must have happened on the other side with the man who just a little while earlier had so startled me with his unruly erection that I hadn’t even wanted to see to whom his cock belonged. He too had been cheated. In his disappointment with me, and after looking through the gray-haired old man still gesticulating with his cock, and through the strange figure next to the old man, an underage, possibly crippled boy, as if they were made of air, he couldn’t turn anywhere but to the giant. He wanted to show it to him if he could not have me. The giant may have confused him, probably with some inviting movement, for he was showing himself not to this man but to me. Not only the giant’s cock but his entire loin was uncovered. Or so it seemed in the poor lighting provided by the thin beams of light filtering through the high windows. The crippled boy wore a platform-soled orthopedic shoe on one foot; his cane, which he could not hold, was leaning against the tarred wall. He was showing his to everyone, offering himself to anyone; a lit cigarette dangled from his lips.

I knew the exposed loins of the giant. And he knew their effect on me.

For five nights in a row, again and again, at different locations and in different positions he had offered me everything. Maybe his specialty was showing not only his prick but also his testicles, hair, belly, and top of his thighs. There was a certain merciless openness in this. The relief of his stomach, thighs, and loins, his head, and his entire splendid figure eerily reminded me of the man with anvil and hammer one can see on the twenty-forint bill. On each occasion, I had stupidly run away from him. To my shame, in the light of day I would take out the twenty-forint bill to see him and be with him. I couldn’t forget him. The only difference between him and his image on the bill was that on the latter the artist had used drapery to conceal the loins. It was because of the giant that I had returned every night.

Because of him, or because of my finally wanting to find someone, anyone, who would love me for my body.

Now, holding his cock, avoiding all other offers, he leisurely started toward me. With his other hand, he had to hold up his worker’s overalls, which had slipped down his thighs.

This did not make him look ridiculous. There was something flamboyant in the entire man, permissive and contented but not self-satisfied, or at least not petty. As if he had not bared the huge muscles of his buttocks intentionally, either, as if it just happened that way. But perhaps he wore no underpants. And that excited me extremely, every night.

Others quickly exploited the changing of places by these two and became active in the darkness. Again, it felt as if a gust of wind had blown across the landscape, only this time it did not pass on. I, or the person standing there in my stead, was the only one who could not move. However ill-mannered my behavior seemed in this company, I was very far from ending my noisy urination. As it kept pouring out of me in an ever larger and stronger spurt, my erection was gaining strength too.

In the meantime, I found myself flanked by the two men.

In my shame I glanced from one face to another. This seemed to them as if I were asking for their patience and their pardon for this unavoidable need of mine.

As if I could keep them away from me with meekness and alarm. Or from the somebody standing in for me. Who was hoping that some kind of distance could be maintained between people.

At any rate, I would be asking something from them, mercy.

They did not touch me, didn’t dare, not yet, but were standing so close that the emanations of our bodies, their heat and odor, flooded and penetrated all three of us. By turns, they watched my cock, the jet of my urine, and my mouth. From this close, the face of the mustached one affected me differently than before because he did not seem nearly so calculating or aggressive as he’d been when seen from a distance. Until now I’d feared some sly cruelty. Now, on the contrary, he seemed gentle, attentive, expectant, and self-controlled, careful not to ruin things with a wrong move or give me reason to flee again. He mesmerized me, as one does a dangerous wild animal. At the same time, there were signs of sadness on his childlike features hiding behind his meaty nose and deeply grooved forehead. Like a person who does not expect much good to happen to him yet cannot give up hope completely. Perhaps there was a chance. Maybe this very minute. Maybe with this complete stranger. Perhaps with him he could return to that elemental joy he had once received, then lost and could not find again.

Our proximity did not alter but rather deepened the beauty of the giant.

He was the same on one twenty-forint bill as on another.

As I turned my head toward him, I could immerse my soul in his real fragrance.

With his incredible smile, he expected nothing, did not hope for or count on anything; he was only giving something one rarely receives.

He gave it with his eyes, his lips, his amazing teeth.

He still had plenty of surplus happiness, he did not have to be thrifty, he could go on giving and giving, he would not exhaust his supplies.

I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t rush, should finish peeing at my leisure, he likes to see how I hold my weenie and let the gushing out in a large wide arc. It was not that he was waiting patiently for me; he was caressing me with his smile; he liked to hear it.

I should dribble for him; I should continue.

There’d be plenty of happiness left when I finished; he’d give me more even then.

From that moment, I couldn’t follow the course of events, probably because the sight of inexhaustible plenty completely overwhelmed me with its promise. Most likely my entire body must have relaxed and my consciousness grown dim because the moment he put his open palm into the urine’s strong jet, to my great surprise, I let out a short, loud fart.

No doubt about it, it happened.

Everything happened at once, all sorts of things happened, and they happened everywhere.

In the silence filled with tiny rustlings, several men broke into brief crackling and popping laughs, and then there was silence again. Undisturbed, the hand went on playing with the stream of my urine; the two men standing closest to me with bated breath were not laughing.

It was probably thanks to the promise of approaching happiness that anxiety left my body. These two did that to me, that’s why they had no reason to laugh. Then, from the depth of the silence full of scraping noises, somebody else responded with another fart. It was not as restrained and inhibited as mine; the sender played it with obvious pleasure, in long staccato sequences, as boys and young men do in boarding-school and barracks dormitories, where, for lack of other means, they entertain one another with sounds produced by the lower regions of the body.

There was general laughter, many echoing explosions of the original guffaws.

They did not even wait for me to shake the last drops of urine off my penis.

My penis had grown so stiff I could hardly shake it anyway.

The mustached one, now behind me, drew me to him with his strong bare arms, embracing my shoulders and back as if wanting to crush me. The giant bent over me, covered me, and grabbed it with his hand still wet with my urine.

They laughed loudly into my neck.

Their panting, their voices, their lips, all in one fell swoop. So much strength and novelty made me very weak, and I was surprised at the unfamiliar hardness of the male body. I laughed along with them. If the mustached one hadn’t supported me with his chest, I’d have fallen backward like a swooning lady in a nineteenth-century romantic novel. Not only was I no longer interested in the appearance of my own manliness, but I was positively amused by giving it up and surrendering myself. It seemed as if he wanted to twist my free hand behind my back; I did not understand why he wanted to do that. He planted a kiss on my eyes with his full mouth and then tenderly, very sensuously, he buried his face in my neck. I was left alone with him, for the giant quickly disappeared.

His lips were glued to me, he was childlike, as sweet as the past, and he swarmed over me with the strong multilayered smell of his hair, mustache, and mouth.

The pleasure coursing through my spine put an end to the laughter.

And then I felt what the giant was doing too. Thrusting his knees against mine, he found a different grip on my prick, let it go for a second, and then clung to it with the heat of his open loins, tapping and rubbing against it, gathering it together with his own, and this was painful. On my prick, I felt the well-proportioned, moist surface of his, the slippery rim of his bulb on my tautening frenum. Which, I believe, made me faint a little, or maybe I strayed over to an unknown otherworld. But he continued calmly to unbutton my fly to free me.

I thought they knew what they were doing and I could entrust myself to their common sense.

He wanted to get to it from a better position, uncover my loins, make me more like him, give me everything one gets when unclothed. While the mustached one placed his in my hand that was twisted behind my back. He was the only man I saw whose cock was of the same substance as his body. That must have been the reason the giant had accepted him as his assistant. In this one thing, he surpassed the giant’s perfection. But I scarcely had a chance to feel its strength and heat with my fingers, having barely closed it in my palm, when his mouth landed on mine. I leaned with him, with my head and entire back I gave myself to him. He absorbed the weight of both of us because the giant was leaning along with us. With his mustache he seemed to arrest and embrace my face.

He enveloped me.

I would have kissed him back, but with my cock freed from the pressure of my pants the giant was kissing it, and I felt the shock of this in my brain. He lightly pressed his tongue into my testicles, gently rooting in them. He roughly sucked one in, licked it all around while it was in his mouth, and then with his tongue quickly and mercilessly plowed the spine of my cock. With his teeth he pulled back the foreskin caught on my bulb. He pulled it down, nibbled it, and then in a single devouring suck made it disappear in the hot hollow between his lips and throat.

He deceived me a little.

Until then I hadn’t been thinking there were women in the world.

The way a man’s lips took possession of me suggested that I should possess myself, yet it felt as if I had wound up in the vagina of a woman.

This worried me; I could not allow the female and male principles to get mixed up, and fear of that happening led me back to this world.

But then, in the fluttering of his tongue I felt that no, no, we are in an entirely different place, and women have nothing to do with this.

From the sensations converging under the influence of abstract thoughts, my mouth would have been ready for a rasping shout, but the mustached assistant not only absorbed my physical exposure with his fleshy lips but also stabbed me with his stiff, hard tongue. In the taste of his saliva I could tell he smoked Munkás cigarettes, that the spritzers he drank were made of tart wine grown on sandy soil, that he had had someone else’s cock in his mouth before me, and before that had eaten something made with onion, maybe meat stew.

I hadn’t been at home for supper the previous evening, but now I remembered that the remains of Ilona’s rice chicken at the bottom of the pot were still waiting for me on the stove.

Unless Ágost had come home and gobbled it up.

I was tossing between their hands.

Nobody made better rice chicken than Ilona. She made it with chicken necks, livers, and wings, with tomatoes, and she always made a point of telling me, Kristófka, don’t forget, we’ll have rice chicken today.

I had never before had a stranger’s cock in my hand like this, nor my own in another man’s mouth.

Sometimes, without hesitation, Ágost would eat what was supposed to be my portion.

They had been looking for him in vain for three days; he disappeared with his great big cock, for which I’ve always envied him no end. He was just as voracious as his mother was.

They couldn’t find him anywhere.

It would have helped to know what to do with it, now that they bothered to put it in my hand.

I also thought of Pisti, of what would happen if he walked in and saw what I was doing.

I was grasping it, squeezing it as a baby would its rattle, though I thought that might not feel good for him.

I don’t know when, but they unbuttoned my shirt, along with my underpants they yanked my drainpipe trousers down below my knees and, grasping me by my ass, the giant lifted me into his mouth. They grabbed my nipples between their nails, twisted them until they hurt. I don’t know which one of them did what. I lost my interest in particular persons; to be more precise, other persons must have appeared, because my entire body had already accepted the giant and his assistant.

They knew everything about me; they could do with me anything they wanted; I no longer had to be busy with them.

I kept squeezing what was in my hand, because I did remember whose it was and would have liked to reciprocate. With rapid little grasps and squeezes the giant felt the tense muscles of my thighs and calves. At least I hoped it wasn’t somebody else doing that. I felt as if I were hovering in the air among their four hands. Occasionally, I felt his entire hot loin, his cool stomach, and his cock tightly held with mine, somewhere between heaven and earth.

Which would have made me scream, this whole thing they were doing to me; it spread me and stretched me out like a bow. I threw myself down from somewhere high into the depths, saw my own fall, but never reached bottom. There was no ground to absorb my weight. In my dread I must have opened my tightly clenched eyes, because I saw from very close up how he was leaning over me. I must have opened my eyes to be sure. I saw his crazy smile with his teeth and that told me it was he, after all, who was doing this to me, he was the one playing on my helpless body as on a musical instrument, and I also saw that this man was a lunatic. As if he had not only induced but with his entire being also followed every convoluted branch of my pleasure and thus increased his own joy.

And mine, mine.

I’d have screamed with this brute joy if the mustached one hadn’t thrust into my mouth — instead of his tongue, which was quick, slippery, strong, sharp, and pierced me like a spike — two of his long fingers. This hurt me, his nails bruised my tongue, I was choking. I had to bite him; I’d say that I didn’t do it consciously yet it was intentional. He wasn’t the only one who screamed; it hurt him and he enjoyed it, in my mouth his blood mixed with mine, but by then the darkness was full of these repressed moans, whimpers, wailings, and barely repressed shouts.

There were no intelligible words among them.

In the depth of the darkness, two intertwined bodies were shining, and it seemed to me that except for their pants down to their ankles they had nothing on. They were immersed in each other’s mouth and the heads of their cocks were peeking out from between their bodies pressed against each other.

But now the giant raised my ass even higher and with one of his fingers tried to enter my anus.

That scared me a lot.

Luckily, my sphincters would not let him.

Yet even the fear felt good because it made me feel as if I were looking back from the time when I was an infant.

And this strange countenance also saw something of what others were doing around it.

However, he could not tell when he wound up on the flagstones.

He could feel with his naked buttocks that he was lying in cool wetness and he could feel, through his wet shirt, that his back was in contact with the floor. Who did this. Maybe he was lying not in water from the faucet, which was still dripping behind the open door, but in piss, other people’s piss. This must have been his first thought when he regained something of his consciousness. Then he saw enormous shadows towering above him. He couldn’t have counted how many men were there, all of them making strange little sounds, as they went on slinging sperm onto his stripped body now lying on the stone floor.

The sperm landed on his belly and chest with soft splashes, warmly.

From this he finally understood that although he was neither aware of nor feeling anything, and although his perception was considerably delayed, he too must have reached his satisfaction earlier and the two men he loved so much, and who within a few short seconds had induced in him this now-dissipating pleasure, had already left him.

Had thrown him to the floor.

Had vanished in the night in search of other gratifications.

These two were really vampires, in which case he no longer had any blood, and they had also sucked the marrow from his spine and now death was happening.

Their black dog had been death’s harbinger.

The giant from the twenty-forint bill, with whom he wanted to share his entire life, had vanished.

Without an embrace, without a kiss, without either of them saying a single word to each other. He had no word for me, not a solitary word.

From now on an entire long life will have to be spent in death.




A Brand-New Civilization


When Ágost opened his eyes again — he could not tell when he had closed them, if he had closed them at all — what he saw was an opalescent surface on which he did not immediately find his bearings.

He was lying on his back on a drenched bedcover, above him the wide-open window of the maid’s room and beyond the window the empty nocturnal sky.

He was staring into this emptiness.

The sky of diffused yellowish red reflected the city lights. As if he were looking into a geometrically designed space whose dimensions he was unable to conceive, unable to conceive his own life. In the depth of the motionless summer stillness the distant Váci Road was knocking, hammering, clattering, booming, and whistling with all its factories working through the night, and nearby something clicked.

He concluded that the lights were carried on an invisible mass of air.

Gyöngyvér had just come back from somewhere.

This told him he was involved with a woman again or at least had come up to her uncomfortable rented room.

A few years earlier, when they had unexpectedly recalled him from his post abroad, he had found the city’s cramped interior spaces especially exciting.

Forced into such congested conditions, people here live in intimate proximity.

They must move more carefully, maintain the goodwill of others. They cannot be cold and distant with one another, since they see into one another’s lives and with their every movement interfere with them. But for quite a while now he has found this behavior compulsive, unfolding like a pointless irritation from which they should free themselves. But this narrow space had no exit.

Where did you go, he asked lazily and sleepily.

Meanwhile he was glad he’d finally found the correct spatial perspective.

Even though every wall was depressingly close. And it quickly occurred to him that the strange feeling matched perfectly his own fate.

If matter has no mass, it cannot appear in the physical space and its perspective cannot be experienced.

I took a shower, but there’s lots of hot water. I left plenty for you.

I got lost, he thought, I got lost in this woman, I must admit.

I should scrape myself out of her.

I could have one more day, though; all right then, I’ll give myself another day.

I don’t feel like getting up, he said aloud. If it’s all right with you, if I don’t bother you with my excretions, I won’t go anywhere.

You don’t have to worry about the old woman because I can hear her way before she gets to the door.

I’m perfectly all right without a shower.

If you want me to, I can stand guard in the hallway and won’t let her in.

What time is it.

I don’t know.

About.

Probably not enough time to sleep.

That sounds like a rebuke. I hope you’re not offended by my importunity.

At this, they both laughed.

I haven’t heard any streetcars. One thirty, two thirty, I really don’t know.

Did you open the window?

Who else. The first streetcar comes at three thirty.

Help me stand up, please.

What, you really want me to help you.

Out of love for a fellow human.

My God, how I must have exhausted you. How could I ever compensate you for your squandered energies.

Hearing this, the man began stretching pleasurably; he yawned a big yawn and pretended that down there on the floor he was struggling helplessly. Now he sat up, now he sank back on the piss-soaked cover, pressed and cracked his limbs and knuckles, and then drew his hands across his darkly shining, hairless chest.

Pay for it, he said from behind another yawn, that’s how you can, the simplest solution. Let’s see, I’ll be generous and not count the days, so just pay for the full four nights.

It would have been more honest if you’d told me this before. We could have clarified whether you wanted a separate payment for each round or a lump sum for everything, the woman replied equably. And we still have to talk about how much you want for special activities.

The idea appealed to her because, knowing herself, she might indeed have been willing to pay him.

With great pleasure, they submerged themselves in the sight of each other’s nakedness. The man thought a bit more about the price, but he had no doubt he’d accept it.

I’d be happy with, let’s say, three hundred per round.

They were peeling each other out of the darkness, less with their eyes than with their inner vision, and with a mutually seductive self-gratification that was also pleasurable to demonstrate: the abundant flesh and the light-minded irresponsible words.

Well, let’s try to add it all up.

Although they both felt that these words were becoming morally dangerous.

I don’t think we’d arrive at the same sum.

They might injure each other with words.

Of course, you’ll try to deny a few rounds.

Ágost’s hands, on his stomach, finally stopped moving.

This self-satisfied gesture flattered him with a renewed erection.

He countered it with another gesture; he had had enough of erections; he dug into his dense pubic hair with its trillion little curls, scratched it and kept scratching. Which in Gyöngyvér’s eyes was more comical than seductive, and rather beastly. His way of carrying on, his tossing and snuggling — dogs act like this when absorbing the odors of a newly arranged litter to sleep on or of strange feces. Then he slipped his hands between his thighs and reached for his testicles as if his hands were one large ladle.

And this brought to Gyöngyvér’s mind the image of reapers on their break, sitting on the ground, spooning hot thick goulash soup from a common bowl which a blond woman brought to them. She had to think about this woman, because she did not know where she knew her from and why the sight of her gripped her with fear.

Ágost raised his prick and his testicles, and Gyöngyvér had to turn away from this sight.

She could not understand why this strange woman kept walking around in her mind and what sort of reapers were lolling about in the shade.

His penis took a long time to shrink back to normal size after the protracted excitement.

Ágost was amazed how long the aftereffects of his lovemaking could last; sometimes he could hold on to it until the following night. The swollen, sensitive rim of his bulb now touched his arm, warning him: I am bare. Its injury would cause pain.

Still, he didn’t want to examine it in front of a woman whom he’d just happened to come up and visit. But he said this to himself only out of self-defense. He pulled the foreskin over the bulb so it would not seem so shameless and defenseless, and then with showy strokes he several times ran his fingers across the swelling spine of his cock.

Come here, he said softly to the woman, who, however, did not move.

Come here, please.

But this woman was thinking about something else.

Please come here, and stand above me. Please.

Now he really wanted to eat Gyöngyvér.

But the woman did not budge, did not respond to his offer with her body, perhaps misunderstood him.

You’re afraid of me, you don’t trust me, you’re not coming here even though I’m asking you. Maybe you think I’ll go away. How else should I beg you. You’re not even here. You’re terrified of me. Now I can see it clearly.

Where do you get such an idea, the woman wondered, because she was indeed terrified, but not of him, rather of the blond woman and the reapers. I don’t understand why you’re so conceited.

To find her clitoris in the tangle of furrows and hook his tongue gingerly into it.

And why should I be here for you all the time. What are you, a tyrant or a little boy.

He wanted to feel the woman’s tangle in his throat.

You can’t even imagine that I’m by myself. I don’t want anybody, and not you either.

As if pained by thirst, he wanted her with his entire oral cavity. The familiar taste of cunt, which nevertheless differs wildly as one goes from cunt to cunt. Impossible to devour it completely and for good. Only its disgusting strangeness remains, which one cannot dissolve in one’s saliva and make one’s own. Perhaps saliva does not even have its own taste, and that is why one wants to mix it or flavor it with something else.

The woman’s shape was nicely outlined against the white door, the strong lines of her hips and the thick, swollen peaks of her diverging breasts.

From the floor, he could not see her facial features clearly for they were partly shadowed.

She remained a woman.

Come on, you can admit it.

In response Gyöngyvér absentmindedly extended her hand to the man, but not as if she meant to admit anything. And not to help him up either.

It would never occur to me to be afraid of you, but if you want to, you may leave.

All right, I’ll leave, but first pay me.

Cut out this nonsense. Go on, leave. At least I’ll lose you now and won’t have to worry later.

As she spoke she squatted in front of him as if she had to examine him carefully from close up, to understand him better.

Then you can foresee your sad fate, after all.

She does not understand.

They held each other’s hands, almost indifferently, but they both tremendously enjoyed their new positions, which showed their perfect isolation and independence.

You can’t be serious when you say you’ve never been paid for it, the man said offhandedly, as an experiment, almost contemptuously.

And what if I told you that yes, I am always paid, I wouldn’t do it otherwise, I’m a registered whore. That’s obviously what you want to hear.

Suddenly in both their faces was a flash of some profound resistance or hatred.

And instantly they became emotional in this mutuality. As they went on scrutinizing each other’s features, words and gestures became too much. As if there were no gestures or words that would not provoke them emotionally.

Gyöngyvér saw him as more beautiful than she could endure; and Ágost saw her, as always, as a little more beautiful than his mental image of her.

I think you’re a pretty spoiled person, Ágost.

I think so too.

There’s very little chance of my continuing to spoil you.

That’s a decision you have to make. I won’t interfere.

But you want to force a bit more flattery and a bit more subservience out of me. You want me to be terrified of you and serve you while you’re allowed to brutalize me.

And what can I do about it. You tell me. I’m not a prophet, I can’t see into the future, but yes, things might turn out like that.

You could protest, you could be ashamed that you’ve been like this with every woman. You could promise me it won’t be like that anymore because, for my sake, you’ll pull yourself together and turn over a new leaf.

I’m sure that would work in a kindergarten, Gyöngyvér, but I beg you, I can’t disappoint you so much.

Disappoint me, the woman asked, shocked.

It would show you what a mistake you’ve made, how you’ve miscalculated everything.

What mistake have I made.

You’ve picked a spoiled man, and you wanted a different kind.

The woman did not reply; she was clearly pondering something very seriously.

You could start looking for another man right away, the man continued, one who’s not so spoiled.

Maybe you’re right.

I’m sure I am.

But of course I can’t forgive you just like that.

If you can’t, you don’t have to, replied the man, and brushing the woman’s hand off, he jumped up from the floor.

After all, you can take your revenge anytime, any way you want to.

And with that, he threw himself on the bed, lying on his back. With his legs spread wide apart, he enjoyed his victory like a child.

Surprised, Gyöngyvér remained squatting by the wet bedcover.

The bedcover was rather embarrassing.

There was a small balcony off the kitchen; she’d hang it out there to dry.

In the afternoon, in the evening, sometime, she’d have to wash it.

What you mean to say is that I’m a silly goose who doesn’t understand her own wishes, doesn’t have enough common sense to grasp her own situation.

I’ll think about what I meant, but in the meantime, dear, you could bring me a blanket, I’m cold.

Maybe a sheet, I probably won’t find anything else, Gyöngyvér replied hesitantly.

She was beginning to be anxious about what was happening.

What had they done; what lies would she have to tell; when would she have a chance to wash the blanket in secret.

Altogether, what had the two of them done here.

God, how could she make all the telltale signs disappear. I know where she keeps the bed linen, she said aloud, but I don’t know if I can find a blanket.

She wanted to deny him the blanket, because denial felt good.

She wanted to deny him warmth.

In an apartment like this I’m sure you can find a blanket, probably more than one, said the man, yawning contentedly. Please, don’t bring me a sheet, and bring a glass of cold water too.

Anything, before I dry out completely.

He turned to the wall and curled up in a ball. It would be so nice for me under a nice warm little blanket, he whimpered. All I want is a nice warm little blanket, nothing else. And water.

And then you too should come under the blanket. And don’t bring the water in a glass, let me drink from your mouth.

Without a word Gyöngyvér left with the wet bedcover and stayed away for some time.

She felt like weeping, though she couldn’t know why, didn’t know what to cry about.

She continued tasting for herself his humiliating words and his insane cadences.

I let somebody take advantage of me again, she thought. She was ashamed of going along with the game, especially since she did not believe the man had wanted it, though he was a beast and in retrospect she thought he wouldn’t be ashamed of anything. He had deeply hurt her self-esteem, with his self-confidence or maybe his shamelessness. He spoke as if he had free access to and was at home in many strange apartments.

Unlike Gyöngyvér, who could not get her bearings even in places she thought she knew.

I must not let anyone take advantage of me ever again, she kept saying to herself, her anger turning against herself.

She did not put the light on; she hopped around naked and barefoot on the parquet and the stone tiles.

First, with a single quick movement she spread the soiled bedcover out on the kitchen balcony and locked the door on it.

I’m a pig, she said to herself, not very convincingly since she enjoyed her body, its suppleness and its easy flow.

She felt as if during the night she had grown by at least five centimeters.

Quickly she took water to him and then quickly left him alone again, though it was nice to watch him slurping the water eagerly, the spoiled beast, whom she continued to spoil, stupid as she was.

She stopped in the hallway crammed with furniture and tried to imagine where this man would find the damn blankets he was talking about.

When they were sneaking into the maid’s room, the man couldn’t have had more than a quick glance at this hallway.

She had to be careful not to overwhelm this man with senseless rebukes and thereby further betray herself, making it easier for him to take advantage of her. She hastened across the hallway, on whose rustically sanded, pale gray bare walls only one sconce gave a cold, unfriendly, dim light. Mrs. Szemző obsessively believed that with this light she could scare off burglars or sneaky thieves.

In fact she could not shake the fear that in her own apartment she might find herself face-to-face with strangers or bump into living bodies in the darkness.

That is why this weak light had to be on all night.

For a while, the living bodies inside the sweltering cattle car supported the living dead.

According to regulations, the gendarmes* were to count off 90 Jews and jam them into each cattle car, but they crowded 116 into this one so as not to have to attach another car to the train at the Veszprém station.

This was duly recorded in the notebook of Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, whom His Excellency the regent of Hungary had personally appointed to observe the process of deportations throughout the country. Beginning in April 1944 and following the itinerary prepared for him by the Interior Ministry, the chief counselor traveled from city to city along the proposed deportation lines.

His verbal reports could not of course include such insignificant details as one overcrowded cattle car.

He did not want to talk and could not have talked about it to anyone.

During his three-month inspection tour he returned only twice to Budapest, where His Excellency received him in a more than friendly atmosphere, for tea with the family. At the conclusion of the tea and accompanied by His Excellency’s daughter-in-law, the always composed and cheerful Countess Imola Auenberg, he strolled over to His Excellency’s study, where he could briefly summarize the impressions he had gained on the inspection tour. The countess had been friends with Elemér Vay’s young wife in her youth, and it was at her recommendation that the retired counselor had been recalled for this special mission.

His Excellency was very pleased with the reports from this high-ranking civil servant, who on more than one occasion had proved more than competent in the execution of confidential missions and whose loyalty was unquestionable.

At the conclusion of their last meeting, he made the chief counselor promise that if there were incidents of atrocities or arbitrary actions taken by gendarmes during the evacuation of ghettoes around the country, the counselor would telegraph a report immediately, using the usual codes and addressing himself to the countess. His Excellency’s personal opinion was that within a few months a burning and weighty problem would be settled once and for all; arbitrariness and injustice were not commensurate with the chivalrous Hungarian character.

Ever since, Mrs. Szemző has wanted to see what the unavoidable moment might bring, the inevitable moment.

She told herself that the details would surely be of interest to a pathological anatomist or an expert in forensic medicine, and then she had to think about the person, identical to herself, who had the chance, for a few months in the Buchenwald camp, to work as an assistant to Professor Nussbaum, the prosector. Who had examined how, in a given situation, living bodies deal with the bodies of people who have fainted or died, in which case, according to popular belief, they are no longer aware of anything. It always seemed to her as if she had only read about these cases, rather than that she was remembering them as a real occurrence in her life. She also remembered Dr. Dénes Schranz, who could not have known in advance about this abomination when he wrote his book about the various and extraordinary phenomena of death.

Mrs. Szemző snickered at this notion.

Interesting in all this was that she couldn’t believe how many superfluous bits of knowledge she had.

Once the living and the dead were jammed in there together, the dead were stuck, inescapably and constantly, under the feet of the living, who went on thumping and jockeying; the living trampled and ground down all the soft or liquid tissue, which oozed through the gaps in the cattle car’s floor: blood, urine, eyeballs, excrement, even bone marrow.

A few had tried to do something about this but ultimately could change nothing, their shouts being insufficient; after a while she too lost her voice, no longer saying that things shouldn’t be like this.

She had to conceal from herself what her feet and others’ had done in the infernal heat and maddening cacophony, for days on end.

Her mind invented a fear with which to occupy her memory.

That she could no longer wear her medium-heeled shoes with their arch supports, or that she would have constant guilt feelings about the ankle boots of her two dead sons.

The sounds now echoing from her other life, the creaking of mucous, muscle fibers, tendons, and cartilage, were sounds that even that stranger, identical with her, could not have heard, theoretically, given the other constant noise and clatter, the crying, the clanking of the cattle cars’ buffers, and the frenetic, crazed altercations.

The light did not become much friendlier even when they turned on both sconces and the ceiling light for music practice.

The custom-made furniture that had originally given meaning to this sort of spare lighting were missing from the apartment.

Once, Mrs. Szemző stopped her accompaniment, laughing, and said that Gyöngyvér should not be an alto because she had the voice of a man who’s trying to sing contralto.

They giggled about this for quite some time, saying that Gyöngyvér must have been a eunuch in one of her previous lives and was now the reincarnation of Farinelli; they laughed, but the idea made them shudder, and neither of them could shake it off. Gyöngyvér thought of this later when she and her famous coach were grappling with problems of her voice sliding and gliding, and the need to clarify her timbre; it was at the tip of her tongue, but she never dared to mention the nightmare to Médi Huber.

Originally, simple lack of brilliance and sobriety free of illusionism characterized the light from those lamps, but for years the appropriate opal bulbs had been unavailable, so the original idea had become plain shabbiness.

One of Mies van der Rohe’s Hungarian pupils had designed the original interior, in fact had built some of the pieces with his own hands, skilled as he was in many crafts. But except for the sconces, little remained of this work because these unique objects had fallen victim to the Arrow Cross terror of 1944.*

The architect’s name was Alajos Madzar; his friends called him Lojzi.

He returned for a while to Budapest, but he had no intention of resettling there.

He planned to go to America, which he did as soon as he had completed his projects.

On the recommendation of friends, the Szemzős had commissioned him to design their villa on Dobsinai Road, including all the interiors, and almost as an afterthought had him design Mrs. Szemző’s clinic on Pozsonyi Road. The circle of friends in which the Szemzős moved had direct contacts with the two great schools of architecture of the era, the Bauhaus and De Stijl; their friends had friends who worked or studied in Weimar, Dessau, Leiden, and Utrecht, or with Alvar Aalto in Helsinki, or overseas in the great architectural firms of Chicago and Boston, even with Frank Lloyd Wright. With the psychoanalytical clinic on Pozsonyi Road, the young architect attracted considerable attention because domestic and international architectural journals often photographed and published articles about his projects.

The mainly young people at these journals, with their networks of interest and lively exchanges of ideas, captured half the contemporary world and documented every progressive change in it, however small.

The architectural attributes of the newly furnished apartment were, however, far from flawless. Madzar encountered serious issues at every turn. He had a good rapport with Mrs. Szemző and right away explained to her what he was objecting to. It would not be honest, what he was about to do, and therefore he couldn’t do it in good conscience. He was not objecting to the apartment’s architectural attributes per se. The world is the way it is, after all, but like Mrs. Szemző, he could not bear decoration for the mere sake of decoration. Yet he’d be forced to decorate because the fundamentals did not show any kind of original architectural idea but were mere imitation.

What was the sense in decorating an imitation. Simulation wouldn’t work either, or pretending not to notice the imitation.

With detailed architectural arguments he gave ample reason why he could not undertake the job in this unimaginatively and falsely constructed building on Pozsonyi Road, but then he decided to do it anyway.

A few days later he withdrew, however.

Mrs. Szemző did not protest and did not want him to change his mind.

She understood his arguments and found his dislike of the building persuasive.

But she could not invent for herself another street, another city, or another practice, so she was prepared to give the architect an elaborate, factual account of reality’s compelling power.

They began their conversation on the subject in the empty seventh-floor apartment, later went downstairs and out on the street to look for a café, and then, as if by chance, they strolled across the Margit Bridge and wound up on Margit Island.

Already this first long walk caused them some embarrassment.

They could not decide which was more important: the person whose work they were talking about or the historical and sociological subject of their conversation; put another way, neither of them was clear as to the connection between these two. After all, it was not enough for Mrs. Szemző to understand the young architect’s motivations; Madzar also had to understand why she wanted her psychoanalytical clinic precisely here and what work she would do, in these surroundings and in this clinic, for the people entrusted to her care.

As if both of them were saying they had to look for something amid the pathological or disadvantageous fundamentals in order to create new possibilities.

Madzar found it difficult to refuse the job for another reason: in Mrs. Szemző’s intentions he discovered an analogy of his own plans, so that unexpectedly the building’s inferior architectural quality became not an irritation but a challenge. His hands would create the new qualities needed for a brand-new civilization, and the places of creation, wherever they may be on this earth, would slowly interconnect. Like the best of his generation he was a devotee of this monastic utopia.

They all shaped their fate under its influence. They threw out their parents’ junk, freed themselves of superfluities, strove for transparency and simplicity in order to create pureness.

They accepted nothing less from one another.

Madzar wanted to take another half step in this radical direction. He did not care to go into finished situations; he wanted to confront others with a fait accompli. When standing under the huge plane trees on Margit Island, Mrs. Szemző understood the architect’s strictures and recognized in them the compelling force of her own attributes and inhibitions; she suddenly began to regret not being younger. Or more daring. She could not begin a new life with him, another life perhaps in another language and on another continent. As if she were discovering that beyond her real life she might have a more intense, ascetic one.

They felt the spray of the fountain on their faces.

His origins do not restrain this man in the kind of tight familial and tribal net that obviously had not let her go or did not let her go far.

She could not take her eyes from the young man’s hair.

Not only was its color, a deep bronze red, unfamiliar, but also its texture, the thickness of the individual hairs, as well as his quickly fluttering eyelids, suggesting nervousness, and his dense eyebrows, attesting to constitutional tranquillity. The roots of his eyelashes were transparently blond, the arc of the lashes darkening gradually to bronze red. His rapid blinks gave the impression that eyelashes and eyelids were unconnected, each fluttering independently.

A little enviously, almost longingly, she thought to herself that this man was heavier than bronze yet would soar. A most original man. Freeing himself from the burdens of the material world. With no apparent mythic bonds.

Mrs. Szemző was curious about the relationship between personal experiences and the characteristics of larger surroundings beyond the personal; about the personal and historical pasts, about everything that was mythical and magical in the historical past, everything beyond individual life that recurred as ritual in deeds and words. Ultimately, she and her friends were concerned with similar issues and occupied with similar matters. Mária Szapáry dealt with the relationship of the body to the fabric draping it, between the body’s nakedness and its exposure, a subject profoundly and thoroughly, yet no less falsely, documented and developed in the history of civilization. They both asked the same question: what was unique in the material they were dealing with, what was general, what was collective and what was individual, how did one fit into the other and how could one be comprehended, shaped, and expressed through the other. Perhaps Margit Huber’s profession was the classic exception, for which the other women rather disliked her. A dompteuse d’animaux. Dobrovan’s basic question was also similar; originally she had wanted to rescue her mere body from this extremely old false world filled with superfluous gestures that restricted her senses.

After her terrible accident, her sight remained her only tool, helped by her hand, her drawing ability, and her attraction to handicrafts.

She designed and wove fabrics and worked for fashion designers.

She learned her profession from her Lithuanian boyfriend, who had studied with an ancient Parisienne, and both of them had probably paid for their skill with reluctant love. She was searching for possible practical solutions to the problem of how, on what levels and by what means, the unique personal imagination can be reconciled with the demand of the masses, and in what way handicraft can be linked to mass production. Or, in the reverse direction, what higher standards might the nature and methods of industrial production, and its new technical achievements, offer the public. Although none of her woman friends knew Madzar — he was much younger than they — they all spoke the same language of ascetic functionality, albeit in different dialects.

They instantly understood and liked what he did on Dobsinai Road and what he designed for Pozsonyi Road.

The given was the seventh-floor apartment in a building erected only a few years earlier and designed on principles of functionality and modular coordination like other similar buildings in the Újlipótváros district. On closer inspection, however, especially by a person who worked or lived in these buildings, one noticed that their interior proportions were determined neither by the necessarily modest scale of individual need nor by the era’s architectural aesthetic, dependent on collective Puritanism and personal asceticism, but by the profit motive of petty, insignificant designers and investors shamelessly exploiting an architectural style.

In truth, the business egoism of the larger context left its repressive stamp all over this quarter of Budapest.

Writhing under the enormous weight of its ongoing collapse, self-satisfied feudal Hungary drags itself from one economic crisis to another, lugging along the antiquated customs, traditions, and inexhaustible wounded pride of its failed aristocracy, which keeps an iron grip even on those who do not share their hope for prosperity in an illusionary greater Hungary or their confidence in the historical mission of the Hungarian people, but who feel great social responsibility for rural wretchedness and urban poverty, yet nevertheless adjust their professions’ rules and demands to the generally accepted and all-pervasive laws of the corrupt gentry.

If one decides to build on illusions, it is not easy to break free of hypocrisy and the worship of decoration.

It showed through in the floor plans; it showed through on the walls.

Mrs. Szemző instinctively understood what Madzar was talking about and what he abhorred.

The ceilings and windows were lower than they should have been though not by much. Not by much, and everything was less spacious and airy than what could be called desirable for a balanced, individual lifestyle. Once again entire streets had been laid out so the sun could not shine into the buildings. In the absence of appropriate architectural demands, transparent geometry turned into rigidity and constraint. Empty style. Material and fittings of questionable quality. Showy but inferior facings that could easily be detached from the underlying constructs. On his first visit to the empty apartment, Madzar already had the feeling that he was not standing on but hovering over the floor. Something wasn’t right with the construction. As if he were hearing an echo of barracks architecture from the First World War. Most buildings in Újlipótváros had an improvised look. They lacked the elementary joy that the personality and sensuality of true artisanship offers. As if every building component, in its symbolic language, were saying, well, it’s true, there is peace now, the lost war is behind us, but industry has not yet recovered, it has not been modernized, therefore we are producing inferior goods.

The ceilings and walls were flimsy. Even the more generously proportioned or better-built apartments were unpleasant to go into because the stairwells and entrances were too narrow, and though there were spaces where one could step out of the apartments, what was the point of so many congested balconies and loggia if they felt like dovecots.

The other side of the street was too near.

These buildings with their crippled interiors could not even present their facades to the outside world. They did not have enough room to look at themselves from any angle, and they couldn’t see how inconsiderate they were of one another.

They wanted to show something other than what they could show.

They had no air.

They either pretended to be open or tried to conceal being locked in.

After a few hours in the empty apartment, Alajos Madzar realized there was no partition wall, door, or window that he did not want to change. Mrs. Szemző had claimed that although historical givens should not be altered, sometimes a single creative professional move, a kind of trick of the trade, was enough, at least in theory, to alter the inner conditions of functionality and to influence the surroundings strongly.

Hearing this practical comment, Madzar asked himself whether there was such a trick in the architectural trade.

Of the many outmoded light fixtures, only one gave any light at night.

And now there was nothing in the spacious hallway except the open, pitch-black piano.

It stood heedlessly in place, just as the movers had heedlessly put it down more than a decade earlier.

In the wake of the wartime devastations, no one analyzed the traces of destruction anymore; neither did anyone look for some trick of the trade when a job was to be done, not anymore.

In her search for a nice warm blanket, Gyöngyvér hurried past the piano like someone about to steal something. She had to go around the piano stool. The movers should be called again to move the piano from the stoppers placed under its rolling legs and shift it a little to one side. Mrs. Szemző had meant to call them, but she never got to the point of picking up the telephone.

Yellowish light from the street and bluish light from the rooftops opposite filtered into the hallway, and Gyöngyvér stepped back to the piano like a sleepwalker at the sight of an apparition.

Seeing nothing else and forgetting every other intention and danger.

The real apparition in these surroundings was her healthy, tanned, naked body and the restrained patter of her bare feet.

As if she and the apparition could not see each other.

She knew nothing of the missing objects or of the history of the house or of this section of the city; indeed, she knew very little. Although Mrs. Szemző had mentioned the night when Arrow Cross men opened every faucet and threw out the window all the furniture Madzar had made with his own hands, still, Gyöngyvér did not know much. She felt for the piano stool and sat down. But the strange apartment, the strange building, and the silence thick with the strange city’s history came crashing down on her.

Among the abandoned objects, the haunting soul of the missing objects spoke to her in the warm early summer night.

Exhaustion or happiness, she didn’t know which, was making her want to cry.

Everything of the past sat here with her in the night, trapped between the bleak walls, among the furniture that was temporarily staying in this apartment.

She completely forgot about the annoyingly handsome man in her room.

Her life was here with her, along with all her earlier lives and the memories of her earliest life. A life she had spent within strange walls, among strange odors and strange objects whose history she could not have known, or anyway whose remaining traces simply had no historical context for her.

She forgot about the blanket, whose proper name, in her own dictionary, would have been pokróc, a bedcover made of fur and coarse wool.

She could not properly learn the names of objects, therefore they signaled their existence to her as senseless obstacles. In her mother tongue, she could not comprehend why in certain life situations it would make sense to say blanket instead of pokróc, and sometimes the incomprehensible filled her with hatred. At this moment she sensed something of the world, however, enthralling in its incomprehensibility and beyond the objects’ material worth, usefulness, names, and existence, beyond all personal sentiments. Her bare feet made pleasant contact with the parquet floor, which produced a warm, ticklish feeling where the edges of the dried-out oak laminas pressed into her soles. She could not have known what sort of moistness had evaporated from the wood, but she had a definite notion about the history of drying out. Even Mrs. Szemző could not have known anything of that since she had escaped much earlier and by the time the event occurred she had been taken away along with her two sons. Gyöngyvér swiveled around on the piano stool, which Mrs. Szemző had bought from a junk dealer long after the war was over. She wanted to cry but the tears would not come, and therefore neither anger nor hatred could surface either. In the Szemzős’ villa on Dobsinai Road only those objects had remained that were not easy to move, which is why she still had the piano, but the piano stool that Madzar had designed later, along with all the other original furnishings, had disappeared.

Gyöngyvér was sitting on the piano stool made for young ladies which Mrs. Szemző had bought as a replacement, remembering the ones she knew in her youth. There were countless chains of causation in the world and they were not perceivable in sequence yet were not imperceptible either. At this moment, Gyöngyvér may not have known what her senses were registering, but, like other people, she felt something definite and therefore formed certain suppositions.

She instantly looked for a possible intonation in place of crying, a vocal passage in her own range reminiscent of shouting, beseeching, or praying; she accompanied her search by tapping two consecutive keys at a time on the piano. She was chasing after a single note or semitone but did not know what she was looking for, while the old piano stool creaked meekly on the well-worn parquet floor.

With her buttocks, she enjoyed the cool leather of the stool, though after a while the contact with the cool cowhide again revived in her bladder the urge to urinate. She had nothing more to let dribble out of her. Her bladder would have liked to inundate the leather on the piano stool.

She wouldn’t have budged but would have just let it all out.

The urine would first collect on the stool and then drip down from it.

She would listen to the trickling.

She saw it; she saw immeasurable amounts of fluid flowing out.

She became alarmed at the mere desire for a flooding.

She had to repress, squeeze back into herself the heat of her burning slit, which made her posture rigid.

She stared out into the night as if watching a movie about her frightened and irritated self.

A sliding glass-paned door opened from the hallway into the living room, whose own wide window, encompassing and framing the entire room, looked up at the empty sky.

Gyöngyvér could not imagine her own home, but wherever she lived, she always had to imagine it anew.

Except when she was singing.

A future home, the home of a famous opera singer, refused to take shape in her mind. Whenever she thought about this, what she remembered was an old, large, worn iron key and bluish-purple lilies on the silk wall tapestry ripping loudly under her hands. In the castle at Tiszadob* they had to tear all the silk tapestry off the walls, and in their enjoyment they screamed and yelled happily together with their instructors, along with the sound of ripping silk.

She could not shake the thought that their enjoyment had meant pain for the silk.

Together, they were busy girls and their instructors freeing this castle, where they lived and worked, from the dark tyranny of the sinister Countess Katinka Andrássy. The windows were closed because Mrs. Szemző was afraid of sudden storms. The pervasive fragrance of valerian in the stifling air may have been the same fragrance that had eaten into Mrs. Szemző’ s every belonging.

Here, in the heat trapped between the buildings, the night had no cool edge, yet she shuddered a little.

One of the tin-helmeted towers of Palatinus Mews planted itself in the empty sky and, as if pinged by the moonlight, glittered in the darkness.

Madzar used the soles of his feet to try to overcome or at least understand the strange floating of the apartment; he stamped, treaded, and trampled on the floor.

He was walking systematically back and forth across the well-laid parquet because he wanted to feel clearly what caused the sense of floating. He listened to the entire building, to how it rustled and made other small noises; without a stethoscope he auscultated the building’s heartbeat, as it were, listened to its echoes, the trembling of water pipes and the gurgling of drainpipes. He let out shouts of various lengths and strength. He did not find this pleasant. The otherwise attractive glass cylinder of the stairwell behaved like an ear trumpet, brutally amplifying the tiniest sounds, elongating them, repeating them individually. Given the interior proportions, the poor quality of the materials, and the lack of insulation, noises within the apartment were received by the cold reinforced concrete and reradiated back into the apartment in the form of imperceptible vibrations. The interior spaces therefore did not project a sense of proper enclosure, had no warmth, and did not provide a feeling of security.

A future tenant would be exposed to irritations for which there would be no remedy. A building might possess several characteristics that a person, though experiencing them, refused to acknowledge, and then it might seem as if the person was creating his frequent and serious bothers on his own, not realizing that the architecture was at fault.

If the ceiling had been higher by just twenty centimeters, the partitions by, say, thirty centimeters, the sound box would not have been so unpleasant. But neither the owners nor the builders had clarified the relationship of the interior to the exterior, which led to fatal disproportions. They had used the idea of functionality to hide their own wretchedness and their profit motive, and this infuriated Madzar.

As if they considered disproportion the incontestable reality of things.

He could think of no architectural statement more irresponsible.

Light was the only thing of any worth here. Strong saturated light whose sources were, of course, decipherable, and one would have to make a thorough examination of the surroundings. Direct light mingled with two indirect lights that had a completely improbable, unreal general effect. He could begin there. But no, he could not, because he would have felt he was merely doing something clever in an emergency situation of unknown proportions.

The problem remained: could he do the job with impunity. The light was indeed very good; he’d hate to give up on it.

I really can’t find it in my heart to do this job, he told the woman flatly.

And, to be honest, I am not very interested in this whole spiritual-poverty business, this whole emergency situation that has become permanent in this country and even put down roots.

Not my cup of tea, he said in English.

It presents conditions I don’t care to deal with, conditions I don’t know what to do with.

You’d rather not touch it at all, said Mrs. Szemző quietly but pointedly.

Unguarded contacts, of course, always have their peculiar hazards.

Maybe you’re right, said the architect, as a person with long experience in avoiding potential friction by being agreeable. I don’t like walking into an unknown. But even that doesn’t signify much, since I sense no danger.

Oh, go on, belittle it, continued the woman insistently. But don’t misunderstand me: you may walk away from the task as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to force you to do anything. I probably wouldn’t have the talent to do so in any case.

Which made the man blush.

Still, he could not completely disregard the woman’s brazen manner.

Perhaps you’ll understand, he said more coolly, that this is not my egoism. I just can’t clarify other people’s extremely unclear situations.

But I do. Of course I understand.

I can’t poke around in it now, after the fact. The building is a finished thing, I can’t fix it. What I work with is only matter, nothing else, cold and indifferent matter, but it’s not like a hat or dress that one can alter according to one’s needs. What’s in a building — its organizational concept, Zeitgeist, and so on — isn’t as flexible as the soul.

He turned red in his anger.

What right has this pampered woman to make her pointed remarks.

His plebeian conscience was protesting. His exceptionally smooth white skin had a reddish tint that made him prone to blushing. Perhaps this was the only trait that showed his strong personality as vulnerable. Not only could he not stop himself from blushing, but he had no idea how to hide it. Which, unfortunately, he attributed to his low origins. The blushing would unexpectedly gnaw at his sense of security, ambush him, and then in successive waves thrust him deeper and deeper into embarrassment.

This is the first generation of architects since classicism, he said more loudly than was necessary, that does not define itself by representation or decoration. Architecture is not a style, but its practitioners here live in that delusion. The church and the aristocracy no longer stand in their way. This is tremendous, an irrevocable change for the better. The twentieth-century way of formulating and expressing itself is in systems and structures, a functioning system of interdependent parts like a living creature, an organism itself — which architecture must organize according to some concept, of course. The unfortunate bunglers who built this place, to use an historical example, should have solved the problem that the March Youth didn’t solve in 1848*: how to create personal proportions, how to complete the bourgeois revolution. For me, what was done here instead, please forgive me, is very heterogeneous and unclear.

Also impure. And I hope you understand that I’m not thinking primarily of moral conditions. I don’t accept your historical explanation either, because I’m interested not in history but in the substance and condition of things.

He pretended to be raising his voice against the wind, but in fact he was trying to suppress his anger. Once again, he had come up against a patrician woman, just as he had in Rotterdam. Who in her completed personality had indeed completed the revolution.

He was struggling against his blushing and broke out in a sweat, realizing that once again he had fished out for himself the same kind of woman.

If I understand you correctly, you draw a strict distinction between individuality and personality, or the person’s egoism. You hit the nail on the head. This is indeed a risky undertaking. You say that you must separate your own egoism even from your personal needs.

Absolutely.

You don’t consider any collectivism as valid.

I wouldn’t even ask whether I do.

Not the collectivism of egoism, then. For you, only personal agreements are valid.

Exclusively, replied the man, and this time he blushed in joy.

This woman understands him, after all; he’ll give it a try.

That is the only principle I can follow, this is the spirit of our time, I believe, the organizing principle. I must make it fit between the communal and the private, as much as possible with the help of the cleanest and clearest agreement between the concerned parties. In other words, I’d be satisfied with an offer. I propose a possible contract or agreement.

Luckily for him, another strong gust of wind blew in their direction, catching his heavy, full head of hair. Which gave him a reason not to twirl and crumple his hat, but to do something else with his suppressed joy and enthusiasm.

He grabbed at his hair.

Simultaneously Mrs. Szemző grabbed her hat, though the wind wouldn’t have swept it off. As if she were copying the other person’s diversionary gesture because she too had something to conceal. But this made her blush deeply.

Mainly because first came the gesture and only after that her realization of why she’d made it.

In each other’s eyes, they could not have been more exposed.

I think you go too far with psychology. I find it provocative but admit it’s on the right track, continued the man, smiling. His voice was warm and strong. But I may be thinking of these things that concern us both in a more simple, objective, and if I may say so primitive way.

This remark managed to arouse Mrs. Szemző’s anger.

No, no, she said, indignantly and almost harshly, when it comes to thinking, I tell you, everyone thinks the same way. At most, some people prefer their simpler thoughts, others their more refined ones when it comes to saying them aloud. But this has nothing to do with whether they think objectively or subjectively.

Now suddenly and mutually they were angry at each other for what they saw as the other’s lack of comprehension.

But they could not rid themselves of the pleasant feeling that they did not have to vent or experience their anger as enemies. It was as if they had to carry out the command of a strange power, but not with anything like the same conviction. Madzar obeyed as a courtesy to the strange power; Mrs. Szemző was guided by a sense of professional responsibility.

At the same time they also realized it made no difference that they were expressing themselves so politely, circumstantially, and very intellectually. The pleasure had grown so great that words could not stand in its way or curb it. They did not understand what was happening between them. In other words, they had to acknowledge that what was happening under the overcast sky in the spring wind was very different from what they had had in mind earlier in the morning, and also very different from what they were talking about.

As if they were slipping between mental and physical pleasure.

After all, thought the man, who hadn’t yet noticed that he was attracted to this woman. His lightly starched, carefully ironed white silk poplin underpants that came halfway down his thighs did restrain, though could not prevent, an erection. He had to admit that he found the woman quite ugly, though unusually intelligent and independent. But precisely for these reasons, a woman like this was not his type, or at least this is what he wanted to believe about himself. The underpants pressed his erect cock against his thigh, drawing the foreskin back from the tip. It will get caught like that. I won’t pay attention to it. I must not pay attention to this now, he thought.

It rarely happened to him that because of an erection he’d be confused about his own intentions.

Perhaps, if I were a revolutionary, Bolshevik, syndicalist, anarchist, or something of the sort, I could go on a little adventure like this, he said, laughing. In fact, with his laughter he was begging the woman’s pardon and showing her his strength and desire too, with a display of his full set of teeth. Then I could really get into it, obviously, because I’d want to change or save the world. Or wipe out and repair everything that others have done before me. I’m no communist. That’s not the way I think. I need clear frameworks. And supporting them in the background, of course, there must be unambiguous agreement. There is no urban plan that is not based on thousands of important pacts. What ensures the durability of buildings is not the stone or the concrete but the security of the world order. And if I can’t find these necessities here, or if they turn out not to be clean enough, then I’ll go someplace else.

That is why I decided as I did. I hope you understand.

From a distance, standing by the neo-Baroque fountain they seemed like a couple of those practiced lovers who break up for good at least twice a month. Probably neither of them noticed how unjustifiably close they were to each other. They were obviously trying to keep a distance.

Actually, they both leaned back, away from each other, yet their legs and hips remained too close.

This must have created a certain aura around them; on occasions such as this, the body releases incidental scents. Yet this is not why their situation had become so complicated. Their clothing, whose quality and character were comically similar, also reinforced the feeling of mutuality, which meant not that they were becoming similar but that they were finally realizing how similar they had been from the beginning.

It was preparing to rain on this overcast spring morning, but it did not.

They both wore sand-colored Burberry coats, designed for spring and autumn, which differed only in their cut, and they both had on dark hats; the man held his in his hand.

In those days, women’s hats were often worn low on the forehead, the brim pulled down so that the features of the face were taken into the protection and shadow of the hat. The woman bowed her head slightly and looked up from the shadow of her hat into the man’s pale-green eyes. As a protection, with both hands she pressed her pocketbook to her chest. What was considered fashionable in those days in a female figure was a slender, elongated, and overrefined silhouette. Irma Arnót was not beautiful, not even in her youth, but she had a beautiful silhouette, exactly as fragile and graceful as that era coveted.

The wind now swept away, now intensified the man’s scent. It had in it something of the cigar smoke of the Britannia, that old-fashioned hotel on Teréz Boulevard, also a barber’s shaving cream, along with lavender aftershave, and then among many unfamiliar shades the scent’s heavier, dominant, all-powerful central aroma, in which the skin’s nearness can be deciphered. They were already past the point where they listened to each other’s intentions and the secret signs signaling them. But at this stage it would have been inconvenient for either of them with a careless move to step out from behind their defenses and put their cards on the table. They would find that stupid and irresponsible, no matter which of them might propose it, very brutal and ill mannered. After all, one was not put on earth just to be in heat and to mate. Though they happen to have reached the age when many people might ask what other reason was there; does our life have any other conceivable and worthy goal besides this. Both protested instinctively against the emptiness of life, and therefore they were characterized not so much by what they did with each other but by what they denied themselves, by what they consciously renounced.

This is what made this moment so fulfilling, and they took away its grief and joy with them for the hours of loneliness.

At any rate, the man, younger than Irma, who had fled hastily to Budapest after a complicated love affair, did not ask, what made you sad so suddenly.

And it would never occur to them to address each other informally.

He despised overfamiliar amatory commonplaces, such as, what are you thinking about, what are you laughing at. Yet he was not interested in anything else and so, in his thoughts, began addressing her in the familiar. Why are you so overcast, what sorts of shadow are passing over your clever face. If he had asked and the woman had answered anything at all, his erection would have grown stronger. He did not want that. Although it had been in the air earlier in the day when, before leaving the Britannia, just to be sure, he wanted to gratify himself. To look at his erect cock in his hand, how the pleasure followed his movements. He was satisfied with his cock. Yet he had not done it — actually changed his mind halfway and left off with it. He could not embrace or press the woman to himself. And the woman did not ask the man, younger than she, though the question was on the tip of her tongue, from which of his parents had he inherited this maddening head of hair. What stupidities I’m thinking about. As if it makes any difference to me from whom he inherited it. She would have liked to say your maddening head of hair.

Maddening.

A word that would irrevocably show the wonder and amazement she felt for the other.

Neither of them wanted to go that far. Deep brown tended to appear in this kind of red; it was so rich, and undulating. Even with words, it could not be touched with impunity. Mrs. Szemző honestly hoped it would not show on her skin that her back, shoulders, and neck were shuddering. As a special armor, of course, he is defending himself against me, wearing a ritual hair helmet. No matter how she assessed it and kept looking at it, in addition to the brown and red she also saw purple, which seemed improbable. Where did you get the color of your hair, this is the way she would have preferred to ask him. While she was trying to talk herself out of it. I have two children, I’m a married woman, I cannot ruin my professional name with love affairs.

Their exertion was so great they could no longer have spoken in normal tones.

In her confusion, Mrs. Szemző shrugged her shoulders several times. Madzar became like a statue, motionless; even his miraculous eyelashes stopped glittering for a little while.

And then, somehow, they started together on the empty promenade that led along the stretch facing the Pest shore.

And then it became significant and meaningful that they had started out together. And if that wasn’t enough, their steps were in unison.

Which quickly irritated them both.

Some strange power pulverized their independence. It was the other one who did it; the other; there was another one; another one had appeared.

In their embarrassment they could do nothing else: they listened to the loud creaking of the pebbles under their feet. For the man every step was torture. This was not the first time they’d been silent, but until now they’d known what to do with their silences, until now their luck had not abandoned them, as the man put it, nor their upbringing, as the woman put it. Now they feared they had no more reserves and that something might crack, burst open. A situation well balanced until now would become awful. The man could not but think about what he would do with his cock once he was back in the hotel.

Ultimately, it was about a lot of money, about work, nothing else. But it won’t go like this. I cannot go to bed with the wife of every client. And nothing is really forcing me to take on this job. And I owe no one any explanation as to why I might not do it.

They kept telling themselves, enumerating to themselves, their respective reasoned and realistic arguments.

If he doesn’t want to do it, he shouldn’t. I’ll furnish it myself; after all, the building has its own tradition, so if won’t be hard. And that way it won’t cost much. I’ll put the sofa there, the desk over here, and that’s that.

Or maybe someone else can do it.

But that person will not be a man, that’s for sure. Belluka probably knows someone she can recommend.

Each summer the promenades on Margit Island were replenished with fine pebbles from the bottom of the Danube.

They sank into the pebbles, and because they weren’t paying attention water got into their shoes. They were both wearing strong shoes, medium-brown and welted, the woman’s with a raised, athletic heel, the vamps divided in the shape of a heart, the toes ornamented with an elegant twisting pattern. The woman’s coat was held together at the waist by a belt, the collar turned up to keep the wind away from her neck. He could not tell what she was wearing under the coat, but the grain-patterned wool of her dress seemed identical in quality and pattern to the wool of his English suit.

He could not see her silk-stockinged legs, but he thought they were too thin. She had no breasts at all. In a few years, she’d be like a board, like a poker.

The woman was struggling with the thought that although the man’s hands were not particularly handsome, still it would be nice to hold one of them and together dig into his coat pocket. Or to restrain the hand that kept mangling his hat, to hold it down. He might have habits like jiggling his legs, and he probably wasn’t well brought up as a child.

Their steps grew stiffer and stiffer. If one may say such a thing, the man’s hands were positively ugly, his fingers short and thick, his wrists too powerful. Still, she would have liked to feel them, to walk with their fingers intertwined and to keep on walking. To get away from here and go to America with him. They should have stopped to shake the pebbles out of their shoes. And neither of them could bear thinking about the long stroll stretching out before them. The farther they walked from the entrance to the island promenade, the more certain it seemed that once well inside the island, in spite of everything they would irresponsibly fall on each other.

A saving idea occurred to the architect.

They shouldn’t continue in this direction because there was too much wind on this side; they should cut across at the casino and take a look at the new covered hall for the high-board diving tower at the Sports Baths and how it had been marked out; he’d heard it would happen this week, according to the plans.

Maybe he would find the renowned architect Alfréd Hajós* there.

The woman understood the implication of this suggestion, and at the same time the enormous ache surprised her.

She felt in her throat and in her chest that although she would accept the man’s arbitrary decision, she wouldn’t get away scot-free with a surrender.

Because it hurt very much, she would not be free of this pain for a long time. She was suffering and she would continue to suffer.

Luckily, they found nothing and no one.

They found only traces of uprooted trees, a few abandoned ditches from which the designer must have taken soil samples, and a few stakes at various points on the neglected lawn. The construction had been halted for some reason. This gave them an excuse to talk about neutral topics, look around, roam about, linger and be silent, and then quickly turn back.

At the island’s entrance, which is one of the city’s most exposed spots, the wind stormed across their bodies, pushing them relentlessly.

They tried to resist, laughing loudly, they held on to their hats, kept on shouting, accidentally bumped each other, and then deliberately leaned against each other back to back and, holding on to each other, kept guffawing about how they were so enjoying themselves and how each successive gust took their breath away.

Or who knows what took away their breath.

There was nothing to be done about the wind; in the end, they took the streetcar.

In the empty car, they panted loudly, right in front of the conductor, flushed and wide-eyed. They behaved as if they had just saved their lives.

And if they already had, then they could quickly part company at the very first stop in Pest.

Which is the second-stormiest place in Budapest; here, tin gutters often become loose, rain pipes detach themselves from the walls, plaster and roof tiles take flight and crash to the sidewalks.

They parted on Lipót Boulevard as if they never wanted to see each other again.




Otherwise It Couldn’t Have Raged


I don’t know where I got the courage finally, valiantly, to spit it out. The sentence was bad, but I said it anyway. I’d like to have a date with her. It sounded like another person’s voice calling over into my own life.

Maybe today’s young people no longer say things like that, they say something entirely different, but back then that was the proper expression. Propriety, of course, did not make the declaration less shameless.

It wouldn’t have been possible to wipe out or remedy one of my shameful deeds with another.

Only nine months had gone by, I figured out quickly while standing by the rain-lashed living-room window, yet those events seemed to have receded into a calmer distance.

During the fall, there was one foggy evening when I ventured back to those places, but luckily I found not a single soul among the trees and bushes. Yet it seemed so useless to go on with everything as before when I could not help looking continuously into another life. Into a life running parallel to the one I was leading. I should have kept the secret even from myself. I needed more time, maybe the same length of time that has passed until now, this was my ascetic hope, and then I’d forget it completely. Though the best thing to do would have been to kill, that’s what I kept imagining, to kill everyone, leaving no one on earth who might remember those things.

Sometimes I even recalled the black dog, the way it stood over me, panting into my face, longing to lick my eyes.

With legs spread, hips thrust forward, there above me stood the men who knew everything better than I, did everything better than I, and wouldn’t miss a single opportunity.

The strange shadows of huge birds.

That is why I hesitated, helplessly mulling over every prepared sentence, that is why I waited for weeks for the right moment, and that is why I became so harshly determined with my dumb sentence when the right moment finally arrived that blustery March morning.

It was as if for the first time in my life I’d blurted out my wildest wish to a total stranger. Until then everything had been the other way around: I either rejected or expected crude invitations from others, which was much simpler. And I still did not have enough insight into the secrets of men, I still didn’t know exactly how they carried on the dangerous game of making overtures, even though I observed things very carefully, wanting so much to learn the ropes.

I probably should have appeared before a woman in the guise of an innocent, instead of presenting my wish as gloomily as I did when it finally burst out of me. My awkward sullenness made it awkward for both of us to begin like that. Her immediate response to my gloominess was a sadness of her own. As if she were saying to me, this is not what I’d expected from you. I should have been lighter, kinder, sweeter, and hidden my secret wish between two more innocent sentences. Shouldn’t have barged in like that, asking for a date. However, I was anything but innocent. Should have given her every opportunity to refuse without offending me, or to pretend she hadn’t heard right.

She wore a wedding ring, and seemed older than I was.

She shouldn’t have been able to humiliate me even if she rejected me.

Yet to my great surprise, she did not reject my proposition. But not because I played the role of seductive lover well. She must have had some other reason.

Maybe she enjoyed my ridiculousness.

She closed her eyes for a moment, I could observe her dejection, and then she opened them again and nodded. And by that time her sadness was gone. Maybe it had been neither dejection nor sadness but something quite different. I understood nothing; nothing made sense to me, least of all my own existence. Facing each other we were just as much strangers as we had been before, and she’d said not a word. We ran out of time as someone with a receipt headed toward her from the cash register. The key moment was over and we hadn’t even set a time or place for our date.

And we couldn’t, not only because of the approaching stranger but also because it was no longer clear why we should meet at all, never mind where or when.

I was unprepared for her sadness and unprepared for her acceptance, which like my proposition was unrefined and undisguised. If I’d had a way of knowing what she wanted from me, perhaps I’d also have known what I wanted from her. I had just enough experience to decide on having a little affair and I did take the first step, but then had no idea why I should take a second one if she wasn’t glad about the first. I figured that if others did this because they found joy in their amorous romping, then I too should learn how to do it. Something told me that without this knowledge I’d perish. If I get up every morning, I should know what other people do in the successive hours of their day. The thirst for learning urged me on, but the object of my study looked back sadly at me.

My fate had once been shaped by coincidences, but for some time now I had been gripped by decisiveness.

After voicing my awkward proposition, I hadn’t expected much beyond a sweet little laugh and then her telling me, come on, kid, what do you think I am. That would have been a game, something joyful. I had a prepared sentence for it too. And when it didn’t happen that way, it was precisely my calculated decision, nurtured over several weeks, that made me not know what to do. Not with her sadness, her resigned indifference, or my prepared sentences. I didn’t understand anything.

Why is it already turning out differently, why can’t it be predicted.

Other than what my eyes let me see, I knew nothing about her. I did not understand what complete strangers might possibly do with each other so suddenly. Or why they didn’t sink into the ground in shame if they wanted to start something together. I had entered into something that offended my sense of decency, though I’d expected it to turn quickly into liberating pleasure. When you live in a herd of juveniles or students, everything happens by itself, because one way or another everyone is familiar, everyone is driven by similar compulsions to a wild search. Now I was standing by the counter, bare and exposed, having stripped naked. This woman wasn’t a classmate whom I’d run into because of coincidences in our class schedules. It was as if I had said to her, very loudly, that I wanted her and that I wanted to realize this wish of mine as quickly as possible.

Which wasn’t true.

I didn’t even want her by my side. I liked looking at her; at most, I’d have liked to find a way not to have to observe her secretly. I didn’t even want to talk to her. What did she or I have to say to a complete stranger. And I definitely did not think of touching her.

What I wanted was something I always had to be alone with, otherwise it couldn’t have raged.

I thought to myself, all right, now we’ve tried this too. I’m free to go. As if again I had several persons within me, which was not at all surprising, and one of them has been incited by the others to commit this stupidity.

But now it was all over.

She wasn’t looking at me, as if I were no longer there or never had been. I was free to go, all right; nothing was stopping me. I kept standing there clumsily with my glass of coffee, undecided whether to put it down on the marble counter but remain flagrantly in place, or perhaps withdraw with it and watch her secretly in the mirror as I had done many times before, or put down the coffee, which was only an excuse for my staying, and simply walk out of the place.

On the rainy street, a bus pulled up and spewed out a cluster of people in overcoats, some of whom came inside.

On this blustery spring day, central heating was still going strong. The small establishment’s vaporous warmth was filled with the smell of coffees, teas, pastries, and wet coats.

It seemed unlikely that we could exchange any more words.

There are moments when one’s attention is so reduced that one sees only a single object, nothing else. At other times one’s attention may be so fierce that objects aren’t even visible. There was this big coffee machine with horn-handled levers and small towers of glasses on top placed inside one another, warming up. She grasped a lever with both hands, pressed it down, and kept her entire weight on it until the hoisting gear clicked across a buffer; only then did she let it go. She had to make a big effort because her body in her white work coat was incredibly light; I truly enjoyed watching. Her breasts or bra bounced against the robe, I could see the outlines, and her strong buttocks and hips made an equally good showing. The lever returned to its original position; out of the resulting steam she smiled at the older man who stopped before her, holding his receipt. It was as if I saw nothing but the irritating glitter of the heat-and-steam-producing metal cylinder and heard only voices in the distance.

You certainly came early this morning, Counselor.

They began to talk right away, speaking as if the words had no meaning, only a place and a role to play.

I knew this older man by sight, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor. He lived nearby, behind the boulevard, in Eötvös Street, very close to the noisy maw of the Hunyadi Square covered market, in the so-called Podmanicky Palace, which had once been a very grand building, but the neighborhood was now considered one of the least attractive in the city.

They were playing exactly the kind of game I should have learned. They said nothing that was not ridiculously simple. First, they talked about the coffee, whether today it should be stronger or weaker, that’s how the game began. They were inexhaustible even on this simple subject, not because they had something valuable or new to say about coffee but because they observed in each other’s words and eyes new possibilities opened up by their lighthearted, carefree expressions.

As if with their words they could coax out of each other’s mouth this special, this elusive and secret something.

Then came the weather: today it will probably be like this or like that.

The wind was howling, raging, and they readily agreed it was raging, sweeping water out of gutters, tearing off roofs; the wind uprooted trees, and they said that it uprooted trees. The red flags and national tricolor flags were soaked in the rain, and the wind slammed the drenched rags onto flagpoles and electric cables.

Somewhere, the aerial cable of a streetcar had snapped, the lawyer mentioned in a whisper, and had electrocuted a number of schoolboys. I understood this happened at the National Museum, the site of the official ceremony. The boys were being led across the street on their way to the Museum Garden. Nobody knew how many casualties there were, but the entire area had been closed off. The official ceremony had been canceled.

The police are on a general alert.

According to a reliable source this might be considered a counterrevolutionary provocation.

I would never have ventured to talk about a topic that did not interest me or that irritated me, and that’s why I’d never lose my clumsiness. And how could I be sure that a stranger might be interested in something that depressed me or made me happy. And if, protected by their lighthearted words, they played with each other so cleverly, why didn’t they arrange a date immediately.

I didn’t understand that either.

They kept playing with secret challenges. I had never reached this point, so in theory jealousy should have been eating away at me. He stepped closer to the woman, who very quietly asked him something, hissing between her teeth, as if I weren’t there at all.

They took me for air.

Who knows, replied the lawyer a little more loudly, but seeing that fortune’s wheel keeps spinning around, today at least we are free.

As he spoke he plopped his big briefcase on the marble counter, and this movement also had something homely about it. He placed his hat carefully on top of the briefcase. As if, in the proximity of the woman and for however brief a moment, he was allowed to set up house. A worn old briefcase a little heftier than a doctor’s bag, a hat made of water-resistant rabbit fur. Now I didn’t have room to put my glass down. At any rate, continued the lawyer confidentially, all court cases have been postponed with no prior notice. And I mean every trial. Well, this also has an advantage, I could see your pretty face earlier.

They should have had a titillating little giggle at this remark, but the smiles meant for each other had faded.

I didn’t exactly understand that.

The tragedy at the museum must have been too large and the pervasive police presence too dangerous for everyone.

The man glanced at me, his look lingering; I must have seemed familiar to him from somewhere. And if he knew me from somewhere he must have been asking himself whether he should say in front of me what he was about to say. Or maybe his eyes were wondering whether I was that other kind of man. Men’s eyes often tried to catch mine, and that’s the question they’d ask themselves. Sometimes they looked at me for so long that I got red in the face. Men are very curious about that question when they look at young men or their own sons.

Now of course I remembered exactly from where I knew him.

And now I was getting in everyone’s way; many people with their paid receipts were trying to reach her to be served. I had to retreat with my glass. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hesitate. Anyway the others couldn’t understand what he was talking about or pretended not to understand.

For security reasons, everyone preferred to pretend they didn’t notice what other people did or said.

Anyway, take a look out there, you’ve never seen so many wet policemen. They were called out on a first-degree alert. Now there’s no use dreaming about a long trip abroad, for example. Even I couldn’t get a travel permit for your sweet person.

They allowed themselves a careful little laugh, and again, what became important was that they were doing something secretive in public.

This did not hurt, did not even make me jealous; I was admiring them.

I took no more sips of my hot coffee, but I ate the lump sugar, first one cube then quickly the other. I shall wait for her. I must prove my faithfulness to her. No matter what happens, however humiliating it might be, I shall wait until everybody is gone again. I was waiting for a single glance from her.

She could not have forgotten her promise to me so quickly.

I had waited for her for more than two months. Ever since they reopened this shop. It’s not possible that I wouldn’t have another opportune moment with her. It did not occur to me that her seemingly credible indifference only made our mutual game more serious.

Because it couldn’t occur to me that I was playing.

On this badly damaged block, this was the first store that after five years had reopened. Young people don’t count the years.

One simply went along observing that everything was slowly changing from what it had been, or thinking that everything had somehow been restored. This side of the boulevard had been completely destroyed in a single night in 1956 by Russian tanks firing from Oktogon Square. The entire row of stores was gutted by fire; their ceilings and the floors above them crashed down. They first restored the ceilings and the second-floor apartments, but for a very long time nothing happened behind the boarded-up shop entrances. The situation remained unchanged for so long that it no longer reminded anyone of anything. The buildings’ facades were painted; later the scaffolding was removed. Streetcars were running. A shoe store, a drugstore, a flower shop, and something else, maybe a tobacco shop, and farther on a woman’s fashion shop — their absence didn’t seem to bother anyone. I couldn’t remember what kind of store had been there before. Who cared that there was nothing behind the boarded-up entrances. Life was not much fun anyway. Very few things remained that still had meaning. And when you remembered something, what came as a surprise were the many things you had managed to escape.

Sometimes this sort of fleeting feeling made my walking around feel unbelievable. It was not plausible that I could get from one place to another just by taking one step after another.

As if I couldn’t completely convince myself that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and, with this peculiar activity, carry my physical weight forward.

This, more or less, is what memory, or oblivion, consisted of.

Because no one could have thought seriously that holed up in some unfamiliar cellar one would survive the night.

By midnight, there was neither electricity nor water. As if the bowels of the earth were on the move, everything was quaking, rumbling, booming, and trembling all at once. Saltpeter was falling from the bare brick ceiling. The way this became integrated into my life was that afterward I never wanted to go down to the cellar, but when I did these memories did not surface; it seemed advisable to forget even the associated anxieties. Explosive blasts first sucked in the candle flames and then extinguished them. Still, somewhere, there was always a new-lit candle. Everyone went deaf, everyone screamed, yet people did not understand one another. They were stumbling around helplessly, groping in the dark, or running around berserk, driven by fright, pretending to have something urgent to take care of.

Someone must have thought that the cellar door should not be closed.

Men opened it and carefully barricaded the passage leading down to it.

Mildewed crates, ancient cupboards, ripped armchairs, and wobbly sofas were dragged out from the cellar’s deepest compartments. Not everybody helped, because some people were busy with themselves, with their crying children, with their families. The latter set up their own sections in the cellar, hoping that the wooden partitions would give them perfect protection. But neither laments and swearing nor the sound of running footsteps could be heard. I didn’t try to figure out why suddenly there were so many of us but instead kept watching the gaping and opening mouths set to scream in fright or hysteria. Still, news spreading in the cellar’s dark passages about contingencies and possibilities sounded sensible. However numb one may be in such a situation, one’s brain fills with speculations. Somehow, there were always more people who tied their feverish desire for action to the remnants of reason and some palpable hopefulness.

The problem was much too big.

It was a sensible idea to leave the cellar’s steel door open yet obstruct the entrance to it. Because if the house were to fall on us, rubble would make it impossible to move the door and we’d never be able to dig ourselves out. Who could count on outside help. Well, all right, the Americans were on the way. If the water main broke, on the other hand, having no exit, we’d drown in the water flooding the cellar. The earth was moving so violently that somebody must have thought of this too. We have no water because the main broke. And there was no way of knowing whether it was going to be over very soon or was just about to start in earnest. Through the flues opening into the enclosed courtyard, we could see that something was burning nearby. Two steep flues opened upward, not far from each other. The formidable sight before us was far beyond what could still be considered real.

Above the building’s high four stories, the red conflagration was reflected in the night sky.

It was like a gigantic shadow play, a licking of the sky.

While a few watched the mesmerizing reddish shadow of tongues of fire reaching into the sky, the cannons ceased for a while. Then one heard only one’s own deafness, which was perhaps more frightening than the noise. Later, from the depths of deafness, one heard machine-gun bursts, which was almost like peace returning.

And it seemed that the cellar walls were being pounded steadily.

The ones who ran out for fear of a burst water main began to smash the cellar’s rear wall in an effort to break through it in the direction of the buildings on Eötvös Street, parallel to us, which were less threatened. That night, people opened a veritable labyrinth under the city through the walls separating cellars, but I heard about this from Pisti only the following summer when we were at Wolkenstein House in the valley of Wiesenbad. The women remembered from the days when Budapest had been under siege in the Second World War, and they could tell the men where to break through the walls. Shortly, there was a huge explosion, and in the renewed cannon fire a fine coat of soot covered the faces of those standing under the flues, and then everything went dark as dense smoke filled the courtyard. It might have been the other way around, first the dense smoke and then the fine soot. In which case the cause of death would be not water but smoke, not drowning but suffocation.

Which is to say, backing away from suffocation. Fleeing from the bodies jostling one another.

And somebody must have thought about how and with what we should stuff up the flues before we all suffocated. Or that same somebody, while fleeing, must have found the right material. While it was still usable, while somebody was still able to do it. Newspapers arrived from the depths of the passageways. Everyone knew this made sense, even though it might not change the situation drastically. One hand passed it on, the other crumpled it, and somebody, in the ghoulish light of a flashlight, that revealed the serpentine streaks of smoke, holding her breath, grasping the grating and seeking the wall’s support, kept on stuffing and stuffing.

It was a tiny woman. I had never seen her in the building before and never would again. Such openings could not be stuffed up with newspapers. Until some thicker wrapping paper arrived, they made very little progress.

We were all gasping for air.

The coughing could not be heard, of course. As if not the smoke itself but the sharp odor of the smoke had torn the mucous membranes. There was no water to wet kerchiefs or rags with, which occurred to me just as it must have occurred to others too.

The ribbed wrapping paper with a waxy feel to it came from Diósgyőr and not in sheets; it had to be pulled off a large cylindrical roll on which one could read IGNÁC REICH, DIÓSGYőR; there was plenty of it, people were tearing and crumpling it. Newspaper was used to fill the smaller gaps. Of course, not to the point where all seepage could be stopped, that was impossible. Partly because everything was quaking, moving, and rumbling, and we couldn’t hold our breath forever. The paper rolls from Ignác Reich’s paper mill in Diósgyőr had been stolen from somewhere in the darkest days of the Second World War by Arrow Cross men, and then, just as senselessly, they left it in the building, in Balter’s care, whose daughters later used some of the paper for wrapping their schoolbooks and notebooks.

We’ll die of asphyxiation.

As if some sweetness had flooded my mouth, which the sharp stench nauseatingly rips open.

Someone stuck a flashlight into my hand when we first started to run away from the smoke, but then somebody found the newspapers necessary for a sensible defense. There was no longer any point in having a flashlight, yet everybody insisted that using it made sense. A small Bakelite lamp that fit one’s palm and produced electricity via rhythmically applied pressure. The longer and more steadily I kept pressing its corrugated metal plate, the sharper and stronger its beam became. Except it could no longer penetrate the smoke and, when it did, I couldn’t see because I was suffocating. Because of my fitful coughing, the light had not been hitting the spot where people doing the senseless work still insisted they needed it.

And then something peculiar happened.

Nobody wanted to escape from the cellar. The beam of my flashlight was jumping, flying in all directions, but somehow I managed to retrieve it, and it did produce some visibility when I kept pumping it. And there wouldn’t have been anywhere to escape to. It was only a matter of time before the smoke would fill every passageway.

Everybody was holding out, yet everybody was running at the same time.

One can hold out only until the last breath and not beyond that, and the physiological needs are uniformly unavoidable for everyone. I was only retching, but several people were vomiting.

The tiny woman also vomited.

She tore the checkered shawl from her neck as if it were choking her. My light slipped off her too, even though I stopped near her in the hope that at least the light would help her. While the light was on her, she could see that she had vomit on her pants and combat boots. Either she had vomited on herself or someone else had. If I’d continued to watch for another second as she wiped off the vomit with her shawl while still retching with only saliva coming out, I’d have thrown up too. I was fleeing with my own retches, though I empathized with her, wasn’t at all repelled.

The building held on decently too, it did not collapse on us. Actually, the buildings on the other side of the boulevard, which were being fired on, were the unfortunate ones, which was our good luck. Ours had to withstand only blasts produced by explosions. None of the survivors speaks of this needlessly, because they all know that no matter what, nothing happens the way one imagined it would.

I’ve never even asked anyone in the neighborhood what happened that night to the people on the other side of the boulevard.

Survivors are busy with themselves and I wasn’t interested in the lives of others either.

In the early afternoon hours, the shop became very busy and I knew there wouldn’t be another opportune moment. This woman not only made the coffee but also did the dishes and waited on customers.

One week she worked in the morning, the next in the afternoon.

When the lawyer finally made himself scarce, I managed to spit out that I’d wait for her after she finished.

Not here, she replied softly and quickly, as if she had to defend herself fiercely against me.

Luckily, she didn’t say that I shouldn’t wait for her.

Continuously, without letup, relentlessly, I thought of only one thing, that I had never seen such beauty and never would again if I left her even for a moment. Her eyes, the color of her eyes or her glance, I don’t know what, but it paralyzed me. Her scent probably had a part in this but I could reach only the edge of it because she took it with her, though sometimes she left thick clouds of it behind. Here eyes were not blue but not green either. As if I were looking down into the depths of unfamiliar waters. I did not understand the angry darkness, but the color of the water was throwing sparks at me. No human can have eyes of this color. There is no water of this color, no material of any kind. I didn’t even have a chance to ask her where, if not here, because her partner was looking at us anxiously, an older bespectacled woman with whom she always worked as a team, as she measured out candy, then fudge, and finally handfuls of jelly beans to an insatiable child.

It was very difficult to hide our cautious glances from her.

She listened as one who needed to know what was happening around her and mainly what transpired between the two of us.

Her thick glasses made it hard to follow her eyes. I’d say to myself, right now she’s not looking, and then she would be. On other occasions too. I could never, ever pretend that she was not a constant eyewitness. She very quickly discovered why I frequented the shop and what it was I couldn’t tear myself away from. This in itself couldn’t have been so conspicuous, and others too came to the shop just to see this woman or her beauty. There were always two or three of them hanging around the coffee machine, chatting, laughing, and not only men but often women of her age too. The older woman watched and observed; she watched everyone. Sometimes I had the impression that she knew everything before I did. More precisely, that she knew better than I how serious this was, while I presumptuously kept on deluding myself that it was merely a little adventure.

Because I didn’t think I felt anything for her. Or I might have thought that that’s how others did it, just take the risk and do it. Begin by just looking, without feeling anything, cautiously look at her, that’s something nobody can forbid. But this woman with her thick glasses right away needed to know what would develop from my interest. Maybe it was more than mere curiosity on her part. She was keeping an eye out for what should be forbidden. She was the boss in the shop, but that couldn’t have meant much in this context. Maybe the difference in their ages was what counted, or the woman’s old age, or her ugliness.

Perhaps she wanted to protect the beautiful young woman from random crazy annoyances.

This seemed unlikely, however, given their cool relationship, more friendly than hostile yet dealing with each other as if they had to avoid tension.

This tension was in the air. Clarissa, my sweet, she’d say to the young woman, or she’d call her my little Klári. And the other would reply, Terike, darling.

Perhaps their tension was just as passionate as the secret attention the young woman and I had been paying to each other. The boss might have feared that the other woman would slip out of her hands, a fear indicating a kind of jealousy, after all. There was a chance that their tension might explode one day, in which case I thought I should keep away from them.

When I turned my back to the counter and looked at them in the mirror, I was acting out of instinct. I must not be the cause of an explosion. Of course, the mirror also revealed to the boss the directions of our glances, but it protected us. It protected me from my self-accusation of being too forward and from the shame of being so crazy about her. Naturally, this act of mine was more forward than if I had turned to her face-to-face, more insane.

While searching for her countenance in the mirror, I saw her back, her shoulders, her naked neck, her hair caught in a loose bun. This was more than I had wished for. Because in the reopened store mirrors covered every wall, which was considered very luxurious since one could see everything from both sides and, from certain angles, the same thing multiplied many times.

Our lives were barely moving on; therefore, those many mirrors confused others too.

You barely stepped into the place and you were already facing yourself among the sweet aromas. And if you wanted to turn away from yourself, you saw at the edge of another mirror how, on the polished surface and in multiple copies, you were turning away from yourself, or how the waitresses, also multiplied, were waiting for your order. Even the ceiling was framed with a mirrored strip.

Of course, some people took to the mirrors immediately and were delighted to keep looking at themselves, or to preen and pose, though doing it as if keeping it secret from themselves. The walls behind the narrow shelves packed with merchandise were also mirrored, and there was another mirror above the sink. This woman named Klára, whom sometimes the boss a little mockingly called Clarissa, always splashed water on this mirror above the sink and then carefully wiped it off. Maybe to see me better. Because sometimes she pretended she had to rinse out the glasses and would turn away from me; I would also turn around, but we could still look at each other — all we had to do was raise our heads a little.

The boss noticed every little irregularity.

She was always complaining about the draft. It may have been too hot in the store, but the new entrance door did let in streams of unwanted air.

She’d be shivering near the door, behind the cash register, with the tip of her pencil following the long column of numbers, and if she raised her eyes a little behind her glasses, she could see in the mirror opposite what the two of us were doing with our glances. One could be exposed in all those mirrors, yet one could also say that’s not me, it’s only some reflection. It’s not the same as looking directly into someone’s eyes. We had some respite from her only when her husband showed up or, around noon, their pathologically overnourished son, a pupil in the nearby music school who allegedly played the violin as wondrously as Jascha Heifetz.

Even in those moments I cautiously looked back at Clarissa in a mirror, and not only because it excited me to know whether we were indeed safe.

January went by, and then February, and still I knew nothing of this Clarissa. Nor did I believe that such a beautiful young woman could be interested in me. After all, she did nothing but look. But this was a big thing because I could not discover anything about myself that would justify her looking. And I had no idea what to do with her first name or nickname either; I did not want to imprint it on my consciousness. I was a little ashamed of this, but it’s how I protected myself. I didn’t want to think that maybe in the future, thanks to some fortunate circumstance, I might wind up so close to her that I could call her by her name or that I too might address her, pompously, as Clarissa. This was completely shameful idiocy, but I had to maintain my distance.

Let this remain a minor novel that no one has ever written and no one ever will write.

I had no idea what beauty was or what one should think about it.

The eyes see something, and when they cannot not see this something it cannot be addressed with a common first name. I must not be interested in anything that has to do with her ordinary life. I did not understand how such a beautiful woman had wound up here, though I couldn’t have said where she should be. The questions cropped up because I was interested in everything. Or, why was she behaving so commonly with everyone. Or, if she was behaving so commonly why didn’t I believe that she was indeed common.

When the boss’s husband was in the shop, I watched her because I had no explanation for the enmity between her and the boss; I wondered what it really referred to or stemmed from. Or why did this Clarissa smile so politely at everyone, and if she smiled so politely why didn’t she go ahead and sleep with everyone. I thought my cogitating was ridiculous, since I wanted nothing from her. I told myself almost each time I left the shop that, no, I will no longer put up with this humiliation; but nobody had humiliated me. I’m not coming back. I won’t come back even if she’s waiting for me, even if she’s really missed me. But no matter how I formulated these firm decisions for myself I could never keep to them, not to one of them, ever.

They made the weekdays horrible because nothing was happening, and Sundays became unbearable, interminable.

Still, Sundays were better than weekdays because I had no idea where she might be, I didn’t know where she lived, and the store was closed.

But from one of the living-room windows I watched the closed iron shutters.

In the evenings, from the same window, I usually followed the shop’s intricate closing ritual.

The lights in the windows went off first, followed shortly by those inside; they came out of the shop with their coats on, but momentarily left the door open.

One could hear the bell of the church in Terézváros; it was eight o’clock.

With a long rod ending in a hook she’d reach up, fit the hook into a ring soldered to the side of the shutter, which she often missed or did not find. I observed their ceremony from the height of the third floor, between us trembled the bare crowns of trees on Teréz Boulevard, and on the cables stretched over the roadway the dim light of streetlamps was swaying. I saw mainly their shadows between the branches. Laughter usually accompanied their actions. If a lit-up streetcar happened to pass, it drew its yellow light across them.

From their movements I could tell they were laughing.

Now one, now the other tried her luck with the rod. When they managed to pull the shutter halfway down, they threw the rod back into the store, locked the door, and, holding on to the shutter together, pressed it down with their combined weight. The last centimeters were the hardest. When the upper ring clicked into the one at the bottom, they slipped a padlock through and the boss took the key; they stood facing each other. Two strangers in an empty street in the evening who nevertheless had to spend every blessed day together. The key was put into a steel box that, after it was locked, had also to be sealed. They usually fussed with this for some time in the cold. Then they said their good-byes. The boss disappeared into the lobby of the adjacent building to drop off the box with the concierge; the young woman moved on.

That’s how the day ended.

I often wondered what would happen if I waited for her downstairs and followed her when she went off by herself. I didn’t think of talking to her; I’d only follow her from a distance and learn where she went every evening. But only on very exceptional occasions did I bring myself to do this, because, to tell the truth, it was better not to. To watch her as she passed by the boarded-up store windows, walking on the empty sidewalk, then turned into the almost completely dark Szófia Street, and then ceased to exist until the next day.

But there were weekdays when I couldn’t resist going downstairs two or even more times. It was an achievement if I went to the shop only once. I had no money, either, could barely buy a double espresso. At other times I’d gain two full consecutive weekdays not going downstairs at all and not even looking out the window; I wanted to feel how strong I was. Now it’s really over, I’d say to myself, she no longer interests me. But it was at just those times I felt most strongly my loss and my ridiculousness. In fact, all I’d done was waste two days, and it would be even more ridiculous to waste any more.

Because when I went back to the store, she rewarded me with a glowing countenance. As if asking me, why didn’t you come if you wanted to see me. As though asking me, why are you playing this game. And the entire agony would begin anew if her countenance was overcast. I could not be certain about anything: was she telling me or asking me these things, did she reserve her maddening reticence only for me. Her face lights up at the sight of everybody. But I could be certain that she was even more beautiful than I had envisioned her in those endless hours when I wanted to forget her beauty and therefore pretended I wasn’t thinking about her.

This is how our story began.

I didn’t notice that it had already begun, because I was not daydreaming about what would happen if I could touch her. Rather, I was contemplating what would happen if I forgot her. If I could eject her from my mind. What would happen if I never went back, if I left her to her fate, if I could convince myself that I neither had nor could have any need for such escapades.

I should look for other kinds of adventures. As if I my old self still existed, the same person from whom I could expel this other self, or my attraction to her, or my insatiable interest.

I can’t say I made no efforts in these directions.

I thought it was some sort of sexual urge from which one could break free. But I could not satisfy this urge, because I longed for nothing and no one, or rather, I couldn’t make my usual fantasizing in this area work with her in mind.

Nobody else interested me, yet somehow I had to deny this.

I made great efforts to be at least interested in others, as they had to some extent interested me before, but any person I engaged in conversation instantly ceased to interest me. And this happened because of her, but I did not understand how and why such a light-minded little promise in my life had become so weighty. Attraction had not been an obstacle before; one should expect at least that much from attraction. But now it was as though it pricked me at my most sensitive point. I could not cope, no, no, with the temptation of waiting for someone else. I should evade or avoid the ominous experience I am about to acquire. Except I don’t know what to do with the insistent sense of urgency.

Neither did I know what to do with the threat that without this experience I’d forever remain alone and my wounded pride would destroy me.

Nothing was happening as I had imagined it would; I knew this too, of course. As if I had to tear myself away from the fatal conviction that I’d been born into a world in which what I wanted to have happen, what only I and no one else wanted to have happen, would simply not occur. A world in which every intention missed its target, every action went astray. As if, using my head, I had to break through a wall that I myself strengthened every day.

Naturally, I had no such thoughts, because what I’m talking about was neither a thought nor a way of thinking; it was just there, hanging in the air, like a zeitgeist. Hope did not vanish, it was somewhere else, impossible to know just where. Elsewhere. Helplessness coursed though the brain cells, and inevitably I had to believe it was my own helplessness. A birth defect or something I developed because my mother had abandoned me. Others are deserving of love and find each other, or from the start possess the ability to love, which I lack. I just stood there with the glass in my hand. She reached for it; I wouldn’t give it to her. All that was missing were six words. Where should I wait for you.

Without an answer, I simply couldn’t leave the store.

She wanted not a word. She waited, resisted, with both hands in the air to take my glass, but with her hand she forbade me to spit out my question.

Others drank their coffee and left their glasses all over the place. I always returned mine properly and put it down on the counter in front of her; otherwise, she’d have to go and collect it. Sometimes she came out from behind the counter, stacked the glasses into little towers, the plates into piles. Perhaps as early as during my second visit she noticed my consideration and responded in kind; she took the glass from my hand and we both nodded, tipping our heads a bit. Sometimes she said, oh, very kind, how nice, really nice of you. I didn’t understand why she had to make fun of me.

And the next day, in revenge, I wasn’t going to bring the glass back to her, but she stopped me with her voice.

You brought it back yesterday, why not today.

Perhaps she felt she was overstepping a boundary; after a while she wordlessly accepted the situation and watched as if to see whether I was really like that or only pretended to be and wanted her to like me, and was trying to deceive her.

And then even the small nod was abandoned.

I’d have liked to say in gratitude that today’s coffee was especially good. Or some such little foolishness, lightheartedly, as people somehow expect from one another. The glass wobbled awkwardly on the saucer and I didn’t say anything. Because it seemed as if my hand were shaking. I did not want the inapt sentence, I didn’t want other people’s sentences. My grandmother had, with the best of intentions, stuffed my head with all the commonplaces, and they would have worked well in appropriate situations, but I wouldn’t let them.

If she took the glass from me, the tips of my fingers involuntarily touched the tips of hers.

Sometimes she, sometimes I, successfully avoided this involuntary contact, the game being no longer about that but about the avoidance of it. As if both of us preferred the contact to be voluntary yet neither wanted to risk it. I couldn’t do it now, anyway. At the same time, it would have been impossible to stretch the moment out longer under the boss’s eyes, because Klára did not want anything like this to be happening in the shop. As if with her eyes she was asking me not to involve her in a dangerous situation in front of the wicked boss.

In that case, I preferred to take on my own humiliation again; all right, I’ll resign myself to leaving once again without the redeeming words.

I saw everything, I understood everything, I realized what I had to do, yet I did not leave.

The insatiable little child reached the end of his wishes and the three small bags filled with candy, fudge, and jelly beans were lined up next to the scale. The boss could openly raise her eyes to look at me.

She gazed at this lunatic for a long time.

Now I could only hope that a customer would come in and distract her so she’d turn away. Because she wouldn’t turn away to deal with the child, she let him stand there, in front of the counter, jingling the coins in his hand. The glasses the boss wore were small and round, and the thick lenses, when looked at from up close, enlarged her eyeballs. Her alarm was directed at me, but her gaze was always frightened, as if she feared everything and everybody. Her thin bony body was full of emotions. She sucked in her upper lip, the lower one protruding hideously as if she were ready to pucker it, her jaw set and taut. She wore a much-laundered yellow cardigan over her white work coat, perhaps to break the impression of a uniform, to be a little different from the other woman, and as we stared into each other’s alarmed eyes, the yellow of the cardigan particularly bothered me. Because of the emotional knots in her body, she pulled up her shoulders. Her voice was hoarse from heavy smoking, and the humorless edge of her words was at once a defense and an attack; a malicious woman.

She tempered her nastiness with exaggerated obsequiousness, or covered it with sugary tones when she felt compelled to defend herself.

She always had a cigarette burning somewhere; she would leave it anywhere in the store.

What she really needed was to light up and feel the pleasure of the heady first puff; after that, the cigarette was free to smolder as it pleased.

These first puffs left the imprint of her deep-red lipstick on the edge of the paper.




American Dream


A restless Madzar, on the very same day, returned to the building on Pozsonyi Road.

The wind had calmed down somewhat by then; it was around seven in the evening.

He walked up to the seventh floor and did not turn on the lights because he wanted to see the effect of natural light in the opalescent glass cylinder of the stairwell. Opal diffuses light, strengthening the insufficient and dimming the abundant. Which made twilight lighter inside than outside. When he reached the seventh floor he was surprised to find the apartment open, because he remembered locking it himself that morning.

Perhaps this was the moment that decided their fate.

Mrs. Szemző was standing by the window of the inner room, the one in which she would receive patients. Sufficient light remained within the bare whitewashed walls, where raw smells of fresh construction were trapped: planed wood, oil paint, and lime.

He saw a face of hers that no one had ever seen.

They both had on the same coats and hats they had worn in the morning. Time had not shifted; nothing had changed. Madzar was about to say something but he faltered halfway. Perhaps the woman had not heard his steps for some reason. She stood, stiffened, in a state of utter concentration, but it was not possible to know what she was looking at. She was looking out toward the darkening sky, but obviously she was listening inwardly. This sight, more alienating than exciting, made Madzar recoil.

And the woman still hadn’t noticed that someone had surprised her.

It would only lead to a hysterical outburst; this woman would love him madly, she would writhe, go wild, be like a bursting dam, he thought; she would sweep him away.

In the afternoon in the Britannia, he had tried to gratify himself so that he could forget about the nagging need and concentrate on his work, but he did not succeed, because he could reach satisfaction only if he thought of no one in particular. And he thought about this woman whom no one had ever awakened and should not awaken.

At the same moment Mrs. Szemző slowly turned toward the man, but just barely, only with her head, and a peculiar, desperate shout issued from both their throats.

I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to frighten you, cried the man.

Good Lord, what are you doing here at such an hour, moaned the woman when she caught her breath, recovering from her fright.

I’ve got a job to do here, so I can easily explain myself, said the man, experimenting with a little laugh and some flippancy, but I’d like to know about you.

I wanted to check on what you had told me. I realized you were right. And if that’s so, I needed to see whether in fact you don’t have anything to do here.

You’ll laugh and probably think my fickleness ridiculous, but in the meantime I have changed my mind.

I’d put the sofa there, some kind of desk here, and that would be all. It was just a passing idea that we might come up with something together.

The man did not know how to respond to this.

You know, there’s an unrealized or uncompleted artist in me, and that’s why I always have an ambiguous idea instead of a concrete solution, the woman continued, as if making an obligatory apology, and quite aware of what she was doing. But now, to make an exception, I was thinking simply that we could take psychoanalysis out of the usual stifling dimness — not into sunshine, because it doesn’t belong there, it would go blind there — but at least to half-shaded light, into fresh air. It’s a nice, noble idea, in theory anyway.

Why do you speak so ironically about yourself.

That, at least, you should leave to me.

On the contrary, the man protested, I admit I was talking a lot of nonsense this morning. All I can say in my defense is that with the help of all that obstinate nonsense I managed to get closer. He wanted to say closer to her, I managed to get closer to you, but he stopped in time. He fell silent, but he had the sense that the woman knew exactly the words he had suppressed. Now I understand the nature of your work better, he continued indecisively. After all, you can’t abandon your patients, can’t take them with you anywhere for my sake.

This last sentence, fueled by powerful passion, had the effect of an involuntary confession.

Embarrassed silence followed.

As if he had just realized that he could not take the woman with him to America.

Although it had not occurred to him before that he might want to.

They could no longer rescind their desire. For weeks they had been trying to talk about a job that had to be done, and what they finally said meant something entirely different. His only excuse for himself was that his words had not been clearly understood.

I suppose I’m bringing you into this American dream of mine, he continued, because, he added quickly but still indecisively, I won’t find for myself there the kind of clean architectural situation I once dreamed of.

But in the empty twilight this meant that he might stay for the woman.

Mrs. Szemző hastened to help the man out of his discomfort. And I’ve realized, you know, that the structure and characteristics of our utopias may be similar, but their substances are different, and we mustn’t forget this. I don’t know, I must not, no, for me it is outright forbidden to transplant my problems elsewhere.

But that’s exactly what he had come to understand, the man responded gratefully. Your sense of reality must work more strongly than mine or, put another way, I’m still chasing ideas that somehow insulate me from the same reality that you cannot ignore. This is the actual difference. But it’s also possible that my profession is what gives me freedom. I’ve been thinking about that too, whether I can simply move on with my ideas. Perhaps I’m guilty of turning away too quickly from something or of turning my back on things.

Perhaps, the woman replied.

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about all afternoon, said the man, which of course was only half the truth.

Until now they had been standing motionless, speaking through the open door from one echoing empty room to the other. Madzar noted that the apartment’s lights seemed no less improbable in the twilight, and so he did not tell her about the theoretical question he had been brooding on in the afternoon. The lights occupied his full attention. As if his powerful passion for the woman were sliding into his professional passion for lights. Up above the nacreous sky was tending toward crimson, while below, closer to the street, yellow-beamed lamps were already shining through the loose green foliage.

Then it’d be better if I left you alone now, the woman said.

The man did not respond, because he felt he might stutter and somehow embarrass himself.

He had expected from himself something other than what happened.

That once again he was about to choose his work over a body.

But the woman was alarmed, sensing that it was not so simple to carry out her hasty decision. Perhaps it was only via the man’s body that she would find her way out of this apartment, which, after all, was her property.

Why should she have to part with it.

She caught herself observing the man’s attractive body, searching for an exit and at the same time repeating to herself the words my property, my property. She fell into a trap and felt ridiculous.

No, there was no exit anywhere, and she was procrastinating. She could not deprive her sons of their father, who, incidentally, constantly cheated on her.

Now, for the first time, she understood what it was that her husband could not resist.

This was too much, much too much, barely tolerable. No one could be expected to resist it.

And the man was so taken by their multilingual, and also mute, dialogue — in which their respective languages, so foreign to the other, along with their obstinate and disciplined silences, could neither be separated from nor substituted for each other — that he couldn’t speak.

Or say anything.

He was gripped by his old, adolescent fear that he could not give or say anything meaningful to a woman.

Now Mrs. Szemző had a saving idea.

She thought that the architect should divest her of her property; otherwise, she could not work with him. And that would be the same as divesting each other of their clothes.

And she tarried no longer because her new realization gave birth to a new rhythm of action in her. She started to leave, but for a single fleeting moment stopped next to the man and did something she otherwise would not have done in any circumstance: she dropped her gloved hand on his arm and squeezed it gently. With which she entrusted herself to his care and handed over her property; through his coat and her glove she absorbed the penetrating feel of his strong arm, but she also put an end to her unreal fantasies. So of course she felt a little sorry for herself.

Without a parting word, she hurried through the open door and out of the apartment.

Madzar did not move for a long time. The sudden absence left him breathless. As if he had lost his hearing because of a toothache.

He took in the space to which he had once been so averse. First, with his eyes he greedily felt his way around all the lights in the place as a sort of compensation, so he would not have to experience the woman’s sudden departure as a defeat and humiliation; then he immersed himself in the lights and, forgetting everything else, kept weighing and measuring them.

Although it had grown dark in the meantime.

The insane yellow of the street remained, though, and it transformed the shadows of the foliage.

During the day, in addition to direct light there were two indirect sources of light. This building on Pozsonyi Road stood opposite Palatinus Mews, over which one could look out on the Danube beyond. The lively, weightless reflection of water therefore permanently hovered on the ceilings; the rooms were also flooded and colored by the heavier light thrown back by the enormous, intricate, partially tin-covered roofs of the Finnish-style Palatinus buildings.

Of course, the effect was different on moonlit nights.

At twilight a third, indirect light joined the reflections. This was the multicolored reflection on the thinning green foliage created by the yellow-beamed streetlamps, swaying gently on cables stretched at third-floor level above the road, itself paved with insanely yellow tiles. These effects changed with the seasons and with the time of day. Even at night, there was never a moment without some interesting play of reflected lights. He should try to separate out the mutable elements in this milieu and then perhaps trap them somehow, in some material, so as to stabilize their effects permanently.

He forgot about the woman in an instant.

At most, a first little drop of sperm made the beak of his foreskin stick to his underpants, and he tugged it free.

They had come to an agreement earlier about having to lift the psychoanalytical clinic out of the classical, almost obligatory semi-darkness.

That meant dimming the direct light but without shutting off the outside world, bringing it inside, conveying the local rhythm of eternal changes.

He made the surface of the inner windowpanes into something like a loose quadrate net, having small squares of the glass chemically treated to become opalescent and then sprayed with the finest sand. The opposite procedure was applied to the outer surface of the windows, where the squares were untreated but the borders of the net were made opalescent. Neither vertically nor horizontally did the two systems of net exactly coincide, and this produced two important results. One could not see out of these double windows, but whoever passed or made the slightest move in front of them could see narrow slits of blue, gray, or cloudy sky, nothing more than unexpected flashes, glints of the unnamable outside world. And the outer net conveyed direct lights as shadow, as if filling the space between the processed panes with itself, and these shadows, intermingled with the sky’s reflections, continually played on the walls, left mostly bare.

He left the walls bare but not smooth; their speckled surface gave the walls an irregular texture.

He placed very few pieces of furniture in the available space.

Which opened up on the courtyard side, allowing light to enter, explore, and revive the dead and scandalously proportioned hallway. He did this by replacing the primitive doors to the kitchen and maid’s room with suspended sliding doors fitted with four-square, opaque-glass panes. Here he did not repeat the net motif, which on the double outside windows of the kitchen, maid’s room, and inner rooms formed strong elongated and multiple shadows on the walls, but he did suggest it with an unfinished frame around the glass. As if to say that although one couldn’t look into or out of just anywhere, in certain conditions the space was not baffling at all. The transparent frames, gaps, crossings, strips, and intersections might be helpful; there might be a system here that you’ll recognize.

The sliding door to the kitchen was generally closed, that of the maid’s room open, because that was where the clinic’s files would be kept, and this room became the receptionist’s permanent place.

Madzar built the furniture out of unpainted driftwood.

In the morning, more light came from the courtyard, in the afternoon from the street, and whether or not the sliding doors were open, at every hour of the day and in every minute of every hour intermingling lights moved and shifted the apartment around and changed its proportions.

The courtyard windows faced east, the street-front windows faced west, so from early morning until late evening the interior lived in a tension of lights emanating from opposite poles. When clouds blew quickly past or when the sky became clear or overcast, one could actually see the walls moving from and never returning to their original placement. Everything was in constant motion.

Psychoanalysis is a protracted, time-consuming, and unpredictable process in which both patient and therapist must cross over into a kind of eternity. In advance, they can only say they will repeat the ritual of their peculiar dialogue every week, but the end of the dialogue cannot be foreseen. You enter a castle with no exit. Everyone who has ever stepped inside receives a different image of the very same place. While one’s inner sense of space continually expands because of the treatment, and even if one learns nothing or very little of oneself, one gains a shockingly lively picture of the palpable surroundings.

As if it were not one and the same surroundings but three or four or countless different ones.

And this despite the fact that the patient arrives every week on the same day and at the same hour.

Mrs. Szemző was delighted to discover that, as she worked, her behavior and the tones of her voice involuntarily followed the events of light and shadow. This involuntary attention meant that she could not stick to a routine. Light became a factor that affected the proportions of inner and outer occurrences as well as the relationship between history’s past and present; with significant emphases it enriched, modified, and occasionally even directed Mrs. Szemző’s work.

Madzar also modified somewhat the height of the rooms.

This was a kind of architectural manipulation, Madzar later explained to Mrs. Szemző. I had to do something rather objectionable, but I couldn’t leave it as it was.

He raised the thresholds and covered the parquet floor with thick, matte, medium-gray linoleum.

I could raise the entire floor, he explained, but I won’t because it is laid very well. I’d rather just cover it. That way I’ll reduce the feeling of dreariness in the building, show how low these spaces are, and give some explanation for the hovering sensation; footsteps will sound softly and safely, I’ll mute the sounds, there won’t be much noise. It will also help dim the light. I repeat, it’s empty manipulation and I’d have nothing but contempt for someone doing something like this. A bit of fakery, no better than the illusionism of our grandfathers.

Look into the hole, little boy, see the rabbit jump.

They laughed loud and long at this, as if getting even with an otherwise elusive enemy.

Although these enemies had botched everything and, if they could, would continue to botch the whole world, at least now the two of them had outwitted the whole gang of dilettantes.




Tearing Up Everything


When they reopened the shop in early January, there was hardly anything on the shelves. Merchandise was stacked in large cartons behind the counter; people were unpacking. Everything was new, shiny, and good-smelling.

Outside, snow had been falling quietly for days. On the ceiling and in the mirrors the concealed yellow lighting spots mingled with reflections of the white surfaces everywhere.

The young woman stood on the ladder while the older one, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, handed her wine and liquor bottles.

Only my eyes registered the fact that this older woman was one of the branded people: below the crook of her arm, on the inside, was a series of tattooed numbers in blue ink. First a letter, followed by a short horizontal line, a kind of dash, and then the number itself, maybe six digits. These numbers, by the way, could of course be seen only when the men who had them wore short-sleeved shirts or the women sleeveless summer dresses. A stranger’s arm would reach up for the strap in the streetcar, and one could see what sort of fate had befallen this fellow human being. As if this had not been enough, now suddenly his or her life was on public display, could become anyone’s prey. Some had the numbers removed surgically, but the wrinkly or shiny scar left by transplanted skin became a telltale mark.

The streetcar was moving along, its speed allowing gentle breezes to blow through it, and whoever noticed the numbers, if anyone did, preferred to look out the window at the street sweltering in the sunshine. Later on, disabled veterans died or disappeared from the city, I don’t remember when, and they no longer had special reserved seats either, but back in those days many of them were still around.

Some with a leg missing, some with an arm; where once there had been limbs, the shirtsleeves or pants were fastened with safety pins or flapped freely on the stumps. Jacket sleeves were pinned inside jacket pockets. There were wooden legs ending in shoes, crutches fastened to stumps or waists. And scars and wounds, deformities and missing limbs, traces of burns and frostbite on hideous, horrifying faces. None of this needed explanation. I could never decide what was more merciful, to stare as if I saw nothing or to turn away immediately. I preferred turning away.

My shame and disgrace endured because I could neither look nor turn away unnoticed.

They knew why I turned away or pretended not to see anything.

In our neighborhood one often had to perform this hopeless mental exercise. Lack of compassion is insulting, but I didn’t know what to do with my compassion since my aversion and disgust were much stronger.

The most I could do was turn away very, very slowly.

Almost every morning I saw a man of whom nothing remained but a torso and two arms. He propelled himself among people’s feet, on a board fastened on four rollers. My father wouldn’t have been much older than this person, if he had stayed alive, even if in this condition. The man would roll out of Szófia Street, braking with a hand wrapped in a thick leather glove, and I, when I saw him, could not imagine him as anyone but my father. The sidewalk slopes down sharply in front of the pharmacy. I had no idea where he came from. At this time in the morning, people were hurrying along. He always said the same two sentences. The person he addressed was always a man; he waited for a man.

On this side of the street he could let the board plop down off the sidewalk, but then on the other side someone would have to reach under and lift it onto the sidewalk.

He pushed forward a little, and while he rose and held himself aloft on his fists, he let the board roll out from under him and slip off the curb. With an additional push, he heaved his amputated thighs back onto the board and at the same time braked hard with a gloved hand lest he roll out to the middle of the street.

What remained of him was clean, strong, and orderly. It may not have been because of the physical exertion, but his forehead and neck were soaked with perspiration. From the depths, the handsome face looked up at the pedestrians, his long, straight, deep-brown hair furled out and away from his soaked forehead, and he’d ask if the man would help him back on the sidewalk on the other side.

Not even his emphasis changed.

Please, if you could help me, but only on the other side. An unfortunately disabled veteran thanks you in advance for your help.

Generally, the addressed person would be embarrassed because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do, but the miserable man said not another word. He pushed and raised himself, plopped back down, and braked so fast that anyone seeing him for the first time could not properly follow the order of his precisely planned series of movements.

As he propelled himself across the street, the person he had appealed to would follow resignedly. The four little metal wheels made a terrible racket on the cobblestones.

I saw him often and followed him many times to find out where he went.

Men on two legs were seized by shame and abject terror. A childlike zeal, an incomprehensible shame, was expressed in their faces and comportment. If it hadn’t been the torso of an athlete who had asked them to follow him on their healthy legs, perhaps their backs wouldn’t have slumped like that. Making its own infernal din, the rolling board jounced, rattled, and clattered on the uneven cobblestones.

Cars stopped; sometimes the streetcar did too.

When he reached the other side of the street, the torso leaned forward and his two gloved hands found support on the sidewalk, the strong shoulder muscles tautened, and, as if performing an exercise on parallel bars, he elegantly and easily heaved himself up and held himself in the air.

The other person was then supposed to lift the board and place it on the sidewalk, awaiting the stump.

Everyone understood this; there was no need for words or explanations. Still, men with healthy legs would have liked to do something more demanding of their abilities and adroitness, as though they had to look for something else that might be truly helpful. But the torso asked for nothing more, nothing less, and as it rolled away on the smooth asphalt among the hurrying feet, the two-legged men were left, unsatisfied, with their shame.

I don’t know where he went, or, to be precise, I observed him from a distance and even followed him for a while.

There was also a two-legged, walking third-degree burn. Judging by her clothes, graceful movements, and well-chosen words, she was a young lady. Not a single lock or individual hair curled out from under her giant hat. The folded-down brim somewhat covered her forehead and shaded her face. There was an improbable dent on her brow. As if there had been a rending, a violent crushing or tearing along the seam of the frontal and cranial bones but no sign of external injury. Indeed, only on her dented forehead was the skin unblemished.

Scars, cuts, welts, crudely creased stitches all over her face. No nose, no lips, only a lipless gap, and two dark holes where the nose should be. Usually she wore dark silk clothes that covered every inch of her; she made her neck disappear in tightly wound silk scarves, and if the scarf slipped a bit, one could see that her neck was completely burned too. Probably her entire body was burned. She wore chamois gloves and improbably thick opaque stockings. Her breath wheezed, she spoke from her throat through the hollow of her mouth and she had no other means with which to shape words. Hers weren’t real words, in fact; rather, one understood the meaning from her articulation, from the way she divided her syllables. If we wound up standing together in a line at a store, I pretended I had other pressing business elsewhere. I could not bear her awful wheezing at such short range.

It was as if my eardrums would explode from the pressure of those sound waves, when in fact it was my heart that nearly broke, but I could not admit this to myself because what can a person do with another person’s broken heart.

Others may have been more indifferent or more patient with her, and she probably had become accustomed to this emotionless patience.

But this too could have been determined if she had had a face to reveal it.

Besides, she spoke like the ladies on the boulevard, used to giving orders, who took their maids with them when they did their shopping in the stores and markets.

Have you some Roquefort left? Very well, then let me have some bologna, but slice it thin, please.

No, not from that one, it seems stale. From the other, yes, the fresh one, yes, it’s very kind of you. And please, only a few slices.

I saw her last when the store ran out of bread.

One could not even get into the store; the selling was being done at a table in the doorway.

The curfew had been in effect until eight in the morning, but if one did not join the line at early dawn there was no chance of getting bread. The line was like a long serpent snaking along the sidewalk as far as one could see.

Almost every hour the radio reported that the belligerents had definitely come to an agreement about the terms of a cease-fire, but when the firing stopped in some places, it flared up at others and then spread throughout the city again. This had been going on for three days and very few people had supplies left.

Everyone was lacking something, and therefore everyone was on the move, going somewhere in the city as if the most important thing in the world was to obtain the necessities and to replenish and maintain one’s reserves. As if amassing these reserves was more important than one’s life.

From behind the table set up in the store entrance, the manager was screaming that he had run out of bread and there’d be no further shipments, because on government orders the bakery on Király Street was now working only for the hospitals. Some people screamed back that he should have told them that earlier, to spare them a long wait for nothing. Stay in line only if you want sugar, semolina, flour, or oil, screamed the manager. There’s nothing else, not even salt. And don’t ask him again from the beginning, because he didn’t have yeast or matches either. But at Glázner’s they’re planning to bake all day, and probably everyone can get something there.

The line quickly began to thin out.

On that occasion I saw the burned woman. She had on a short Persian lamb coat, pants, and military boots, and she was explaining something to an older man. We were all on our way to Glázner’s, on Szent István Boulevard.

This sort of thing happened often in those days, and nobody seemed bothered by having to walk to another store. It was not advisable to stay too long in one place anyway. Sometimes one heard, without any official announcement, that something valuable was still available elsewhere in the city, and then an anxious, smaller crowd would start toward a new uncertainty. No one complained. One couldn’t predict anything anyway, not even whether things would be safer or more uncertain somewhere else. There was no future; all that we had was the present moment. One surrendered to necessity, which made one anxious, but moving on to other places gave one some safety. At times it turned out that because of fighting on the streets one could not reach the desired destination, not even in roundabout ways; at other times the goal was reached but the store had closed, or had never opened, or perhaps had been blown to bits in the meantime.

Yet, somehow, something worthwhile always presented itself. And driven by the hope of this something, everyone worked out a strategy.

Everyone seemed to know which way to go and which way not to go.

It was no good to detach oneself completely from the crowd, because that kept one from benefiting from the flow of information, yet too many people all together was also dangerous. Everything was in constant flux. One shuttled back and forth between swelling and thinning groups. It was no easier during the day than in the dark, foggy dawn. Early dawn already had a wintry edge, though an autumnal smell remained. It appeared as if everyone followed their own noses, yet everyone watched closely where others were heading; maybe they knew something. And because of this strange feeling, which in peacetime usually divides a populace, people bunched together. Of course, this was not so good either. Because one guessed that maybe no one knew more or better than the others, were only talking through their hats, and it would be best to continue on alone. For a short time one might be armed with some actual information, or at least knew that others had a different view on the same permanent uncertainty yet were talking nonsense. But alone, one could not decide, for example, whether to cross a square or playground or to try a completely different route.

And the places where the fighting seemed to persist were not necessarily the most dangerous places. If bullets were being fired at a steady height, and if we could see where they were coming from and where they were going, then we’d bend down, duck behind a fence, cling to an upturned streetcar, wait out the pause between two bursts of firing and then run across, bent over, exactly as others had before us. As if there were always others one could follow.

Of course there were stray bullets too.

As if there was always someone, a first one, who had already tried it. But then, when almost everyone had made it across, that’s when the stray bullet might hit someone. Either the person who was shot was left there, or others crawled back and yanked him to cover.

And that meant that a person no one knew was wounded or dead on the spot.

Milk was not to be found anywhere in Budapest. One woman’s milk can took a direct hit. It happened during the day, with weak sunshine filtering through the light autumn fog. The woman had been running across the street toward us from the opposite direction. A few of us were still waiting for the chance to get out of the bullets’ range, and everyone’s faces were contorted, mouths open and eyes narrowed to slits. As if everybody were saying two sentences simultaneously. Do it now. Made it again. When bullets hit her milk can, the woman stopped, incredulous and shocked. Like a mask, her face remained with that expression on it as milk poured out of the can in two separate streams. This told us that somewhere there must still be some milk; somewhere milk was being distributed. Or had been. As if the spilling milk were more important. She did not topple over, only lowered herself on one knee and in her fury knocked the can to the ground, knocked it three or four times, not letting go of the handle. Other people were screaming, more and more of them, but they were late with their screaming.

Then victorious silence.

A dead square, a mute intersection where, ominously, nothing moved.

Closed gates, rolled-down shutters.

Whether it was light or dark, you could not scratch this silence with the noise of your steps. At its depth, something was being prepared. Something was in the air.

This sort of frozen dawn waited for us that day near West Station; not a light anywhere, not behind the windows or above the streets, no movement, no noise. It was cold, foggy, which we felt mainly on our skin and in our noses. We couldn’t see or hear anything. No, not in that direction, that’s for sure. Maybe cats or rats feel things this way. We were still far from the square; we could just barely differentiate between the gloomy sky and the bullet-riddled towers of the station. We had marched to this point like a group of high-spirited noisy tourists. Now it was clear we must be silent and give the square a wide berth. Quickly receding footsteps could then be heard, their echo bouncing back from the surrounding buildings.

Even cats and rats know which way they should go.

From here, it seemed that the upper section of Podmaniczky Street was open.

Others turned there too, because it was the only sensible option. Not together; we walked separately. You said to yourself, somehow I’ll make it to Bajcsy-Zsilinsky Road, and you didn’t ask what would happen then. I saw the picture of Kálmán Street before me, where in peacetime the trolleybuses ran; that’s where I had to get to. Figuring probabilities or weighing possibilities was valid only one step at a time. I wasn’t interested in knowing how I’d get to Kálmán Street.

Only the next step, always.

Never before or after did I feel how deeply the city lived in me. Some need would specify a place, and right away I’d see my situation as if under a magnifying glass. I’d know and see what was where, what sort of corner, stone, recess, or hiding place I could count on, what sort of danger I might expect. Like an animal that knows every trail. Now I must get to Kálmán Street and from there continue without going anywhere near the Parliament or the Defense Ministry. Alkotmány Street was a big question mark because it was so wide, and an even bigger question was how I would reach the other side of Szent István Boulevard. But right now, Kálmán Street was under the magnifying glass, and I didn’t ask what would happen once I made it there. Either something expected would happen or something unexpected, or maybe nothing.

During the day there was always rifle fire somewhere; shooting went on everywhere — close by, far away, much farther away. But only shooting in the street that one chanced to be in meant direct, immediate danger.

When that happened, you were really trapped, and you could only try to find a way out. But of course your success could not be predicted.

As I walked along, somebody asked me what was happening. Bread at Glázner’s, I replied. The street had just started to breathe a sigh of relief. A few buildings had their gates open; insurgents carrying things were going in and coming out. Lights were on in some of the upstairs apartments. The foliage was still rich and full of color; the light made the entire street seem as if the fighting was dying down. The streets looked like this whenever people had a chance to breathe sighs of relief, but nobody knew how long the respite would last. The boy who asked me his hurried question must have been the son of the super. I thought so, anyway, because out of a lit window above us, a woman called down to him.

Pistike, will they turn on the water soon?

He was carrying a long ammo box on his shoulder.

Fuck it, man, you can’t get through here, the boy said to me with obvious goodwill, and he did not answer the woman.

Can’t you see what’s going on?

I did see, of course I did, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he despised me for not joining him. As if he were trying to tell me that I was nothing but a stupid civilian who understood nothing of what was going on. It wasn’t hard to acquire weapons. I could have asked him for almost anything. I had also seen them more than once handing them out from trucks.

It wasn’t fear that held me back, and I can’t say I had anything against the shooting. On the contrary, I approved. I couldn’t imagine it being otherwise. It was just. And where there is shooting there are dead bodies. But I was the one somehow who had to get bread and everything else, for the members of my family had escaped into helplessness. I found their fear truly disgusting.

We’ve already turned it on, madam. Please, go ahead and try it, please do, Pisti called to the upper floor.

I moved on. One didn’t think of saying good-bye to someone whom one had just spoken to. By the time I reached the intersection I found out from someone else that the Russians had pulled back to Szent István Basilica. And they had cannons. But the railway station remained in rebel hands. That’s where there was free passage to the other side. Only one didn’t know when the whole thing might start all over again.

There was a photo store at the corner, and in front of its bombed-out display window a familiar group was gathering again, or at least among the people coming together I could see familiar faces. Broken glass crunched under our feet. Someone should have made a move, should have decided to go in a definite direction toward a specific destination, but no one did. This one knew something, that one had different information, maybe we should do this or maybe we should do that. An interminable discussion was under way. Everybody was talking, but that wasn’t very interesting. What was good about the whole thing was that in this strange neighborhood one could see familiar faces. Somebody from your own street, your own district. People were looking at one another in the dark, explaining things, pointing at things. Some people were quiet, only listened, and the ones who first lost patience were mainly from this group.

This was not good.

I had to think hard about whom I wanted to follow or join. Any way you looked at it, it wasn’t good, but almost any situation had a chance of turning up something good, and once in a while you could gain a real advantage. In the end, everybody was waiting for his turn, but nobody wanted to be first.

Only a single damaged lamp was giving light above the street. The trolley’s overhead wire had slammed into its cable, the shade had been twisted under the weight and the glass broken, but the bulb was intact. Dead bodies lay among the piles of cobblestones the rebels had used as improvised antitank obstacles. At the corner of Kálmán Street smoke was swirling from a burned-out tank. From a distance it looked as if it were steaming. Maybe it had been trying to go around the piles of cobblestone when it caught on fire. It had run up onto the sidewalk and hit a tree; the crown of the tree had fallen on it, and branches and the tank were burned to a crisp together. The blackened branches stuck out of the tank like horns. Only one wall of the collapsed newsstand was intact. In the darkness the foggy air was leafing through white pages. Nothing else was alive. Occasionally the piles of these white, two-day-old newspapers rose and slipped sideways a little.

Even then, I saw that woman again.

Only her eyes, actually, because she held her scarf against her face. That early morning she wore not a hat but a turban. The cashmere scarf and the turban had the same color and pattern. In those days, the sight of such finery was not conspicuous; not even a Persian lamb or mink coat was. People wore many things that earlier they’d kept hidden and wouldn’t have dared to wear. As if they were in the midst of a permanent celebration, though these fine items did not fit the occasion. But she had her arm looped through a basket handle and her hand on the basket just as she always had when going shopping. And while the rest of the people were discussing things, she must have said something from behind her scarf to the man next to her, which he did not seem to understand. This man was wearing riding boots, also an item one hadn’t seen earlier. Then the woman started forward on the sidewalk. The man took a few steps after her, glass and rubble squeaking under their feet, but he did not follow her. She didn’t care; she stepped off the sidewalk and walked on with her basket on her arm. She did not run, did not hurry, and leaned her torso forward just a little.

Like someone going to a store.

The man remained on the sidewalk, which was not very clever because right at that spot the sidewalk protruded and turned like a panhandle.

He was standing on a panhandle with a dark sea of danger in front of him. He should have stepped back or started walking in one direction or other; he should have moved. The rest of us watched to see what he would do.

The woman reached the lit area under the streetlamp with no trouble, but from there the going was harder because of the bodies and the piles of cobblestones. Streetcar tracks poked out from the pavement like dead spines. The city was full of objects that had lost their meaning. Nothing was happening. She stepped between the tracks, where a veritable ditch was gaping under her. This wasn’t bad since she could use it as protection and duck down into it. We did not hear anything suspicious from anywhere in the darkness. At least twenty of us were waiting to see where all this was leading and were not even aware of one another’s breath, or maybe we were just paying no attention to things like that. Once she was across the tracks and out of the area lit by the streetlamp, we could see her break into a run.

If she has managed to get that far, we prayed, she shouldn’t perish now.

During those days it was possible to understand why people did what they did. This woman was saving her life. We saw her next when she reached the side of the building on the corner.

I saw her again at Glázner’s. By then it was light. She had gotten there much sooner than I, because she was already in line when I arrived. When I saw the line from afar, I felt I should just give up, but then where would I go for bread.

The moment one saw a line, one began to figure. This line was so huge that any calculation was doomed. While I was procrastinating — I walked to the front to ascertain that the line indeed was as long as I thought and to see what was happening, and I had to walk all the way to József Katona Street — many more people joined it. But there were other procrastinators too, who also did not believe their eyes; they too walked to the front or looked at the line from afar, pondering what on earth to do. One’s saved life was becoming hopeless. Senseless even in retrospect, as if having survived until now was pointless.

And the longer one weighed the situation, the more one’s chances dwindled, seeing others take the place one should have claimed by right of first arrival.

The end of the heavily populated line coiled loosely from Sándor Fürst Street to Lipót Boulevard. That’s where I had to go to join it. But then it went completely around the entire block, turning back on Imre Sallai Street to reach the bakery entrance on the boulevard. And it wasn’t moving at all. There was no bread. No one knew when a new batch would be baked. Some people had brought small chairs or stools with them. Others just kept standing, shifting their weight from one cold foot to the other, resting now and again by leaning their backs against the building. I no longer had doubts. Going back to take my place, I wondered what would happen if I walked all the way to Petneházy Street, to the bread factory.

Not that I had any forebodings.

Here, at least, things were calm, and perhaps that’s what stopped me from becoming independent. After my very long delay, I took a place at the edge of the curb on the boulevard. The person who came after me had to stand in the street. We could shuffle and edge forward a little, not because they were finally starting to sell bread but because silent impatience somehow compacted the line.

A half hour must have gone by when something happened in the store as a result of which things began to happen along the line too. At first only some restlessness, soft murmurs, people being pressed more tightly together. Everyone wanted to move forward, but there was no place to move to. Where would you like me to go, my dear madam.

In situations like this, everybody has to say something.

My dear sir, a little patience, please.

Well, if you think you know what will happen.

Then a helpless shuffling of feet and, in the hum of exasperation stretched to the limit, the first solitary shouts.

Everybody looks down on the shouters, and for good reason.

To push my way into the store, I’d first have to make way for those who happily, with their loaves in hand, were trying to leave it.

People unfamiliar with the psychology of a queue would think this the most natural thing; after all, it would be in my best interest. If people can’t come out, nobody can go in either. However, everybody has to put up with a number of different pressures simultaneously, and this simply cannot be done in a crowd no matter how well intentioned a person may be. Rationality, a sense of justice, and crowd pressure must fight it out, and no individual has control over these forces. Rationality becomes the most fragile of the three because the farther back one is in the line, and ignorant of what is happening at the head of the line, the greater the urge to move forward, that’s what one’s animal instinct dictates. But a move of even a few centimeters or millimeters unavoidably creates tension. Whether instinctively or deliberately, you shuffle forward, because if you don’t, someone else will, or others will goad you on impatiently, and then your sense of justice will suffer. No matter that one cherishes one’s rationality and sense of justice, there is no way to hold off with one’s back the will of so many people, just as one cannot stay balanced against the pressing weight of others. Suddenly everyone tries to resist and push back against some of the pressure, people in general being well intentioned and sensible, but no one can overcome the treacherous designs of his own animal selfishness. One can’t help it if one is weak and lacks the strength to withstand the beast who has climbed on one’s back, but if people don’t have the strength to close ranks and uniformly resist the pressure at their backs, then the small gap I can create with my own strength can become an opening for the weak and swept-away or, just as easily, for petty self-seekers, cunning foxes, leeches, and greedy profiteers.

Some people wait for just such moment. People differ in their physical as in their mental strength and their consideration for others. A person may have the necessary strength and can bravely stand up to any pressure applied to his back, but all he wants is to hold off the other person, keep him from getting what he wants for himself.

And everyone can find a reason for wanting this tiny advantage. He’s been standing here for two hours. It’s cold. He should be able to go to the toilet at last. His child hasn’t had anything to eat for two days. And if he can’t get into the store, if they run out of the last batch of baked bread just before he gets there, he’ll have to wait at least another hour. He can’t put up with that. It’s possible that indeed he truly can’t; after all, his blood pressure is high, he has cancer or heart trouble.

And what if they run out of flour.

Or the store gets a direct hit.

Or he is trampled by these crazy mean people.

Anybody can see that sense is no longer the master here.

With tooth and nail, he is groping for justice, yet all he really wants is that no one should be unfair to him.

And everybody is screaming and yelling.

He can’t help it, he is screaming too.

The ones who don’t even open their mouths are also screaming. The one who always knew that people were like this, but only now feels it necessary to liberate this knowledge. The one who’s surprised that people are like this and now screams his discovery to the whole wide world. This one didn’t know that his neighbor, with whom he’d been talking just a minute ago, was a wild beast. That one screams because he’s been jammed up against the store window. This one because he has been pushed out of the line. That one’s been stepped on; this one was kicked. There are children and elderly people. There are those who want to come out and those who are being shoved in; there are professional hysterics, and there are those who are truly suffocating. And there are many who can’t believe this is happening to them. Their souls scream, and even the ones who do not do this with their mouths have a peculiar fever wracking their bodies because they can’t resist the others’ yelling and screaming.

A very thin membrane is ruptured.

Most likely, I screamed too; everyone was screaming. At times like this, nothing remains but the grace of fate, luck, and chance. You are no longer responsible, nobody is, for yourself or for the other people, and even if you make it through the mess unscathed, you wouldn’t know who should get the credit. It’s also odd how quickly such a turmoil can subside in a crowd.

I don’t know what happened.

At any rate, the store’s window glass did not break. With bread loaves raised above their heads, the first few customers forced their way out. The crowd pressed against the entrance could not make way for them, yet they managed to push and shove themselves out.

One could see only straining shoulders, backs piled on backs in front of them; in situations like this people have no faces, memory has nothing to preserve.

I saw everything.

I was standing ten meters from them and still don’t know what happened. Backs, shoulders, the white patches of faces.

My hearing remembers.

Shrieking hovered over the congested human mass, but, standing at the very end of the line that went around the entire block yet no more than ten meters from where the bread was being handed out, where at any moment something terrible could happen, we did nothing but scream. As if screaming could remind us of the vestiges of rationality, of a rationality that was still possible.

That they should not be doing this.

Not like this.

And there was anger in this screaming pitted against the shrieking. The anger of self-interest and plain selfishness. If at the head of the line the inevitable happens, then I, here at the very end, won’t get my bread either.

The line in the street went crazy. As far as the eye could see. No one was leaning against walls anymore, people jumped up from their chairs and stools. They had no idea what might be happening, they were turning around, making noises, hoping to move forward. Maybe it happened in the cacophony, in the air, between angry screams and insane shrieks where the opposing currents of helplessness and willfulness clashed.

When the first customers with their bread finally pushed clear of the crowd and stood dazed and happy, or quickly hurried away before someone tore the warm loaves from their hands, the nerve-racking cacophony reached a peak. It couldn’t go on like this. It could not get any louder. Everyone could see that people were coming out of the store, and everyone strove to be among the ones to fill their places. And now they really didn’t let anybody out. Lava must feel like this when it has to crack the crust of the earth and the crust wants to stay at the edge of the crack but still caves in.

Later, an eyewitness could say only that the inner pressure had become stronger, though the outer one hadn’t weakened.

The loaves of bread exhaled hot fragrances.

And if someone inside had been so favored by fate as to get a loaf of bread at last, that person wanted to break out, while the fate of one who wanted to break in trembled in uncertainty. The latter acted so as to get bread. The one hoping to emerge safely with his hot bread acted to save his life. Although nothing had been sorted out properly, the shrieking and screaming somewhat diminished. The line began to move. Which did not reduce the cacophony, now a clamor of agitated indignation. No one was shouting but everyone was swearing wildly, imploring, explaining.

We shuffled slowly forward. In the soles of our feet we felt there was still hope.

And then I saw the woman. Sometimes only her turban, sometimes the vague profile of her burned face. Slowly the sun came out and we started to move quite rapidly. The light felt warm, and the smell of the nearby river was in the air. Nobody talked about what had just happened or what might have happened. Because, after all, nothing had really happened, and if we kept walking at this rate, very soon we’d have our bread. Within a few minutes we reached the corner of Sándor Fürst Street. The happy ones were coming out one after the other. As you moved forward, you paid attention to every little shuffle. Your situation changed drastically. You were no longer at the end of the line but well in the middle of it. You were alert, making sure that no one gained an unmerited advantage, and you were careful not to give the impression that you might jockey for one. The line is moving, everybody’s fine nerve endings are atremble, and everybody keeps their stings at the ready. Everybody is out to gain an advantage, even if only a centimeter or so, and everybody is trying to keep everyone else from gaining the same.

As if each person had put reins of morality on others while the reins holding him were in the others’ hands.

People restrain their own selfishness in one another. If I can’t get ahead of them, into a more advantageous position, at least I shouldn’t fall behind them. When the line moves, there’s no time for argument, and once it stops no one can change his position for a better one. Only now, while still moving. That centimeter and a half must be gained now. And it must be gained not as if I were driven by the dark intentions of selfishness, but as if other people’s slowness or clumsiness made my position more favorable than theirs.

When we reached the corner, the line came to a halt. It was still dark and cold in the narrow street. Only from the roofs did some sunshine drip down to us. And that little warmth and light hit only that small side street that connects Sándor Fürst Street with Pozsonyi Road.

When the line stops, it is a magical moment. Everyone has to acknowledge, alert as they might have been and hard as they might have tried, that they are not next to the people they started out with and not quite in the same relative position to them. Everybody’s efforts were directed to not letting anything change, yet everything did. The familiar coats and familiar faces are the enemy, because many of them are now in front of you. In the next few seconds, you have to establish new alliances with strangers. A bitter moment. This is when quarrels erupt and often become physical. Or suddenly a deadly silence prevails; there is no more hopeful feet-shuffling. In the silence chairs and stools make small noises; sighs are heard. Someone says something, somebody responds. Once again one has to set up residence forever on this one and only spot.

Trouble occurs only when one does not accept one’s place in the universe. Actually, this is not my place, you say to yourself, and, unguardedly, you give voice to your indignation. Most people are wary of this trouble.

Sometimes a common fear even stifles a quarrel that has already started.

Not rationality.

There was silence.

Everybody is afraid.

This could have been the silence of an ordinary autumn morning. There were no sounds of gunfire anywhere.

I got lucky and could lean my back against a wall. Of course, I did a bit of manipulative navigation to reach this position. One could still see on the building wall the damage left from the Second World War. Bullet pockmarks in the plaster had been blackened by soot. I grew up in this city and never thought that this should not be so. But our silence now was not a real silence, because it was touched by a uniform rumbling sound coming from far away.

By then I knew that in the bakery three ovens were working simultaneously, producing a new batch of fresh bread every thirty-five minutes. We figured that we could progress about thirty meters with each new batch. Provided the ovens could keep up the pace. If there was enough firewood and they didn’t run out of flour or received a fresh shipment in time. If they could manage the kneading and leavening as fast as the ovens did the baking.

This was not likely.

We also knew that as of last night, all the ground-floor apartments in this building had been taken over for the purpose of leavening the bread dough. Some people figured out that at such a pace we needed to wait for twenty-five baking sessions and we’d be done in the late afternoon. The question was not whether we could stick it out but whether we’d get our bread before nightfall. Or, if we didn’t reach the entrance by then, would they lift the curfew, giving us more time.

To violate the curfew was harder in the evening than at dawn. It was virtually impossible in the evenings because the city then swarmed with various patrols. The fighting always died down by dawn.

The rumbling steadily grew louder. After a certain point no one had any doubt that it came from an approaching column of tanks. Columns of tanks were not especially frightening. Tanks turned up from somewhere and then moved on to someplace else. Unless they stopped, there’d be no trouble. And it was unlikely that they would choose to come through this narrow street. They preferred the wider streets and avenues, moving at the edge of the road so it would not be easy to throw Molotov cocktails at them from the buildings. The rumbling came from the direction of Angyalföld, and we could guess from the noise that the tanks would have to pass through either Pozsonyi Road or Pannónia Street. And when in this maddening rumbling we could also hear the squeaking of caterpillar tracks, it was clear that they were rolling on the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, on which every squeak sounded harsher and was more amplified than on regular asphalt. First, only the rumbling filled with squeaks took up the space between the buildings, and then, in the sunny junction of the small side street, we saw the tanks.

They kept an equal distance between them as they moved. One would disappear; the next one would appear. The faint sun grew blurry above the clouds of gasoline fume.

No one in the line moved. Those who could see into the side street paid close attention. But the stench of gasoline grew so strong, the noise increased so much, that everyone kept quiet; no one would have been heard anyway. It seemed the column would never end. The buildings picked up the trembling, as did the street and the sidewalk; I could feel in my limbs how the various tremblings blended into one. It wasn’t I who was trembling.

The rumbling and trembling increased as the tanks, squeaking and screeching ever more loudly, turned up on the ramp of the Margit Bridge, and now the entire bridge was shaking. We could feel the bridge in the soles of our feet. I’ve got a city; my city is split in half by a river, and now the familiar bridge over the river has turned into a sensation. The bridgehead took on the shaking of the bridge, the bridgehead’s shaking was taken over by the blocks of buildings around the bridgehead abutment, and I felt the trembling in my back also. Because of the trembling, one did not think of anything; at most one could listen to the trembling of one’s body.

I sensed no danger. And it did not sound as if anything was about to end.

After all, there were larger military operations for which the Russian troops regrouped, but the civilians did not bother too much with them.

In those days, it was not completely out of the question that the Russians might leave altogether. Leave the capital or maybe even the country.

From where I stood, I could see into the small street. I saw the tanks following one after the other in front of the Szamovár coffee bar. Behind the sunny glass of the display window hung a large photograph of Hedda Hiller, the aging, beautiful nightclub singer who had appeared there every evening until a few days ago. The coffee bar was open and full of people even now. Faces were glued to the glass, watching the passing tanks. Some people stood on the sunny sidewalk, watching the tanks from there. Then something happened that to this day I find it hard to make myself believe. Lazily, as if still thinking about it, one of the tanks seemed to change its mind, and it turned into this small narrow street, grazing the sidewalks with its tracks and making the curb throw sparks, scattering the people on the sidewalk. People ran into the coffee bar, some into the adjacent building. The street emptied out in a second. Only the smell of gasoline and the wide strips of sunshine pouring down from over the roofs remained. We, in the line, did not move. The tank was coming toward us, its barrel raised.

It occurred to me for a second that perhaps this tank was securing the safety of the moving column, in which case everything was all right. It advanced halfway down the small street, stopped but did not turn off its engine.

Nothing happened.

Then I thought that perhaps something was wrong with the tank and that is why it had left the column. But I felt that trouble was near. In the next instant the tank’s barrel moved gently downward. Nobody moved. It seemed to be taking aim at the building opposite or at the wide marquee above the entrance to the Danube Movie Theater. But there was nothing there; people in the bread line were waiting underneath it, motionless. It happened so fast my mind could not keep up. My eyes saw it. Still, I could not acknowledge that the flame bursting out of the barrel and the backward jerk of first the turret and then the entire tank meant that a round had been fired. And then another one.

Two mute pictures.

And a horrific explosion in between. And the next one slamming into the crumbling, collapsing chaos within the cloud of dust, also followed by an explosion.

Tearing up everything.




They Could Not Forget It


A few days later, Madzar was standing alone on the deck of the Carolina, the oldest steamboat on the Danube, and he felt very lonely in the spring twilight.

Under his feet, down in the deep bowels of the boat, the engine was working at a uniform rhythm.

The enormous mass of water absorbed the muted puffs rising from the hollows of the ship, not allowing them up to the deck.

The muted, delayed vibrations, the thrusts of the steam engine’s pistons, the metallic trembling of the hull, the gentle breeze that carried the scent of blooming as well as the cold, heavy fish smell of muddy water from the shore, all coursed simultaneously through his body.

Boarding this ship, which sailed regularly between Vienna and Belgrade, meant journeying back to his childhood. Already then, one of his favorite daydreams was to penetrate the immense universe that breathed like an animal and was, in every single one of its elements, suffused with the currents of existence. Let me see how every species of all living things, along with their functions, all the stars, internal organs, and snow crystals, pulsing bloodstreams, myriad details of bridges and cathedrals, how all of these are linked together.

The river was swelling.

His cosmic efforts led to no convincing result, of course, neither then nor later, and it would have been strange indeed if the little son of a shipwright from Mohács had succeeded in reconstructing the metaphysical structure of a pantheistic world.

He had the impression that he attributed significance to relationships and analogies that had none or, worse, that he was unaware of certain phenomena and overestimated the significance of others, which kept him from understanding them. He couldn’t understand, for instance, into what category he should put those of his own deeds he considered ungodly.

Yet he kept at it, began over and over again, buried himself in encyclopedias, ventured into the thick of phenomena and data, wandered off, fell into the depths. He tried to take inventory with his sense organs of every manifestation of every element in his environment and to assign them their possible positions. He realized with alarm that one prerequisite of this effort should be not to make arbitrary choices and separate individual objects from each other, but to know what belonged to what, to clarify the causality of their belonging together, to penetrate them with his imagination down to the last detail, and at the same time to remain outside and, aided by physical and cultural experiences, to establish relationships among all the things he observed, not only between them and himself. He should discern what in their functioning was similar to or different from human functioning, what was personal in the universe, what remained impersonal; by connecting the contact points of the various systems he ought to be able to map the construction, the higher mechanism that perhaps held all autonomous things together.

That was his guiding vision.

He would have liked to uncover how Creation’s objects fitted together; in return for this knowledge, he was ready to be burned alive like Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori.

If they had told him what he was really doing, what he went on thinking about even as an adult and why he did it so compulsively, as if possessed, he would have replied, raising his somber eyebrows, come on now, balderdash, I am not looking for any kind of god.

He leaned against the railing, holding his visored Scottish cap of the same material as his suit, and lost himself in admiring the familiar river as its mute shores lined with silver gray willows floated by.

They were going downstream. The old steam engine scarcely had to work.

The nicely arched bow, ending in a long, broad prow adorned in relief with the bifurcated wavy hair of a mad mermaid, was noisily parting the golden yellow silk of the water. Metal sliced water. The rather high-pitched sound of this was steady, yet the water also made smaller, one might say more objective snaps, plops, and splashes around the prow, and these sounds seemed to link the two substances’ interwoven progress with the currents of the depths.

Madzar was going home to Mohács.

The wide paddle wheeler sank comfortably into the water as the river carried it on its murky back.

He could not stop himself from imagining that the woman was coming with him; he was taking with him her stranger’s breath, which reached him even here, at the railing of the upper deck; he carried the image farther, imagining they were going together back to his childhood. To share something that was close and unique and dear to him, something the woman did not know what to do with. They had not seen each other for days, did not want to, no, no, and the will remained mutual, and it hurt them both. Madzar had expected not to have hurt feelings himself because he considered jealousy or longing to be senseless, pointless, its complications old-fashioned.

So many things that should simply be eliminated from the modern world.

No psychic illness or emotional misery should darken the doorstep of his consciousness.

Since their talk about furnishing the clinic, however, a shadow had fallen on the demands he made of himself, and he was surprised to discover that despite his encyclopedic efforts and Gnostic passion, he had been unaware of it. Although the phenomenon of death could not elude his attention, he hardly paid attention to illnesses and ill persons. He himself had never had even a toothache; on occasion a mild head cold.

He was not aware of his own health.

Ill persons should be aware of their ruined fate; that’s the real reason her office must not suggest clinical sterility — so as not to strengthen this awareness of their illness.

As if the demands Mrs. Szemző made were at odds with every system his imagination had ever concocted, dangling incongruously from them, as it were. As if he were saying that one cannot see one’s fate for knowledge of one’s own illness. Or awareness of one’s own health. And in that case wasn’t everything other than direct personal experience missing from one’s thinking. I might be pathologically healthy. It gave him pause to think that perception of futile and unreasonable things might be missing from his consciousness because it did not fit with his strict empiricism.

I may be headed for big trouble, there is something I haven’t understood or keep misunderstanding.

He began to be afraid.

Mrs. Szemző, however, protested vehemently against his word usage.

I beg of you, she laughed, showing her frightening gums above her strong teeth, please stop talking to me about illness. What I deal with is not illness; it is not maladie but, at worst, malaise. We must keep the concept strictly in its social context; I insist on that, if you don’t mind. Each soul has its given nature and characteristics just as the body does. The people who come to see me, and this is what has to be considered, my dear architect, do not behave in conformity with conventions.

But that is not illness.

Or it may be exactly the other way around: they cling so strictly to conventions that they become ill. And then it’s clear that the illness has to be considered the consequence, not the cause.

Making himself even more ridiculous, he awkwardly protested against Mrs. Szemző’s protest, childishly repeating that he understood, of course he did, he had read enough psychoanalytical literature.

Mrs. Szemző interrupted the sentence she had begun.

With a glance she grasped that what he had said was partly true; he must have heard or read something on the subject. Then she flooded him again with her full-throated laughter, because she liked to hear the man stretching the facts a little, and under the weight of her glance Madzar once again showed his weak side, blushing deeply.

He watched the woman, envied her for her keen glance, wanted to avenge himself.

He imagined that a woman as self-possessed as she felt none of the pain or embarrassment he did but, head held high, went impassively about her daily tasks.

He couldn’t imagine this completely. After all, he was unfamiliar with the life and daily routine of a well-to-do, pampered Jewish woman of Budapest.

Instinctively he knew that she felt the pain, he could not have been so far off the mark; of course she did, she had to.

Still, he asked himself, why would anybody miss me. Because he was not thinking of a single woman in the cool twilight, but, parallel with Mrs. Szemző, he thought also of the rich Dutch woman from whom he had fled when he left Rotterdam behind. He was very familiar with that woman’s daily routine and deduced from it what Mrs. Szemző’s might be. He imagined the moment when the piano teacher says good-bye but would like his monthly payment before going, which these people always forget, and just then the other Szemző boy rings the bell, having returned from his language lesson. Mrs. Szemző feels that everything is in hopeless disarray again in the old downtown apartment from which, in a few months’ time, they will move to their brand-new house in the great green outdoors. Her husband, on the telephone with someone, is pointing at her and gesticulating about something, but she must change her clothes. And before leaving for the opera with her women friends, she must talk to the maid about next week’s menus and she didn’t want that discussion to make her late for Margit Huber and Mária Szapáry.

To hell with the piano teacher’s monthly fee.

Couldn’t we please do this next week, she asks peremptorily. Although the young man gives her a desperate look, she considers the matter closed. There, you see.

But in this series of pictures she resembles the slightly hysterical Dutch woman more than herself.

The breath of their indifference reached him from their fulfilled lives.

In the badly insulated, unheated street-front room of his parental home, in its pervasive mustiness, he will return to his illusions; he would still prefer to spend the night with the Dutch woman rather than with this one, whom he does not yet know and has already abandoned.

He did not understand anything.

Occasionally a dark object from the depths of the river surfaced.

He did not see how his life would settle down at the side of another person.

Which is usually referred to as resignation or calming down; perhaps he was waiting for America.

As the days passed he was continually occupied with looking for solutions to minor architectural problems, but this brought him no closer to an overall solution. Already in Rotterdam, the question of what his future should be, with whom he might share it, had become an insoluble problem. While the work-filled weeks rushed by he failed to give proper attention to this more general and clearly more significant question, and he could see that the weeks would grow into months and whole long seasons. He reluctantly acknowledged that, judging by his behavior, he put a certain amount of passion into his work, a need for emotional fulfillment that could be neither avoided nor dissolved or even annihilated by the joy of a job well done. He should share it with someone, but not just anyone. The crater of an absence grew deeper in his consciousness. And if he found the someone with whom to share his passion, then he foresaw life-organizing problems that one couldn’t solve with this person, maybe with someone else.

If he did not want to step into chaos, he had to step back, along with his passion, or move on.

How could he tell the wife of a Dutch industrialist to pack her things, dress her children, call a cab, and let’s be on our way. He had to step back — to his work and to nothing else. If he were to maintain the living standard to which these people were accustomed, within a week he’d have been unable to pay the hotel bills. Yet they had been planning earnestly, because they passionately wanted to escape from that doll’s house. In the midst of their fervent daydreaming about their future, Madzar realized the woman had no idea of the dimensions of poverty. She dreamed of ways to rescue her dowry from her husband’s business, but the distrustful look on her face showed that she wouldn’t like to entrust her money to a nobody like Madzar.

She didn’t dare reveal how much money she had.

As if Madzar were looking into a sanctuary of guileless honesty where petty and scheming dishonesty ruled.

Because hard as she tried, she could not imagine things in any other way but that a man would take care of her; after all, that was their obligation.

And with Mrs. Szemző, the whole misery would start all over again.

He had decent colleagues with whom he saw eye to eye on nearly every important professional question — structural engineers, mechanics, and civil engineers, many of whom supported his professional career because they shared his ideas about modernizing the technical and spiritual aspects of architecture — but he had no friends. They’d hardly get to the end of an exciting discussion when these men would hurry off; they had secret nets that supported their personal lives. He had no insight as to how others had managed to acquire a safety net; he seemed unable to do so. If only he had some friends. Or if he could give up his desires, his emotional preferences, which kept sending him into the arms of women who were complete strangers and whose unsolved life problems he was then obliged to take on. The only obvious solution would be asceticism. After all, it was all about the purity of lines drawn on a sheet of white paper, and for that he had to see his place and function in the entire human world of strangers.

And if this was not possible, then he should, at least in his personal life and in the interest of clear-sightedness, step out of the vicious circle of passions.

The water brought an object to the surface, spun it rapidly around, brought it closer, moved it farther away, let it drift with the current.

Sometimes the object showed more clearly, was fully exposed; at other times it plunged back into the water, perhaps to vanish forever. It was hard to guess what might happen next. He always feared that instead of a waterlogged tree stump, board, or spinning tree trunk, he’d get hold of a bloated corpse or blackened carrion, a pig or cow, or, worse, that his grapnel would not hold the target but would grasp something that would pop, squirt, tear, rip open, and spill guts everywhere. This fear, part of the risk in anything he undertook, accompanied him throughout his childhood.

Even in the summer after his last school year in Pécs, he continued with this insane sort of fishing, though he missed the great spring spate.

To have spending money, so he wouldn’t have to play poor boy next to the young gentlemen who, in fact, were poorer than he yet had to behave as though they were richer to comply with the demands of their social class.

He also did it out of some obsession.

When the water was high, they went in a flatboat or punt; at other times they would swim to get a tree stump or trunk, occupy it, steer it, ride on it. The struggle among the competing gangs was brutal. To possess a more valuable tree trunk they were willing to tear at one another’s flesh with their grappling irons. The higher and colder the water, the richer the catch was. They hit one another with shovels. He began as a member of the German-speaking gang, given his mother tongue, but on Sundays he would go to the Hungarian church, which in Mohács was what they called the Protestant church, located behind a stone wall on Calvin Street, so he wound up in the Hungarian gang.

He had never been forgiven for that.

And what he did could not be done alone; he had to betray someone, either his mother or his father.

And he was unable to repair this rift.

There was always need for an observer at the top of the willows; that’s where the smallest boys began their careers. There was also need for a boy who’d push off the flatboat or punt the moment the others were in, and another small boy who, though not yet proficient in rowing or steering, would unhesitatingly throw himself in to catch the floating prey, defying rain, wind, or ice-cold water. He did everything to make the Hungarians accept him. A floating trunk or stump could not always be caught with the grapnel; it would turn over and spin out of reach, slip away. The others were suspicious of him; after all, he had already betrayed the Germans. It made no difference that he had betrayed the Germans because of and for the Hungarians; the Hungarians did not want to understand the logic of betrayal, and the joy of betrayal remained a well-guarded secret. Someone had to sit by the fire night after night and guard the loot until the timber merchants came to pick it up and ship it away. In this, he had to agree with his mother, who always said that Hungarians were the biggest lamebrains in the world. Driftwood was a valuable commodity: the heavier trunks and the ones not yet water slogged were bought by the Serbian merchant Gojko Drogo; stump wood, assorted chunks, and less valuable pieces they sold to the Jew with a lumberyard below the pier on Halász Street.

Suddenly he could not remember the Jew’s full name, but he did recall that his first name was Ármin.

He did not have much time to think about the Jew because the ship’s bell was sounded, and shortly the captain sent for him with an invitation to dinner.

Look at that, Mayer, he called to the cabin boy who had come to fetch him, and leaning out over the rail pointed to the surfacing and disappearing object in the water, part yellow from the clayey silt and part gray with mud churned up by the wheels.

It was like a drowned woman in a short red coat.

The water kept spinning it; when it turned from its back to its stomach it became a tree trunk again.

From the moment he boarded the ship at the Franz Joseph dock, he crossed over into a former world, with different humidity and different air pressure; he stepped back into his earlier life from where he could look back to historical times, even to the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary.

He breathed differently here and everyone was someone’s acquaintance.

The river would rise, the river would fall; the water flowed through everything and threatened everything.

Everything was becoming familiar — the smells, the immense gray sky with its sultry southern winds and harsh western breezes, the silver-gray shoreline, and, behind the calm shores, the tidelands that had given him the gifts of mystical experiences and charged silences. He had not forgotten them, which is why he did not believe they’d been mystical. Visions pervading his body and soul that to this day secretly directed his life. The whirling water along the body of the ship; the murky water with its two-tone surface, bubbling up from different layers of the riverbed, and the river’s unpredictable, wild currents.

He went home at least once every two weeks. He wanted to make use of his time before going to America.

The abandoned workshop and his mother were the ostensible reasons for his visits home, but he wanted to be near the water, the fog at dawn, the smell of fish, and to let their reality fill his life. Of all the ships on this route, he preferred the Carolina with its classically severe aesthetic, its reliability and comfort, for it brought something with it from the early nineteenth century that Madzar greatly appreciated: a sobriety and modesty in its proportions, as well as mechanical perfection.

This boy Mayer was from Paks, but the captain came from Mohács, and he was one of the most peculiar people Madzar had ever met; they had sat side by side as schoolboys at the school on Koronaherceg Street.

Mayer did not want to be impolite but he hardly looked at the object floating past them in the water.

That’s not a woman, sir, he yelled over the sound of the engine and against the wind.

No, but it wouldn’t hurt to drown women in water, the architect said, and smiled at the boy.

I’ll manage without them for my whole life, believe me, replied Mayer, yelling into the wind.

Madzar, taken aback, looked into the boy’s immobile, somber, dark eyes, at his thin lips and strongly protruding chin with its taut, stubbly skin.

He scrutinized him, hoping to see whether he was yelling the truth or even knew what he was saying.

But you can’t tell what that red thing is, can you, he yelled back in a friendly tone.

No, I can’t, sir, you’re right, replied the boy readily, but what he thought was, I don’t really care; his demeanor suggested that he was ready to butt and gore the whole world.

To charge anything or anybody.

They remained at the railing for another moment. Madzar wondered who could have hurt or insulted this Mayer boy so much, with what and why. They went on watching the object spinning in the water churned up by the paddle wheels, both of them perplexed and silent.

The red they saw was not a woman’s robe but a loincloth on the naked body of Jesus Christ. For a fraction of a second their eyes caught the crudely carved crucified figure on the surface of the water before it was submerged again.

Without a word, surprised by the red painted loincloth on the clumsily carved body, Madzar followed the young man, who in the tension of his body was proclaiming that it was irredeemable, the entire Creation was irredeemable. The end was near.

He knew Mayer’s father, mother, and grandfather; everyone knew they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and believed that earthly hell would soon be over: the Last Judgment would descend on the human world, possessed by Satan, and Armageddon was imminent. Their manners were harsh and unpleasant, like the boy’s, but he did not know what to make of the boy’s response. There were years when Madzar’s grandfather had built several rowboats and more than two flatboats for them; the Mayers of Paks did their fishing with many different people. This boy must have been the youngest son in a long line of children whom they sent, who knows why, to be a cabin boy. While making their way down the narrow steps to the lower deck, Madzar watched the close-cropped nape of the boy’s neck, his bony, tense shoulders, as if expecting that the body’s structure would explain things. Suddenly, on the lower deck, it was hot. The wide windblown corridor, whose white walls were vibrating with bright spots of light reflected from the water, was filled with the aroma of food cooking, perfumes, and tobacco.

The kitchen was sizzling, sputtering, almost bubbling over; each time its swinging doors opened and closed, waves of noise were released from clattering dishes and yelling cooks, waiters, and scullery maids. Light from sconces glittered on the highly polished cherry-red wainscoting in the commodious salon and somberly furnished dining room, while on the low-coffered ceiling the bright, reflected lights of the river swam in the opposite direction. It was as if he almost understood something, as if to a certain degree he comprehended something of the connection between the nature of reflexes and his own attraction to them.

Mrs. Szemző did not appeal to him. He could not even imagine her as somebody’s type. Yet he could not deny being attracted to her. When he had had the chance, he had searched Dr. Szemző’s face to learn whether he could harbor the same sort of feeling for her as the doctor felt for his spouse. This woman surely had a lot of money. An enormous inheritance. Perhaps the husband married her for her money. Which in his case must have been as persuasive as the light was in convincing Madzar to take on the job, those multiple reflections on the ceiling of the empty seventh-floor apartment created by the yellow ceramic pavement of Pozsonyi Road, the surface of the Danube, and Eliel Saarinen’s tin domes, reminiscent of conical caps. And he did not even want to think about the apartment’s interior. Well, one needs money. And the only thing the tin domes, or indeed the entire group of buildings, had to do with Saarinen was that Emil Vidor had followed Saarinen’s ideas for a few years.

One could say that Vidor stole his ideas from Saarinen.

Madzar also remembered the strange words with which Mrs. Szemző characterized the neuroses of her Jewish patients.

The tin dome cast a shadow on them in this brand-new quarter of the city, as did the memory of the Judenhut, the stigmatizing hat Jews had to wear in the Middle Ages. Nothing like that would have occurred to him, and he was surprised by what Mrs. Szemző was saying and how she said it.

The spray over the water often rose up to and swept across the wide low windows on the lower deck; occasionally, rebounding waves splashed the panes. Here one could hear the even seething and churning of the gigantic wheels, the axle’s empty, unexpected creaks. Below this lower deck carpeted in wine red, in the enormous engine room, the engine with its carefully oiled wheels and gears, valves and pistons, siphoned and pushed, squelched and clicked and snapped repeatedly. From the engine room spiral stairs led even farther below, all the way to the ship’s bottom, where two half-naked stokers, blackened by coal dust, worked in the red glow of the boiler and the noise of the puffing engine.

On the upper decks the passengers had to raise their voices a little.

The passengers were already seated at their tables and the din of the dining hall had increased, though on this late April day there were few people in first class — a number of German officers, egging each other on to louder and louder exchanges, and a little farther off, a couple of very constrained honeymooners from Pest, reminiscent of drenched birds. Obviously ill at ease, they held their aperitifs distrustfully in their hands. Perhaps a rich relative had paid for their tickets and they were unsure how to handle themselves. Beyond the couple and isolated from everyone else, at a table set for one, sat a very well-dressed man in his fifties, Elemér Vay by name, the government’s chief counselor, who, at the personal instruction of His Excellency the regent of Hungary, in the following weeks and without drawing attention was to inspect every port along the lower Danube. At the fourth and largest table, Serb hardware merchants sat in poorly tailored frock coats, Gebrocks, greasy and stretched by overweight bodies, badly in need of pressing, along with their massive, colossal, bejeweled, and painted wives in completely inappropriate evening dresses with plunging necklines.

Madzar had the impression, and not for the first time since his return from Holland, that here in the land of his birth, at some point in the past time had lazily come to a halt and now with its last ounce of strength was moaning softly, saying something like, why should I bother to go on ticking. He observed these people with a profound horror as if seeing different variations of himself in his own staid future.

No, not like this.

With the exception of the well-dressed lone gentleman, they were all extremely ridiculous and pitiful.

If Madzar were to stay, his fate would be no different; there was no ingenuity that could enable him to avoid the inevitable.

He would marry somebody, an attractive woman, probably, who would bear children and gradually, imperceptibly become like this, ever thicker, more obtuse, and louder.

Madzar was not dressed for the occasion; he wore simple traveling clothes, a so-called knickerbocker outfit — a six-buttoned, high-necked jacket decorated with a permanently stitched belt, facing pleats, and sewn-on pockets; a vest with buttons one could see above those of the jacket; loosely fitting, baggy knee pants. To match this outfit, he had picked thick, pale-green fishbone-patterned knee socks and thick-soled shoes; out of season such a minor violation of social etiquette was permissible.

Though he was a bit anxious about it.

Supper was served earlier than was customary in the regular season on a luxury ship like this.

It would have made no sense to rent a cabin for such a short trip. He traveled without luggage.

His coat and hat were taken from him by the old Viennese waiter who continually mumbled to himself in different languages; accompanied by the waiter’s purposeless words, he was escorted to Captain László Bellardi, who in addition to being a baron was also a Vitéz — a title given to valiant, heroic veterans of the Great War. Seeing them approach, the captain took his leave of the noisy Serbs.

Behind the protection of his charming smile, for long minutes now the captain had been waiting for Madzar, patient yet almost angry; where was he, he should come and relieve him of his burdensome duty, where is he tarrying.

Not that he needed anyone to relieve him, but he could not forgo an obligatory act without giving an excuse or having a pretext to dodge it. True to his upbringing, he held nothing higher than duty. Now he wanted to chat with his sometime friend rather than with Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, with whom he had a distant familial connection.

God, religion, homeland, the good fortune of every subject of the realm — these were among his duties. He could do nothing publicly unless in the eyes of the world the act had a conventional reason or at least a conventional explanation. All manner of social demands were made on him that were incompatible with his temperament, which, fickle and intuitive at its core, leaned toward arbitrariness and improvisation. He suffered from temper tantrums because he could not consider as his duty everything he could not help performing. And ever since his wife had left him, his body and soul had been held captive by sheer horror and dread. None of this could be seen on him, of course, not in his bearing and not on his face, though he grew somber as he approached Madzar.

As someone who, in the transition between playing two different roles, retains only the physical shell of his own body.

Under the heavy weight of the secret mental burden, his attractive lean visage caved in; bitterness sat on his lips.

But behind the appearance he could show only another appearance.

Moving from event to event, he systematically cobbled together a narrative of appearances that did not conform much with his inner life or most personal intentions, yet this external tale became his biography. When he completed something in accord with appearances, he would tell himself with a measure of self-satisfaction, well, we got away with it. He acted as if the supreme value of individual personal life was the survival of the impersonal life of the group.

As if his sense of I was ruled by the sense of we. He was coming toward Madzar as if he were being pulled by the weight of his head.

Until, between two swaying dancelike steps, he switched to another preprepared smile of his. With this smile he ceremoniously raised his head high, because it was not he who was smiling from behind the woeful mask or who made his feet move as if dancing, but the role he was playing. Right now, he is demonstrating his true attentiveness and genuine kindheartedness to those who eagerly watch the meeting of two friends.

This meant at best only the honeymooners, who followed the two men with their eyes; in their apprehension, they paid close attention to everything.

The strangers’ regard made Captain Bellardi grow taller, he needed the added stature as he needed air, it helped him give meaning to himself, to every one of his gestures. Thanks to the attention his mortal shell filled out with flesh and blood, with hunger and thirst for life.

Madzar felt uneasy at this revelatory spectacle, though he saw no more than what he had already known about the man.

Bellardi was playing a solitary game with himself. If he hadn’t been brought up halfway between small-town gentry and a sophisticated aristocracy, he could have easily spurned or cordially disregarded ordinary fellow human beings. But the duality of his upbringing did not allow him to use either approach, so he regularly disappointed himself. Thanks to his mother, his behavior was designed for a much larger stage than he could ever perform on or even have a chance to see. Yet he was not allowed to complain about the narrow-mindedness and unworthy conditions of the locales he moved in, as everyone else did in the great Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was positively forbidden to blame others for anything. This was the traditional bon ton: to accept every situation without comment. He could not scheme, as everyone else did in the larger milieu of his life; he could not prattle, bear a grudge, or hate to his heart’s content. And he did not realize that in his obedience he relinquished vital mental functions, over and over again.

He believed he was exercising Christian humility, a very decent thing to do, a duty required by his rank as much as a patronly duty toward his church.

Or at least he offered the appearance of this virtue, deployed against the maladies of self-contempt and misanthropy that tortured his soul and irritated his mind, and that also sometimes led him to be carried away and gravely insult others. In their childhood, Madzar had enjoyed these excesses of Bellardi’s playful instincts, even though he shuddered in fear of them. Now he was rather shocked at what he had enjoyed years earlier. Though he joined Bellardi’s games up to a point, he enjoyed the extremes of Bellardi’s dangerous overrefinement and decadence as much as his hypocrisy and imaginative cruelty. Or the ominous size of his fury and his always brief temper tantrums.

But once, in a single instance, they both wound up on the other shore, from which, in the moral sense, neither of them could return.

Take everything easy, casually; you can possess only what does not touch you. Don’t bother with forgetting; within three days even pain loses its sting.

Who else in Mohács could say such a thing; given his behavior, nobody but he.

In company, a serious person does not burden his fellow humans with matters they should take seriously. Just touches on them, barely. When he turned serious, he made sure with his style and tone that either the joke or its calculated effect, like a snarl, would surface on cue, revealing his boldest interests or power-hungry aspirations.

Everyone could see what he was up to, and his impudence increased the impact.

Compared to his former condition, however, Captain Bellardi was visibly tired, had become almost dejected.

Because of his studies abroad and his completed projects, Madzar saw perhaps more clearly than others the realistic scale of Bellardi’s role playing. It was as if the other man had always broadcast his aptitudes and characteristics on two parallel programs. He probably did this out of self-defense. His upbringing suited neither his personality nor his actual social standing. But with a few playacting maneuvers he could permanently maintain the appearance of a person enjoying an exceptional, privileged status; and in this lawless, corrupt environment, saturated with hatefulness, insults, humiliations, and petty jealousies, others must have needed him to maintain appearances as much as he did. On one program, his upbringing progressed mechanically from its original source, the royal princess who was his mother; on the other program, his needful personality made headway in the same vacuous manner. And, as befits conditions in a monarchical police state, a third person supervised both mother and son: a secret-police agent.

To keep personality and upbringing from initiating a forbidden dialogue.

Above his white-and-dark-blue uniform glittering with gold braid, he presented a charming adolescent face that had been creased and probably quite tormented. Every time they met, this creased look hit Madzar in the heart; he loved Bellardi for it, and it conjured up their love-filled teenage years. Although time could not change the picture he carried within him, on Bellardi’s real face he viewed the end of his own youth. He also saw with his own eyes that Bellardi’s timeless face had grown stronger while his essential being had not changed at all. Except that in the meantime everything had been decided; the number of open questions had diminished, nothing was retrievable or reparable, and the interwoven links of Bellardi’s life’s deeds could no longer be integrated into his being.

There he was, abandoned, shivering, in the light of day.

Madzar saw this in his mind’s eye as the shivering of his own being.

The inner structure of their suffering could not have been very different, and this increased the aversion they felt for each other. Bellardi’s splendid marriage had collapsed miserably after a few weeks, and, Madzar thought, I cannot find anyone with whom to share my fate.

The difference is not so great, he thought.

As Bellardi approached him, he could see clearly that a humiliated, failing self showed through the eternal cheerfulness, and this aroused the suspicion that Bellardi had used this sort of illusory appearance much earlier, as early as their childhood, in order to conceal his raging suffering.

Nothing can remain a secret, but performing in public was one of Bellardi’s obligations, and so he had probably become accustomed to the possibility that people eyeing him, scrutinizing his features, were in possession of insidious information about him.

As if they were mutely asking what could have happened in Alexandria.

The news of the interrupted honeymoon had quickly reached Mohács, and when Madzar came home it was almost the first story he heard from his mother. The baroness Elisa had left behind only a one-line message when she abandoned Bellardi in their suite at the Hotel Prince de Galles on Alexandria’s Corniche. People dared to speak of what might have happened there only in vague allusions. They read the newspaper reports carefully but did not much enjoy the pervasive tittle-tattle that accompanied them. They would not venture to reinterpret the story with their customary animosity or deploy their eternal malice- and admiration-filled envy for high society. Yet they could not resist making embarrassing, deliberately equivocal insinuations. It began with the charge that before the wedding too much fuss had been made about the celebration, the young couple was too beautiful, there were many too many reports in society papers, and the couple’s fall was too fast and frightening. Had they discussed the matter frankly, the gossipers would have had to jettison their illusions about beauty and elegance and cancel their subscriptions to The Hungarian Ladies’ Journal or New Times; then they could have acknowledged their own viciousness and profound unhappiness. It wasn’t clear, though, how the Bellardis’ domestic peace was reestablished only a few weeks after the interrupted honeymoon in Africa, or who was to blame when the expectant young wife then left the couple’s new home in Buda. The society papers maintained a deep silence about these events.

In brief, somewhere, for some people, exciting things were happening, and therefore no one could resist talking about them.

In Mohács, women liked to talk not about complications like those in their own lives, but about poor Laci’s mother-in-law, old Baroness Koháry, who had such a peculiar nature that she could never warm to a man. Well, there’s no help for it, one must be careful when picking the family you marry into.

Beauty isn’t everything; a woman doesn’t have to be an international beauty like this Elisa.

It’s not for nothing that the saying goes, you may be looking at the daughter, but you’ll be marrying the mother.

People noted with some relief when this Elisa came to her senses and returned to her abandoned husband along with her baby; but their indignation was all the greater when three years later the news reached Mohács that she had entrusted her little son to the maid and, without a word, left her husband for good. To leave such a handsome, honest man.

And what a good son.

Madzar’s mother could not imagine how there might be so much evil in the world.

A woman like that should be drowned.

As if she knew exactly what she was talking about but didn’t want to say it out loud.

Drown her in water, as you would a cat, for a woman like that has no heart.

Of course, Mrs. Madzar meant this emotional remark only as a stern warning.

Think well, my dear and only son, think carefully about whom you want to marry.

She did not say this aloud, because she was afraid of her son, who often shouted her down, hold your tongue, Mother, stop buzzing in my ear so much. Even so, Madzar never forgot the warning.

As if he deliberately made it sink to lower, deeper layers.

Once he started roaming around the sunlit streets of the city of his birth again, under the round elms that gave so little shade, beneath closed windows and lowered shutters, past the massive gates and formidable fortresslike carriage entrances, his steps accompanied by the implacable frenzy of barking dogs locked in their courtyards and aroused by one another’s rage, Madzar could have no doubts about the local scale of unhappiness.

His interest in urban matters stemmed from the character of this peculiarly settled small town, yet when he had lived abroad he could recall only the broader picture, the ingenuity of the town’s structure, the twittering of swallows under the spacious sky.

The joy offered by a secure place in the world and by the freedom of soaring.

Each quarter of the city was surrounded by a wide, whimsically winding street. If a stranger wandered into this labyrinth of separate lives, following the path of a whimsically meandering street, he would be sure to reach the heart of the quarter — a marketplace adorned with a church. Along with its five different churches, five small squares remained in old Mohács. Looking at the town from the perspective given by his twelve-year absence, Madzar began to suspect that despite the liveliness of the city’s ingenious civic plan, despite the varying architectural styles strictly separated along religious and ethnic lines, creating a diversity within the unifying whole, and despite the harmonious tenements and rhythmically proportioned blocks of barns, granaries, and stables piled together, giving the whole cityscape a certain Mediterranean sobriety and lightness, these pleasant characteristics spoke of a warlike spirit that had been dead for centuries.

Mohács’s spirit is dead.

Its earlier spirit had penetrated its walls and topography, but ever since the Turkish victory* and occupation in the sixteenth century it had barely functioned, and ever since Serbia’s rule after the Great War probably not at all. No matter from whom the Hungarians had retaken the city, it never became theirs again. Today, the Hungarian town lived on solely in the houses’ closed yards, alive with yelping dogs. It was easy to say that the city still wore on its forehead the memory of the devastating defeat there, which over the centuries had become the symbol of the final hours of Hungary’s independent kingdom. But Madzar, returning from abroad, saw it the other way around: with the help of the historical baggage he had acquired, he carried within himself the preconditions of the ancient devastation.

The experience of the catastrophes in Mohács, the shock of them, had blocked the city from understanding what had led to its calamities. And because of this unawareness, the city was vulnerable despite the passage of many centuries, to every new shock. This realization was so powerful for Madzar that it was as if he had become frightened of himself. He felt he’d been carrying his city’s characteristics within himself all along, not just the sensation of devastation but its unconscious preconditions.

In its lovely setting, the city seemed at once threatening and threatened, not as if it were spiritless but as if its spirit were dead. It could never open its mouth to speak, it never closed its eyes, nothing was alive in it except the insane loneliness of its inhabitants; it had stiffened into alertness and rejection. Whether the city turned its personal or its historical face to him, it upset his utopian ideas about social mobility and a fair organization of society.

He dismissed the thought, as he had tried to dismiss all similar thoughts, because otherwise he’d have to admit not only that he saw something of his own mentality in this city but also that he might take a good part of this mentality with him to America, and surely he would not succeed there with an injured utopia.

When he and Bellardi had met up a few weeks earlier for the first time in many years, in his joy and surprise it hadn’t occurred to him to bring up the captain’s depressing marital story, just as the captain did not ask him whether he was still single. Yet he sensed that this familiar man was wearing many more masks than was necessary, and they were far from unfamiliar; and that the reason the captain did not ask him questions was probably selfish caution, not wanting to feel a gnawing jealousy on account of an unknown woman. With the horizontal wrinkles on his forehead, the vertical grooves in his cheeks, the puffed bags under his eyes, the radiant liveliness of his countenance, and the openness of his features, Bellardi seemed at once much younger and much older than he. These features of contrasting adult characteristics on his face, which Madzar remembered from their childhood as having been finely dovetailed, seemed to have been separated by a ruthless hand.

His spirits are dead, like mine and everyone else’s. As when saltpeter invades an old wall and betrays how and out of what material the wall was built, what its capillaries drew into itself from a badly insulated foundation.

Glancing at his own face in the mirror, Madzar tried to guess what he would take with him to the New World, to see whether he had similarly dangerous features.

I’d probably give myself away, he thought, though he could not tell what secret he might reveal on the other side of the ocean.

The social gap between them was so great that as a child it had never occurred to him, not even secretly, that Bellardi might become his friend. Yet today he realized that Bellardi was probably the only person who could have been his friend. If such a thing were possible between men. Or that Bellardi might be his friend today. But from Bellardi’s viewpoint, their relationship worked differently, and had even in their childhood. Bellardi tried to create the illusion that he could bridge social differences, and, to make everyone accept the reality of this desirable illusion, he referred to Madzar several times as his best friend. Of course, with this brazen statement he only strengthened his own social position, making it appear that his origins automatically entitled him to such an unequal friendship and that it would have been truly strange if he had lacked one. He once went so far as to declare, loud and clear, that Madzar was his bosom buddy, a friend in body and soul. The other boys looked at the two of them as if they were idiots. None of them understood what Bellardi’s phrase meant exactly. It was as if Bellardi had declared Madzar his serf, responsible for his master’s bodily comfort, whose entire being including perhaps his soul was ruled by his master. Which, in the eyes of the other boys, was equal to an accusation. For quite some time, they treated Madzar as a servant of the Bellardi family.

These boys avoided Bellardi lest he imperceptibly put them under the yoke of his family, which already ruled the entire town.

Although his privileged status was part of his birthright and could not be denied, nobody knew what to expect from him or how to prepare for what he might do, except by being very cautious with him.

Bellardi was oblivious to these complications, however, and after his initial declaration of friendship with Madzar felt no need to say more. Madzar could not possibly forget the confidence Bellardi had in him.

Madzar was a heavy man, with a soul filled to the brim, a man without secrets almost to the point of tedium.

He was looking at the captain and reassuring himself that his friend was indeed a good boy. He could not pretend he did not know the less favorable aspects of Bellardi’s character, and the captain must have known this though he pretended otherwise, satisfying his longing for appearances. Once, Madzar thought, Bellardi’s embarrassing characteristics had not been embedded so obviously and deeply in his features.

He had light-brown, confidence-inspiring eyes, a finely cut, well-proportioned nose, shapely, strong, full lips above which he sported a rakish little mustache.

My dear, dear friend, he shouted thunderously from a distance. My sweet, good old pal.

He was fond of exuding such phrases, for they befit a lively disposition, full of life’s energies.

The motive for these extreme appellations was his wish to express in a single gesture both his monumental sentiments and the social distinctions he was obliged to respect, and, with that, to designate unequivocally his position in any possible hierarchy. The two adjectival signal rockets he launched made a little pop, shed a little light, then fell into the void, and the Great Hungarian Plain grew dark again.

They had barely shaken hands when he changed his tone.

Welcome, he said gently in a low voice, as if withdrawing the tone he had just used publicly and implying that this low tone was his true timbre.

At times like this, he spoke with the impersonal love of a priest, ready at every moment to share with almost anyone his most heartfelt emotions for the Almighty. Of course he never shared them; he never shared anything. Perhaps he had nothing to share. To tell the truth, he whispered in a voice full of emotion, your arrival is most opportune for a number of reasons. Whenever Bellardi hit this tone, Madzar knew from his childhood that he should stay away from him, tolerate him if he had to, but keep contact to a minimum. Now, after all these years, he also realized that this tone was not Bellardi’s but that of the Franciscan priest who from time immemorial had been the Bellardi family’s confidant and the son’s spiritual guide. Bellardi allowed no time for sulking or reticence, because with another change of tone he put the previous dissembling one into a more desirable perspective. Very soberly, he added that later they would talk more in detail about all this, au coup; they would find time for everything.

I’m certain we shall, Madzar answered, no doubt about it, but he was aware only of standing there again, in front of Bellardi, awkward and clumsy, and this made his limbs feel heavy.

Yet he could not get enough of the playacting.

There was a crack through which he gained an image and some sense of his own heavy disposition.

It was as if he were saying to Bellardi, you never fail to amaze me, when in fact it was his firm intention to demand that he stop, leave off with these tiresome and superfluous appearances, this foolish masquerade. But Bellardi, encouraged by his success, did exactly the opposite of what his friend expected. First, he took a step not toward, but sideways before his guest, coming so close as to make Madzar inadvertently recoil, not unlike a horse held short by its bridle. And then he took another step, beyond the necessary or possible, thereby issuing a challenge, a provocation.

He could not let go of his friend, patting and squeezing his solid but helpless body, which made Madzar, who carried this body on his powerful soul, blush deeply.

Don’t even hope, my friend, that the masquerade will end. Be honest with yourself, just this once. You wouldn’t like to see it end either. You’d keel over with the boredom oozing from your Protestant soul. You like it when someone plays theater in your stead. I don’t have a real face, you can see that yourself, but if somehow you had a chance to catch a glimpse of it, you’d die of fright.

I am your representative in everything you are too craven to participate in.

Perhaps you won’t hold it against me, he said, smiling at Madzar with benevolent, charming, and ironic eye beams, that I’ve disturbed your solitude so impudently. I too long for monastic solitude above all, but I can’t get along without your company, he said loudly, as if he needed this big sound to make himself utter the words.

The captain took pleasure in filing away his cruel little victories in the records of obligatory modesty and politeness.

On the contrary, replied Madzar graciously, helped somewhat by the routine politesse, I would hate being a burden to you with my importunity, and he enjoyed his lie as much as if he had spoken the truth. It did not even occur to me.

Come, come, Bellardi shouted, his face darkening for real, what are you talking about, old pal. How can you say such a silly thing, Lojzi. How can you even think such a thing, he said, and then, after a minuscule pause that took the edge off his indignation, he quickly added, I am profoundly shocked. All the while his huge eyes were flashing kindly and tenderly in the pleasure of the performance. True, he expressed a bit more umbrage with that sentence than his acting could plausibly support.

And even this ambivalence seemed intentional.

What should I say, what would I most like to do with you, he said loudly. Of course, my first choice would be to get off with you at Mohács.

He burst out with a sudden laugh.

We’d let the old ship drift away all by itself and spend the remainder of our lives in a sweet duet in Mohács, my dear. We’d listen to the constant barking of dogs, and you know very well I’d never let you go to America, he cried in the voice of a scorned lover.

He kept laughing, as a child would go on tasting the sweetness of revenge, for his very expertise in concealment allowed him to see behind every possible human hiding place.

With Bellardi, compared to Madzar, everything was the other way around. Bellardi’s huge, weak body groaned under the crushing weight of his soul.

We’d expose the mass graves, or we’d — oh, whatever the hell it was, but we’d do it, we’d realize all our old plans, he exclaimed. We’d do something utterly useful and noble. We’d support the destitute. Let’s leave it at that, he added, growing somber at his own jesting, which he also intended as a sort of gift. And now, as a gift to my dearest friend, I shall offer up a sight of my soul’s sobriety. He seemed to have drawn enough strength from himself with his irregular, solitary dalliance and now was ready to repudiate, with genuine feeling, his own noisy sounds and to end the public interrogation.

Alas, I can’t leave the boat, he said like a good soldier summing up his life situation, but we shall consume our last supper together.

What makes you think it will be the last one.

How does one know when one’s life ends.

Not only did they say things to each other they didn’t mean, but they compelled each other to analyze continuously and in several ways their deeply disingenuous words.

Conventional logic was insufficient to cope with their secret language.

Madzar was taken aback by the captain’s offer to get off at Mohács with him, though he knew it was only playing with words or, at best, only a playful thought. The captain was playing with their shared memories, with the mass graves, reaching back into dangerous depths all the way to the sweet duet and the tragedies. He wondered in the meanwhile what the captain’s intentions were, where they would be seated, where was the table set for the two of them. He noticed no such table in the dining room. From which Bellardi instantly sensed the effect of his words; he could see he had nearly gained his friend’s confidence or at least made him anxious. Madzar also found it odd that the captain spoke of dogs barking in Mohács when in fact they could hardly have heard any barks in the Bellardis’ mansion on Városház Street. Even now, he has that devilish ability to read my mind, he told himself. And since he himself had been thinking similar thoughts only moments before, standing at the railing on the upper deck, he wondered once again whether or not he was in the presence of the most significant friendship of his life.

No matter what, Bellardi always knows what I’m thinking about.

Because Madzar has always harbored suspicions toward men, he rejects him for the second time.

Perhaps this time I should make an exception.

By the time the cock crows thrice, you will have betrayed him at least three times.

How could one take seriously the proposal of the two of them spending their lives together. In dialogue between men, there is always an intention to search for a firm hold that reveals the nature of the relationship. Should I strive for a favorable position in what I say or should I just tell him that I already occupy a favorable position.

Try as he might, he can’t keep up with me.

Nevertheless, the captain reminded him of the longing and promise that every little boy wants to make come true at least once in his life, and if not as a child, at least as an adult.

They could not forget it.

Where the river current had washed out a high section of the shore, the surprisingly intact ends of human bones stuck out of the sandy wall in thick layers — skulls, shins, pelvises, and toes that along with the sand crumble into dust in one’s hand. They happened on this scene, forgotten for centuries, south of the city, about two kilometers from the tip of Gypsy Reef, even though they knew that according to historians the battle had taken place at an entirely different location, at the foot of the Majs hills. If the desperate swallows had not been protecting their nests on the collapsing chasm so fiercely, they might have tried to dig out what they thought was there, in hopes of sharing a great discovery. They encouraged each other; they were both terrified of touching human bones. This was Madzar’s third time on the Carolina going back to his parental home, and on the two earlier trips he and Bellardi had already come to understand that the more they used the memory of the bones to preserve their common past, the stronger their disappointment in each other.

There was no limit to what they could have done, but their youth was gone; they could do nothing anymore.

It was not that nothing remained of the old attraction with which they could bridge the almost historical distance between them.

They had discussed everything thoroughly; they had revived their more innocent memories almost to the verge of boredom. They left everything else untouched out of mutual consideration, and as a result they always found themselves surrounded by issues of which they did not speak.

In complete darkness, they bumped into familiar objects.

They smelled each other’s fragrance, and as the captain yanked the architect close, on the surface of each other’s hard body they both could definitely feel rejection being expressed. The two of them were shocked that despite their now obviously weaker attraction to each other the mutual rejection was still so powerful. As if they were being reminded of a former rejection, as if even prior to that mutuality they had had a common life that designated their places next to each other and condemned them to mutual impassiveness. Moreover, even as a child, Madzar had found Bellardi’s smell repulsive, though his repulsion was coupled with a fierce curiosity. He had felt it most strongly when they came out of the water together; perhaps it emanated from Bellardi’s hair or skin, which was given to shivering even in summer. He’d decided that this was something peculiar to the bodies of rulers and princes; he was smelling the odor of history.

And now he was assailed by it again, along with the repulsion and curiosity. Stale earwax, which one scrapes out of the outer ear with one’s nail when it itches, smells like this.

The captain meanwhile, despite his own embarrassment, kept patting and squeezing the architect, gleaning some joy from the strength of his rejection. Let him feel that it was his privilege. This caused an embarrassment for the architect at least as great as the joy he elicited from the captain by recognizing the aversion.

And because of their shared past, they both had a rightful claim on these genuine sensations of aversion and repulsion.

Madzar remained mostly naïve about his own feelings and therefore had barely reached the threshold of his sensual compulsions.

The captain’s behavior was comparatively unembarrassed, though with his every word and gesture he followed the gentleman’s code of etiquette, the very code he poked fun at and sometimes attacked with other words and gestures. He brought attention to something, which he had no intention of doing, and Madzar, although he perceived this, did not understand or have any feel for it.

Or rather, he knew that while superficially Bellardi always seemed to accede to every request, there was always something else he wanted. To get away from this upstream area of the great river, he was sure to keep an eye on the great exit at the delta.

He had once organized an expedition to the South Pole, but he did not include Madzar in that plan, only boys from the better families. The two of them had gone on shorter trips of discovery, though, and once on a longer one. Anyone growing up near a great river is familiar with the desire to entrust one’s light human body to the current’s immense strength.

As everyone learned later, Bellardi had run away one summer with some Serb and Italian tobacco smugglers. He had told them he was an orphan. Gendarmes brought him back to Mohács. At his father’s order, he was taken to the town hall and, exposed to the view of passersby, made to stand in the huge echoing lobby, flanked by two gendarmes with bayonets fixed on their rifles, until his father was ready to receive him.

Stop thy trembling, his father snarled as he rose from his enormous carved desk, I will not lay a finger on thee, but be sure I shall have thee flogged.

He wanted to know exactly what had happened; he asked hard questions in the interrogation, set traps, his eyes penetrating more and more deeply, lighting up every dangerous corner, and all along maintained the formal address.

Then he had his son taken to the empty city detention cell, and the gendarmes beat him with a flagpole because they couldn’t find a stick, but it was a largely symbolic beating.

He was locked up for three days and given only bread and water.

The family’s extravagant lifestyle and chaotic finances allowed for nothing else but that the son too would become a municipal or district civil servant like his father, who had been for many years magistrate of the Mohács district and very popular, given his dispassionate fairness. The son’s other choices were the armed forces or the church. Since he took God no more seriously than anything else, the young Bellardi opted for the navy, where his career ended before it began: shortly after he received his commission, he had to leave because of some matter of honor of whose details no one seemed to know anything.

He was alleged to have stolen money from a fellow officer, but this was impossible to imagine about him.

Madzar kept shaking his head at this news as if he had water in his ears, gesticulating to his mother and warning her not to dare repeat it.

In the end, Bellardi fetched up on the only luxury liner owned by the First Steamship Company of the Danube, which was struggling with serious financial difficulties. Part of the reason for this move was that his future father-in-law had a major interest in the company. In fact, Baron Koháry liked the good-looking young man more than he loved his own beautiful daughter, whom he later sent on her way with a single suitcase.

The baron was a man unhappy to the very depth of his soul who had never shown any of his unhappiness to another human being. He viewed the penniless young man with a certain pity for letting himself be ensnared so haplessly by his daughter’s beauty and dowry. Bellardi would raise his only male grandchild, which Koháry approved of with all his heart. Nor did he fail to notice that Bellardi preferred to follow his example of stern paternal advice rather than that of his own father, his flesh and blood.

The steamship company, for undisclosed personal reasons as well as others, did not easily give up the old ship. At sessions of the board of directors they gave as reason for their expensive persistence the hope that when Hungary regained the territories that so unjustly had been taken from her, she would again have an outlet to the sea and, as a result, Danube shipping would flourish anew. After Viscount Rothermere made his unsettling declarations favoring a revision of the borders of Hungary,* no one had any doubt about the matter. The situation of the merchant fleet would change, shipping would become profitable again, and therefore in the interest of the future the beautiful old liner should not be sold.

You probably wouldn’t want to dine with these people, said Madzar, fighting his blushes, and with an awkward movement of his hands tried to return the captain’s sentimental hugs.

Ever since Serbia’s bloody rule after the Great War, the people of Mohács had feared Serbs.

That leaves Chief Counselor Elemér Vay as a possible table companion, you can see him right behind my back, said Bellardi, laughing, but I have a feeling you won’t mind very much if we skip him too.

On the contrary, replied Madzar, but the gesture of dismissal did not succeed, their hands slipped together, their fingers locked involuntarily.

Anyway, I have an important assignment to carry out, Bellardi continued, and because of it, I’ll have a table set for us upstairs. I must talk to you about something in absolute confidence. Josef, he called to the old waiter who had been standing close to them all along, wir essen oben, trinken zumal ein Burgogne Chardonnay.

Madzar, plausibly, was incredulous.

An assignment, from whom, about what.

More confidential than usual, said the captain, and laughed encouragingly.

And Madzar instantly felt that he had to defend himself and apologize; he said he really did not know anyone here, he had not been born into a good enough family to have any serious connections anywhere, and while he spoke he realized how revealing and ridiculous his fear must sound to Bellardi.

Across the bridge, they reached the captain’s salon, where Bellardi usually invited valued passengers for tea or coffee, or for the sheer enjoyment of watching the landscape swim by. The compact wainscoted room was at the highest point of the ship, its windows set in a semicircle. As soon as they came inside, the landscape offered itself to them. Water and air, nearness and distance; in the gentle rhythmic rocking, all outlines dissolved, everything blended together.

The captain reached for the light switch, but the architect put a hand on his arm.

With your permission, one more moment, please.

Of course, of course, laughed Bellardi, as if he realized he had forgotten something important, his friend’s aesthetic thirst, which he, Bellardi, considered feminine whimsy; please, sit down, right there. He pointed to the cream-colored, silk-upholstered cherrywood armchair. From here, you can see all this darkness more comfortably.

Madzar did not sit down.

Along the shores of the huge river, the infinite flatland dissolved in the cool mist of evening.

The darkness endures, giggled Bellardi behind his back.

They moved forward in the darkness, but that made no change in it.

What do you mean by that, asked the architect cautiously. The captain did not reply right away.

The sun had long since disappeared behind the western horizon, leaving wild lights in the air, mad colors piled on top of long, layered strips of clouds. Incandescent oranges, yellows, melting reds, hard purples, nacreous grays radiating from inside out, every shade of gray from white to black, while a thin slice of the moon was already shining on the steel-gray crystal surface of the eastern sky.

Which they kept approaching, the ship puffing and trembling, stuttering as it were, but which they neither reached nor came closer to.

It was my dear old father’s habit to huff and puff about how the universe is mutable and only its darkness is enduring, said Bellardi in an unusually quiet tone. It wasn’t his own wisdom, he added, laughing, he was only summarizing the contents of an old letter. There is an ancient letter, you know, in the possession of Mother’s family, the wisdom comes from that letter.

Madzar wanted to ask what sort of letter and what was in it, but the waiter and the cabin boy appeared, bearing everything needed for the dinner table.

They clattered with the dishes and utensils, exchanging short instructions as they worked.

An ivory tablecloth flew up, opened, flared out, and landed flat in the semi-darkness brightened with improbable lights and colors; the Mayer boy smoothed it out over the table.

The two men kept silent and immobile in their places.

When the old waiter and the cabin boy had disappeared into the steep stairwell, the captain, with two slender wineglasses in his hand, stepped closer to Madzar.

Tell me, Madzar asked in a serious tone, in the deepening twilight that promised to be overemotional, which frightened him, do you remember the name of the Jew who had the lumberyard below the pier.

Gottlieb, you dummy, Bellardi replied, and his voice grew hesitant, quickly taking him in another direction; he concealed his surprise by pretending that the recalled memory put him under the spell of a cheerful absentmindedness. Why on earth are you asking.

Funny, but I couldn’t remember it, Madzar replied, as if he had to apologize for his question. How laughable one can become with memory lapses.

Because of his carelessness, they each knew whom the other was thinking about.

About whom they would never speak again or, more precisely, about whom they had stopped talking even back then.

I never found out, the captain continued in his more cheerful tone, did finally anything happen between you and Marika Gottlieb.

I’m serious, he said, and held out his glass with the quavering gold-blond wine.

I liked her, no doubt about it, the architect replied and gazed pensively at the wine, but we were little children. I haven’t seen her since.

I don’t understand what you mean by that.

Even though he understood very well.

Because Marika Gottlieb’s thin face did appear to both of them, though neither of them was thinking of her. Madzar wanted to keep feelings at a distance, yet he was glad he had managed with his unguarded remark to remind Bellardi of something they wouldn’t speak of.

In fact, I liked her a lot, he added so that they would go on to talk about what they had been keeping to themselves.

Well then, here’s to it, God bless you, said Bellardi, raising his glass. No doubt about it, with Marika Gottlieb our manly life is complete.

They both laughed.

Madzar was embarrassed by their shamelessly shared laughter. This too he could not take back. It was too much for him that with the laughter, instigated by Bellardi, they were sealing their past complicity; with it, they were canceling their love.

Whatever happened, whatever is happening now, the captain continued, growing serious as he made his own reference to the dark story, which Madzar had just succeeded in suppressing with his reminder — and unexpectedly he cried out dramatically, you made me very happy, my dear friend, one might say you gilded my childhood. And I am very happy now that I can have you here for a little tête-à-tête, he added quietly. I must manfully confess that to you.

To keep the emotions generated by the confession from overwhelming him, he grimaced amiably.

Madzar looked at him as at a complete stranger whom he was seeing for the first time.

Why say things like that aloud.

Let’s drink to that, let’s, exclaimed Bellardi as if he understood Madzar.

You won’t believe this from such an arch pagan as me, but I am grateful for this gift even to the Lord, the one and only Creator.

They might have laughed at this remark, but there was only silence between them.

I’d like to know what you were thinking about, said Madzar after a pause, in a more severe tone, as if these frivolous words had briefly anesthetized him.

What does it matter what I was thinking about, replied the captain, pretending to be annoyed, his tone sober. What I think, you know, is that there will be a war and we, dictated by our interests, will join it. The Germans will devour everybody, that’s what I’ve been thinking. And I’m thinking about my scandalous life, about which I’m not going to give a report. All you civilians, pardon my language, haven’t the vaguest notion of what’s going on in the depths.

Madzar did not like this turn in the conversation. What is going on in the depths, he asked amiably.

We’ll only harm ourselves if we do something openly against it, but it would be very irresponsible to jump in blindly.

Water flows in the depths, my dear Laci, nothing else.

You’re putting it mildly, Bellardi said, laughing.

As one who knew more and was ready to divulge anything.

You want to put one over on me, my good man. Maybe we should talk of the blood that will also flow.

Which, of course, to spare the other man, he’d never say out loud.

Despite his resistance, Madzar had to admit to himself that Bellardi was steering their conversation in the right direction. Perhaps it was right to talk about politics and nothing else. It is better for the captain not to share his secrets. He nodded his heavy head with the hair like armor.

That’s the reason I want to go away, you see, and the sooner the better, far away from Europe, he answered heavily and then stopped abruptly.

Somewhere it’s still possible to work, he added by way of explanation.

The project you have agreed to do here, though, you will finish, won’t you.

Yes, I shall.

It’ll probably take you into the fall, said Bellardi in a tone implying that in the most sensitive depths of his soul he wanted to understand something of the other man, or that he was weighing something.

It will probably be winter by the time I finish it.

They clinked their stemmed glasses lightly; this too was part of their declared happiness.

Madzar was now belatedly overcome by panic. He couldn’t imagine a life in which every emotion was openly named.

As if the desire for transparency were dragging him toward bottomless depths. His psychological preparedness and architectural concepts made contact at this point but remained irreconcilable. He also didn’t understand how he could have gotten so far with Mrs. Szemző. Who should stop, and where, with this compulsion for transparency. Two mature men, ridiculous, he kept reassuring himself.

I’ll never take this ship again, not me.

I can put an end to this story, very simply.

Would it have any significance if he placed emptiness behind a glass wall.

They were looking into each other’s transparent eyes.

They sipped and inhaled the fine aroma of the wine, filled with the rich, mature, sweet autumnal fragrances of a distant land. Happiness was its aroma, a fulfillment, but its flavor was tart.

Again, he wanted to change the subject quickly.

You know, I’m making some of the furniture myself, he began to explain. That’s also part of the reason why I asked about old Gottlieb. If I found the right material at his place, I could stay home for a while. But in any case I’ll probably need a few weeks in summer just for the furniture.

A few weeks in summer, Bellardi repeated pensively, his voice trailing off into an intimate distance while he absentmindedly twirled the stemmed glass between his fingers.

I’d say about two months.

God, if I could have a few weeks of summer in Mohács.

You know, I’m very excited about being able to work in my father’s workshop, which was also my grandfather’s.

All the Hungarians of Mohács are lost, you’re the last one.

I’ll do something with their tools they couldn’t possibly have imagined. They’d have said it was impossible, forbidden, shouldn’t be done.

Won’t you be needing some help, Bellardi asked.

Madzar had no response.

Please, tell me, and this time the captain turned his head away, out of decency, this doctor in Budapest, his wife, the ones you’re working for, I assume they are Jews.

Bellardi evidently did not wish to break completely with the earlier subject of their conversation.

But Madzar didn’t want to return to it.

Yes, they are.

They took a few more sips of their wine.

As if they were quietly weighing the nature and character of the confidence they had in each other and as if this were the subject of their conversation.

To get into it or not.

But you still haven’t told me, said the captain from behind his glass, as though about to make a decision, was there anything with Marika or not. It hasn’t been more than two months since I last saw that female.

That means you were at home.

It was a sad occasion, to liquidate my aunt’s inheritance. What can I tell you, judging by the characteristics of her race Marika is very pretty.

You must be joking, what could possibly have been there between us, Madzar replied, irritated.

The old Viennese waiter was making his way up the stairs again, this time with the menu. Madzar was reluctant to be drawn into matters he had managed to avoid earlier. The waiter flapped open the menu’s hard covers and with a broad gesture spread it out before them.

I am curious about your confidential message, Madzar said.

First we order, my friend. Later we’ll deal with business and politics. The captain laughed hard, showing his strong white but uneven teeth, and he imperiously poked at the top line of the menu.

If I’m not mistaken, then, you wish to talk about business and political topics, remarked the architect.

First I wish to talk about entrées and mainly about our favorite soups, my dear Lojzi. Everything else will come later.

I can’t imagine what you want to ask of me, but frankly I sense some ulterior motives.

You may not believe it, but my motives are honorable. The sword is out of the scabbard. I shall lay it out for you. We’ll play with all the cards on the table. Or maybe we’ll first see the first-course dishes before deciding on the entrées. Bellardi looked at Madzar questioningly, boastfully.

Madzar did not reply; alternately they studied the menu to avoid seeing each other and then looked up into each other’s face; it would have been hard for them to break contact completely.

Or, even more important, they both wanted to keep the other’s countenance from gaining an advantage, from deciphering the unmasked face across from him.

Only the steady puffing of the liner was heard.

The old Viennese waiter had lighted the candles on the table, stopped muttering to himself in his several languages, and now stood expectantly in his enormous worn-out black shoes and baggy black trousers that shone at the knees.

Where is Mayer, why isn’t he here, asked the captain as if in passing but in a curious falsetto.

It seems, said the old waiter in German, he had to go down to the stokers again.

Bellardi let it go, but it was obvious he did not care for this answer. It made him restless.

The candles in the three-arm silver candelabrum were burning more brightly, slowly reaching their full intensity, thus deepening the approaching night outside.

I suggest, said Bellardi after a while, that we stay away from the more ordinary dishes. Let’s have a holiday meal.

If you tell me what you call ordinary, replied Madzar, drawing out his words — he was immersed both in the menu and in all those ambiguous feelings that Bellardi’s proximity and the liner’s puffing aroused in him — I’ll be happy to follow most of your suggestions.

As if the tremendous steam power were working itself into a night in which there was neither forward nor backward, as if all that enormous effort were exerted only to be standing still.

Could it be that this confusing sensation was what grown people think about when they claim that friendship is more important than love. His heart was filled with unfamiliar anxiety and dread.

Because only now did he comprehend completely what had happened twenty years earlier.

We’re not yet thirty, yet our lives might be over.

Bellardi’s probably right, a person does not change a bit, and without change, how can there be any progress in history. For there to be progress, one should be aware at least of one’s own direction. What has happened, what is happening to me. And if there is no progress, then why am I so severe. The two great paddle wheels on a single axle are spinning in place. He knows that, of course, because he sails now with the current, now against it; he has no other choice. With the same exertion, he might be a horse on a treadle or a streetcar conductor. If there is no progress, there is neither past nor future.

Man, like swine, lies down in the first puddle, bathing all the time. This is a dyed-in-the-wool miserable man, this Bellardi, who has always had this secret, dark little penchant for conspiracy and rebellion.

What a pleasure-filled mouth he has. Perhaps every emotion is pure illusion; illusion is other people.

In which case, my experiments to objectify everything in the extreme in that psychoanalytic clinic are in vain.

It’s not the women, they are overly realistic, but the men. We are good for nothing but reproduction. We might as well be breeding stallions or even rabbits.

How could I suggest anything, do you think I know what I have in mind, the captain responded whimsically after long cogitation, shaking his head for emphasis. Well, I definitely won’t have lobster, he said, still looking at the menu, not goose liver either, nor will I order buttered escargots with Provençal herbs, no sir, but don’t expect an explanation, and I won’t have frog’s legs.

It seemed as if he was trying to say that in the approaching warlike situation his own military high spirits would be at least as useless as the architect’s civilian austerity and seriousness.

At least this is how Madzar read the information.

The old waiter leaned closer and with his serving cloth began nervously to slap different parts of the table, which rudely disturbed the two men.

Please, stop that slapping.

Wir haben alles, müssen Sie mir glauben, wirklich alles frisch eingekauft. I swear to it.

Don’t swear to anything, Josef, said the captain, and raised his hand to cut him off. Today, I’d prefer something less refined, less cooked for a an appetizer. Let me call your attention to the fish-roe salad, he said, clicking his tongue, or perhaps champignons à la grecque. Yes, I’ll start with that.

Sehr wohl, sehr wohl, said the old waiter, bowing several times, ass you gentlemen vish.

His importune loquaciousness did not go well with the profound, genuine humbleness with which he kept bowing, always ready to be of service. The misshapen rebel whose time had not yet come but who already held all the strings in the conspiracy.

As if he were the one who controlled and guided Bellardi’s behavior.

Darf ich doch sofort nachgiessen, den gnädigen Herren, he asked nervously, and kept bowing with his entire body as though he had to correct his earlier mistake if he wanted to regain control of the situation.

That’s right, that’s right, answered the captain amiably and totally inattentively, die höchste Zeit, tun Sie das.

For the first time Madzar closely observed the waiter’s figure.

The enormous heavy body that all his life the man had been dragging up and down the stairs on legs riddled with varicose veins. As if despite all indications that he was unsuited for this profession, his parents had sent him to become a waiter, and he had spent his entire life using the same method of obligatory dissimulation that Bellardi and the other gentlemen he had to serve also used. Bowing low to fill their glasses, and with his free hand waving his serving cloth in all directions, he explained how the fish roe was prepared.

They take the roe of lean Danube fishes, this is important to know, not the roe of predatory fishes, never, as your excellencies must be aware, because they are much heavier. Their eggs often smell of silt, not pleasant, while the eggs of plant-eating fish have only a slight scent, sans odeur mauvaise.

The creased-up wrinkles that once had been plump with fat were now parched; they flapped and slapped on his neck and his face. He rehearsed the information in a bored nasal voice, and one could not be sure that he was not parodying with his accent the vocal mannerisms of mildly crazed Viennese aristocrats, which would have been a great impudence on his part. At any rate, he behaved as if he had no intention of imposing a decision on the fine gentlemen yet could barely disguise how bored he was talking to them.

Our chef — and the honorable architect must unconditionally understand this — is unerring in such delicate matters. He adds milt, you see, sir, I’m sure you know what I mean, not much, about a fifth of the roe’s weight; it is said to be beneficial for virility. Then he splashes it generously with lemon juice, adds a bit of grated lemon peel, lets it sit on ice for about an hour, while the sourness of the lemon tones down the harshness of the fish eggs, which is as it should be, gentlemen, bitterness sometimes settles on top of bitterness, as we all know from life, and then he sprinkles it with coarse-ground pepper, tosses in finely cut red onion, crushed garlic, salts it lightly, that’s important, not too much salt, and, while very slowly dripping olive oil into it, he stirs it until the last drop of oil is absorbed. I highly recommend it. We serve it with hot, caraway-seeded pumpernickel toast.

Bravo, Josef, well done, the captain cried. Go ahead, Josef, bring it. I don’t think you can choose anything else. I’ve already ordered the appropriate wine for it too, for I am nothing but sheer foresight, you see, he said, laughing, and of course I’ve just revealed that I tricked you.

He literally guffawed.

Madzar was not fully present in this moment; his attention was arrested by the intricately detailed words; he disregarded the subject of the speech, let it pass by his ears. He was watching Bellardi’s strong, crooked canine teeth, glittering in his guffaw, and he could easily imagine the man’s brutishness as he might tear into someone’s lips. The face itself was a trap. An empty surface on which the features may be rearranged, thus every moment gives the impression of novelty. And the almost yellow wine had a personality, a stratification. Despite its perfect dryness, it left a sweet memory on the surface of the tongue, while its spices widened and inundated the palate; its various flavors prepared one for the tasting.

You won’t regret it. Bellardi laughed, and this time it frightened Madzar. But he had no choice now. He was becoming lost among Bellardi’s many faces; perhaps the wine had gone to his head. Swimming in the wine’s multiple flavors, he had failed to gauge its strength.

As soon as they were served, with quick, eager little movements the hungry captain began to spread his Greek mushrooms on the toasted French rolls. Greatly enjoying watching each other eat, they kept spreading and then chomping on their various breads and drinking quite a bit in a leisurely but steady rhythm. Their chomping was rather noisy, not very proper; to make it a bit quieter Bellardi explained to Madzar how finely chopped onion was simmered in olive oil and then bombarded with mushrooms cut in small cubes. In the fall, and Madzar will have a chance to see this for himself, it is even more delicious because then they make the dish with cèpes, the woodland mushrooms Hungarians call the gentleman’s mushroom.

Which obviously meant he would want Madzar on board with him again in the fall, would like to chomp on bread in his company, talk to him with his mouth full, digest and drink with him; he kept pouring now, perhaps to get drunk, let out huge farts, never become sated; there was nothing to misunderstand here.

From the moment Bellardi had been hastily taken out of the school on Koronaherceg Street and hastily transported to Trieste, Madzar no longer had a bosom buddy, no one he could count on as his friend.

Bellardi’s absence turned into a very peculiar lack. Something was missing, which Madzar did not consider important.

Something of Bellardi returned every summer, a now strange figure who always had something to brag about, something to show off his exceptional qualities, and to whom, sometimes for whole days, sometimes only for a few hours, Madzar managed to find his way back. On these occasions he was glad he had never taken their friendship seriously, because he sensed ever more palpably the distance growing between them, and no matter how close they found themselves, this drifting apart was unforgettable. He lived with this estrangement as one fortunate enough to have escaped a great danger, because he no longer had time for puerility.

Now, because of Bellardi’s unguarded words about the future, that in the fall Madzar would have woodland mushrooms, the real pain felt at the long-ago loss returned.

He did not know what to think of this; for the first time in his life, it confused him to his core.

Maybe you don’t remember, he said loudly in a stifled, strange, trembling voice, as one calling back one last time from his childhood, desperately asking for help, I left my best leather slingshot at your house.

Something similar now happened to the captain too; it was very rare that something truly surprised him, but this was as if some rebuke or old rumor had caught up with him, accusing him of theft.

You forgot your what, he asked, shocked and threatening. I don’t remember a slingshot.

This hurt Madzar because he could see that Bellardi truly did not remember, the louse. But somehow he quickly awakened from his surprise that Bellardi couldn’t even remember this foul deed of his. He had the nerve not to return one of my best slingshots and he doesn’t even remember doing it.

Don’t be angry, I beg your pardon, it just happened to pop into my mind.

Sounds ridiculous, but I remember exactly, even today, where I put it that afternoon, he said, looking for his grown-up voice, placating.

You had a picture book, Hungarian Noblewomen, and I put the slingshot on top of it.

You mean I didn’t give it back, asked Bellardi with a modicum of obligatory remorse. It was as though he had a vague memory, after all, of Madzar putting his leather slingshot on the book. Just goes to show you that one always harms one’s fellow even though one is unaware of it, he said, indulgently self-critical.

What stupidity.

Madzar remembered well how he had to be on his guard against Bellardi at such junctures.

Bellardi’s lies were always convincing, he wove them out of modesty and arrogance, a fabric not familiar to Madzar; he was always late in realizing he’d been taken in again, and that it was best to be quiet about the whole matter.

You know, even if you did leave it with me, when I went home to Buda for my first vacation and not Mohács, I couldn’t find my old things in our new apartment. And I wouldn’t have dared ask about them. I imagine they simply threw it out along with my things.

Imagine, I could find none of my stuff. Nothing at all, he added after a short silence.

Forgive me, I really don’t know why I brought it up, why it popped into my mind.

Come on, what’s there to forgive, please don’t apologize.

You think you could offend me with something, he asked, flashing his teeth and pouring more wine.

This time only into his own glass, however, as if accidentally forgetting about the other man. There’s nothing in the world, you couldn’t offend me with anything. But when the mushrooms turn red, he continued relentlessly, they sprinkle them with lemon juice, salt them, throw in some bay and freshly ground pepper, a dash of saffron wouldn’t hurt either, that’s what makes it so crazily yellow.

Madzar was paying no attention.

Yet he heard that the dish was then cooked gently for ten minutes, uncovered, no lid. He was thinking about slingshots, that there were rubber and leather ones. It is cooled on ice, auf Eis sozusagen abgeschreckt. The leather ones were more valuable, and he saw Bellardi put the bottle back into the ice bucket. Of course, he preferred coarsely chopped black olives, he was saying.

He always needed some advantage, not a big one, just enough to feel a bit of gratification. It would suffice to drink more than the other man, even if only by one gulp.

For him, his life on the river is forever the Mediterranean, forever the Adriatic. The black olives are tasty too.

Forever, said the architect jovially, who began to pay attention when he heard this pathetic word.

Go ahead, laugh, my dear friend, forever, that’s right, forever, and I mean this seriously, said Bellardi, and his voice trembled. After all, he had deployed the concept of forever to regain Madzar’s attention, so that they could laugh together at his real sentimentality, which tied him to the other man and which, in this way, he was still willing to display.

Do you have any idea what a yellow night in Cyprus is like, he asked, growing subdued.

I’ve never been to Cyprus.

How would you know, even if you had been there.

Go ahead then, tell me about it.

You live in another world, a completely different world.

Perhaps that’s why I’m still curious.

You’re going home, let’s say with all due respect you are on your way home with your accidental Greek lover. What home. What you’ve got is a room, another fleabag hotel where everything is sticky and smelly. But at least on high the stars are yellow, the size of your fist. You’re only a lousy little sailor man, but that, my dear little Lojzi, with all your big ideas, you will never understand. A Hungarian who no longer has a sea, because they took his last lousy little sea away from the lousy little Hungarian.

You’re one big nobody. You have half an hour with your lover, and his arm has the fragrance of fried fish.

While he spoke, he kept staring at Madzar’s hand as it lay on the table. He looked at it as if his gaze was stuck to it.

And the cicadas are screaming in your ears, you can’t hear yourself think. That’s how things are, my friend.

As if he were waiting for the other man to raise a big fist and knock him down.

Madzar could see that on the gleeful face the long laugh lines had flattened out because Bellardi could not say what he wanted to say.

He had the feeling they were sailing into the empty night on Bellardi’s face, and he truly did not understand him. On the surface of his face, unfamiliar faces kept turning up, and Madzar could barely follow them. This is a given quantity, he thought, self-satisfied, as if he had indeed discovered something. He also saw what the other man was expecting from his fist. Bellardi’s expression was changing so rapidly that its various qualities were impossible to track. He could no longer weigh whether he should accept this behavior or not, whether what was happening would turn out well or whether he should reject it.

The essence of the other man was radiating directly into him.

I didn’t know stars were so important to you.

Now you do, Bellardi replied in a hostile tone, and he quickly lifted the wine bottle from the ice bucket.

To be proper, this time he refilled Madzar’s glass first.

What could be more important for a sailor than the stars.

From this point on, he could say anything at all, since he had that one-gulp advantage. He laughed bitterly, as if he were using his self-pity against the other man. But who’s a sailor anymore, he said. To you I don’t mind admitting I’ve become a common maître d’hôtel in a flea-bitten hotel.

I see the wine’s got to you, gone to your head. Or is it melancholy.

As much as you’d like to deny it, we Hungarians are a lost people, my dear Lojzi. You still believe, my pigeon, that you have something you can take with you to America and that’s how you’ll rescue yourself for the future. I don’t give a shit whether you go or stay, Lojzi, and don’t think I’m envious. You’ll pack your suitcase very nicely and discover when you open it that it’s empty. We are empty, my Lojzi, we’ve been drained of our blood. From here, you can take nothing with you except your emptiness.

Come on, you’re talking nonsense.

That’s what I was trying to tell you with those dumb yellow stars.

Maybe I’ll hire a guardian for you.

I shit on the stars too, including yours. You can take this as a manly confession, but I don’t give a shit about that either.

I really don’t understand what this is, maybe some kind of weltschmerz.

Their voices deepened and they spoke more and more quietly; the deepened voice of one made the other deepen his voice too.

Well, if you don’t understand, then you don’t.

After that, not another word.

They ordered different soups to keep their feelings for each other from being so alike. In small matters, being different means a lot.

The captain had the so-called pale fish soup that, true to its name, was given color only with finely grated carrots, turnips, fennel, and celery.

It looked back at him, pale bluish green, from the white soup bowl.

He can’t possibly think I’m complaining. An obdurate German like him is always more calculating and levelheaded than that.

Madzar ordered chicken soup for himself.

Na ja, das wird etwas deftiger, the old waiter clicked his tongue upon hearing the order. Unser berühmt, berüchtigter potage royale.

Bellardi, revived by his sense of gratification, explained as they spooned their soups that if this interests you, they make this famous, infamous soup by cooking a good-size hen on a slow fire, along with various vegetables, until it is very soft and tender. Our chef has a big pot of it on the stove from early morning on, which he moves to the edge to make room for other pots. When it’s done, they lift out the chicken and strain the broth until it’s clear; the meat on the chicken should be falling off the bones; they cut it in pieces and grind it up along with the vegetables. Then they put all of it back into the broth, along with a generous amount of slivered almonds, you can taste them in it.

He felt a kind of serenity, as though he had had a good cry on the other man’s shoulder.

Oh, so it’s the almonds, then, that’s right.

They also add a butter roux to it, and then simmer it for a bit.

Now all Madzar had to do was watch the other man struggle with his sobbing.

To look at the imposing uniform, the furrowed, strong face, the thickly drawn straight eyebrows, the traces left by the sun on translucent milky skin, the thin edge of the prominent long nose, and the way his face constantly changed in the hovering candlelight. The way he traced his explanation with his fine fingers, making it easy to see how familiar he was with culinary activities; the way he gesticulated, lost in the details, and explained things while holding back his impending sobs.

You’re not serious about this, are you, don’t tell me you know how to cook.

Why should I deny it, Bellardi laughed amiably. I could be a ship’s chef anytime, though in the first weeks I’d probably miscalculate the amount of ingredients you need to order.

You don’t have to deny it. It’s just that I’d never have guessed.

You mean because it doesn’t go with my manliness.

Nonsense, why would I think that, Madzar answered with a question, but he was thinking that within this mature man, considered very manly even as a boy, this man he had vied with to be most at home with the myriad details of the world, to know them in greater depth and objectivity, there surely dwelled a woman too. It seemed as if Bellardi were carrying all the Odescalchi duchesses within him, and not only with his contrived, polished manners. The face of Bellardi’s mother showed through in his face; he had his sister’s milky skin and sharp nose; and some of his manly features he inherited from his aunt. That aunt was an old maid, almost completely penniless, whom fate had sent to Mohács for a while but then she could not afford to move elsewhere. It was to her that Bellardi returned every summer from Trieste, until he started going to her parents in Buda.

The best chefs in the better hotels are all men, Madzar said.

If I can put your mind at ease, if you’d like me to put your mind at ease, replied the captain, laughing, I’ll tell you that I’m most comfortable preparing outdoor dishes. And you know yourself that that is truly man’s work.

If only because of the fire.

Roast beef, roast mutton, those are delicious dishes.

And so is slambuc, you know, noodles cooked in broth or water with potatoes, then baked, not to mention knuckle of veal, goulash, tripe, chowder.

Yes, chowder. Between you and me, chowder would be my main attraction.

They changed wine for the brandied snipe, listed on the menu as bécasse flambée.

It was getting late. The ship was to dock at Mohács at half past eleven in the evening.

Madzar did not want to look at his watch but he sensed the time approaching when Bellardi would have to leave the table to give orders preparatory to docking. And with that everything would be over between the two of them. Yet he no longer wanted these flat, embarrassing conversations. There didn’t seem to be time for Bellardi to carry out his confidential mission. While they had been dining, they could hear the helmsman’s commands as well as the shoveling of coal in the boiler room coming through the open brass cylinder of the communication flue; and those below could hear their conversation or at least snatches of it. Occasionally, Bellardi appeared to want to say something to the men. At the corner of his mouth and in the deep furrows on his forehead there played a kind of childlike or perhaps grown-up affected gravity; Madzar could see the high-minded, religious boy scout as well as the deeply disappointed man. He hoped this would break the icy silence between them, which could not be warmed with words. But he hoped in vain. The upright boy scout meant to do something good but did not do it. And the man who was disappointed in everyone did not make the confession of his life after all. The old waiter kept turning up to pour more of the simple Szekszárdi that, with its slight acidity and rough aftertaste, went well with the venison.

He came with his whistling breath.

The cabin boy did not return to help the old man collect the dishes.

With his whistling breath, he kept shifting the two men’s intended intimacy to different dimensions. Or he was busy with the desserts; in the end they both ordered baked peaches.

Large peeled and halved peaches, which out of season were fished out of a jar of preserved fruit, filled with finely grated gingerbread and, in a well-buttered pan under a thick layer of marzipan, cooked to a pale red.

Bellardi was going to order a third wine for this. Madzar parried the offer; he would stay with the Szekszárdi. Which was clearly not to the captain’s liking; it seemed to hamper his self-realization. He did not voice his dissatisfaction perhaps because by then they were both quite under the influence or at least pretended to be. They grew heavy, genuinely weary of words. They once again became rather bored with each other; or rather, they each gave this name to the icy calm from behind which they observed each other’s strangeness.

They pretended to be staring ahead or looking out into the motionless night in which the river gave signs of its existence only by sounds. The insult suffered by one of them inevitably offended the other, and so the muteness did not seem vacant.




By the Summer of ’57


It was as though I could hear again the faint, even banging on the rear walls of the cellars.

He was telling me about it as we stood on the platform at the end of our car in the speeding train; he told the story as I remembered it too.

There was cannon fire, with everything booming and trembling; mortars that made the ground heave; the impact of shells nearby, explosions far away or very close that seemed to make the building above us look as if it were shaking its head; blasts of explosions from which the walls seemed to lean away or somehow hide, while in the vaulted parts of the cellar the candles went out or their flames became eerily elongated; rattling and barking bursts of machine guns and submachine guns, now shorter, now longer; excited monologues and leisurely dialogues. Yet, easily distinguishable from these sounds and despite them or perhaps together with them, one could hear the continuous, regular sound of hammering as people wielding pickaxes, chisels, and hammers were breaking down cellar walls, simultaneously on both sides.

He told me how they managed to reach the Kilián Barracks, which was under constant fire. People broke through to our house from a cellar on Eötvös Street; from there, passing under several buildings, one could get to Szófia Street.

By dawn, we were out of the mousetrap.

This is how I learned — from him on the train, quite by chance, while the inrushing wind puffed up the unbuttoned shirt on his chest — that on that particular night not just in our building and not only in the neighboring buildings but all over Budapest people were opening up an underground labyrinth.

By the summer of ’57, however, one remembered nothing of this, or at least no one spoke of these matters. Everyone was responsible for erasing their personal memories. Or maybe I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. It was strange to listen to him above the infernal clattering of the train wheels, and to stare through his open shirt at his razor-sharp lean brown body. But I’d probably have told others the story the same way as he was telling it to me, free of emotion, as if he were modestly defending himself from his own sentimentality or as if he were telling the story to himself, without self-pity. We were hurtling into an unknowable night. He must have known that I was familiar with the core of the story. A few words sufficed to remind us that we had met once before; a shy blink was enough to ascertain what the other thought of these things. This was the older boy who on that memorable early morning had stopped me on Podmaniczky Street and asked me where we were going, and I had told him to Glázner’s for bread, the one the nice woman called down to from the second floor.

She had called him Pistike.

When with the ammo box on his shoulder he had unexpectedly leaned toward me and was so close to my face in the darkness that he flooded me with his mild breath, I felt I had been caught doing something wrong.

We had exchanged only a few words.

His speech was not very refined. Still, I felt I should stay with him so I could fight too.

As if preparing for some peaceful celebration or festivity, bright lights were shining from the windows of the upper floors.

At the same time, the attraction frightened me, because it was as though I had a view of myself as another figure, more beautiful and more sharply drawn, and because of that I could not possibly part from him. Until then I had been but a shadow, but now I had before my eyes the body itself. As if staying with him depended not on my cowardice or courage but on his beauty. Despite the fact that in those days I was interested in many things but not in beauty. Somehow, it was easier then to look beyond people’s ugliness or beauty. In the general turmoil one’s eyes searched more for signs and peculiarities of character; that’s what seemed important. This boy was dangerous; one should be cautious with him, even fear him. It was as if I had to be afraid of myself. I did not want anything irrevocable to happen to me; I walked on; but after a few steps, I wanted to look back, and that is how my leaving became irrevocable.

Even though I too could have lugged ammo on my shoulder.

Which in the language of feelings meant that it would have been better, after all, for me to stay with him. The situation of the street could be gauged in a second.

Their ammo dump was in the onetime concierge’s booth in the building opposite; from there they carried the ammo up to the roof for the sharpshooters. For days people on the radio had been talking of snipers, who did not stop until the final cease-fire was established among the Russians, the government, and the rebels. The rebels chose firing positions that bullets from the street could not reach. Tank barrels could not be raised to such a steep angle, so from a roof the rebels could control an entire street. Buildings were destroyed by cannon fire from far away, or Russian tanks fired until every support beam and wall underneath had been blown out, when the roofs, along with the rebels’ firing positions, crashed to the lower floors.

Nevertheless, important transportation hubs remained in rebel hands.

Just such a battle must have raged here the night before, and the Russians, unsuccessful in their efforts, retreated with their cannons to the basilica. But I had barely reached the pillaged corner, where the contents of the former photo store with all its furnishing and equipment had spilled out on the sidewalk and glass mixed in the debris was creaking under our feet, when I was already forgetting my stupid wish to stay with that boy. I gave up the idea of fighting and with it I also gave up any moral superiority. I was on my way to get bread, and the more important question was how to cross the street and who’d have the courage to go first. Even without aiming accurately, from the basilica the Russians could fire into any part of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Road; a careless step or movement in the early morning darkness would be enough to set them off.

By the summer of the following year, however, I couldn’t even remember on what day this happened and at first had no idea from where I knew this boy.

Maybe it happened on Sunday, but probably on Monday, at dawn on October 29.

For a short time, standing near the train toilet, we tried to figure out when we had met. Sunday, he exclaimed, because the bakers didn’t work over Saturday-Sunday night.

I already had my hand on the toilet door handle — that’s where we met again, on the speeding train, in front of the toilet.

Definitely not on October 30, because that day I’d never confuse with any other, not even accidentally. That was the day of lynching, with riffraff loose on murderous rampages everywhere in Budapest. And I don’t think he meant to remember or to remind me of anything in particular; he began to talk just to ease his embarrassment.

In fear that he might involuntarily have exposed himself to me and I might inform on him to the police.

Even among the rebels, most of them are sleazebags.

I didn’t quite understand why he called them sleazebags, but in fact I was an eyewitness; I could testify against him anytime.

That summer, normal people no longer talked about the events of the previous autumn, and certainly not about what kind of people the rebels might or might not have been. The rebels were no longer spoken of. For a while, I was grinning in embarrassment that I had initiated such a conversation right by the train toilet and was ready to listen to such an unpleasantly candid recitation. What did he want with this story. He was trying to figure out whether I was a provocateur and I was wondering whether he was an informer. At times like this you can feel in the corner of your mouth the unpleasant twitching of the other person’s distrust. True, we were talking in very low tones, the train was rattling underneath us, and we were on an open platform, children were asleep inside, piled on one another, and, their jaws open, the German nurses or whoever they may have been were dozing off in their compartments. We were in the charge of Sister Klára, an older woman with very observant eyes who paid particular attention to me. I could see she wasn’t watching me so much because I spoke a little German, but she watched me everywhere and whatever I was doing. I was anxious about her attention. These nurses wore gray uniforms with white collars and white aprons; the small gray caps on their heads had a large cross with red borders.

Nobody could hear what we were talking about.

Another reason it was inadvisable to talk was that it seemed better not to know about things that someone else knew. I had no way of knowing the things he didn’t talk about. And maybe that was the reason we couldn’t stop talking. With every word, our knowledge of each other accumulated, and that’s why we had no choice but to trust each other.

It was as if we were mutually forcing our secrets on each other.

Later, we urinated together, which he initiated.

He said, fuck, we were already buddies forever, weren’t we. Why would we be ashamed of showing our cocks to each other.

There was some profound truth in this because, thanks to our jabbering, we had instantly lost our independence.

Whenever he said something concerning which he counted on my confidence, I had to reciprocate by saying something with which I would gain his. I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t urinate with anybody and certainly not because of my cock. This was the hardest thing, to trust each other, to entrust him with something secret that would make life riskier than it already was. Because you had the feeling you were becoming somebody’s friend not of your own free will but because of a compelling necessity, and that is not a pleasant feeling at all. Or as if you were flaunting your own candor and confidence so that you could appease the other person or bring him to his knees with his voluntarily accepted vulnerability. This kind of chumminess could be nauseating. But now, the train and the insane journey had somehow lifted or torn us out of the conventional, shadowy world of compulsions and unpleasantnesses, had somewhat lessened the force of its strict regulations.

The train was taking us on a vacation so exceptional that we could not know in advance when it would end or even where exactly we would spend it. Everything would be decided in Dresden, where they might put us on a different train or not; some kids might be taken to the sea, others to the mountains.

Sister Klára talked of these things in big generalizations, as if she herself was not quite certain of them.

In brief, although the general emergency condition continued in uncertainty, no authority or person could come up with surprises, at least until we reached the border.

We were still clattering across the landscapes of our country; our train didn’t stop at any stations but sped through them, blowing its whistle, or stopped for long periods in open areas. A special train illuminated by pale lights in the sweltering summer night. We were truly free on the train.

When the train suddenly braked and stopped in an open field, the night around us, resounding with crickets, seemed to pulsate.

Or if we were not quite free yet, we would be somewhat free out there, beyond the border.

That year, the sizzling summer had burst on us suddenly just as the school year ended.

The official notification said that one should report at such and such a time to the departure hall of East Station; having to be in the departure hall was itself a good sign. Assembly at train number 2; length of stay abroad undetermined; group passport in conformity with ticket of participation. Didn’t understand a word of this. The only difference in our papers was that some had to report to train number 1 or 3; I had to go to number 2. But nobody knew what this meant or how a ticket of participation would turn into a group passport. I had never been abroad. It felt as if I were going to Paris to see my mother, who of course was not expecting me, was not in the least interested in me, and whom I did not even remember; I didn’t even know whether she was still living in Paris or if she was alive at all.

I yearned, I thirsted for the sea because abroad meant not only my mother but also infinity.

The two distant objects of my yearning had somewhat blended together the night before my trip, and because of that, like a child, I developed a temperature and fell asleep at the table, my head buried in my arms. As if along with the sea, I might have my mother again too. Or if I couldn’t, I’d be given an even larger body of water, one unknown to me but whose grandeur I would remember. Nobody knew of this pipe dream of mine, just as I had to keep secret that I had a temperature. They might have noticed, though, that I was paler and even more reticent than usual. Nínó felt my forehead. I was still shivering in the rapidly warming morning as we hurried to the railway station with Ágó.

In the huge, glass-covered sunlit station several thousand children and even more relatives were thronging and grumbling. Since my grandmother had died nobody had kissed me, nobody had touched me, nobody had hugged me. Beautiful Ágó and I could not stand each other. I did not have to fear tenderness from him; he would definitely not have noticed that I had a fever. He did not care much about anybody but himself. Just then he was preoccupied mainly with his ancient Mercedes Nürnberg, left parked in the blazing sun, which he claimed had been made especially for Pope Pius and in which for days the radiator water had been coming to a boil.

As soon as we set foot in the station, the sight of the crowd made him even crosser, he mentioned his car again, and my yearning had to subside, perhaps my temperature too. In the throng there was no longer room for promises made to individuals. I knew what I could expect; the collective dread would continue. Neither of us felt like wading into the crowd; I set down my suitcase at my side. It would have been better to be sick and stay home. Who could have known that the children’s vacation operation in East Germany would be so enormous. We were counting on being offered some privileges to cope with our problems.

Ágost kept looking around to see whom he could turn to in the crowd, wondering what he should do among so many disgusting human beings.

The glass-covered part of the station was completely empty that morning; the usual traffic had been redirected to the outer tracks. Only three long trains stood on the indoor tracks, but the police had cordoned off the way to them. Even the railroad workers couldn’t tell the hysterical relatives where these trains were going, or maybe they were not allowed to say. It seemed there was no information to be had from anyone. Ágost did not move; he stood like a statue. I asked people what was happening here, what was supposed to happen to us. Only people who had registered earlier could cross the police cordon, which meant people who had turned over their participant’s tickets at the table where the crowd bunched up and everybody was shouting. A child’s name would be looked up and checked off on a list, then the child’s papers would not be returned, and instead they gave the child a number, whereupon the boy or girl had to say good-bye to the accompanying adults.

The German sisters practically tore the smaller children away from their relatives or escorts and pushed and shoved them along with their luggage across the cordon, from where they staggered to their trains, mainly by themselves, while the sisters kept yelling after them in German, there, not that way, the other track. These were stern, disinterested women, though some gently smiling deaconesses were among them.

If you didn’t understand German, you couldn’t understand anything of the chaos, of the German commands echoing through the huge station.

The little ones were bawling, did not want to be taken from their families, did not want the language of this other chaotic world. Parents and relatives tried to explain things to the children, waved good-bye to them, and implored the shouting, impassive women who were urging the children on and trying to calm them, but no matter what they said or explained, the way the nurses stuck to their orders seemed ominous and incomprehensible in this emptied-out railway station.

From the railway people one could learn at least that the three long trains had arrived the night before from Dresden and would probably return, as they put it, to their home base. And there something would happen, they explained patiently, because passenger trains of this length usually did not run on domestic routes — they would be rearranged, we’d be transferred to other trains, some of the cars would be detached — and then we’d continue our journey. The adults were running around discussing things, showing their papers to one another; maybe somebody else could find some secret and decipherable sign or cull something intelligible from them, something promising. The excitement was understandable, given that the adults were being asked to relinquish small children in their care without knowing where the children were headed or for how long.

The echoing German words probably also contributed to the general excitement: that something like this was being done again by Germans, that Germans were once again free to do anything they pleased.

When we’d been given our participant’s tickets at school, they’d told us we’d learn all the necessary details at the train station. But the German nurses and sisters pretended not to hear the questions or did not understand what was being asked in this stupid foreign language. At best, one could presume they had good intentions toward the children; one certainly could not see it. And most people were rather afraid of asking the Hungarian policemen; when someone did, the policemen merely shrugged their shoulders, they didn’t know any more than the questioners. The trains were taking orphans and bombed-out children somewhere, though the official language no longer permitted these innocent words, just as it had been forbidden, since March, to utter, even by accident, the word revolution. Jails and internment camps were full, reprisals against the uprising of the previous autumn had entered their most vicious stage, and people were determined not to let their mouths betray them; if they had managed to survive until now, they weren’t going to make a wrong move and risk everything. Anyone talking to a policeman had to invent a whole other language, taking into account that the very act might be considered suspicious by people standing around. Everyone was still afraid that a misunderstanding might result in a lynching, as had happened to some secret policemen on the street in the last days of October and to anyone whom the riffraff declared was a secret policeman.

Newspapers were reporting that our sister countries, as part of their summer vacation campaign, had offered to take children who “live in broken families” or “whose housing problem is not solved.” What a laugh. Although one could appreciate that they were trying with these unnatural formulas to avoid certain locutions. The official version decreed that it was hostile propaganda and punishable slander to make any statement or allegation that the Russians had conducted air attacks against Budapest and had helped their troops fighting in Budapest’s streets with bombs. The mere suggestion that the Russians might have bombed the city would suggest that not only had they smoked out the rebels from their hiding places but, in complete disregard of international rules of warfare, had not spared the civilian population. Yet the high number of dead and seriously injured, or of destroyed apartments, couldn’t be denied, and the numbers passed by word of mouth could not be explained as having been caused by street fighting, the dimensions of which were known. This is why normal words could not be used when speaking aloud.

Nevertheless, when we children talked to one another, the first question we’d ask was always whether the other one was an orphan or one whose family had been bombed out of its home.

That way, one knew right away who had had help getting into the vacation program.

I said I was an orphan so that at least here I wouldn’t be looked on as a privileged child. I couldn’t tell anybody that my mother had abandoned me for a woman and my father had been done away with by his comrades.

While I was going around looking for information, I noticed a boy who seemed familiar to me, though I had no idea where in hell I’d known him from, picking up his suitcase.

It was similar to my yellow suitcase.

He started off as if resigned to throw himself into the crowd bunched up in front of the platforms. I saw why he did this. Earlier he had seemed determined not to; no, he would not cross the police cordon. As if that meant walking voluntarily into a trap. He’d rather not go on this vacation. Then he decided that in the end it was best to put the whole thing behind him as soon as possible. Nobody went with him. He hadn’t noticed me then, and I had no way of knowing what he was afraid of, or why he thought it better to get on the train. It was as though on his face and in his bearing I could follow all my feelings, all my disgust, all my fears and anxieties. Perhaps my relatives had insisted on my going on this vacation so they could at last be rid of me. I suspected that I’d wind up in an institution from which there would be no return. They’d take my name away again and this time I’d be given a German name. I did not understand what was waiting for me or why the grown-ups were so unsuspecting.

Maybe they were not unsuspecting but, rather, party to this lousy show.

Then it meant that we were being taken away the way the Turks used to take away rounded-up children to raise them to become janissaries. I so surprised myself with this association of ideas that I suddenly had to look up at Ágost, who was barely taller than I was, which I always forgot. For some time then, I had been made to wear his used clothes. His gaze passed absentmindedly over my face. I wanted to attract his attention with something, to say something quickly so I would see on his face whether there was a conspiracy or we were actually going on vacation, in which case I could get over my persistent anxiety. The station was reverberating with the insane hubbub of the children and their families, and an impassive female voice on the public address system went on repeating, probably for hours, the same few sentences.

Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks, outside the departure hall. Departure hall. Parents and relatives, relatives of children participating in the vacation operation, operation, are requested to leave the departure hall, departure hall, as soon as the children have reported in with the officials, officials. Cials. Your attention, please. Please. Ease. From tracks 3, 5, and 7, special trains are departing, trains are departing. Regularly scheduled trains depart from the outer tracks. Outer tracks. Racks. Acks.

I was racking my brain, where could I have known this boy from and from where could he have gotten a yellow suitcase just like mine. But I did not remember where I knew him from. Nothing came to mind. My suitcase might have been used more; its yellow cowhide had darkened more than his had. More precisely, even my suitcase wasn’t mine, or anyway I had nothing of my own. I had nothing and nobody, and that is why I didn’t feel I had something from which I could be torn away.

If they take me away, well, they’ll take me away.

I told Ágost he could leave me there, he could go, no point in waiting longer. He should go and change the water in his car radiator. I’d manage by myself. I meant this as some kind of bold, manly gesture but, in fact, the boy I knew from somewhere made me do it. Because of the earsplitting noise Ágost did not understand what I had said, and he answered something I didn’t understand. I was impatient, eager to take off after the boy.

Ágost was shouting that as a going-away present he wanted to give me his pen.

This stopped my breath. His offer strengthened my suspicion that I was facing a final farewell. The pen was an expensive one; he was searching for it in the inner pocket of his light summer jacket.

He wore incredibly fine things, the kind of clothes that in those years perhaps nobody else did.

But nobody had ever received anything from him.

Or he had always manipulated things so that whatever he might have bought for someone else or given as a gift would eventually always return to him or at least bring him some benefit. Ágost was not wicked but, rather, weak, insatiably greedy, and cruelly selfish. I felt ashamed, even to myself, of my contempt for his weaknesses. Perhaps my grandmother was the one who had instilled in me that bit of life’s wisdom according to which nothing is worth making a gift of except things we cling to with all our hearts. Ágost was rather far from such wisdom, yet now he was ready to make just such a gift. He was rummaging so energetically for the expensive pen that I had a feeling he wouldn’t have the strength to carry out his generous intention.

Not that he couldn’t find the pen; he was enacting for himself an entire scene created by himself about having to look for it.

Although he possessed exceptional mental abilities, Ágost was not taken quite seriously in the family. Probably Szilvia and Viola were the ones who began calling him Gézuka—Gay-zhoo-ka, they would say — which he vehemently protested. He was a very good-looking young man who with his sheer presence made the two girls very excited and threw them into no small confusion. He was also a highly skilled diplomat residing in some mysterious place abroad. But it was impossible to exchange three sentences with him without the infantile traits of his character rising to the surface. Because they were attracted to him, the two cheeky girls quickly took appropriate revenge. Renaming him, picking a particularly soft-sounding name and ending it with the diminutive given to a child, helped them to maintain a distance from him and consider him below their rank. They pumped him with questions, set traps for him, spied on him, ferreted out his weaknesses so that they could pick on him; they made fun of him and imitated him; and no sooner did he turn away from them than they’d mimic and ridicule him.

He had made his decision, but I could see that every moment that he could still possess the cherished object, every moment the expensive pen was still in his pocket, was precious to him.

Or he had gone mad.

I did not understand, I stammered and giggled like the girls that no, please, really. I wouldn’t dare dream of owning such a valuable thing; please, don’t embarrass me with it.

But he, mellowed by his own generosity, insisted, though he went on not being able to find it.

I’d look upon it as something borrowed, I said; he would merely deposit it with me for safekeeping.

I was given new clothes only if and when my aunt Irén tired of the family’s miserliness.

We’d go from store to store. Sometimes her anger was so great that she would dress me from head to toe and I was the one who’d have to insist on some balance, since in her fury she could pile all sorts of superfluous nonsense on me. Aunt Irén was an exceedingly careless woman, things dribbled through her fingers, she loved to spend extravagantly; sometimes she was simply gripped by an urge to splurge; but buying clothes for me also meant a chance to compete with Erna, which she obviously enjoyed doing. Erna hated unnecessary expenses and very strictly determined what was necessary and what was superfluous. In a mildly reproving voice, she would claim that Irén was weirdly similar to my mother in all her traits; I heard this with great alarm. And that the relationship between my mother and Irén had been exactly as intimate as that between my two cousins Viola and Szilvia, who were inseparable. I watched the girls as one who looks not only into his corporeal past but also into his possible future. With these insidious assertions, Nínó cautioned me that I would grow up in the world as irresponsibly as this nice set of females had, both of whom were probably lesbians. If I wasn’t on guard, if I didn’t resist the temptation of squandering and extravagance, inherited through the maternal branch of the family, I would wind up a big good-for-nothing.

However, she justified her son’s expensive tastes by saying that Ágost was a diplomat and having an elegant, smart wardrobe was part of his profession.

But Gézuka had no profession.

Ever since he’d been recalled from his position abroad, he had been working as an interpreter in an ordinary government office, and in his free time he translated stupid, boring political speeches and all kinds of strictly confidential diplomatic papers into foreign languages. I myself had no interest in this man or in his doings. I don’t know why, but my impression was that, compared with his father, he was an inferior mutation, and I found the old Hungarian Nazi more interesting. Irén called the lecherous old man, straight to his face, an old fascist or evil Arrow Cross man. She liked him, and he often slapped her behind; she drank much red wine with him; and because of Erna’s pettiness, she had only contempt for her. Her view was that, Jewish or not Jewish, what she looked for in a person was character. My husband is a Jew, so I can afford to hate the flaws in their character.

Believe me, I know everything about them, inside and out.

Still, I felt that everything was the other way around.

Because of her ruined marriage, Irén took her revenge on unknown people. In Nínó’s character flaws, she was looking for acceptable explanations for her own unbridled emotions. When we walked around the city, I had a chance to observe her close up, yet I failed to develop any liking for this strange trait of hers that was so intimately familiar to me, even though I sensed that my mother must have had the same trait if, as Nínó claimed, Irén and Mother had lived in a symbiosis like the one between Irén’s daughters.

Perhaps she abandoned me so heartlessly because I’m half-Jewish on account of Father’s side of the family. But then, why did both she and Irén choose to marry Jews.

The sight of our excitement and enthusiasm when we returned from one of our shopping sprees, flushed and talking loudly, throwing the packages down in the spacious hallway of the apartment on the boulevard, must have seemed to Nínó as a frontal attack on her personal convictions.

Her carefully, lovingly maintained apartment was flooded by a wave of confusing irresponsibility.

She’d say she couldn’t for the world understand why all this was necessary.

Shamming surprise, Irén responded, come, come, Erna, forgive me, but I couldn’t bear watching our favorite nephew walking around in outgrown rags any longer.

She was the only one who did not address Erna as Nínó.

Nínó was indignant, turned red, pardon me, what rags are you talking about.

His wrists are hanging out of his jacket sleeves and his ankles do the same from his pants. Maybe Erna hasn’t noticed how the boy has grown, and wasn’t she glad that suddenly he has turned into such a handsome lad.

I had been given Ágost’s best clothes, and my wrists and ankles could not have been showing or hanging out of the jackets and pants, for he was taller than I by at least by six centimeters. Unless I had suddenly grown since the previous Saturday morning.

Irén had a tendency to grow pale; she would never raise her voice, not for the world.

She said she had no intention of arguing but, sticking to the facts, she had noticed that my socks were wet. She had been noticing it for two weeks by then.

I slept in their house on Saturdays.

Which means you’ve let him walk around with holes in his shoes for two whole weeks. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, no one would see the holes, but it’s autumn and it’s wet. On Sunday we couldn’t even go to City Park because of those shoes. And I don’t think there’s any point in hoping for a completely dry winter, either.

Then I have a suggestion.

Go ahead. I’m eager to hear it.

I see that you are dissatisfied with me.

I won’t deny it, sweet Erna.

I am ready to entrust the child’s care to you without further ado. If you take him to yourself, I’ll have no objection.

I assume you are willing to give me, along with him, the appropriate portion of the inheritance.

Frankly, I don’t know what you’re referring to with this sly insinuation. I am a sick woman, I’ve lived though a lot, and I don’t suffer baseless reproaches easily. Take it back. Please take back your last sentence.

I won’t take it back, but if you wish, we can discuss it in more detail.

Absolutely, but it would probably be better to pick another time for that.

The child has a right to know what we think and why, about what belongs to him.

Within a certain framework, absolutely.

Why can’t we talk about what your poor mother wanted to have happen.

Your aunt Irén is a very charming woman, Kristóf, but please, don’t be fooled. What is the meaning of this open accusation, she shouted. You slander me in front of the child, she shouted. I cannot imagine where this misleading information might be coming from, but if you insist on going on with it, I know what I must do.

Irén must have felt that she had gone too far.

I don’t insist on anything. I’m simply telling you.

Nínó, however, did not want to be told.

She must have feared that I was the source of the information, and that scared me too.

I’m not interested, she shouted. And if you have any doubt about my honesty, I’m sure the guardianship authority will be glad to be at your service. Nothing and no one will stop you if you wish to file a complaint, I can assure you. In a court of law, I’d be happy to account for everything down to the last penny, but not here in the hallway. And quite apart from any future decision of the courts, I’m ready to turn over to you the right to guardianship this minute.

Sometimes they carried on over the telephone, and that made me even more nervous because I could only guess what was being said at the other end of the line.

Irén saw she was losing, and she looked at me for help.

I’m afraid my principles of child raising and education would not be to your liking.

It was strange to hear these arguments taking place over my head. It was like a dream in which I could not see every detail and did not exist at all. Sometimes, in my excitement and nervousness, I’d get an erection, as a stray dog would when with different kinds of people among whom it hopes to find a master.

I did not help Irén; rather, I betrayed her. I kept standing there in my new clothes, saying nothing. I realized they were both lying while pretending to be telling the truth; if that was telling the truth, then that was what I was doing too.

We can find our way in the labyrinth of one another’s lies, and that’s what makes us one big family.

But we’re not talking about your principles of education, my dear Irén, you have accused me in front of the child that I made his inheritance disappear. In any case I want you to know that I have no child-raising or educational principles.

Well, dear Erna, that’s the difference between the two of us.

I beg you, Irén, let’s leave it at that.

As if they had said that nobody wanted me. And a few minutes later, as if nothing had happened, they were quietly having their tea, gingerly munching on Irén’s inimitable cream puffs.

They were talking of the rare cameos that during the past week Nínó had finally managed to acquire at a low price from someone’s estate and add to her large collection.

In fact, they were talking not about me but about themselves.

I was a burden to everybody.

I didn’t have to be a genius to realize that I wouldn’t have it any better with Aunt Irén. Word had it in the family that in addition to her husband she had plenty of passionate affairs, and what I saw was that except for discussing their clothes and dressing preferences, her attachment to her daughters was not very strong. She silently loathed her hairy, cross-eyed husband, who, to all appearances, idolized her. Irén not only accepted and enjoyed this but also knew that none of it was true. This short, bald, and very strong man who so enjoyed cutting up leather and fur with his big scissors that he had to stick out his tongue while doing it, and who had once told me I could not move in with them because with me there he’d be afraid for his daughters, was also playing a role, like Gézuka. He was certainly colder and more calculating than my aunt Erna, who was always flitting between emotional extremes but whom, when all was said and done, I loved more than anyone in the family. In the company of Irén’s husband, I froze. He believed the girls and I would have a mutually very bad influence. He gave me long penetrating looks as if he were seeing and silently enumerating all my secret sins. As if he knew what sort of person I would turn out to be.

You’ll never be a real man like me, he said, fixing me with his piercing cross-eyed look.

He glared at me as if expecting a full, penitent confession.

You will not spoil my two sweet little girls. I will keep you from that.

Which made me realize that my status would be even lower than that of the Jews, unless I restrained and disciplined myself.

Even they would have reason to scorn me.

As opposed to her husband and the others, however, my aunt Irén had an irrepressible curiosity, a kind of esthetic exultation, and because of that I could not deny her my affection. More precisely, my enchantment with her referred back to my mother’s icy silence. I sensed what might be blazing behind it. When Aunt Irén dressed me, she enjoyed finding connections between a person’s physical attributes and latent possibilities with which she might open up the essence. She enjoyed making somebody out of me whom I didn’t know. She told me it was always women, she had always dressed women, her little girls or her women friends and their little girls, yet the world, after all, was made not only of women, and this was now very different for her — a boy, she had now managed to get her hands on one, this was a novelty, a pleasurable break. The older I get, the greater the pleasure will be. Of course, with a boy she should be more levelheaded.

She was flattering me with her openness. I was attached to her.

Irén was beautiful, and I abhorred beautiful people. Her personality was considered colorful, and she never ran out of ideas, even if these ideas were very wicked.

As if her beauty were shackles from which she hoped to free herself and therefore every morning she hurled herself into the boring, gray multitude of ordinary people. This must have been the very opposite of how Ágost felt about people; he could derive no pleasure from observing that such-and-such a person was boring this way, another boring that way. As if people’s mere commonness and insignificance offended his good taste; or as if he were jealous of everyone and of everything anyone had; as if he would even have been glad to possess the ugliness of other people.

Perhaps this attitude too was the result of their obsession with frugality. It was hard for me to understand why these two people felt this way, while I felt nothing at all.

The two of them walked about in the world with an expression that suggested someone had just insulted them in some way but they were too genteel to acknowledge it. There’s no denying that their noses were pretty high in the air, always showing the world that they would not show what they felt. And if in accordance with their upper-class will and taste they picked something out of Ágost’s hand-me-downs and, having no choice in the matter, I wore it, Nínó was very happy, not because the clothes found a new wearer or because the clothes looked good on me, but because it pleased her that once again she could save some of the money she received as my orphan’s allowance. I was given favorable treatment because of my father’s disappearance; since his comrades could not account for his body, the sum, officially called a civil servant’s pension, which the government regularly transferred to my guardian for my support, was quite substantial. But the price of success was high; something had to be given in exchange, and Nínó considered this another offense she had to suffer in the world. The shadow of loss darkened the joy of the gain. At least Erna made herself believe that the gain was greater. But Ágost could not even give a farewell look to his used clothes. I saw that he had to control himself so as not to take them back right away.

He suffered a terrible loss; gift giving pained him.

No one but his mother understood the terrible pain he had about objects he might lose. And to reduce the pain, he treated the items given to me as gifts, as if they were still his.

Whenever he felt like wearing them again, he’d simply take them out of my closet, without a word. When I lived with them, I never knew exactly what belonged to me, what had been taken back; had they eaten my food before I had a chance to taste it, did they really use things they had already given me.

I barely remembered the years when I had lived with my mother and father. Thereafter, I had to learn quickly what my new caretakers wanted of me, with their strange intentions.

Sometimes I couldn’t find an item of mine that Ágost had no personal connection to. They just laughed. They also had a lot of fun when in their greed Ágost or Nínó gobbled up the lunch or supper that had been put aside for me.

Don’t tell me you’re going to whine about a lousy lunch. Ilona will scrape something together for you.

I watched and I observed this strange and beautiful man, this Gézuka, and I could not understand how he could be my cousin. He treated me as a lord of the manor would treat his servant; take this translation to such and such a place; bring me such and such a book from this other place. Sometimes he hurt me to the quick, sometimes he amused me, and I couldn’t figure out what sort of effect, and when, his tyranny might have on me. That’s why I was terrified of him.

Unknown emotions toward him arose in me. Sometimes I thought to myself, I will kill this man.

Ours was an unambiguous relationship.

I could stay with them so long as I behaved perfectly. With this premise, of course, they let themselves not only make all sorts of judgments about my good or bad behavior but also laid down for me, very strictly, exactly how and within what framework I might protest or rebel against them, what I might request or demand of them. In most cases, nothing. There was no humiliation I didn’t have to endure. And if I hadn’t been raised by my grandparents, this would have been much harder to bear.

Ágost could not relinquish anything of his, not with his eyes and not with his fingers. Let’s say he walked by me and, as if accidentally, pinched my shirt with his fingers. With an embarrassed little laugh, he’d remark that he’d probably never again have another shirt made of such excellent oxford cloth.

I felt I was burning up; my face was red; I was ashamed for him. And if I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting, for example, that perhaps I should return the shirt, he’d say innocently what a great idea, he could then wear it for a while longer. Actually, he liked these passed-on items. One does not like to wear brand-new things.

I wanted to tear off my skin — here, take it.

And now I didn’t care about him or his expensive pen, I didn’t care whether he stayed or went. I cared only about the boy I knew, I was sure, but still hadn’t figured out from where.

I felt that if I took my eyes off him, I’d miss something. I could still see his checkered shirt and yellow suitcase, but the crowd was swallowing him up. I wanted to stay with him; I wanted to run after him. But the thought embarrassed me. Ágost was proffering his stupid pen and shouting at the same time. That he was indeed going now, leaving me on my own, he really didn’t have any more time, and there was no point in waiting. Nobody had thought this departure would turn into such a disorderly mess. And I should use his pen in good health. Pleasant journey. When I arrive, I mustn’t forget to let him know my address. I should write him with his pen. He handed it to me ceremoniously, with both hands. I couldn’t tell what was more refined, his pen or his fingers, his gift or his gesture. He kept shouting that I should write, write, otherwise Nínó would be very anxious and I should know how dangerous that could be.

I shouted back that he might worry about plenty of things but not about my not writing. I most definitely would write, he could be sure of that.

Ágost looked like a Persian prince, as our great-grandfather did in photos from his youth, dark and with a martial bearing; his face thin, solemnly proportioned, almost somber, his hair thick and black. His darkly brilliant small eyes looked out from under heavy, tired-looking, half-lowered lids. His wrists were narrow, his hands delicate, his fingers improbably long, and his arched, nacreous nails seemed like a unique ornamentation, like jewels. It felt good to look at him even if you found him profoundly repugnant.

People in general don’t pay much attention to these phenomena or don’t sense them, but everything happens to us in the air.

Ágost was one of those people around whom nothing happens in the air because he did not emit anything, no feelings, no heat or light, perhaps a scent. I could not reach him with anything, and he did not reach me. The heavy gilded pen was a glossy black Montblanc, with the characteristic little white star shining at the tip. But there was something very advantageous in Ágost’s being unreachable and his not reaching anyone. He could not be deceived, perhaps, but there was no superficial emotional expression that, in the interests of his own comfort, he wouldn’t accept at face value. He was truly most content when he could remain indifferent, his face motionless and unsmiling.

Of the conspiracy I suspected in those moments there was no trace on his face. Or, if there had been a conspiracy and the family was now truly free of me for good, they must have kept it a secret from him too, and he had no idea of it. Perhaps he was giving me the pen so he could leave me there without any pangs of conscience. In the end, I don’t know why he did it; I didn’t understand it.

For a long time I thought I didn’t understand beautiful people because they could not be understood. I understood my grandmother and my grandfather, but they were small and could not have been especially attractive even in their youth. When I took family photographs out of my grandmother’s velvet box and looked at pictures of my father, I was reassured that he had not been beautiful either. Even as a small child I thought that people perceived beauty like some sort of medal or decoration, the grace of faith, when instead it should be considered as an elemental calamity whose painful consequences no one can prevent. My mother would not have abandoned me had she not been so very attracted to the beauty of someone else, or if her beauty had not meant a continued temptation.

I shouted all right, I’m going to register, he should leave and not worry.

I picked up my yellow suitcase by the handle. I had no place to put the pen because there was no pocket in my summer shirt. I kept holding it like a treasure; let him see that I value his gift. But I worried that with his fine, dry fingers he might touch my face.

Lightly, he raised his fist and yelled that I should forgive him but he couldn’t stand this terrible noise anymore; he shouted salut, bon courage.

Salut, I shouted back, and with that, we both turned on our heels.

The checkered shirt had already blended into the crowd gathered in clusters at the front of the platforms.

I took off on a run after him as fast as the throng and the suitcase bumping against my leg let me. As I ran I shoved the pen into my pants pocket. Perhaps this heedless gesture broke the last thin thread that tied me to my family. I sank into the universe, surrendered myself to a dangerous attraction, and no longer cared whether I was alone or not.

I enjoyed my enormous freedom without knowing what terrible dangers it had in store for me.

Our train pulled out late in the afternoon. An unexpected clink, a jolt, and very slowly we were moving, rolling.

At least the air moved in the stifling cars.

The heat was unbearable.

Everyone had long since devoured the food they’d brought from home; hours had gone by since we’d had anything to drink. My thighs and back stuck to the seat and I couldn’t move much because a little girl who had been entrusted to me was, in her sadness, alternately nibbling on my thigh and crying herself to sleep in my lap. Another little girl slept with her head on my shoulder. They were hungry and thirsty, as were we all, and I thought it better not to wake them. At age sixteen, I was the oldest one in the car and the rest of the children expected everything from me. The youngest ones were asleep, exhausted, or staring blankly out the windows.

Boarding the trains had ended around noon. We were given lemonade in green, buckle-lidded bottles. Everybody was still hanging out of the windows then, shouting and hoping to elbow their way to a good place for the trip. After the German conductresses closed and locked every door on the three trains, making a terrific racket, we thought we’d be on our way shortly.

The impassive, almost bored female voice coming from the loudspeakers kept repeating for long minutes that in compliance with the orders of the station inspectors, for security reasons the departure hall would be closed before the trains’ departure, therefore parents and relatives, tives, were asked immediately to vacate, cate, the railway station.

Tation. Tion.

But the crowd would not move.

Children hanging out the train windows were waving, yelling, and the long complicated sentence kept echoing, maddening and incomprehensible. The throng of excited parents and relatives was now packed into the open space between the entrance of the glass-covered departure hall and the end of the platforms; they stretched, waved, and screamed from there, though it made no sense to wait until we’d leave.

The loud bubbling of a dark mass.

Outside, Baross Square was sizzling in the sunshine.

Bullet marks on the facade of the glass-covered hall had been repaired in the first months after the fighting, but the station’s domed roof was still gaping with holes, and the hot sunshine pouring through them in enormous beams created a veritable curtain between us.

It was dazzling.

The little girl whose cardboard suitcase someone had thrust into my hands, I should take it for her, would not leave my side. She was whining that she couldn’t see outside, I should lift her up. If I gave up my place for even a second to satisfy her wish, the other children would have squeezed me out of my seat, for sure. There was her head, stuck between my stomach and the window, and from there she was screeching that I should lift her up.

Lift me up.

She was from the country and she used the formal address.

But I was not so much worried about losing my place as disgusted by the little girl’s smell. The unknown smell was emanating from her little dress, her skin, and her two heavy braids.

And then something happened that created a moment of frozen stillness in the station. The loudspeakers fell silent and we could hear loud commands being given, long reverberating and very aggressive.

As if someone would be hit immediately.

Only a few months had passed since the end of the fighting; what else could I have had as a first thought than that shooting would start soon.

But the policemen simply grabbed one another’s arms and formed a human chain that tautened against the fearful crowd. It all happened in a wink. The silence thinned, became ever thinner, and then snapped.

All hell broke loose, because as the chain of policemen began to move, the helpless crowd’s indignation soared, and the echoes reverberating in the hall sounded not like a mass protest but like an expression of dread and horror.

And then something else happened that I could not quite understand. The police officers were desperately shouting something that sounded like a ritual supplication, and the crowd responded with shouts of indignation, but there was no strength left in the indignation, the crowd’s resistance had no force at all.

Over the next few seconds, people squeezed through the two open gates and away from the glass-ceilinged hall like filling out of a sausage. The giant glass doors flapped, creaked, and then slammed closed; the mute hall echoed eerily and now the revolution was finally over.




Every Hungarian Was Lost


Next morning the landscape was dazzling.

For that time of the year, the sun was blazing very strongly above the small riverside town where houses were painted blinding white, gaudy blue, or burning yellow.

The silence was broken only occasionally by fish jumping in the river. The sky exhaled a fragrance of the water.

Every willow by the river was in bloom; horse chestnut trees lining the streets and round, deep-green ash trees all over were leafing out; and spilling out of closed yards, over fences, stone walls, and pickets, myriad purple and white lilac blossoms were about to open. Nobody was in the streets, no cart in sight anywhere.

The previous night, he’d fallen asleep very late in the cold room facing the street in the house of his birth.

He had drunk a lot of water.

He told himself that the water he had to drink after the roe salad was causing his insomnia.

He could not slake his thirst; he kept going into the kitchen and ladling more water out of the bucket that stood on a bench under the window facing the large moonlit yard. He drank, but the well water did not slake his thirst. In the midst of this ceaseless thirsting, waking and dozing, tossing and turning in bed, he saw his life as fruitless and empty. He dreamed of a dry riverbed; yes, his life was one big thirst, the scaly, odd-shaped segments of the dried silt made no noise under his feet, and there was nothing anywhere but barrenness, an infinite gray wilderness. Perhaps the fish eggs hadn’t been quite fresh.

The water became heavy in his stomach.

Yet his thirst remained unquenchable. Maybe he had gastric poisoning.

His stomach swelled, became hard as a drum. He walked outside and stood on the veranda steps, sweating in fear, worrying that he might not be able to cope with the pain. From the steps he urinated into the night, but took care not to let his stream reach the delicate leaves of the fledgling rosebush. He had on his dead father’s white nightshirt, and when he pulled it up with one hand the cold night touched and pleasantly cooled his lower body. Feverishly, his brain kept grinding away at his anxieties. I’ll drop dead like a poisoned dog. He enjoyed the damp coldness of the night on his thighs, spread legs, and testicles, and he was glad that in the last moments of his life he could still hold his penis, somewhat stiffened between dreams and wakefulness.

I’m going to die, he said to himself. I’ll die and leave this miserable existence without having found the person I’ve longed for all my life.

This is how they will discover me.

From the steps of the veranda he plunged into the bed of roses.

He appreciated his prick most when it was in this state, when it no longer lay shriveled on his testicles but, completely alienated from his own bodily reality, had not yet stiffened to the point of showing tense blood vessels. People will say he died among the roses with his cock in his hand.

Maybe I am a lost man; I haven’t found the one I’ve always longed for.

If only I could get back to America.

Dogs were barking, howling, and yowling nearby and far away; the moon was out, not too high yet, just over the roofs of neighboring houses, among the tips of the poplars; and with the air pulsating with barking he felt sure he was no different from the dogs. He envied the dogs their existence. If he were an honest man, if he didn’t keep deceiving himself, this is how he would howl into the night, every night.

Perhaps God was letting his body feel Jesus Christ’s suffering course through it.

If at the bottom of others’ suffering he feels his own, then his entire pantheism is a delusion; he has been mistaken. God does not reside in me; we are separate entities.

He could never resist the moon’s attraction, as if its light caused a cold shudder under his skin and pulled the hairs on his head skyward, individually.

There will come a time when I won’t be able to resist the moon; I will unite with it.

He listened and waited to see if he could detect the first sign of poisoning.

There was no person in the world in whom this sought-after someone might have taken shape. Everyone only resembled this possible person; more precisely, all too many people, both men and women, resembled this possible person. If at least he could endure loneliness; here he was, standing on the veranda steps in the midst of all this barking, and holding his penis, semi-erect from sleep, until all the urine emptied from him. What nonsense. What could be more boring than waiting for this to happen several times a day for one’s entire life. One would endure this only if there really was an independent self-interested God who, on hearing such skepticism, instantly struck one down or lifted one up. But this endless urinating was taking a long time; the urine had a strong inner pressure. As soon as a body is born it begins to function but without any reason, it merely functions; if, for example, it takes on liquid, it has to get rid of it. Or maybe physiological functioning is stronger than reason, in which case the universe is actually inert, making the reasonable labor of an entire life worth less than a farthing. The work of reason leaves no traces behind, in which case intelligence finds so little of worth in all of Creation that it might not even want to piss out whatever is superfluous.

Still, he has to piss it all out.

He could not step out of this vicious circle on the grounds that death was more reasonable or, put another way, that death appeared more valuable from reason’s point of view than existence did.

I miscalculated everything; funny, but now at least I comprehend it all.

He was deeply ashamed of having wrung some reciprocity out of himself.

Though he not only loved but downright adored this miserable Bellardi.

Out of sheer politeness he should not have reciprocated Bellardi’s confession with his own. Why did I do it; how could I have done it. Bellardi learned something I should have kept to myself forever.

And after he had urinated the superfluous quantity, he drank some more water, kept drinking, though in the mute kitchen’s cleanliness, more perfect than perfect cleanliness, he found the drinking mug unbearably smelly.

It’s possible that Bellardi is a lost man, but that doesn’t make me one too; why would I be a lost man. He struggled, protested against the idea that every Hungarian was lost, as Bellardi had claimed. All the while he felt the intense taste and scent of the Danube’s silt on his tongue and palate, and in his throat. At least Hungarians feel lost because the Turks took away their kingdom. I, however, am nothing but myself, nothing more. If I leave here, I can end this ineptness for myself. The Austrians at least recaptured what the Turks took from them. The Hungarians can’t even do that, they can’t do anything. If I leave here for good, I could at least end the constant stupid feeling of defeat and lack. Of this cursed pain that restrains the Hungarians’ stride, puts them at the mercy of Jews, of anybody, even of such idiotic has-been aristocrats as this Bellardi.

What have I got to do with them.

Bellardi hasn’t gone anywhere with his cock.

The bucket itself wasn’t smelly and neither was the mug — he had pointlessly nagged his mother about it, wanting her to wash them properly — which meant that throughout his entire childhood he’d drunk smelly water. In fact, the condition he cannot end is that of not being a Hungarian and not wanting to share the Hungarians’ painful helplessness and their permanent conspiracies and rebellions.

A place that one has grown used to for reasons beyond one’s control, that one calls homey.

It was always the water and not the mug that was smelly.

He won’t find out whom he should win for himself, for the sake of his peace of mind, or what he should end; and he won’t learn these things in America either.

He stood frozen in fear of himself.

The truth was that the last few minutes before the start of the docking maneuvers had profoundly exhausted and upset him.

When one is young, one does not realize that mental exertion means a substantial loss of general energy.

The wines and heavy food also did their share.

He had to admit that Bellardi deliberately timed everything so that he’d have no chance for a response, so that they’d both be drunk with the wine and each other’s presence. This too was a trick. With his dispassionate calculations, he could plow through everything. Madzar saw before him a view of life that made his own view seem distorted and inadequate. As if Bellardi in fact had not been acting at all but instead had transformed his intention to act into a clever trick and then waited for the results. Put another way, if Madzar wanted to hold on to his own view of life, he had to see Bellardi’s behavioral patterns as distorted and inhuman. He saw clearly enough what he had known about him since childhood, but he also saw clearly that his own thinking, desperately seeking escapes, kept manufacturing useless caricatures of either himself or the other man.

That is how I’ve transplanted into myself the eternal, hereditary mental anguish of the Hungarians.

Everything, but everything, about Bellardi — his sentimentality, his gourmandizing, his loyalty, his physical arrogance, even his recurring self-pity — is illusion; everything is an illusion. Either these Hungarians pace up and down in helpless anguish or they stamp on one another. Luckily, Bellardi can hardly cover up one illusion with another. Here is a man who makes everything genuine disappear among illusions.

Yet I can’t avoid him, for he bewitches me with his countless illusions, and he really sank his claws in me with his request.

But now he’s standing here in the middle of the night and can’t rid himself of the thought that in this part of the world people drink smelly water and don’t even realize it.

Madzar was one of those people who become incredibly sensitive and confused by all sorts of requests.

Of course he should have rejected this one, but then he could no longer conceal his extreme stinginess, which until now he had refused to acknowledge in himself and didn’t want to acknowledge in the future either.

All night long he struggled with the dogs’ barking, was tortured by thirst, and the next morning continued struggling because he was constipated; because of Bellardi’s request, he was still furious at midday.

He carried the shit inside him.

He did not understand how Bellardi allowed himself this sort of shamelessness, which is to say, he pretended to himself that he didn’t understand.

That way it would be easier to refuse the request.

No matter how poor they are, these Bellardis always swagger and consider everyone else as their servants.

But why is he taking it, and without a word of protest.

I probably take it without a word because in the depth of my soul I am their serf.

He was incensed.

Either I could be the servant of these rotten gentry or I could work for the dirty Jews, I certainly have choices, haven’t I. I should have taken the time to liberate myself. I want to be a Jacobin, a republican, he cried to himself, and his lips were moving as he walked. He could amuse himself with these sentences. Death to priests and aristocrats. He giggled. Hang your kings.

But these intimate little yelps failed to quell the fury he was directing at himself. That all my life I should be such a gullible fool whom anyone can seduce or play tricks on.

No, no, he argued with himself, chuckling and swearing as he walked on the deserted Upper Danube Row, I won’t stay here, I’ll go away. I will, so help me God.

But this was not the same God he’d thought about the night before; this was the fucking God who thrusts the world into misery, damn him.

He moved on, the sun burning on the back of his neck, in his much too hot knickerbockers, his visored cap in hand. He was going to Ármin Gottlieb’s lumberyard while asking himself how that little pederast dared present him with such choices. To claim that it was a matter of honor, that his wife was frigid. Out of the question. The handsome little lieutenant was kicked out of the navy because they caught him with someone like this little shithead the Mayer boy.

Instead of fucking his wife good and proper.

And just by looking at those two you’d never guess they suck each other’s dick.

Actually, he had been deeply deceived, and now he couldn’t delay the necessary decision any longer, but he also dared not admit his disappointment to himself. What should he do. Give them money for their stupid conspiracy or not give them a cent. Take on the work or refuse it. He couldn’t understand why he might be ashamed to say no. Not only did his paternal name and his religion show that in this multireligious small town he was Hungarian, but for some inexplicable reason he in fact felt himself to be profoundly Hungarian.

He felt more Hungarian and felt it more profoundly than those making a lot of noise around him. These show-off Hungarians disgusted him, and he already knew that because of them he would say no because he wanted nothing to do with them.

With anyone.

It’s not Hungarians who are alone; every Hungarian is alone, a Hungarian does not join anyone, and Bellardi is the last person he’d want to join.

Empty and thirsty, the disappointed lover walks under the sky supersaturated with beauty, he said to himself, while all sorts of murky, weighty actions with unpredictable consequences are demanded of him. He tries to provoke himself with sarcasm.

But it was unbearable to think that behind his back people unknown to him discussed him, came to conclusions about him, people with a secret world in the depths of which, mixed in with ordinary emotions, stifled pleasure was seething.

As he walked, dogs in the enclosed yards and behind the thick gates were awakened by his steps and hurled themselves insanely against the iron and wooden fences.

As if forbidden pleasure and conspiracy were mating at this unknown, hot, and secret depth, concealed from consciousness. Not only do they fuck each other in the mouth, they even penetrate each other’s asshole. It seemed that with the unavoidable and infuriating flight of fancy, he was saying to himself, I’m excluded from that experience.

And so as not to hear the dogs’ frenzy, he fled to the other side of the road.

For a while, he walked beneath the orbs of the ash trees.

From here, from the dam, he could see the water.

Actually, he didn’t want them to accept him.

And he had a glance, in the depths, of those dark underground rooms in which with white-hot iron tongs they tortured one another, and which it would not have been wise for him to enter. Until now it hadn’t been difficult to overcome his natural curiosity and envy.

But now he was seized by sorrow and dread.

The silent water was inviting him with its light, depth, and scent.

He could easily submit to this attraction.

Anchored fishing boats clanked and burbled against one another.

He continued on the shore, below the dam, by the old concrete wall green with moss where in his childhood the bare feet of boat-hauling day laborers had trod in the black silt. This almost two-kilometer-long old wall, considered to be one of Europe’s first significant concrete constructions, exuded the icy breath of winter, despite the sudden heat wave. Near the water, the silence was perfect. His day might already have been spoiled, but at least he wanted to hear the lapping and splashing of water, not barking dogs.

To inhale the scent of the swelling river.

When, the night before, the pale, vibrating lights of the Mohács coaling dock had appeared in the hazy darkness, the captain did not leave the dining table and go to the communication flue to call down to the stokers or talk to the engine room. Those men knew how to do their job without his instructions. On a big, time-tested ship like the Carolina, everything works by itself. In fact, the captain rose and with a single quick movement closed the communication flue. By doing it so decisively, he showed he needed every one of the remaining moments for himself.

He sat back down.

Holding his cigar, he leaned amiably across the table so he wouldn’t have to talk loudly. The crepitating, flickering candles illumined his eyes from close up. No trace of cheerfulness remained in the deep grooves and pits of his face, not even in the depths of his radial wrinkles.

Madzar had never before seen this face of Bellardi’s.

As I indicated already, he began quietly and with a bashfulness not easily concealed, my intention is to inform you of something in strict confidence. I’m not expecting an immediate response from you. But I do count on your complete discretion, otherwise I’d never even begin, naturally.

You do me honor with your confidence, Madzar replied guardedly.

Regarding the discretion, I would need some reassurance.

Forgive me, but since I don’t know what this is all about, what kind of reassurance could I give you.

I’m not asking for your word of honor because that would be too much. Bellardi laughed and looked at him warmly, but you could say, so help me God.

Madzar had the impression that the candlelight was pulling apart the other man’s features and shoving them aside so as to make his masks disappear.

The end is not yet near because this is still not him; he is only exchanging one unknown face for another.

My impression is, he said aloud, that you are asking too much. And we should leave the gods out of the game.

I cannot comply with your wish, he added very quietly, to emphasize his refusal.

Bellardi looked at him, amazed, being unprepared for this refusal; he did not accept it, and, as if putting down a deposit on what he was still intending to say, he broke into a demure, encouraging smile.

It’s not my own safety I’m looking out for, my dear Lojzi, or I should say not only mine.

The seriousness of his words was credited by his transparent, trust-filled, pale-brown eyes, lit by the candles right down to their dark depths.

Nevertheless, Madzar, keenly attentive, could not accept the words; he involuntarily suspected a lie, a deception, ulterior motives between the captain’s mouth and eyes.

He did not understand why this Bellardi thought that of course he’d be curious about secret matters.

I’ve got enough things to think about as it is, he apologized.

He found it abhorrent to give his word of honor blindly about anything. And what do these things have to do with any kind of god.

A word of honor would be too pathetic. Don’t be angry that I can’t do it. I’m much simpler than you think.

Growing indulgent under the influence of his own words, he began to understand Bellardi’s double-dealing, sentimentality, and love confessions. Everything up to now had served one purpose only: to prepare him, to soften him up.

That is why he’d wanted to cast a net over him, to keep him from saying no.

We’re deceiving each other with our childhood, what stupidity, he thought; as an adult with responsibilities on my shoulders, I can’t be playing the cub scout for him. After all, I build buildings that must stand, and the chairs I make cannot collapse when weight is put on them.

He could not deny that a desire to assert himself was rising within him, to tell the other man straight to his face, wait, wait, my friend, things are exactly the other way around; I’m interested first and foremost in visible and reasonable things, not in your bottomless obscurity and perfidious secretiveness. I deal in objects and materials and if for no other reason I feel no obligation to obey your rules of chivalry. Retroactively, as it were, I spit on your hereditary valor too. I don’t give a damn about any of your transparent secrets, yours and those of your kind. Among you, I wouldn’t want to be even a master builder. You’re all notorious parasites, every one of you; your sole vital element is destruction and self-destruction, and I’m happy to leave that pleasure entirely to you.

Of materials, shapes, concepts, building, and expert knowledge you have no idea at all.

And because he did not say any of this aloud, his mouth trembled, as did his nostrils and eyelids, which the candlelight now turned glittering red.

He leaned back on his chair, to be as far away from the captain as possible.

And the moment he got his distance, he grew alarmed.

But I still don’t know, he argued with himself, how could I possibly know what it is I don’t want to hear from him, or what exactly I consider so ridiculous or false in his request.

In his nervousness, he laughed.

And if this is indeed so, he continued in his thoughts, I must be struggling not with him but with my own cowardice, my own mistrustfulness and ridiculousness.

If you absolutely insist on it, he said, laughing, then all right, here it is, but without the inclusion of any capital-letter God, take my simple word of honor.

What does this kind of word of honor mean, anyway, he thought to himself, nothing.

What accounting do I owe these people. I owe them no accounting at all.

It was heartwarming to think he had deposited his money in a reputable private bank in Amsterdam. He had to laugh at himself, and he did, which quickly produced a small advance on the longed-for fulfillment. And nothing really matters except money. And then he saw that his supercilious laughter had offended the other man, and he regretted his own leniency.

Now they had to reassess each other’s situation. They hadn’t yet started anything; they were in the midst of a methodological introduction but already sagging under the weight of each other’s life.

Come on, out with it, he said aloud and brazenly, because he wanted to be free of this burden as soon as possible.

Well then, I am a member of a very old secret society that today, unnoticed yet most effectively, covers the entire country, Bellardi replied, no less forcefully. What’s more, going with the spirit of the times, we’ve crossed borders.

I’ve been given the task of informing you of the organization’s goals.

Madzar did not even nod at this; he was dumbfounded, reduced to silence.

The terrible hunch was coming true, Bellardi was indeed a zealous Catholic opportunist, just as he had suspected earlier, and a conspirator to boot; he was right. But it cannot be, things cannot be so simple, he kept telling himself, as the other man in turn fell silent to allow his friend to process what he had heard.

But he was slightly relieved, after all, that it was not money the other man wanted from him.

Our organization is a community of men of consequence and influence, Bellardi went on, his voice somewhat hoarse, and I want to reassure you right off that we do not recruit our members but rather, after a number of sounding-out conversations, invite them to join.

You mean, I should consider this as one of those sounding-out conversations.

If you wish, I can quickly give you the names of prominent men in our circles.

No, thank you, I’d rather you didn’t.

The less you know, the safer it is.

That’s what I think too.

Don’t think of it as a young men’s club in some village, but rather as a large family with many distant relatives, or an exceptional gentlemen’s club so special that neither its name nor its address is known to anyone. The society has no address or, more accurately, it has as many addresses as it has members. The name of the organization we do not say out loud. Or you can think of it as a freemasons’ lodge, but one in which nothing embarrassing or exceptional happens. Except for the admission process, there are no ceremonies. At most, we listen to scholarly lectures on topics of Hungarian history. Whenever we can, we do this outdoors, at places where our ancestors gathered. The invited speakers are not necessarily members of our community and often they are not even aware they are speaking before a family or even members of an entire national-ethnic clan. Lajos Bartucs, László Németh, and Dezső Szabó lecture regularly. We chat about the world’s situation, its destiny, I would say über Gott und die Welt. The last time, we heard a lecture by Professor Lehr, with whose work you are probably familiar.

Unfortunately, the name means nothing to me, but you know I’ve been living and studying abroad.

He plays a very active and authoritative role in the society.

Bellardi paused, as if with a knowing look he were signaling something like this: I know what I know, the professor is one of the society’s supreme leaders and I’m letting you in on this.

He lectured, I would say very edifyingly, on the relationship between Dutch methods of dike building and the images of nature in rural Dutch life. I mention this because he himself has lived and taught in Holland, where he is well known in academic circles. His fields of interest include ancient history, linguistics, and ethnography. If you’re interested, I can give you a summary of his lecture.

Madzar waited cautiously; he did not want to reply to anything.

I can also tell you that we do not have debates or arguments among us, Bellardi continued. At most, in the warm circle of his family, each member quietly strengthens his moral duties to the fate of the Hungarian nation. At the end of the conversation that follows the kind of lecture I’ve mentioned, everyone knows what to do for the foreseeable future. No need to talk about it much, no one gives orders to anyone; there are no lengthy voting procedures either. The nature of Hungarians is more suited to this quiet harmony than to noisy parliamentary democracy or anything like that. If a decision is needed, the supreme council can deliberate the question, and in matters of greater importance there is the tool of public acclamation. I can also reveal to you that our activities are approved by more than one important personality in the highest circles. In fact, many of them are active members of our community.

He fell silent again.

With his raised eyebrows climbing high on his forehead, and with his arms elevated above the table, he indicated that His Excellency the regent, gazing down from the summit of the hierarchy, silently supports their activities.

He is, perhaps, our greatest patron.

Of course he does not appear in person, he added in a whisper, almost as if in passing, but occasionally his elder son represents him, and Mihály is undoubtedly a most enlightened Hungarian gentleman.

Madzar did not respond to this either.

Seven percent of our annual income goes to a common pool, the captain added in the same whispery tone, again as if only in passing. The majority of this money goes for the university education, and study abroad if necessary, of young men with proven Hungarian patriotic feelings.

From this moment on, Madzar not only felt an aversion to Bellardi but could not concentrate on what he was saying.

He wants my money after all.

Which he did not understand, but his not understanding was as profound as if he had failed to comprehend not only the other man but Creation itself.

Only moments ago I was thinking of my money, wasn’t I.

He felt as if suddenly he had lost his way in the universe, and while he searched for it the universe made a big turn on its own.

No, it can’t be that Bellardi is a mind reader. The thought made him dizzy. Because he did have some money put aside, the money he made on jobs in Rotterdam with which he wanted to start his life in America. He could not touch that. He considered it a significant sum, but it was not so large as to allow for donations to charities from it.

True, he had gotten a goodly advance for his future projects with the Szemzős, and he had not transferred that money to the bank in Amsterdam; it was deposited in the General Savings Bank of Hungary.

On hearing Bellardi’s words, this worried him greatly. He felt that every possible trouble was crashing down on him.

Only a few hours earlier, an article in the Pester Lloyd he’d picked up by chance had informed him that Baron Koháry, Bellardi’s powerful father-in-law, sat on the board of directors of this bank. This information made everything as clear in his mind now as if he had solved a complicated crime. Aha, he said to himself, how obvious. As if the steam engine’s pumps and pistons were not working three decks below him but sucking and thrusting the blood in his veins, and the paddle wheels were rotating noisily not in the water but in his brain; in his agitation, his temples began to pulsate.

He reproached himself for his irresponsibility.

They’ll grind me up.

These people will take me and grind me up. Here, it seems to me, everybody is somebody’s relative and everything is connected to everything else.

And in that case this conversation is far from being a chance one; the coincidence becomes visible.

I should not spend so much time here; they will swallow me up.

But from this point on Bellardi did not fully listen to him, or rather, he did not notice how he had miscalculated the effect of his words.

Whenever he could talk to someone about this delicate subject, and those occasions were rare, he could not properly control his enthusiasm.

The mere thought that after centuries of discord and division, Hungarians might again join hands, and that he was telling this, very cautiously, to another son of Mohács — this exciting thought all but untethered him from the palpable world. Made him happy. After all, the other man knew as well as he did why every Hungarian in Mohács had become lost; he really did not have to explain this to him. As children, they had both wanted to uncover the mass graves, and thanks to the swallows and the powerful river current, they did find one.

He was filled with the happy feeling of liberty that he could build his case on something they both knew.

His activities in the secret organization gave him the only practical opportunity to open the door of his bodily cage and step outside himself. And it did not occur to him that Madzar might reject out of hand such an exciting human community. The liberating feeling that had brought him so close to others strengthened him in the profound conviction that being Hungarian was not a condition gained by being born as one, but rather a belief and worldview one had to earn with actions and reinforce with communal activity. The moment he touched on this subject, he was stepping onto the vast battlefield that had teemed with true Hungarians at the fatal dawn of the modern era. Because the Battle of Mohács was lost not by those who fought the Turks but by those who stayed at home in their warm dens. This clear feeling turned historical time into a mere second. There was no difference between the Middle Ages and modern times. He was watching the face of his childhood friend, with whom he wanted to share his happiness, and he did not notice that he was losing the other man’s physical presence.

His inner vision was held captive by the vision of this powerful community’s secret network. Its members trusted him and he trusted them. This trust controlled his entire sense of human responsibility. It was as if he were watching with their eyes to see where, in the net he had spread, he should tie up his friend, alive, what he might gain by this, and for what purpose and in what way the underground movement could make use of him.

All this had an alienating effect on Madzar, and not only because of the seven percent. The threatened secrecy of his bank-account number was only a practical symbol of his thinking. He could neither comprehend nor feel the impersonal enthusiasm that radiated from Bellardi’s being, so the other man’s fervor was painful to him. Not only did it not fill him with a sense of liberation, it affected him as a painful physical sensation; he experienced it as a rape committed by his beloved, as if several people at once had cornered him or shoved his body into a lair smelling of decay. In his shame, he bowed his head. His powerful chin nearly touched his breastbone and from there, head lowered, he looked across at Bellardi’s face shining with the power of the secret society, in a partly defensive, partly offensive attitude. In the fluttering candlelight his thick hair became like a specially wrought rubescent copper helmet. It made his skull invulnerable, it was an armor no one could penetrate.

Bellardi will not manage to get his money from him either.

And what about that seven percent.

These people know how much money he has.

Money he will not give to anyone.

He was dizzy, felt bad at the sheer thought of donating money.

Where on earth did Bellardi come up with the idea that he would give a single penny to anybody, for anything.

Not one, to nobody.

Meanwhile Bellardi was going on, saying that in the interest of a definitive solution of the Jewish question, Hungarians could not lay themselves open to the Germans, in other words could not endanger Hungarian interests because of the Jews. Waging war cannot be avoided, but the task is to cut off simultaneously the heads of both dragons, all fourteen of them. Only romantic patriots tend to forget that a weakened Hungary is not in the Germans’ interest today. German and Hungarian interests coincide at many important points. We cannot fight alone against Bolshevism. But, in the interest of the Hungarian race, we must oppose those endeavors that the German secret service, using Swabians and ethnic Germans in Hungary, has been promoting and financing for many years. The price the Germans are asking for the annexed territories* is so high we cannot possibly pay it. This is a fight for breathing space, for survival, for sheer existence, and he would very much want Madzar to understand that. The Germans are bent on acquiring more and more positions; they are taking over the police, the entire system of public administration, and the highest echelons of the armed forces.

That is why he keeps saying that civilians have no notion of what goes on deep below the surface. Like moles. Jewish and German elements have undermined the Hungarian state and gnawed it to pieces, and in a weak moment they would lay their hands on it.

This is a struggle, he cried out in frustration, for even these last words the beloved man’s face remained motionless.

Not a hopeless struggle, not at all, and don’t think, he exclaimed, that it’s happening only at higher levels or in higher circles. This needs truly deep Hungarian feelings, but not the sentimental kind. Public administration must be cleansed of German elements, commerce and industry of the Jews. In the interest of progress for the Hungarian race, we must be alert at every moment and acquire every position about to be vacated. In the service of Hungarian goals, we should engage both those who are already among us and those who are not yet with us.

And even those who cannot possibly be among us.

Lowering his voice to a whisper, he continued.

Listen, while we are peacefully talking about these things, the Mayer boy is trying to recruit my Swabian stokers into the Volksbund.* An enormous struggle for their souls, he whispered desperately. It is our job to talk the Swabian element out of this.

How could you possibly remain indifferent.

At this point Madzar interrupted Bellardi’s impassioned speech, his voice gentle.

But my dear Laci, you know that I myself am a good part Swabian.

Bellardi’s instant silence suggested deep surprise, his breath nearly stopped.

Oh, come on, you don’t know what you’re saying. I’ve always considered you a good Hungarian.

That’s only one side of the coin, what you’ve considered me to be.

Maybe you didn’t understand me correctly.

But what I consider myself to be is a whole other thing.

There is no better Hungarian than Professor Lehr. Even Dezső Szabó isn’t a better Hungarian than he is. And Ferenc Herczeg is a good Hungarian too.

Madzar laughed, not because he was in a good mood but because he was upset by what he had heard, so he laughed as if he thought that what Bellardi had told him was entertaining.

Before you tell me too much, before you tell me more than you want to, he said, still laughing, I’d like to warn you that Hungarian is not even my mother tongue. You couldn’t possibly have forgotten that you and the other boys found my accent in Hungarian a reason for constantly making fun of me.

Actually, even today he was reluctant to admit that being laughed at had hurt him.

My mother’s name is still Barbara Stricker.

His voice faltered, but he did not add that the boys had laughed at him especially because of his mother’s name.

And after so many years, he almost broke down over the old humiliations.

They were sitting opposite each other, painful seconds ticking away in their shared pain, the evenly puffing luxury liner continuing to slice the night in two.

Never again, he thought fervently, never.

As if they had been pulled apart for good and continued to keep their seats only out of tact and politeness. Madzar motionless, angry, his head down, his face raised to the captain’s, while his heavy fist, strong to the point of shapelessness and in an ominous state of readiness, lay on the cream-colored tablecloth. Bellardi floating in his state of surprise, oblivious to his cigar.

Hard as he exercised his mind, suddenly he could not return to his subject.

I don’t remember anything like that, he said very quietly and uncertainly, I don’t remember ever making fun of any of your traits or abilities. All my life I’ve admired you, my friend.

My one sweet pal, what are you talking about. He moaned as he said it.

It sounds rather improbable that you don’t remember.

Bellardi would have to return from his ideals and step back into reality.

He did not want to remember what he was being reminded of because he did not want to see himself in all his sinister narrow-mindedness.

He remembered the slingshot too, of course he did.

They were looking at each other’s tear-filled eyes, at each other’s struggle, but they could no longer read each other, could no longer see behind each other’s face.

In helpless anger Bellardi crushed out his cigar and kept squeezing and grinding it until it fell apart, leaving only dry, stinking debris.

Because even at this very moment he loved his old friend, adored him.

What makes you think I don’t know whom I’m talking to, he exclaimed finally in a suppressed, strangely threatening voice. In what other ways would you like me to woo you. You don’t think we checked your background thoroughly. How else might I convince you of my honest intentions.

He paused to control his emotions.

Do you think that such an extensive organization can be built and maintained without keeping a record of the people we think of as potential members and of how we size them up. It can’t be that I so misjudged this encounter, he thought to himself at the same time.

You’re deliberately misunderstanding me, and I also know why, pal, he said loudly. Don’t forget that whatever you know, I also know very well.

Nevertheless, all right, I admit, I’m not a great moral giant, and there was a time when I nastily betrayed you. All I have to say for myself is that I didn’t do it out of convenience. Maybe my conscience told me to do it.

He was shaking with emotion as he shuttled desperately between haughty rejection and sensible admission.

But you also know very well that I loved you more than anybody else and to this day I love you like a brother.

I didn’t love you any less, said the other one heavily.

Yes, I am a race protector, Bellardi bellowed, his voice now at top volume.

Because he could not help noticing that the other man referred to his love only in the past.

But that does not necessarily make me a racist.

Which I am not, he added.

He realized that with his statements quoting Professor Lehr’s words, so often repeated as self-reassuring commonplaces in the society organized for the protection of Hungarians, he had truly surprised his old friend.

It is not a prerequisite of membership, he continued somewhat more objectively, that both one’s parents be pure Hungarians. It is enough that the person’s father and paternal grandfather are Hungarian. Even if you tried not to, you could not help fulfilling this requirement.

He laughed briefly with these last words.

And another reason you should understand all this, he continued quietly, more sarcastic than angry, is that this is what you think too. Weren’t you the one who told me how the Jewish element was striving to control architecture all over the world, he asked.

Hearing so much explanation and self-justification astounded Madzar. As if he had suddenly seen the mechanism of the other’s soul and finally realized that in that gapless mechanism no room had been left for a sense of reality.

He became frightened of Bellardi and had to be on guard to maintain his self-control.

I’ve told you clearly what I am not. And a national socialist I definitely wouldn’t want to be because, unlike you, I do know what that means.

You mean that in your eyes I am a national socialist.

I make no judgments about you.

Ridiculous. Truly ridiculous.

For God’s sake, would you like to tell me then what’s the difference between German and Hungarian race protection. I don’t want to tear the world apart in the spirit of race protection.

In that case, Bellardi replied, our views are one hundred percent identical.

That’s the reason I’m going away, Madzar whispered passionately.

I too would prefer to be a humanist, Bellardi continued, if you permit me to share with you this guilty, mixed company. At least that’s what I still am because of my upbringing, and I will remain one too. I never gave you cause to call me a national socialist.

I did not call you anything.

But that’s what we’re talking about, about why Hungarians cannot let the Germans occupy Hungary by exploiting Hungarian racial interests. We must resist them, and who says resistance is a crime. In a life-threatening situation such as the current one, there is no other solution. Even the more reasonable Jews admit this and cooperate with us. You should really hear Lehr speak. His very beautiful wife is Jewish.

My dear Lojzi, I am not interested in your bloodline, and you know that very well.

If I took matters that seriously, I should reprimand you for working for a Jew, since that means you are strengthening them.

Or I could have said I wasn’t interested in the Hungarians’ cause because according to my bloodline and my name I am Italian.

He did not seem to be near the end of what he meant to say when suddenly Madzar’s fist rose as if he were going to strike the table.

But he did not.

He rose, kicked the armchair out from under him, and stood up.

You don’t imagine, I mean you don’t think, he said dryly, without emotion, that anyone has the right to tell me, or keep a record of, whom I could or should not work for.

The polite smile did not disappear from his face.

By now he had gained a reliable insight into the way the other man’s thinking and strategy dovetailed.

In response Bellardi also rose, but he took his time to tower over the table.

Nevertheless, putting my trust into good old common sense, I will continue, he said very quietly, almost amiably, as if free of disturbing emotion. Even though at that moment, because of his own sluggishness and lack of comprehension, he loathed and disdained Madzar with all the released force of his zeal; or perhaps it was himself he hated so much. He could not understand why he wanted so passionately to lure Madzar into something he knew was not right for him.

Who would not serve him.

And why doesn’t this servant serve him.

Fortunately, he managed to check his impending fury.

It’s a bit like saying that I’m giving you another chance to save your soul from damnation, he cried out with an unexpected laugh.

Believe me, I know your soul better than you do.

His teeth gleamed wetly.

Come on, what the hell do you know, whom do you know, the architect asked himself angrily. Yet the other man fascinated and enchanted him with his insistence and with his convinced inflexibility, which — along with his teeth and his laughter, false to the point of perfection — he had inherited from his mother and which made him very like her.

It also occurred to him that this was maniacal work, a work of madness, of being blind and deaf.

This cautionary thought, however, made him hesitate in his effort to defend himself at all cost from the threat of approaching chaos.

From crashing along with them.

Why didn’t the terrible beauty of chaos seduce him.

You know very well, he protested weakly, that I am going to set up my life in an entirely different world. It will be like going to the moon. I can’t see why, knowing this, you’re talking to me about these matters.

The little boy’s smile on Bellardi’s face now formed charming little dimples between the strong grooves and sharp lines.

Now you’re talking, he said, letting a chuckle shake his body, his pleasure made visible, this is exactly the point I hoped to arrive at, Lojzi, my precious.

Which, however, was no longer an innocent pleasure but a well-calculated obvious way to perform the latest act of the play that starred the two of them. They could not lose the game, had no reason to, and therefore had to do everything to save every single soul.

He could not be disappointed in himself.

Now, however, I must go below with you because we’re preparing to dock.

He gently grasped Madzar’s elbow and as he did so the ship’s horn wailed, long and desperate.

Madzar, to his shame, shuddered.

Our network is widening, looking for possible residents abroad, Bellardi shouted over the horn. We have people in many places already, including America. But it’s a huge continent, you know, and right now it’s brains like yours that we need.

He opened the door, and as they silently went down the dimly lit stairs, the ship’s bell sounded from the bridge and kept ringing until the engine stopped completely.

They could see the lit-up Mohács pier swim past them in the gloomy silence.

The currents were carrying them on with incredible force; only here, very close to the riverbank and under the enormous embankment, did their power become visible.

Moths and mosquitoes were hovering between the water and the floodlights’ beams, as if the light had torn them from the darkness.

And as the current carried them well past the docking bridge and the yellow docking station, festive with the white flowers of the wide-crowned horse chestnut trees, the noisily reversing engine once again made their bodies rattle. They were almost in line with the cold block of the darkened silk-factory building when, with the ringing of a small bell, the two paddle wheels began to rotate backward and the squeaky rudder turned sharply. Now they were moving in reverse, against the current, and the dark, great river gurgled, boiled, seethed, and churned under them until the enormous side of the Carolina bumped against the docking bridge.

Think about it, please, Bellardi said, almost derisively. But please don’t let it upset you. No point in making a drama of it, you’ve no reason to. What we are talking about, first of all, is that when the occasion arises you should join us. This is a simple invitation, friendly and respectful, nothing else. You can’t be so contemptuous of your race or, if not your race, of truth and fairness, as to refuse to join us. And after that, we’ll see. The whole summer is still ahead of us.

Anyway, I’d like to spend the summer with you, exactly as we did a long time ago.

At the right moment I’ll ask you for your response.

He spoke tolerantly and mockingly, as if he had managed to outwit his friend after all. Then he unexpectedly waved good-bye and, before Madzar had time to respond in any way, disappeared into a dark passage on the deck.

Madzar, who had forgotten his coat and cap, was about to step onto the dock when he heard the old waiter call, Gestatten Sie mir, then thrust the cap into his hand and helped him on with his coat.

And the following day, in Ármin Gottlieb’s lumberyard he found what he had been looking for, and the discovery wiped away his mental anguish and his agitation.

I have such luck. How damn lucky I am again.

He exulted inside.

Bellardi, with his bizarre stories, was the first person whom Madzar completely forgot about once he had found the wood.

More accurately, one emotional upheaval was exchanged for another.

The old lumber merchant did not recognize him.

He sat over his papers at his desk in the lumberyard office; there were papers and business ledgers everywhere on the table, on chairs, on top of the filing cabinets. With his whey-colored eyes, he looked up at Madzar from behind his thick glasses, which even in his childhood Mazdar had thought looked like fish eyes, and listened to him without making a sound.

As if waiting to see whether it was worth getting up from the desk at the visiting gentleman’s request.

Outside, birds were chirping, but the riverside swallows were not yet making their shrill sounds in flight, and suddenly Madzar missed them. They had not yet arrived from Africa. Gottlieb always had the boys put down the driftwood and stack it first and then paid them here, in the office.

If he paid, and if he didn’t say, please, boys, come tomorrow for your pay.

And then they had to hang around for a long time, stand firm on their demands for pay. The shrieking of the swallows was part of the protracted wait.

I see, I see, he said now, after a long while, though frankly he only guessed what sort of wood the stranger had in mind. It should be hardwood, preferably from a demolition site, healthy but old, very old if possible.

A few years back, somebody here made a very interesting big catch, he said warily but still not getting up from his desk and not even putting his pen down.

If it isn’t driftwood, I’d appreciate your showing it to me.

How did you know I was thinking of driftwood, asked the merchant suspiciously.




Saturated Sleepers


I am somewhat familiar with local conditions, Madzar answered, sounding not too friendly, to signal that he didn’t want to get into details.

He had no wish to chat.

Outside, sparrows went on chirping in the sunshine. Nothing had changed during the elapsed years, for birds chirping in the sunshine were always sparrows.

They scrutinized each other somewhat suspiciously for a long time, and then it seemed that Gottlieb, searching Madzar’s features and despite his own reticence, recognized the long-lost boy.

He laughed, quietly accommodating Madzar’s taciturnity.

He showed his old deformed teeth, atrophied gums, and bits of breakfast leftovers stuck in the grooves of the worn tooth enamel.

Every morning he ate goose fat spread on a slice of brown bread piled high with rings of red onion, which he considered very healthy, and drank coffee with it, no milk.

With his every word he exuded the smell of stale onion.

He said that without knowing what the wood would be used for, he was very sorry but could not tell the gentleman whether he had any.

He still hadn’t put down his pen. He meant this in jest; it was nothing but the peculiar curiosity of country folk: first he had to know who this man was, what wind had blown him this way, and whether his intentions were good or evil.

With your permission, I’ll take a look, Madzar said in the tone of one used to giving orders, even though he was shaken to the core by his joy in seeing the old man again.

His back and thighs were covered with goose bumps.

Though I see, he added, that you don’t have much wood at all.

Ultimately, this was an encounter with lapsed time at whose depths lay the disgraced corpse of the little boy cast out of the water, which Madzar and Bellardi along with the other boys had to look at.

They could not refuse; they looked at it as the other boys did.

Gottlieb, hearing the gentlemanly tone, put down his pen carefully and to be on the safe side closed the top of the ink bottle.

He saw the stranger’s face turn red, and, as if protecting his property against an anger of unknown origin, he rose, pushed the chair out from under him, though not too fast, and stood up. He was a robust man, and advanced years had made his shoulders stoop, but only a little; in the pocket high on his long dark-blue apron, one could see the tips of a slide rule, carpenter’s pencil, and folding ruler; he wore brown corduroy pants and had black elbow protectors on the sleeves of his striped flannel shirt.

With his knotty palms, used to moving and loading things, he blindly and absentmindedly kept touching things on the desk.

True, I can’t offer you much right now, he said with a helpful, almost humble mercantile smile, and then, as he continued to search for something, alarm showing in his eyes, he forgot to complete the sentence he had started.

Perhaps he’d find it on the blackened wood floor, swept every morning with oily sawdust.

Or perhaps on top of one of the open filing cabinets packed with receipts and account books.

Where is my hat, he asked half-aloud, as if in passing.

But the origin of this wood I’m talking about, he said, returning to the interrupted sentence absentmindedly and going on in a lively tone, I can verify for you. It’s the kind of material that I’m sure would meet all the gentleman’s requirements. I have never paid so much for driftwood, I have a witness too, I’ll show you now what I mean if you’d be kind enough to follow me.

Could I go without a hat, he asked himself half-aloud.

But if the gentleman does not care to see it personally, I’ll show you samples of everything else that is still available.

It’s not much, true, not that much.

Madzar did not understand what the Jew was talking about.

And then Gottlieb, unable to overcome his curiosity, interrupted his convoluted explanation, almost shouting, no matter how hard I look at you, sir, in my view you are not from these parts.

Madzar did not respond, he did not wish to fall into a trap or get involved in a complicated conversation, so he kept silent until Gottlieb finally started out with him toward the door.

They could hear the monotonous clatter of fulling machines in the nearby leather factory and, from farther away, a uniform thumping in the silk factory, as well as the engine of a military assault boat puffing and coughing on its way upstream.

There were so many new things in this world; behind the tall brick wall enclosing the lumberyard on the west, one could follow the noise of a horse and cart as it turned slowly into Farkas Street, where its creaking wheels began to squeak among the one-story houses with their pointed facades. Madzar could have sworn it was the cart of the horse-dealing Gypsies and that a foal was trotting alongside the near horse.

Everything was as if he had already lived through it once.

And only when they left the office did he notice that the Jew was indeed not wearing a head covering.

A sharp little breeze caught his thin graying hair and showed sickly shining spots on his scalp as they were going down the steps. Madzar had never seen him bareheaded. Abroad, he had come in contact and worked with many different kinds of Jew and for quite some time paid close attention to them, as if urging himself to notice at last what he was supposed to notice. Yet it never occurred to him that they were supposed to wear hats. He was seized by a childlike muteness. The Jew had violated the rules. As if noticing for the first time in his life that he had been doing everything that ritual demanded. Having returned to a once-familiar world in which nothing had changed, his childhood self had no idea what to do with a Jew whose scalp rarely saw the light of day.

When put this way, however, the question made no sense; he almost laughed at it aloud.

The ominous absence of the hat cracked the old-time magic.

At the sight of the pale spots and the tufts of sticky, oily hair, he felt aversion and repugnance. Still, he was able to behave according to the codes of his upbringing.

Or perhaps Bellardi had managed to confuse him with his damned chatter.

What the gentleman sees in the yard, Gottlieb was explaining artlessly, will all be taken away tomorrow, end of the week at the latest, because I’m making the final accounts and on Monday I close the whole business for good. Roheim will take over whatever is left, if you know who I mean. The gentleman may not believe it, but the firm Gottlieb and Company was founded eighty years ago.

And Roheim, as everyone can see, and I don’t begrudge him his success, has managed to stay in business.

Eighty years, that’s right, that’s how long the firm has been in business.

Madzar frequently thought that although he knew about different materials, had unconventional ideas and a good sense of space, and possessed a not bad sense of proportion, yet compared with his successful professional colleagues he was hesitant and came to his ideas belatedly.

The big doghouses were empty, he was late again; on the ground, richly dotted with barely sprouting chamomile and chickweed, the chains hanging off the runway wires were lying abandoned, just as they had been unclasped from the dog collars. He paid no attention to the Jew’s heavy remarks, not really; he was thinking about the komondors and about himself, busy with his own desperation.

Which meant that he could interpret existing conditions even in a strange environment but could not use them to foresee anything.

His vision was weak.

Of course he did not mean to lie, it would take two more years to make it a round eighty, but just the same, he will close the business his grandfather had opened, may his memory be blessed, it’s three generations after all, the work of three generations.

In that case, Madzar replied, half-aloud, I got here just in time.

Gott behüte, to say something like that or even to think it, the merchant responded with a scratchy little laugh and much waving of arms. Who knows when the last hour arrives, the gentleman can’t know either. Let’s not hasten it with anything we do.

At this point laughter helped him deflect the conversation. Out of caution, he did not tell the visitor that his son, with the same family name, was carrying on the firm’s work on Coney Island. He had two vehicles, two beautiful Fords, to deliver merchandise with.

After all, he doesn’t know who this stranger is, why would he tell him everything.

Madzar didn’t need much time to see he would find nothing useful here.

Under the rain roofs he saw mainly abandoned pallets and broken support beams, a bit farther away under the open sky a small pile of firewood or rough softwood timber. But one couldn’t stop the Jew; he was going on, hurrying, taking with him the aroma of the morning’s onion, limping a little, his weight shifting more to one leg than the other. Madzar felt like going instead to the Serb merchant who always had a rich assortment of material taken from demolished buildings.

At the railroad, they stack a hundred sleepers to a pile.

He paid no attention to what the Jew was saying.

As the gentleman can see from here, only two are missing to make it a full pile, Gottlieb said, and he smiled at him as if to say, I don’t care to go too far in our conversation, but let’s go as far as the pile.

I must keep the gentleman busy with my chatter until we get there.

But Madzar would have preferred to know what the Jew had done with the komondors, and immediately consoled himself that these could not be the same komondors. He did not want to ask, for that would reveal his identity and then it would be impossible to avoid a conversation burdened with their memories. He shuddered at the thought that he might wind up in intimate proximity to a Jew who didn’t brush his teeth in the morning.

Bellardi, with his theories, had surely made him sick to his stomach.

It even occurred to him that what he was doing now also justified Bellardi. Wherever he looks, he cannot free himself of Bellardi.

Perhaps the reason he had gone so far away was to be free of him. What’s the point of pushing back the Jewish element if the German one will push into its place. If a Gottlieb throws in the towel, there is always a Roheim to take over his business. It’s impossible to shake off the foreign element.

His men were very lucky, the merchant went on enthusiastically, they managed to fish out all but two of them, and sleepers of this quality the gentleman will never find anywhere.

He didn’t know whom he found more repugnant, Gottlieb or Bellardi — everybody, which could mean himself.

He might have killed his own dogs, he thought angrily, giving himself the impression that the Jew was repugnant and that thinking so proved his loyalty to Bellardi.

They’re from Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering, the merchant explained, hesitating slightly at the sight of the gentleman’s expression.

If that name means anything to the gentleman.

It does, of course it does.

But entrusted to this smooth-mannered Jew he felt his situation as even more lamentable in this damned provincial district where he saw the justification of thoughts he vehemently opposed. Away with all this. What was the point of hoping. Why had he come here anyway. He couldn’t go to Roheim because Roheim didn’t deal in this sort of material. How could this Jew be familiar with Stipiczka’s plant in Semmering. He couldn’t get free of — and in his thoughts he almost said of this louse. And the old man could have at least remembered him.

He tried to interject that he did not object to looking at Stipiczka’s sleepers but frankly did not need ninety-eight of them, in fact didn’t need a single one.

The Jew pretended not to hear this; he kept talking just to work his jaws.

Even though Madzar emphasized that he was not interested in waterlogged wood, which he could not use in his work.

Gottlieb did not give in; he enjoyed his own artful jabbering. He understands, of course he does; with a raised voice, he spoke a word to every one of Madzar’s, clear as day, unless he had misunderstood the gentleman. Because if we figure three hundred river kilometers, and we can’t figure less, then this wood had to have been sent downriver from Verőce, which took at least a week.

Well, now, how can you say such a thing, Madzar interjected angrily, as if he were in the mood to argue about this with a Jew. He did not understand why the Jew was exaggerating so shamelessly when the exaggeration was against his business interest. Even from Győr it’s not three hundred, how could it be more than two hundred from Verőce.

I wouldn’t want to argue with the gentleman, I’d probably wind up at the short end of the stick, but please take a good look, he said, and with his finger he pointed at the place they were approaching. Whether it’s two hundred or five hundred, on that wood the gentleman will see no trace of any damage or any alteration. Right next to the red stamp of the railway, the gentleman can see Stipiczka’s burn marks. He, Gottlieb, has a good man with the railroad who follows up and takes care of everything for him. In the end they agreed, he doesn’t mind telling the gentleman, that he’d pay the railroad a symbolic sum, they set it at ten pengös, which he paid properly, because according to railroad regulations the wood had been exposed to a natural disaster, and they’d have to chalk it up as a loss anyway.

And that the gentleman needs just this kind of wood borders on the miraculous. This is what happened. One of the piles, listen to this, dear sir, they didn’t unload it on the right side from the direction opposite to the train’s travel, as the engineer in charge had told them to do. Boggles the mind that such coincidences exist in this world, this is a miracle, a real miracle, this is; I don’t want to exaggerate, but the truth is they unloaded the pile on the left side. This is how this one pile wound up on tideland, but the water didn’t carry it away all at once, it nicely divvied up the labor, and Gottlieb laughed again, his mouth wide open, as if he were praising the water’s elemental force and the treachery of the current. Ten sleepers a day, it regularly lifted off the topmost row, at least that’s how my men caught them. But the last two never showed up, doggone it, he exclaimed unexpectedly, and then quickly offered an explanation. It’s possible that those two rows simply drifted right by their noses without their noticing them.

And they had not yet reached the woodpile, protected by a wide shingle roof on stilts from rain, spray splashes, and strong sunshine, when the sight emerging from the shade stopped Madzar in his tracks.

From that point on he dared to approach the wood only very cautiously, as if not meaning to go ahead at all.

He had never seen such sleepers. He could not believe his eyes.

He did not even know that such sleepers existed. He could not comprehend how sleepers could be so perfectly processed and finished.

Could he be lucky again, he asked himself, and he knew immediately that he was damn lucky.

How long has this pile been here, he asked gruffly.

For years, five years, let me see, I don’t want to lie to the gentleman. I know we repiled it twice and very carefully too, if that reassures you at all. But the mystery, my dear sir, is what these sleepers had been saturated with, go ahead, feel them, come on, closer. I don’t know who will take the secret with him to the grave, but they saturated these with something, that’s for sure. I mentioned that we repacked the pile because I myself became very curious to see whether this material was changing or not.

Madzar was now close enough to study the sleepers’ rougher, darker cut surfaces. He would have preferred to smell them then and there before deciding what the method of preservation had been. But he was bothered by the other man’s physical closeness and the suddenly created professional mutuality.

At first glance one would take them to be of a dark tropical wood, he thought. If these really have stayed like this for you for five years, he said aloud, then they won’t change, and again he shuddered at the idea of permanence and the thought that he had found the material for it.

You can rest assured of this, no need to lose sleep over it, he added gruffly. Bet your life on it.

I must be an idiot to praise his merchandise for him, Madzar grumbled to himself, overcome by a strange, gentlemanly emotion.

He hadn’t touched the wood, hadn’t properly assessed its qualities, and didn’t know for sure whether the unknown saturant had penetrated it fully.

This is what I’ve been looking for, he thought, remaining calm. And what might the preservative have done to the medullary rays, had it reached the wood’s medulla, he asked himself seriously. By then he had told himself that this was it, yes, this is what I had in mind. If he cut it into mirrors, and removed the medulla, which he might have to do, would it be the required size. As if from a secret source, he knew the answer, yes, yes, and was ready to decide immediately that this would be better than taking wood from demolished buildings or long-seasoned plum or cherrywood. He liked this wood precisely because of its perfect saturation of unknown origin and its purity; he only now realized that he couldn’t have done anything with the dry hollowness of wood taken from demolished buildings.

He kept calming himself, saying, take your time, take a closer look, don’t get excited for no reason. In his mind, question was chasing question: would the unknown material leave stains, will it have an unpleasant odor.

I’ve found it.

Don’t rush your decision; don’t rejoice in vain.

In his helpless joy he would have burst into tears if the stranger hadn’t been standing next to him.

It was as though he instantly felt the wood as part of his flesh and was living through the wood’s peculiar fate.

This was saturated right after they felled it, he said aloud, which leaves the question, saturated with what.

Gottlieb joined him in making little rhythmic sounds punctuating the logic of the thought.

And Madzar could not tell how the magic moment occurred, a moment not entirely the product of either chance or necessity but containing elements of both. Something like condensed precipitates. He must look into this, cannot jump blindly into the unknown. Destiny appeared before him as a convergence of old dirt roads coming from various directions under the open summer sky.

Sometimes the old dirt roads crossed, other times only touched one another; they were familiar or completely unfamiliar.

Events arriving from different points of the compass met on these abandoned dirt roads, and once the encounters were over they moved on, indifferent to one another. Perhaps Gottlieb was also luxuriating in the grandeur of the moment; he wasn’t chattering anymore, he grew silent alongside Madzar.

There’s no doubt these oak sleepers were used on secondary rail lines.

In size or material they did not differ from standard ones.

To prevent any possible disappointment due to the usual stickiness one feels when touching saturated sleepers, he hesitated to step closer and did not dare touch them right away.

Even though he could see plainly that he was not in for much of a disappointment. In his mind, he had already gone too far, figuring and calculating things; the disappointment would be unbearable. Two fifty, and he wouldn’t need longer ones than that, not even by a centimeter. But mainly he was shocked by their color. Although they had darkened considerably, the substance of the wood, as far as one could see, had not changed at all. Or perhaps they had steamed it too, and after the first saturation sort of washed out the tar oil with some kind of additive, dried it, and put it in the pneumatic boiler under high pressure, then saturated it again with, say, creosote and some other refined preservative. Not impossible. It might have been a vegetable oil. After that, the density and quality of its flesh could not change. It would not get moldy, it would resist fungal decay.

It has to be looked at in a radial section.

It could have been linseed oil.

Once, on behalf of Mies van der Rohe, Madzar had gone to order some material from the famous plant in Semmering where the modus operandi was true handicraft and nothing was mass-produced. He spoke to the ancient Stipiczka himself, and now, thinking back, he had the impression that he’d never gotten any information about the details of his work. With his drawn-out, reluctant emphases, his bulging, expressionless eyes, and in the blue work apron tight across his abnormally protruding belly, Stipiczka was for him like a peculiar idol one should not dare address. He either spoke so fast it was impossible to follow, as if he did not want to be understood, or he kept quiet. He must have been frightened of people his whole life, frightened of everybody and everything except perhaps wood. Because he feared that everything would be taken away from him. But to the wood, in contrast, he gave everything the wood had to have or could possibly wish for.

I won’t be able to get the information I need from him, if he’s still alive.

He tried to imagine the pleasant surprise that would greet him when with a power saw he opened the heavy, dark blocks of wood. Or painfully unpleasant surprises, one after the other. He drew his finger across the surface of one sleeper, lifted the finger to his nose, smelled, and very quietly asked Gottlieb if he knew the sleepers’ measurements.

Of course he did, Gottlieb replied in a similarly quiet tone, and quickly enumerated them, they wouldn’t have to measure, revealing to Madzar that his rough calculation had been way off the mark. The sleepers were a full ten centimeters shorter than he had guessed by his eyesight. In his embarrassment, Madzar leaned closer and now had the impression that his nose was registering something familiar that one usually smells several times a day, the odor of a common chemical.

The sleepers’ cross-section he found ideal, however.

He was making small approving sounds too.

It deviates from the standard, or I may not be remembering the standard measurements right.

He thought, pondered, mused, tried to recall and fix in his mind the smell of the familiar chemical, but from where. Another excitement on top of the others he’d been coping with. He tried to lift this smell away, as it were, from the smells of other compounds. Perhaps it is from an organic not inorganic compound.

Probably some formaldehyde derivative.

With this idea in mind, he started to go around the pile, but he moved away more to be alone with his sense of smell and freedom to touch, and also to keep telling himself, to be allowed to keep telling himself, how damn lucky he was.

Gottlieb did not follow; he did not wish to disturb the strange gentleman, whom he could not place by either his attire or his behavior.

He thought of belladonna, which ladies suffering from headaches drip on lump sugar in the depths of their darkened rooms, and of atropine, but he didn’t stay with either because of that sharp edge to the odor, so characteristic of organic compounds.

I never heard of Stipiczka manufacturing sleepers of any kind, he said irritably to the merchant when he came back around the woodpile.

If material of such quality lay around here for years, the question pricked him like a thorn, why did no one take it.

As if to say, you can’t put anything over on me, my friend, you’ve got to get up a lot earlier for that.

Stipiczka doesn’t make sleepers, why should he, answered the merchant, yielding, but my man told me these here were specially ordered from Stipiczka by the Hungarian State Railways. They could have had them done in Dombóvár, but extra demands cropped up, you see.

Correct me if I’m wrong, these measurements are for sleepers used on secondary lines.

That’s right, no need for me to correct the gentleman. You may not know, but between Verőce and Kismaros the railway has a branch for forestry work, and that was the one whose capabilities had to be strengthened, how should I put it, in order to make it possible to reach the new border station.

They turned Mohács too into a border station, he added, but then cut short the plaintive sentence.

Hold on a moment, Madzar said, that secondary line has a narrow-gauge track, which as far as I know would need two-meter sleepers. These here, according to you, are two forty.

If the gentleman does not believe me, we can measure them. But it’s not me who says it, I’m telling you what my good man told me, and the insulted merchant giggled a little, then went on in a whisper, my man at the railroad. For troop transports, the gentleman understands, the man said the line had to be suitable for transporting troops. And the job has been completed.

With his index finger, he pointed triumphantly to the sky, indicating that it was done at a higher command that saves us all from damnation, and then he silently spread his arms.

We put down larger and more durable sleepers than regular ones, but nobody could tell the difference.

I see.

They did not want to attract unnecessary attention, you see.

Well, then, that’s the explanation.

So the gentleman understands now. To avoid any accusations that we might have violated that part of the peace treaty.*

During the pause that followed, in which neither of them could think of anything but the injustice done to their country, its territory dismembered by the peace treaty, the architect, deprived of the last morsels of his distrust of the sleepers, thought it was going to be very hard to get through the next few hours patiently. He glanced at the elderly merchant with tenderness, affection, and almost as if asking for help. He had a good mind to have him cut into the wood. He wanted to slice off a piece at the end to see the cross-section, and then another piece lengthwise to look at the radial section. Perhaps Gottlieb had not dismantled the machines in his workshop; they might still be working. How could they be working, there was an ominous, bleak silence above the embankment precisely because they were not working. Anyway, one is better off alone with such ideas. In retrospect, he understood every word of the Jew’s meaningless jabber and saw through it, but he could not find the words with which to reciprocate.

He was as happy as a lark.

He was back at the reassuring feeling of bourgeois equality.

To rush forward with gratitude was not advisable since they had not talked about the price yet.

The price could not be too high, though the mere thought of it gave him a fright, again.

The Jew must have set a trap for him.

He asked whether Mr. Gottlieb could have one sleeper delivered to his workshop.

By all means, gladly, of course.

Now he thinks he will need all ninety-eight after all, but for the final decision, he would have to examine at least one of them thoroughly.

The gentleman doesn’t have to worry about price, said the merchant, his tone suggesting that suddenly he didn’t understand things.

What workshop could this stranger have here.

But of course he understands that the gentleman can’t buy a cat in the bag, the quantity is quite large for that, he nodded, and in a voice filled with profound distrust he asked where to send the sleepers, because he would send at least three for the test.

On hearing the object of his earlier curiosity, the familiar name and familiar address, no surprise showed on his face, because he was not surprised.

Although he no longer had hired help, he would fetch somebody to deliver the material to the Madzar house.

In his soul, Gottlieb was crestfallen.

As he covertly and incredulously observed the blue shadows on the other man’s delicate white skin, always ready to blush, and his strong, darkly red hair, he could not chase away the thought that red-haired people were always sly foxes and mean swindlers.

They exchanged a few words about what the price might be, paving the way, so to speak, for later bargaining.

The mind could not comprehend what the young man was doing and why.

This young man’s father and even grandfather had bought wood from them, not from Roheim or Gojko Drogo, and in an instant he recognized in the young man’s face the long-forgotten features of those two older men.

After all, this young man had been a classmate of Gottlieb’s own boy in the school on Koronaherceg Street.

And because of these useless thoughts and unappeasable indignations, his fate opened up, his everyday life came crashing down on him. He saw before him his little boy as a grown man, the unlucky, miserable little boy. Never mind, we’ll have him study a trade, he’ll be a watchmaker; that’s what they planned for him.

Which made his soul whimper.

He saw his beautiful, strong wife at a time when she hadn’t yet gone mad. She had been not quite right in the head even as a girl, but no one would have thought that as a woman she would go mad. Still, he blamed himself. He was feeling the threat of the final hours groping their way toward him, a total darkening of the spirit. He hadn’t recognized the Madzar boy. Not only can I not find my hat and to my greatest shame I’m standing here without a head cover at the sight of my Creator, may His name be blessed forever and ever, but I don’t even remember whether I put my own hat on my own head this morning.

His negligence confused him, the other man’s presence and incomprehensible behavior upset and hurt him, and he must not allow any of this to show on his face.

When he was finally left alone with his desperation, limping back to his office, going across the yard alive with the chirping of sparrows, he began to whistle, but with him this was a sign not of jollity but rather of unbearable tension.

All right then, this hour too has arrived.

He could console himself that at least he managed to sell the wood after all.

And the architect strolled along the embankment to the boat station. He sat down on a large stone by the ferrymen’s small kiosk and watched the arrival of the almost empty ferry from the island; creaking mightily, it slid up on the paved shore. Serbian Gypsies in snow-white shirts were the first ones off, leading three restless horses amid a loud pounding of hooves. There was no feature of the landscape that didn’t bring back something of the past. The sun was very strong, and nothing was left of the early-morning mist above the lively surface of the river; the water reflected the current-driven image of the sky in vanishing brown, blue, and white spots.

There were moments when the landscape made a profound turn, because he felt that everything, after all, was referring to Mrs. Szemző.

It was for her that he fantasized about the darkening color of the oak, but he did not understand the connection between her and the color.

As for Bellardi, well, the sooner he forgot him, the better.

And what about that certain deep purple visible on the densest part of the surface, on the knobs and knots, would he find it on inner surfaces exposed by cutting the wood. Among the women, whether on foot or with bicycles loaded down with packed baskets, gabbing loudly and cutting into one another’s words as they followed the horses to the shore, he did not see a single one with a bonnet on her head. But it was too early for his mother to return from the island; she never came back before four in the afternoon. These women were Hungarian, he could see that from afar; Catholics and Protestants wore their headgear differently, while the Slavic women, who used their white linen kerchiefs only during work, spread them taut across their foreheads and tied them not under their chins but at the back of their heads. The most fertile lands belonging to Mohácsians were on the other shore, along with shepherds’ and fishermen’s accommodations and the so-called bush farms, owned by rich German farmers who moved there with their households for the summer months. In his childhood Madzar had frequently experienced a strange anxiety at the thought that among the uniformly dressed, constantly chattering women he might not recognize his own mother.

Standing by the railing, he might lose himself in watching the ferry and would never find her. But in his dread he was not allowed to cry, not there among the horses, the carts piled sky-high, the bicycles and people. Look at him, a boy, and sniveling, some German woman laughed derisively, what kind of man will this one grow up to be, and then somehow his mother’s hand, the one with the ring, suddenly turned up from somewhere and slapped his mouth.

No kind, if you let him get away with everything, he won’t become a man.

He was still thinking about Bellardi, and he did not forget Bellardi’s lover either, whose arm had smelled like fish all night.

Nor did he forget that to Hungarians every German was a Swabian because their prejudices made Hungarians incapable of identifying any concept correctly. Although at this moment he could not have told Bellardi whether he was thinking of himself as a Hungarian or as a German. Was he lashing out at the Hungarian element in himself for the slipshod phrasing or was his German blood protesting the Grobheit. In which case it would be Bellardi speaking from him, after all.

The word of the blood.

As if without Bellardi such a thing could not have occurred to him, blood.

He used to be plagued by nightmares in broad daylight. He was especially frightened of Hungarian women wearing dark kerchiefs. Congealed blood clots.

He kept scaring himself with the notion that one fine day, if he failed to behave correctly, the German women with their ringed fingers would pummel him and thrust him from their circle and then the Hungarian women would take him in between their legs. The envisaged image was of the huge, fat great-grandmother with the pus- and blood-soaked bandage on her ulcerated leg as she lay on her pallet in the dark kitchen. Her leg would never heal. Because Hungarians wash only to their waist, it’s a good thing they wash at all, and they couldn’t wash out this bandage, he heard this complaint enough times; mainly on Sundays they slap some water on their upper bodies, and only at the well, and Hungarian women won’t even take off their vests or undershirts to do it. The blood stank. He’d never have dared to reach into the cleft of his buttocks while washing, not to mention his hole. It never occurred to him that his underwear wouldn’t be shit-stained if he cleaned his bottom properly. He did not have his mother’s permission for this, which caused him no small inconvenience in college.

Not even after graduating from high school did he receive permission to do what had to be done with his foreskin.

The fine deep purple, which only the most experienced eye would have detected on the oak’s dark gray surface, ran through with yellow streaks, also stood for a grave threat.

For a very long time, he used to turn away, ashamed even before himself, when he drew back the foreskin from the bulb of his penis. It could mean that water had somehow managed to make its way into the structure of the wood after all, and was still working into it. He was about to purchase some material, having fallen in love with it because of Mrs. Szemző, whose inner characteristics were unknown to him.

He tried to imagine the two of them in the empty apartment on Pozsonyi Road, what he could have done with the woman in the twilight had he not let her go. Good Lord, what couldn’t I have done, he kept saying to himself; as if the woman’s hand had left a trace on his arm, where with her touch she strengthened his awareness of the mutuality of their feelings, which he was now tearing asunder. He could have done everything with her. But he did not see anything there except the reflected yellow light on the ceiling. His wish now grew so strong while sitting on the stone that he did not know, or rather did not wish to imagine, what might have happened had he reached after her and held her back.

Don’t go away.

The more he tried not to imagine it, the more he reinforced his inability not to desire this woman.

He considered it scandalous on the part of nature that it had presented the human male with such a member. As if the demanding gods had turned his raw insides, so sensitive with their mucous membranes, out into the light of day, had denuded an inner organ with no aesthetics of its own commensurable with other surfaces of the body.

He could think of nothing else except that while groping in the dark, searching for the true inner structure of things, with his erection he was feeling Creation’s sole palpable instruction.

He was standing before God with his head uncovered, he remembered that too, and then he suddenly rose from the cool stone and started off after all, though he knew they wouldn’t be bringing the wood yet, no matter how much he wanted to hasten things. It was as if he had to reach the end of the world to complete his mission. He’ll wait at home for the wood to be delivered. And when he got home, first he opened both wings of the workshop’s enormous door as wide as they would go, to let light and warmth at last pervade the huge space where he might spend the next few weeks working. As he wedged open the heavy iron-framed oak doors, which would grow hot in the sunshine, frosty cold invaded him from the inside, which made the moment even more celebratory. As if he had released both past and present, letting them flow into each other. And he saw before him the morning a few days after the funeral when the assistants pushed the last completed barque out of the yard.

This time there were no loud cheers when the barque hit the water with a great splash, only the dogs barked and yelped in joy, being used to it with their master.

After that, the workshop became overgrown with the bare tendrils of woodbine.

He stood for a long time in the dead, spotless, and for many decades useless yard, waiting impatiently and helplessly and with a rising sense of ceremony for a knocking at the gate and delivery of the wood.

After that, two of their dogs were beaten to death.

But nobody was coming, because first Gottlieb, insensitive to his own forgetfulness, had to look in the office, helplessly and furtively, for his hat.

He had to do this before going to find somebody in the neighborhood, this he remembered, but, and this had never happened to him before, he even forgot what he was looking for. Yet instinctively he kept looking. He looked among his papers, under the furniture, and if he came upon it, he’d remember it. In the meantime he murmured fragments of a prayer designed for other occasions, about our God, who was one, as if he had to convince himself that he had someone he could trust. Our Lord is great, His name is sanctified and awesome, he continued in Hebrew, remembering it by chance, not praying consciously.

For years he hadn’t asked for anything, only given thanks for everything. When he asked for something for his daughter in Dombóvár or for his son in Coney Island, he simply recited what he had learned fifty years before in the heder, and had the nagging doubt that he’d never fully understood what he was saying. He saw no point in asking things from the Lord. Although he had fulfilled his obligations toward Him, his wishes and intentions had simply died away in him. The Lord has not heard my wishes, he said to himself in secret, somewhat reproachfully, even when He answers one. The Lord does not listen to wishes even though He is not deaf.

There is no causal relationship between the Almighty’s mercy and man’s appeals to Him.

A little later Madzar walked into the house; in the hallway, smelling of mold because of the cold winter, he opened the lid of the hope chest in which his father’s, grandfather’s, and their old live-in assistant’s oft-patched, clean work clothes were kept.

He found everything in the chest ironed and neatly folded. While he changed into work clothes, exposed to the pervasive smell of home-boiled soap emanating from the chest, no one came with the sleepers on his shoulder. Soap boiling was done everywhere in the autumn, when the golden yellow leaves fell from the poplars; sometimes Bellardi would go with him to help push the wheelbarrow home with the collected bones from the old granny’s house.

Driven by shame and restlessness, Gottlieb finally closed his office.

That was actually very nice of Bellardi, helping to push the stinking bones in the wheelbarrow; after all, his mother was a princess. It was very nice of him. And it was very nice of the Lord Jesus that he blessed both of them with the most deep-felt childhood love.

He was literally fleeing from the words of his prayer, was it holy or sanctified be Thy name, the angels sing Your praise each day, he was in a hurry and picked a detour along which he might meet the least number of acquaintances as he rushed along, uncovered, at the very nadir of his shame.

He wanted to avoid everything and everybody.

He hastened along the flood-blackened brick wall of the silk factory, and he kept on saying the words, shouting over the monotone booming and clatter of the machines, the metallic clangs of the combs, reciting the words to himself. With the fragments of the Hebrew prayer he displaced every Hungarian word so that his thinking would not be Hungarian, so that he would have no imagination, no Hungarian imagination either. Let us praise the exalted sanctity of this day. Terrifying and forbidding, Lord, what Thou hast given us today. May your realm and golden throne, resting on mercy, tower above all abomination.

There could be no living tie between the ancient text and Gottlieb’s practical thinking, since he no longer believed that people’s stupid wishes could touch Creation. He no longer believed; did not believe in his own faith that there was a god on whose terrible deeds anybody would build an empire, or that there was any other kind of god either. He imagined, keeping it a secret from himself, that the world was an empty vessel, completely empty, anything could be poured into it in any way, no matter what, since everything flowed out, spilled out, dripped away and scattered in the dust, dwindled and vanished. These were the kinds of thing he envisioned and thought about, though he continued to celebrate all the major and minor holidays, strictly observed the ritual rules and regulations. He concealed his own convictions from himself as if in his old age, supplanting his parents and taking over their role, he related to himself as if he were still a child. He must remain the same. Whatever happens, the world cannot change, and if his eyes saw far-reaching changes, he would not allow his mind to follow his eyes, lest his personal experiences improperly violate the depth of his faith or that of his skepticism.

Thus was Gottlieb riddled by the excruciatingly painful absence of God, about whose rapid withdrawal he would not talk to anyone, not for the world.

Gottlieb was not a stupid man.

To no one.

He should not be seen while crossing Halpiac Square, where at this hour the fish market was being cleaned and scrubbed by municipal sanitation workers, followed everywhere by cats, dogs, screeching seagulls, and beggars hoping to retrieve some scraps. He waited a little while and then managed, without having to greet anyone, to make his way across among the upended washbasins and tables glittering with water and leftover fish scales; hurrying under the spherical crowns of the elms, he fled from the familiarly functioning world along Szent János Street and the narrow, snaky Kígyó Street, and after he had crossed the wide and tranquil Szentháromság Road, lined on both sides with the severe-looking houses of the more prestigious Catholic families, their blinds rolled down and shutters closed, looking for all the world like two rows of citadels, he at last reached, at the corner of Zsidó Street, the old Israelite graveyard packed with uniformly pink tombstones.

Here he definitely had something to worry about without his hat.

The goyim could not know the meaning of the Almighty’s wrath and judgment; but there was no Jew who didn’t. The terrible promise filled him with the sense of a painful safety. He stopped in the shade by the tumbledown wooden fence to protect his bare head from the burning sun, and he regarded the street with the eyes of a stranger abandoned by God, his breathing heavy.

Between two breaths, he was still praying.

The bustle and shouting was great, somebody in front of him was pushing a handcart piled high with assorted junk. In the cacophony, it seemed improbable that he could reach his house unnoticed. Two unfamiliar rag-and-bone men were shouting at the top of their voices, their free hands spinning rattlers to attract attention. They both wore yarmulkes. We buy everything, they shouted into the noise they were making with their rattlers, everything you can find in your kitchen, your pantry, anywhere in your house. A few meters away, on the bank of the roadside ditch covered with wild spinach, a Christian kitchen maid was cleaning a chicken and singing loudly. In the dust, children were having a hoop-rolling competition; a farm wagon loaded with last year’s grapevines was just arriving, its wheels creaking and squeaking. Dishwater was hurled out of a window. From deep entranceways and echoing yards, the sounds of arguing voices, hammering, and grating were heard, which died suddenly at the unexpected slamming of a door. Then, along with the kitchen noises, the wound was opened again, and while a man’s voice begged and beseeched, two desperate and frantic female voices were shouting at each other.

A few weeks earlier, by mail, the Gottliebs had received the voucher from their son Jakab, according to which they were to board ship in Rotterdam for their overseas journey.

They already had their railway tickets to Rotterdam, and their son wrote to tell them to spend the night in a small old hotel near the dock, which frightened Gottlieb more than the long journey across the sea. What if there were no vacant rooms in that hotel. What would I do with your mother then. In response, Jakab wrote that there were many hotels, like mushrooms, near the piers. They didn’t have to worry about that. Robbers and drunkards are found in hotels at every port, Gottlieb knew that already; he already saw the corpse of his wife, frozen in its own blood, among the slashed eiderdowns in a ransacked little room. No amount of prayer could keep him from looking into the future, in which he too would be killed. One night he looked out the window because he thought someone was prowling, he heard voices. He could not get his head above the flesh of the murdered ones. The blood stuck to the feathers, no one bothered to bury their blood, and later no one could find out what jewelry had been stolen from them. And he could not write to Jakab about this either — that we are taking such and such pieces of jewelry with us — he could not put it in writing because he did not trust the letter, which might wind up in anybody’s hands. He did not reveal what pieces they were taking to Marika either; it had to remain a secret, otherwise a war of jealousy would break out between brother and sister, which never stopped smoldering anyway. That is how their terrible lives ended, for which he expressed his thanks in advance, bowing before the eternal throne.

The glory of Merciful God never ends; His rule is our beacon.

Actually, he couldn’t imagine that his own son would rob him, the son for whom he had made allowances, out of necessity, and to whom he had given more, after all.

He listened to ascertain where his wife was, who in a short while would be murdered mercilessly for her jewelry.

He most feared that their bodies would be mutilated and their blood left unburied. Their fingers would be cut off along with the rings. And as he suddenly opened the door, he saw the miscreants approaching in the silent night with their sacks open. By then he wouldn’t be able to get up, out of his cut-up flesh, to do the most necessary things for the soul. In the meantime, as if nothing had happened, all his hats were there, in a row, on the coat-and-hat rack in the dim hallway. The shiny wide-brimmed black hat he wore on high holy days, his richly embroidered kippa, the everyday black hat he wore in the city, and the oddly frayed, lusterless, greasy hat too, which he wore to work and which, after exchanging it for the yarmulke he wore at night, he should have put on this morning.

Like a thief, he lifted his own weekday kippa off the hat rack in his own hallway and hurried deep into his house.

At least a dozen times a day he made himself believe that just this once he could avoid the madness of his wife.

He opened doors carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible by tiptoeing on the softwood floor, turned gray and splintery after many autumn cleanings. There were a few spots that creaked badly no matter how careful he was, because the joists underneath had rotted away. As he made his way through the rooms and corridors, moving ever deeper into the unpredictable labyrinth of the commodious house, the emptiness became darker within the whitewashed walls, which echoed the tiniest sound.

The dark-brown folding shutters were closed everywhere, and only through cracks in the aged wood did some light come into the house.

Gottlieb put his yarmulke on his head and relaxed a little in the familiar dimness, in which white slipcovers on the furniture glimmered faintly and his transgressions reassumed their customary places. He also seemed to hear his ancestors, who opined that at least in our homes and synagogues we should remain free human beings in the sight of the Lord of Mercy. When on waking you cover your head, no matter what the day will bring you have spread the holy firmament over it. They have always lived in this spacious home, with its rooms opening one into another, hoping to please the Lord and to avoid eliciting His terrible wrath with their transgressions. There were only the most necessary pieces of furniture, beds, tables, chairs, that should suffice, and these were also made of the least expensive painted or wood-grained pine. Although there were more expensive carpets, they lay on the floor, carefully rolled up in wrapping paper, along the undecorated and empty walls. If, at the time of general cleaning or during high holy days, the folding shutters were opened, the covers removed from the cheap chandeliers and modestly dark furniture, the carpets rolled out, smoothed along the floor in preparation for receiving friends and relatives, then Ármin Gottlieb’s house positively flaunted its merciless cleanliness and cheerlessness.

Here lives a Jew, and Gottlieb was fond of this awareness, a Jew who displays nothing ostentatious, does not tempt fate, because he has not forgotten for a moment what he owes his Creator.

He would burst into loud sobs at the painful joy when, after the holidays, he was suddenly left alone in the sunny, bleak emptiness. But soon he would exchange his embroidered kippa for a plain one and, obeying the ancient duty of resignation, go from room to room carefully closing all the brown shutters again.

His house had one bright space: the wooden veranda framed in glass that faced the small, walled-in yard.

At the edge of the yard, where grass could barely survive at the base of the walls, stood a tall sumac tree, its widespread branches towering above the roofs, its trunk partially grown into an abutment of the brick wall; it was a Rhus hirta, the undemanding plant of Mediterranean and subtropical regions whose leaves, unlike those of the indigenous trees of Mohács, did not open completely until late June and whose acrid, velvety flowers emerged very slowly.

When he could be alone, Gottlieb liked to sit here, on a painted kitchen stool, and between two ritual devotions he either prayed or read one of his beautiful half-leather-bound books, either the six-volume Prayers for the High Holy Days or the eight-volume Weekday Prayers. This time, however, he had barely sat down and opened a randomly selected prayer book from which hundreds of small slips and bookmarks stuck out, both from the Hebrew text and from the pages printed and footnoted in Hungarian, and he had barely placed his elbow on the windowsill to create a reasonably comfortable position for reading, when his wife appeared in the dark frame of the doorway.

She appeared like a shadow slipping silently toward the light.

You think I don’t know, you really believe I don’t know why you’ve come home so early from your famous lumberyard, his wife said angrily, contemptuously, reproachfully, and then she almost broke down, barely able to suppress the tears of her bitterness.

But I know, I do. I could have known that you’d deceive me again and come home earlier.

If only once you came home on time, then I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Almighty God, I keep saying all day, the poor man really thinks he can hide his forgetfulness from me. Of course, he still has to wait for his lunch. I know very well what he forgot and left at home, but I shall never tell anyone what I know about you. How would I know, I don’t know what time it is, the kitchen alarm clock is broken again, and he hasn’t taken it to the watchmaker; but this time he had bad luck with his forgetfulness, didn’t he, leaving his hat home again — unheard of. He’s come home, let’s not talk about why, but his lunch is not ready. He said, I’ll be coming back late, Margit, didn’t he. And indeed, now it will be late for you, even though you hurried home early. Wretched. You’re a wretched man. You couldn’t possibly get done with your papers in such a short time. You can thank only yourself for all your troubles, because all your life you’ve been fumbling. Your famous lumberyard has always been more important to you, sawn planks are more important than your beautiful family.

You’re not a Jew.

You should be ashamed of yourself, you and all your papers.

She continued to talk very quietly like this, rather impassively, actually, using a barely changing falsetto, chanting a text that seemed alien to her, her head tilted a little mischievously and little-girlishly, her countenance suffused with hatred and contempt, her eyes narrowed and swollen with too much sleep. She was observing this despicable stranger who had wandered into her home, yet whom, according to the prescribed rituals, she should receive with a hot lunch, someone with whom, allegedly, she had lived in the happiest of marriages for more than forty years, giving him three beautiful children and raising them very well, yet her secret opinion about this man remained that although she knew him by sight, she wouldn’t marry him if she listened to her heart, because he was not a Jew. A Jew does not behave like this, and she hasn’t the slightest intention, there is not enough money in the world to convince her to marry him. She will dissuade her mother of blessed memory from insisting on this marriage, and she truly hopes that at least her adored father will reconsider his plans, because this wretched man will do nothing but deceive her, throughout an entire life will do nothing but mislead and deceive her.

They should look for somebody else.

I am the only one who can see through him.

Like through a sieve, that’s how I see through you.

You wretched man, you.

But if you dare do it anyway, and it’s obvious that you will, you shameless, vile man, and my dear beloved father will not want to keep me by his side, what can I do, that’s how it is, then you will go tell it to everybody on our street, you won’t spare yourself and go into every single house and tell them. What you’ve done to me, what you have done. And every Jew in Munkács will know what a wretched man he is.

What he did.

Such a wretch and yet what he dared to do.

He violated an innocent Jewish girl.

It was as if the empty dark house were the only house she had ever known, or as if she had recalled a long-abandoned snail shell, yet the street outside would not be a street in Mohács and the lapsed time had no meaning.

Keeping her dead alive.

It was not surprising.

However, the snail shell might have crushed under anyone’s careless step. All he had to tell her was that we’ve raised only two of your beautiful children, Margit, because the third one is long dead. Gottlieb wondered more than once how he or anyone else could remove themselves from this vast present, in which we eternally mourn, only mourn, while every event relevant to our person is still ahead of us.

We are still before the death of our loved ones.

One’s unlucky little son should not have died before one’s own death.

For a second he looked up at her, ascertaining the time in which, separate from everything and everyone else, he too lived in the eternal present time of his wife.

Margit was pressing a deep china bowl against her large, heavy, drooping breasts in a peculiar defensive posture, as if to protect both herself and the bowl, and with a wooden spoon she occasionally lifted and then disgustedly slammed back the dumpling dough, bright yellow from its many eggs, or with obvious boredom she simply stirred it. Over her pink, not quite clean nightshirt she wore a dark-blue apron patterned with tiny white flowers and, on top of that, a sweater filthy from work in the kitchen and from making fires in the large stove. When she spoke, one could see she was missing many teeth, which made her lips sink into the hollow of her mouth. Unruly clumps of thin, unkempt gray hair leaned stiffly in all directions; for more than a decade now she had refused to have her hair shaved as religious propriety would have required.

Threats, implorations, or explanations notwithstanding, no and no.

Until given away in marriage she would not sacrifice her beautiful hair.

She was even prepared to play the madwoman.

Her daughter tried once, but the moment she cut a large tuft the mother grabbed the scissors from her. They tussled vigorously for a while, until it became clear it was more than playacting; she first stabbed her own breast and then, with shouts of murderess, murderess, I’ve been murdered, she was ready to throw herself at her daughter, Marika.

She suffered a kerchief on her head only when she went out on the street.

The street was perhaps the only worldly authority before which she was willing to bow, or before which at least she forced her madness into different forms. On the street she played the kind of role that others could accept but that also suited her own adolescent daydreams. She transformed herself into a lady who, with exaggerated gestures, indicated how disgusted she was by the vulgarity of the world but who also knew at any given moment what this world owed her.

At home she wore no shoes, not even slippers. If in the winter she spent time in one place or just stood on the kitchen’s freezing floor, she’d keep shifting from one foot to the other and under the long nightshirt rub her cold soles on her calves.

She suffered from the cold.

Although she wore thick underpants, she struggled constantly with inflammation of the bladder and chills. Before going anywhere, she’d spend a long time picking her shoes and bags. Sometimes the careful preparations took days or even weeks. Because of her fine skin, her legs were sensitive, she explained to everybody, and with her fingers she’d point to and gently touch the fine skin on her cheeks and forehead, everything chafes and irritates it. If she went only so far as the marketplace, that would be the end of it, her feet turned into one big sore, sometimes her shoes filled with blood, and every shoe hurt, cut into her flesh, she has nothing to wear anymore because of your disgusting stinginess. I will not shove my feet into bloody shoes, yet she has to because this helpless man, whom even his children have left because of his terrible miserliness, they hate him, won’t talk to him, have nothing but contempt for him because he is mean, mean, and everybody always cheats him at the market too, sells him rotten fruit, he gets all the bruised ones and the ones full of worms, and no matter whether he looks at them or not, if the merchandise is cheap he doesn’t notice.

The meat already has a smell. Still, he buys it.

Shoemakers can’t help her anymore either. Once she had a decent cobbler, but who knows where he is now.

May his memory be blessed.

These cobblers can’t or don’t want to widen her shoes properly, if only they widened one pair, the one made of fine calfskin that’s flexible enough, because all her shoes are custom-made so they won’t chafe her instep or heels. She swears on the memory of her beloved father that she never suffered any pain comparable to this, and every week, when she goes to the market, that is her burden, that is what she has to endure. And not only is the cobbler wicked, treacherous, mean, and I don’t even know his name, but he’s worse than the goy cobblers, only the butcher is worse than this cobbler. The butcher is so mean, he’s a common criminal.

Mean.

Listen to me, man, that’s how I call him, who can remember the names of these cobblers, I’ll give you any money for a pair of proper shoes. God is my witness, when I try them on they fit, see how nicely you could fix them, you see, but by the time I get home, my feet are nothing but blisters.

And already yesterday I told you, she says now, that you’d have liver today.

But of course you forget everything. To you I’m air. I already told you yesterday what nice liver I bought for you, you wretch, was I talking to the air. I don’t eat any of it, not a bite, but once again I swore, I swore on everything dear to me that I’ll never go to that shoyhet again. I don’t care what you say, he is not a human being. Mean. You protect him only because you want me to go to him for your liver, but his stinking mouth is always dripping with hazeer,* she said all this in a uniformly high, almost bored falsetto, and then, as if obeying her body’s unknown passion, and with the passion of her sense of justice, she unexpectedly began to shout.

Can’t you see, she shouted, yanking the elastic dough out of the bowl with the wooden spoon, you don’t even have an eye for wickedness. Mean. You’re no less mean than all the rest of them. All right then, I’ll fry this liver for you, she added tenderly, stupid that I am, I always let you have your way, and the unexpected emotional turn was addressed not to her husband, this miserable man, but to the liver, because she liked to fry it and she liked to pronounce the word fry as many times as possible and always with the same gusto.

And to make her lips pronounce the word liver, while she envisioned the liver bursting with blood under the bluish-purple membrane, even though she would never have put it in her mouth.

I hope you’re happy to have liver for lunch.

Now I’ll fry it well again. And don’t worry about blood, not a drop will stay in it, don’t you worry.

All this time Gottlieb did not look up from his prayer book, not out of meanness but out of considered goodwill and self-defense. Ever since the woman’s condition had taken a turn for the worse, he let her have her way, he had to endure almost everything, while with carefully doled out indifference he protected himself, spared himself from emotional involvement to the extent that allowed him to remain by her side.

He did not love her, not even in their earlier lives, and the woman had not loved him, never; he had failed to love this woman for even a moment, and therefore it was incredibly hard for him to remain permanently indifferent to her. To find a solution for this problem throughout an entire, unpredictable lifetime, even though the solution consisted of unbearably long moments.

In the early years of their marriage, they had tried to accept each other’s bodily proximity, but they failed.

At most, he was fond of remembering her beauty. Of saying to himself, after each moment gained, see, you managed to bear it, and instead of rebelling, you steadfastly praised the Father of Mercy for all your tribulations; yet he knew that his perseverance had only its own value and no reward, and never would have, neither in this nor in the promised other world. To this day, it filled him with satisfaction that he had been granted a beautiful wife, though he had never succeeded in opening up this beauty, and had never been able to think about what might have happened between them in the sight of the Lord. He feared that if instead of praying as he should, he’d think long and hard about how unbearable it was to endure her indifference; then madness would seize him and hurl him into the depths. Once, during a prayer, he shuddered when he realized he should stay away from depths, should strive for heights, because this hapless woman had no one but him. Since then, consciously and guided by the greatest compassion, he forced himself to think only about shallow things. Thank God she had two healthy children, knock on wood; may the memory of our poor little dead one be blessed. But these children, her own blood, are not only indifferent about their mother but stranger than she is, because they take after her completely. He could see that they wanted to be free of their mother; they would unhesitatingly put her in the nursing home in Bonyhád, which the Transdanubian religious communities maintained for mentally deranged Jews.

What else can we possibly do with our mother, they would say.

He must not die while the woman lives.

He, the stranger, must take care of this strange woman.

He did not understand Creation, why it assigned strangers to live together.

But how could he comprehend His powers. And he no longer wanted to.

In the midst of his prayer he really had to laugh out loud at the Lord Almighty for his wild thoughts, and that made him shudder. Into the minds of people given to alienation, the Lord put thoughts of estrangement. He enjoyed immensely the sly tricks of the Lord, how He managed to reach into his thoughts.

He says, think of shallow things, and the shallowness turns out to be deep enough to be painful.

You’ve got me again, my Lord, I thank you, Thy will be done, as Thou had willed it once, now, and forever.

He understood how the Lord’s mercilessness could possibly remedy his joyless life.

Don’t reply, don’t even look up, whispered the sober thought, but with the prayer drive out the sparks and restless incitements of reason.

Actually, he could endure everything except for one thing.

When Margit screamed, can’t you see that I’ve raised three beautiful children for you.

Not that, not that third one.

Our third child, Margit, deformed and crippled, you can call it what you want, but not beautiful.

Hold your mouth. Give no cause for quarreling.

If they started to quarrel, because Gottlieb did not respond or because he did but could not reasonably control himself, which made their quarrel deteriorate, because he said out loud that they had buried their third child, we buried him, Margit, make a note of that finally, even then there was no room for reflection. Except that on those occasions it was not his goodness but his wickedness he had to relish to the last drop, and with it he had to part with his reason — no small physical and mental ordeal. His wife would repeatedly shout the name of the dead child, exactly as she had done when she was first told; she kept calling him to come home, where was he, just a minute ago he was still out on the street playing with the other children.

He was not, how could he be, we sent him away to the Strickers, Margit, for the whole summer, to the island.

I don’t send my child to anyone, to no kind of island. You gave him away. You did it. You. To the goyim. Only you.

She collapsed, writhing on the ground as if in her pain she would have to give birth again.

But Gottlieb’s silence might provoke her; at times, whether he behaved well or inadvertently did something incautious, it was impossible to keep on an even keel or escape without fits and outbursts; his wife’s monologues accompanied him in his waking hours and even in his restless sleep, sometimes inexplicably.

If she yelled out into the great big world, Józsika, Józsika, the whole neighborhood came running to the house and the doctor had to be called so that with the help of injections and tranquilizers she would calm down.

I’m glad, Margit, he said now, in the voice of a man who has tired of even the semblance of indifference and, in addition to his physical reality, is searching for emotional reserves with which to mold something into something else.

You know how glad I am about the liver.

This did not sound very convincing.

Why wouldn’t you be glad, you wretch, it was fresh when they brought it, I was standing by the counter for a whole day so it would be fresh for you, and on top of that I’ll fry it again for you. I can spend more time at the stove standing on my bad legs.

She did not always fry it a second time; this was unpredictable too — just as he didn’t know whether she’d address him in formal or familiar terms — and that made Gottlieb dread the possibility of blood spurting under the knife onto his plate; he always tried to hide it under the rice or potatoes. At least he should not see the abomination when, to ensure the mental calm of his wife, he silently ate the blood.

Because of his insane wife, once a week he eats raw blood.

Just fry the liver again the way you usually do.

For a change, today I’m making nice white rice to go with it, because I could eat a few grains too, the wife said pensively. For two days now I haven’t had more than a few morsels. With my stomach, I can’t cope with liver anymore, no matter how much I like it and would like to eat some. But I’ll peck at a few grains of rice with you.

I don’t like watching you eat the liver all by yourself all the time.

Only no blood should be left in it, Margit. You know that’s the most important thing.

He did not look up from his prayer book, signaling obsessively that he was calling out from his book between two sanctified thoughts and had neither time nor energy to waste on this liver story even if he was frightened of blood.

You know, Margit, how much I love to have the fried liver well done, you know very well.

And it doesn’t matter if it burns a little and becomes a bit crunchy.

Deathly silence followed; perhaps this was already too much, too many instructions and explanations for the woman.

For her, his words could mean that according to her husband she burned the liver and ruined his food. She paid no attention to anything; she could not be expected to fry liver properly, and, according to these facts, Gottlieb married a woman from Munkács who spoils the creations of the Creator.

Now something was again about to happen between them. Should she tolerate such nasty slander from this wretch from Mohács.

In the tense emotion-filled space, Gottlieb completely forgot he had come home because of his missing hat, and that Madzar must be waiting in vain for the three sleepers to be sent to his home.

He had developed a special ability in himself.

Within a split second, he was able to withdraw attention from his wife. Accompanied by the singsong high falsetto, he fell back into the sought-after text. In the prayer books, he liked checking those prayer fragments that involuntarily cropped up in his mind during the day, while waves of the senseless singsong words broke pleasantly above his head.

Even after several decades, he still did not think he knew the prayers by heart. How could he, when throughout his entire bitter childhood he had been beaten so much. His father of blessed memory beat him, his teacher lifted him out of his seat by his side locks, and her gentle mother shrieked as she pummeled him, because the raw matter in his brain instinctively protested against receiving verses whose sense, despite all his well-intentioned efforts, remained vague and elusive.

He knew nothing, though he should have been able to rattle off all the prayers by heart. There were constant complaints about him — that he was not paying attention, that he was always busy with some nonsense under the bench, his mind wandering elsewhere.

He fell asleep on the bench so he wouldn’t have to hear things of which he understood not a word.

They beat him.

Yet it seemed more pleasant to put up with the beatings than to absorb the Hebrew passages, because no matter how he had tried to follow them with his ears he could not catch them, let alone memorize or recite them by heart as the other boys did. When he was about to catch one verse, another was already pouncing on him. He did not understand how the brains of other boys coped with this speed. But he learned quickly enough that it was no use complaining about headaches. Even though the dreaded effort to somehow fit in the words of the hurrying Hebrew verses among the sounds of Hungarian and Yiddish words, and to fix them with their own meaning, had his head throbbing. The throbbing produced white circles through whose center he saw into a space of unfamiliar color. If he succeeded, if among the illuminated circles he managed to reach the inviting darkness, if past the dazzling of his own pupils he managed to glance into the red and green, then inevitably he awakened to being doused in water and beaten at the same time; and he knew that he would be beaten again at home, yanked and shoved around for a good long while.

He could not have said when all this became pleasurable, because neither before nor after this period did he know a parallel world in which things were or could have been some other way; yet he enjoyed it. The eternal obscurity never dissipated, and throughout his life his mind searched for certainties, whether or not he understood well or truly knew some things; and though he had been unable to obtain these certainties — he had not enough education for solid knowledge — he did enjoy the endless act of searching.

While he perused the Hungarian footnote on the Musaf prayer, which he had no problem locating and according to which the prayer’s origins were to be found in the written legacy of Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, Germany, he did not acknowledge that his wife winced, slammed the dough angrily back into the bowl, insolent, how shameless, just keeps reciting to himself aloud, and I am frying liver for such an impudent character and then, with her mouth slightly open, stared at him.

As if asking whether such insolence was even possible.

For a little while Gottlieb also fell silent within himself, and he stared back at her.

Such an ungrateful, insolent man, brazen, and I didn’t just buy him a whole liver, bought him the nicest liver in the entire butcher shop, but I’m also making soup out of fresh, completely fresh mushrooms, she said after a long silence. But I did see that he left his hat at home, don’t worry, I did notice it, you wretch, you addle-brained old man, she shouted and then laughed. Her laughter echoed weirdly in the empty rooms. He left with his head uncovered, she laughed, this never happened before, but now he let that happen too. I said to myself, when I saw it happen, something like this could never happen in a normal Jewish family. What tsuris. He eats properly, just as he should, unselfishly I take good care of him. At least once a week I make him beef broth, still, he’s a complete idiot.

Then suddenly her laughter abandoned her.

At least I’ll cook the mushrooms for him, for this idiot, I’ll do that.

Expecting some kind of response, however brief or small, a word of abuse or thanks or just a yell, for all the sacrifices she had been making for her husband, she stopped talking. She fell silent as if to pray. I beseech you, I am begging you for anything. She would have been content with the slightest of signals, which throughout a lifetime she had been unable to force out of this man, insensitive to the marrow of his bones.

A little bit of compassion. Just a tiny bit, out of love.

She knew him well. He needed no introduction.

He had no secret she did not know.

I am making dumplings for you, with plenty of eggs, she added, and still you show such ingratitude toward me. Did I make them with a parsley roux, I certainly did, what more should I do for you. I’m telling you, I’ll moisten them with some beef broth. Don’t be afraid, one day I’ll tell everyone all your little secrets.

After a while, the emotional silence became dangerously loud and tense in Gottlieb’s ears, though it would not have been advisable to evoke, by silence, Margit’s thirst for revenge.

With his glance, therefore, he quickly returned to the first sentence of the footnote, though he was still unfamiliar with the end of the story.

In the city of Cleve, in that vast lowland where the Maas, the Niers, and the Rhein flow toward one another, there lived a rabbi named Ammon, he read the footnote out loud, and he smiled as if he had found a liberating, happy ending in his book. Listen to what I’ve found, Margit. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of this Rabbi Ammon. I know I haven’t.

And I’m telling you, you listen to what I am telling you. If once, just once, for a single moment you listened to what I say, what I say, I, responded the woman almost threateningly, surprised in her endless marital daydreams, not only liver, I’m telling you, how could I tell you more clearly, you mean, wicked, accursed man, that I’ve also bought sponge mushrooms for you.

Mushrooms, she said, pronouncing the word with her entire mouth, because not only did she like to take on her lips the image of liver swollen with blood, but it also felt good to pronounce the word mushrooms with big, long vowels.

I bought the morels from Jews, don’t worry. I don’t buy a single mushroom from the goyim. I should buy what they already touched and felt all over with their filthy paws. Wicked ones, they spoil everything. I don’t buy those mushrooms.

Gottlieb took one look at this complete stranger, this unkempt, desperately ill woman who was incurious about anything she did not already know. With profound conviction, she guarded her ignorance, yet occasionally she seemed to know surprising things. It may have been possible that she did in fact know the story of Rabbi Ammon. Her adored father of blessed memory, an ugly, rather mean and violent man, was cantor and schoolmaster in the service of the Munkács Jewish community, and thus, in her parental home, where the stable and the classroom both opened from the salon, Margit had picked up many things.

Gottlieb was literally beaming at her with his convincing smile, because just this once he really wanted to share the story with somebody.

And with that smile he slowly convinced the insane woman longing for understanding, or perhaps he deceived and bewitched her.

It says here about him, he looked back at his book quickly, that his wealth, enormous erudition, rare integrity, and piety made this rabbi first among his contemporaries. But his fame also reached the court of the prince of Jülich in Duseldorp, and if he or the princess happened to be in the mood, the rabbi was a welcome guest of theirs whenever they invited him.

Sit down, come, sit there, facing me, Margit, sit down with those miserable dumplings, let me read to you the whole story, he said, and with his book pointed impatiently to the other kitchen stool.

At about this time Madzar’s mother arrived home from the island, flushed and hot from work and riding her bicycle.

Madzar, standing on the veranda, wrapped in silence and invisibility, was observing how she pushed the bicycle to the shed, how she leaned it carefully against the wall, and how she slipped off the basket she carried on her back.

A solitary bird was chirping shrilly from the edge of the eaves.

The bird flexed its legs twice after each chirp, but did not fly away.

His mother had nothing in her back basket but her white petticoat, which she had taken off because of the heat, her black sweater, and a little freshly cut alfalfa for the rabbits. Her scythe was carefully hooked onto the upper rim of the basket. And the redstart nesting in the eaves had been sending its alarm signal because from among the roses or grapevines a cat was peeking out. Standing behind the veranda window, Madzar read a great many things in his mother’s dry features. Many things that earlier could not have reached his consciousness. He saw too much of the reality that consisted of simpleminded details, with which the foundation of his life had been laid. On her face, he saw again his own most intimate memories, which, precisely because of their commonness, one never scrutinizes closely.

How many things she must have learned while she waited for the ferry and during the short trip from the island to the town shore.

The excitement easily dissolved the dry features.

While on the ferry with the other women and on her way to her house, she gleaned much information that she had already learned from other sources in slightly different versions; and some details now became clear about which she could never have had an inkling.

Margit was irritated, cursed her husband, if he could take it outside, why can’t he take it back in, don’t you have hands. Why should I do everything.

Sometimes she cried because of the kitchen stools, but she would not take them inside herself.

Now she lowered herself to one of the stools, spellbound.

On the Gottliebs’ veranda, there was nothing but the two stools.

If you don’t bring it back here, don’t expect me to do it.

Never, you understand, never.

Maybe the wedding ring would fall off his precious hand if he did.

You are a base, mean man who does not wear his wedding ring so he can flirt with anybody.

The last person to tell her a story was her adored father. She did not sit on the entire stool, only on its edge, because she was afraid that this wretch, this shameless, this insolent, this mean man would deceive her with this new approach. He would deceive her by reading aloud to her. He is capable of anything. He would read something from his pious book that isn’t even in it. And I don’t want to hear it. She had a special contempt for the wretch because of his books. You don’t come up to the ankle of my adored father, you hear, you wretch, with your lack of education and your ignorance. Thinks he can fool anybody with his famous books. That people will look at him as a finer person, a scholar, they’d say, because his nose is always in books. Ridiculous. A hardworking peasant doesn’t eat as much as you stuff in your big stomach. And when it comes to sleeping, he really knows how to do that. And to snore, so I can’t sleep. Like a log, you sleep, while I only toss and turn on the sheet all night long. Your brain is as blunt as a log. Sharpen it all you want, with your books. You won’t deceive me, believe me. You only give yourself airs with your books and your great knowledge, while on the sly and quietly you keep passing them, one after the other, out here on the veranda.

If only he did it aloud at least.

And you make such a stink that I have to stop at the door. That’s your big knowledge, how to pass wind, that you know. So that my whole life, in my own house, I should smell it. Your stench, you shameless, treacherous, mean wretch, you are not a man. Your stink has eaten itself into the walls. I can’t even clean the window glass because of it. All the windows stink. Nobody else could live with you in the same house but me, and even I’m suffering like a dog.

I am suffering because of you, don’t you understand, suffering.

Why must I live in so much suffering with a complete stranger, that’s what I want you to explain to me.

It happened that on an early spring day Rabbi Ammon received another message, Gottlieb read aloud, as if he had not heard any of the woman’s words, inviting him to distant Duseldorp, which was the name of Düsseldorf back then. Maybe she had never heard of this. Jan Willem, the prince of Jülich, had moved his court there after several decades of warfare, and, based on what he had read, Gottlieb’s imagination created a special space in which to accommodate the action of the story. Once again, the prince wanted to hear the rabbi’s advice, Gottlieb read in his book so he wouldn’t hear the false sounds his wife was making. The messenger also revealed the subject on which the mighty prince had expected to hear Rabbi Ammon’s advice. Because then the guest would have a chance, during the journey to the palace, to contemplate the matter, turn it over in his mind. The messenger was also a nobleman, a large young man, his chin just becoming downy; he insisted on setting out immediately because the Rhine and the Maas had overflowed, not to mention the Niers, and there was a chance that they might merge and flood the highway. They rode in pouring rain, and because of the floods, a journey that should have taken only two days lasted more than five. On the low-lying meadows, above which the heavy-bellied rain clouds moved slowly, they continually had to search for passages of high ground in the water. They lost their way several times, had to put up in unfamiliar inns to feed their horses and rest them. Water, nothing but water as far as the eye could see. The horses’ hooves splashed in water. On the afternoon of the fifth day, they reached the Duseldorp castle, whose walls, in a merciless driving wind, were being lashed by the waters of the flooding river. But the prince had already adjourned the conference, attended by distinguished lords from Jülich, Berg, Pfeilen, Mark, Ravensburg, and, from the rabbi’s hometown, the count of Cleve himself. When Rabbi Ammon was led in, still drenched, the nobles were already seated at the table set for dinner and even the prince of Jülich would not have wanted to remember what he had hoped to hear from the rabbi.

It would not have been proper to revive the debate among the restless lords.

They let the Jew dry off, along with the dogs that burst in with him.

Do you hear, Margit, I hope you’re listening, Gottlieb interjected but did not even look up at his wife, who, with a confused little smile on her lips, was paying fairly devoted attention to him.

She had even lowered the bowl with the dumpling dough to her lap.

But she was on the alert; because of the always-stinking man she could not relax the tension in her body.

Occasionally, the noblemen would throw a bone or piece of meat to the dogs, who grew excited by the smell of food, but they forgot about the rabbi. The prince, who sat close to the rabbi but facing away from him so he could warm his aching back at the fireplace, turned to him only once.

If you ever blabber about my question to you, Jew, I’ll have your tongue cut out, and then I’ll have your head chopped off.

But nobody ever uttered, or ever would utter, the certain question or request that the rabbi might reveal to someone. No allusions to it have been found either in Rabbi Ephraim’s notes taken in Bonn, which, of course, is more than understandable.

However, they could not deceive the rabbi.

Because of the prince’s words, the drinks, the music, the dogs’ barking, and mainly because of the postprandial gratification coursing through their entire beings, the good mood kept rising among the noble lords.

The rabbi neither asked for nor received more than some fresh water.

He was still hoping somehow to get through this ill-omened visit.

Until the count of Cleve stood up and spoke for a long time directly into the prince’s ear. He spoke for about a quarter of an hour as if, in the midst of great giggles and guffaws, he were dripping poison in the royal ear. And Jan Willem, who was nicknamed the Wealthy because of his immense treasures, at first laughed at the deluge of words with which the whispering large-nosed count of Cleve inundated him; not until the count had stopped and, smirking under his large nose, contentedly strolled back to his seat did he summon the rabbi before him.

In the silence that fell in the great hall, the lashes of the flooding river could be heard.

Now, however, to everybody’s great surprise the prince addressed the rabbi by his name, as if the Jew too had a regular name like everybody else. He no longer needed his advice, the prince told the rabbi, and he could keep all his advice to himself, because he, the prince, had taken care of everything, he and the other lords had set the world aright. But just then Margit made a move on her stool and let out a painful moan.

I already put your mushroom soup on the stove.

Let your mushrooms be. Who’s interested in your mushroom soup now.

How could I let it be. The good mushroom juice will boil away, and I still have to thicken it with flour, and I haven’t chopped the parsley either, the woman whimpered, yet she seemed to be nailed to the stool.

Unless, with some luck, the fire’s gone out, oh, maybe I didn’t put in enough twigs.

We’re still very far from the end of the story, listen, Gottlieb said, and he looked up for a moment to ascertain whether he could continue.

Margit was of course paying very close attention not to the story but to him.

Here comes the terrible turning point, Margit, because the ruling prince says to the rabbi that along with his entire family, the rabbi should move to the court. The prince would be glad to have him as his permanent counselor, and he wouldn’t even have to give too much advice. What a great honor that would be, you see, and the only condition of receiving this position was, Gottlieb read on in his book, happy to see that with the bowl in her lap and her lips parted the woman was affected by the story and was leaning forward, that the rabbi abandon the faith of his ancestors.

Well, Margit, you can just imagine, that he should dress in civilian clothes, take off his hat to all the saints, and live his life with that name always on his lips and in his heart, the name of that big Niemand the goyim call their redeemer.

When he reached this point, Gottlieb laughed aloud with pleasure at how infinitely ignorant and stupid the goyim were.

Although Margit did not laugh along with him, the man’s joy did cause her some pleasure.

In his haste, Rabbi Ammon replied by asking for three days to think it over, and begged respectfully that he be allowed to spend the three days in his home.

Go, Jew, the ruling prince answered graciously and waved his hand as if, with this gesture, he had already forgotten what the count of Cleve had whispered to him. But he did not forget it, not by a long shot; when a week had passed, then another, and then a third, and the rabbi had still not returned, he sent after him.

The mean, the vile, the godless man, how mean can such a godless man be, Margit said, this time referring to the prince.

Don’t get excited, Margit, wait until the end. Gottlieb looked up again from his book.

In that year, the floods lasted a long time and it took the prince’s messenger a good week to reach the count of Cleve’s city, Gottlieb continued softly. But when the messenger finally got there, the rabbi and his family were not to be found, and nobody could tell him where they might be. In great secrecy, the rabbi and his family had moved to the town of Pfeilen.

Where in the world did they move to, asked Margit, irritated, and in her fear regarding the possible outcome of the story she pressed the bowl to herself even harder.

To Pfeilen, Gottlieb repeated the town’s name.

And where in the world is that. I’ve never heard of a town by that name.

After all these years, what difference does it make to you, Gottlieb replied, and he slowly closed his book.

It’s much more important that the Jews there dressed him in beggar’s clothes and he lived like that to the end of his life, enjoying the greatest respect of his people.

Margit laughed a light laugh of relief, and Gottlieb laughed along with her. Which was such an exceptional event in their lives that they kept laughing together for quite a while, guffawing with the pleasure generated by their own laughter. That on the same night the count’s soldiers burned down the synagogue of Cleve, along with the houses of the ghetto, Gottlieb chose not to tell Margit. And that they put to the sword every Jew they could find.




The Last Judgment


Interrupting the usual early morning music, the loudspeaker called him to the south gate.

Kramer to the south gate.

And it cannot be claimed that he did not know what that meant. The people they called to the south gate they put away for good.

The Niers flowed there, nice and slow.

By nature, he was the kind of man who rarely thought there was any problem he could not solve or avoid. He was breathing more heavily, or rather he had the feeling that with his body grown heavy he should be out in the fresh air. This time there was no way out. He could not avoid it. For days, he had counted on the water’s slow current to sweep him away. They could hear shots from the direction of the river; it was surprising they wasted bullets on people. And there was one fleeting moment when he still hoped. The person he loved more than his life, more than his long-forgotten wife, more than all his incidental lovers — and he did remember them all simultaneously during this long moment, all of them — the person he loved even more than his children was standing only two steps away from him at the deep-brown, empty table of the Blockälteste, in the harsh light. A pale, fragile, but strong and nimble young man whose ambition and energy had given him a stooped back and who could get away with nearly everything and could afford not to be completely bald like the others. His shapely skull was covered with maddeningly rich hair, curly, golden, and ruddy.

He was ordered to special details at least once a week. To sort clothing in the laundry building, which did not necessarily mean anything but sorting and loading clothes, though sometimes it could mean something else too. The camp had eyes for things like that, since close connections acquired a commercial value of their own. Eisele, an always well-dressed and very cruel man, the commandant’s deputy for supplies, personally managed the work in the laundry. At such hours, it was still dark outside. If the loudspeaker ceased, they could hear the intense bombardment. The potbelly stove was glowing red. Every breath of night dripped or cascaded down the small square windowpanes. He was chatting with someone, with Bulla, obviously doing business with him, explaining something very convincingly, his snow-white hands flashing in the lamplight.

The boy might get away with it, Kramer thought.

This was his first precise thought and perhaps the last hope of his life. He could not harbor resentment of the boy, because business is important for someone who has to live.

The morning cauldrons still had not been brought.

For more than two years now, he’d had no way of knowing whether members of his family were alive or not. Even political prisoners were forbidden to receive mail, and so it was all right if family members were alive and healthy, and it was even better if they were dead because an air attack had killed them all; they were easier to imagine that way, since he did not believe he would ever return to them. If God existed, he would have loved Peix more than God, but God showed himself neither in any person nor in any thing. He loved him enough as it was, did everything to love him even more, though he found no explanation for it and, as a result, could sometimes hardly suppress the disgust he felt toward the boy.

Kramer’s oldest son should in theory have been at the front, and this Peix was exactly the same age. What he did not like to think about at all was that his son might be serving the Nazis. And he could also love this boy because or especially because secretly he hoped, quite ashamed of himself, that he had a greater chance of surviving no matter where he was. The front was somewhere nearby, they could hear the British cannons and were somewhat familiar with the strategic situation. All the working radios had to be surrendered to the authorities, but guards in the area brought superannuated sets to be revived by one of his comrades. He also had occasion to listen to the English news in the orderlies’ room, the Schreibstube. They were forbidden to pass on information they heard, lest the Nazis discover it. Not to yell and shout to the world that they were coming, they’re here already, down by the gardens. The bombers carefully avoided the camp, which showed the British knew well that except for human flesh there was nothing worth destroying in the one- and two-story barracks among the low pine trees. However, the two nearest small towns, the Dutch Venlo and the German Pfeilen, received their daily dose almost every morning and every night. Prisoners disturbed by the explosions yelled and screamed, which aroused emotions that had been dormant for months or even years; they cried for joy.

When he looked at the boy, and he had been looking at him constantlessly for four years, eighteen hours a day, every one of his muscles, fibers, cells, and membranes told him, with a happiness that coursed through his soul, that this boy was his personal possession. This put him in the state of physical readiness one assumes when in love. Sometimes he wondered why, why was he not jealous or not more jealous, because when Peix came back from the laundry he felt no more than a dull thud or stab in his heart. No matter how exhausted he was, he wanted to start to wakefulness several times a night just to see the boy’s feminine face deep in sleep. Peix carried his mother’s face on his own, the face of an unknown woman, her milk-white skin and attractively ribbed full lips, and Kramer could not avoid the thought that he had known this woman. At night they often held each other, by chance and intentionally they would hug each other hard, pressing themselves to each other, or they gently touched and pressed each other’s hands. Kramer saw to it, took great care that they stayed together but never had to be squeezed into the same sleeping place. A night spent in deep sleep was one prerequisite for survival. He taught the boy more things than he himself could possibly have known. He realized that one creates not only one’s own sons, or that even if this boy was not the fruit of his loins, he would still make a man of him. And how could a man at the gate of some woman’s womb remember what he had done and when. He did not like remembering things like that; they had fallen out of his memory. He had been a prisoner for seven years; after the first long year in prison, this was the second camp he’d managed to survive in, along with Peix.

It was not that it hurt, that what was in him still hurt, but that he could not comprehend his own situation, that he should perish now when he was so healthy and well fed. They had taken an oath about what they would do if they both survived, that is what cropped up in his mind now, where they would go. They swore to each other what they would do if the other one did not make it. He would be the other one. He also knew that in these last days his death would greatly endanger his comrades. It would be like a signal, the criminals would know they had come out on top again. Unless the British got here sooner, or the prisoners weren’t taken away and slaughtered, which possibility always existed, the camp would slide back to the condition in which they had found it when they’d arrived two years before. The camp commanders knew they would get nowhere without the communists because only the communists had some consideration for others, yet it was in their interest that the criminals hold a superior position. Indeed, they smashed or weakened the secretly always-rebuilt communist cells in which it was virtually impossible to plant spies. It was just such a measure that was being taken now, Kramer knew.

It was not senseless, personal ambition that Kramer felt was ridiculous, not the eagerness of the will to survive, no, not that. One should stay alive at all costs, this he understood. He did not think the movement’s argument for breaking the criminals’ power was ridiculous, or at least for removing the threat of their superior force from the heads of many prisoners, ignorant men driven to bestiality. Surely reason allowed this much; at times he was even proud of himself. What he did find ridiculous was a man who, although identical with him, could neither comprehend nor avoid the last judgment. He and Peix could not go to Pfeilen to blow up the church whose tower they of course had never seen. They wanted to, so that those people could no longer ring the bell so peacefully and indecently every Sunday morning. He and Peix could not go to Paris together. Which they both had longed to do all their lives as ardently as small children wait for Christmas Eve. Maybe the little Huguenot, who in his former life specialized mainly in art treasures, would go there alone.

Success would also be denied because in his heart he had always kept a place for tenderness. Should blame no one but himself.

And then, dead silence in the barracks, for a brief moment, frozen stillness. The very same thing, although with a slight delay, in the noise of distant cannon fire that reached, separately, everyone’s consciousness.

That Bulla might have betrayed them.

Perhaps it was the low-hanging, heavy metal lampshades that were amplifying the fine humming of the strong lightbulbs. Several people had been beaten to death with these shades. The silence of about four hundred men; this too has considerable weight. During the last days, an even two hundred more had been let in, drawn from evacuees of one enemy-threatened camp or other; overall, there were now more than four thousand in the camp. Himmler ordered that these people be neither killed nor left behind to the enemy, an order that was impossible to carry out but from which one could deduce that the leadership was hoping for a favorable turn in the conduct of the war. There were so many dead that they could not be burned in the crematorium’s two small ovens. The bodies, like logs, were stacked in piles in front of the north gate. During the day when it thawed for several hours, the naked piles began to loosen and stink; the pale bodies slid and wobbled, while on-foot transports of exhausted people, screaming with hunger and filthy with dysentery, kept arriving. Kramer needed all his ingenuity and cruelty to ensure that they could stay together in the great congestion, at least in their sleeping places, and that they had something to eat; most likely, the kapos’ blows sealed the fate of several people who, unsuspecting, had wanted to crawl into those two sleeping places.

The newcomers fell silent together with the old-timers.

Many of them believed that König or perhaps Königer was the real name of the person who was now the focus of four hundred silent faces; even his orderly, who slept next to him, did not have to share his place with anyone. Some of them added the name Bear. Now they could see and hear that Walter Kramer was the name of this hulking, stentorian German who in the eyes of the camp’s veterans was king of the Pfeilen camp. Peix should have feared him too, because of his size and voice, but he did not.

A simple locksmith, a man like you or me or anyone else. A kind and dedicated communist whom the Gestapo had arrested in January 1939 in the brilliant snow-covered mountains. Since then he’s become completely gray. For four months, they kept him chained to a cell wall, his handcuffed hands tight behind his back. If it hadn’t been for his guard who out of mercy regularly loosened his rope for a few hours and took off the handcuffs, his arms would probably have had to be amputated. They arrested his wife, who, after protracted torture, asked him to end the nightmare by making a detailed confession. Hearing the request, what else could he have done: he banished from his heart the woman who had allowed herself to be instructed by his torturers. If he had acceded to her request, he would have had to betray more than a dozen men. Maggots settled in his festering wounds and by the time the prison doctor was willing to take a look, they had eaten a good-size chunk out of his shoulder and thigh. He had a barely perceptible limp and he could now not fully raise his left arm.

Of course they managed to get the information they needed out of other prisoners, his wife being one of them.

He had too much to answer for; he killed without giving it a thought.

By then he had been smuggling comrades across the Czechoslovak border, near Annaberg. These people had gone all the way to Prague or Moscow, or happened to be sent back from those cities with new assignments of illegal work. Kramer stayed mainly in Chemnitz and conducted operations from there, working with runners. He developed an entire network of smugglers and confidential collaborators whom he did not know personally but about whom he knew everything. It finally took a dozen agents to surround him and catch him. But not before he killed two of them. The last person he smuggled over the border was the young son of a Hungarian comrade of his named Kovách. He had to rescue him from the Wolkenstein hunting lodge, from a secret boarding school for boys well concealed in the Erzgebirge woods and used for genetic experimentation. He did not want to entrust this delicate operation to anyone else. But by then agents were following his every step. The child got across all right, a car was waiting for him on the other side, but Kramer was wounded in his shoulder and thigh.

He returned fire as he fell and could still see the car speeding away in the snow despite a damaged rear wheel.

But now he did not see how he could go on.

And he had accomplished so much in the camp with his incredible caution and implacably calm nature.

For a long time he had been considered the master of life and death in the Pfeilen camp. When he had been first called up, near the end of the Great War, he had completed his training as a medic, having seen typhoid fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, all manner of injuries and mutilations. In times of need, SS officers had him operate on them instead of prisoner doctors or, especially, the two SS surgeons, since one was an alcoholic whose hands shook terribly if he did not have something to drink every hour, and the other was probably a morphine addict with similar problems in getting his required dope — where to get it and how many milligrams to inject. But now, despite everything he had done, Kramer had to go to the south gate because of Peix.

At first they entrusted him only with disgusting, septic operations, out of convenience and because the two surgeons feared infection. Kramer became a specialist in purulent inflammations; every morning he had to open and expertly clean these terrible wounds by the dozen. After a year in the pathology section of Buchenwald, he knew no less about human anatomy than the learned physicians did. The pathology section was shared by the men’s and women’s camp — the only place where not only body parts of both men and women, kept in thick-walled glass vessels, came in contact on the same table but where prisoners of both sexes worked and ate together; some of them were well-known specialists. Life was comfortable and convivial; the men cooked for themselves, could bathe to their heart’s content and chat endlessly with their shaven-headed female colleagues. Kramer worked with an elderly Jewish pathological anatomist, a prosector, who had been the head of his department at the university in Prague. The furnishing, installations, and equipment of the two dissecting rooms met the requirements of the most modern medical technology. Every morning they had to select in the barracks, and then in the mortuary of the sick bay, the Krankenrevier, those bodies that showed some deformation of a hereditary character or bodily anomalies that might be considered exceptional. The corpses had to be those of Jews. Organs and limbs of scientific interest were severed and together with detailed, comprehensive autopsy reports were shipped to Berlin, to the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Dahlem, on Ihne Street. The addressee was always a certain Prof. Dr. Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, and two large red stamps were always affixed to the package. One stamp called attention to the fragile contents and the other to the urgency and speed with which the shipment, of great military importance, must reach its destination. On each occasion, its arrival was duly acknowledged by Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, whom the laboratory workers in the camp imagined to be the feminine version of the famous former pathologist from Prague: short, round, and bespectacled. Sometimes she addressed brief questions to her colleagues, and these questions revealed her attentiveness and expertise. Professor Nussbaum never mentioned that the baroness had been his student in Prague, but perhaps he did not even remember her. At other times, in exceedingly warm words, the baroness expressed joy regarding the excellent condition or the professionalism of the autopsy findings.

All the autopsy material had to be stored in the refrigerator until permission came from Ihne Street regarding the exceptional cases.

On very rare occasions, there were instructions to boil a corpse down to the skeleton and then preserve it in a benzene bath. Or not to boil it but rather to dissolve the softer tissue in chloride of lime; this was the longer procedure. In any case, a collegial and friendly relationship developed between the camp laboratory and Ihne Street which neither their respective situations nor their tasks could begin to justify.

Later, in Pfeilen, troublesome aseptic cases were also assigned to Kramer, such as hopeless orthopedic operations and amputations. By then, Obersturmführer Eisele, who in the chaos of the approaching collapse had lost all sense of self-discipline, had been absent for more than a week. Nobody missed him and probably nobody held it against him that lately, with the help of SS physicians, he had been selecting many of the sick to be taken to the north gate, to the open area covered with snow. From the guard tower they shot only those who tried to crawl away; the rest stayed until their turn came. According to the criminals in the camp, Eisele’s wife and two small children had been evacuated in a lightning-fast action, before dawn, from the officers’ quarters in a suburb of the town. Peix had relayed this news to Kramer by the next morning. They both knew what danger awaited them. From the viewpoint of the communist cells, Eisele’s constant use of Peix offered considerable protection, but Eisele had reasons to maintain a tight and passionate relationship with the criminals too. In every possible and impossible secret hiding place, in the mouth and anus of every living and dead person he had been searching for gold, and proved to be very good at it. If he could be made to disappear, just like that, along with his accumulated gold, there was a good chance the criminals would make their own move against the now-defenseless Kramer.

What they really wanted, however, was Peix, alive.

This was such a threat to life in the camp that, to avoid it, the four hundred prisoners were ready to continue their panic-filled silence in the dark barracks for a long time, but the loudspeaker started to crackle, then play music. If this can happen, anything may happen is what people usually say in such cases. It was once again the famous entrance of Countess Maritza from the Kálmán operetta,* blasting at the prisoners from early morning until late at night so they could not hear the sound of cannons.

Kramer has to perish alone.

Nothing more terrible than this could possibly happen in the camp, because it would leave Peix on his own, with no one to restrain him, to keep him from doing whatever he pleased.

Döhring, the commandant’s new deputy, the younger and crueler of the two Döhring brothers, would surely use Peix differently from the way his predecessor Eisele had done.

Kramer might have been the only person to whom it never occurred that for other people real hell meant Peix.

Everyone was terrified of Peix.

A few days sufficed for newcomers to become terrified by the beauty of this healthy, strong person. Many of them would start coughing at the sight of him.

Past the pine forest, in the middle of a plowed field, Eisele had ordered a long, wide burning pit to be dug, seven meters wide and four meters deep, and for more than a week the living and the dead had been burning in it. A nice footpath led to the pit from the north gate. They set the fire with gasoline, applied generously, and when hair, skin, and fat were happily blazing with eager little flames, they kept on feeding the fire. This was Eisele’s last deed, which does not sound too good but, as people in Pfeilen then said, it was necessary to prevent epidemics; the pit smoked and sizzled. Brains and spinal marrow oozed from skulls and spines opening in the heat at the wide bottom of the pit and very slowly began to glow. Brain and spinal marrow become flammable only at a very high temperature. The high temperature was created by the corpses’ own energies. Easily flammable fatty and hairy parts continually ignited the burning mass. Even if people had wanted to, the fire couldn’t have been put out. After a while, the liquid brains acted as perpetual kindling. Of this, however, nobody spoke in either of the two small towns nearby or in the camp itself; all of them, unequivocally and despite the confusion, inhaled the stench of burning human flesh and bones, and had the impression that the smell had a material-like substance, something sticky, and that they were also eating it. It was impossible not to inhale it. The smell and taste in one’s saliva became a little like those of cheap church candles made of tallow. People coughed cautiously whenever the wind blew across the low pine forest, because after a cough one would have to inhale more deeply. Although they had grown used to everything, the knowledge that burning human flesh was what their sense organs were experiencing in this peculiar way and that tomorrow, in all probability, they too would be burning brought tears to their eyes and literally deprived them of air. Acrolein, which is nothing but unsaturated aldehyde, mildly polymerized at high temperatures, stinks like this; it irritates the mucous membranes whether or not one knows what sort of chemical and physical processes are taking place.

Big, strong young men were terrified of him no less than decrepit enfeebled old ones, who, perhaps because of their stupor and helplessness, might enjoy another happy half hour under the eaves of the Krankenrevier. But if Peix had a chance, he tortured these men too. They warmed themselves in the pale sunshine, together with the flies that dared emerge from the cracks in the dark-brown plank wall of the barracks. Icicles dripped happily. Squatting above the filth and stench of their own dysentery, these men waited for Kramer to perform a miracle and perhaps find room for them. The flies still had enough strength to crawl onto the men’s warm necks, where they became stuck or fell down and buzzed in the stubble-like growth that appeared in place of normal hair. If Kramer saw somebody persevering, he might have him sent to the sick bay, or at least the rumor among the prisoners was that he would find beds for them there. Until somebody else died in bed, they could lie on the cold stones in the warm, clean air and, in their fever-induced daydreams, stare at the snow-covered beautiful pine trees outside.

Kramer saw to it that, despite the congestion, there was silence and order in the two wards; this is what he kept Peix busy with all day, though during the chaotic last days it became impossible. It was not unusual in the midst of this quiet, resigned waiting that someone simply keeled over out of sheer weakness and without being pushed. His body would stay there in the mud, which, along with the excrement, vomit, and flies, would freeze again during the night.

Peix killed many people. He had them stand up, it was their turn, they can come in now, and when they managed more or less to rise to their feet in the drippy midday thaw, he shoved them back down. Mainly the handsome young boys had reason to fear him, the ones he took on as assistants in the sick bay, just as Kramer had taken him, back then. In the camp, people said he was a pervert, which in the prisoners’ lingo meant he did not use them even though he could. But he fed and pampered the pretty boys. He would sell one to Eisele in exchange for liver paste to feed another one. The boys did not have to do anything, they could just lounge around, and while Peix worked diligently all day for Kramer, he kept sending his laughs in the boys’ direction, his mouth wide open.

This was also something Kramer knew more about than anyone else: Peix’s hideously mute laughter.

But one fine day Peix grew tired of them, and no one asked himself why, or whether he would like another one. Kramer never let him keep more than two assistants at a time, which would have put an immeasurable burden on the sick bay’s population. These boys were mostly from the ranks of Russian prisoners of war or from Polish forced labor units who had been isolated from others because of capital crimes; they regularly killed for raw potatoes, for a frozen apple, anything. Peix himself had started his career as a common criminal. He was sixteen when he arrived in the Buchenwald concentration camp having committed a particularly cruel double murder. Kramer looked at his mashed and infected hands and then by chance looked at his face and said to himself, no, this boy may have committed murder, but he is no criminal. Peix eagerly affirmed that indeed he was not a criminal. He was not the one who had murdered the two old art dealers whose place he and his friend had broken into, he told Kramer, quickly realizing what Kramer wanted to hear from him. He and his partner had found the house empty. They knew where to find the two big Leistikow paintings they had been hired to steal; and the two old homos had probably been killed by their lover boys. Kramer took him along to the pathology section, a privilege for which, Peix assumed, he was to pay with his body. By the time they discovered the misunderstanding, they loved each other so much that they could not be separated.

Now they had to part, which evidently did not bother Peix, or at least he did not let it interrupt his important business. But it did bother Bulla, the trashy little Polish squealer: in the harsh light cast on the lower part of his face he pretended to be attentive to Peix while nervously blinking in the darkness at Kramer, wondering what would happen next. Bulla limped badly; his mates had once picked him up and thrown him from the second-story window of the laundry. They heaved him out so he would fall on his spine, but it did not happen that way. He was Eisele’s personal informer. If Kramer had not fixed his terrible open fractures and if Peix against his better judgment had not nursed him so devotedly, he would never have walked again. Peix wanted to kill him; he asked that Bulla be given a small dose of sedative, which in the language of the criminals meant enough to put the squealer out of his misery.

Peix also threatened: if Kramer was unwilling, he would do it himself.

Save it for others, for a worthier patient, Kramer said; his quiet self-assurance calmed the boy down even in the most critical situations. He wouldn’t have wanted to pick a fight with Eisele over such a senseless murder. Someone willing would come along and do it anyway. Informers could not support themselves for long; they never had more than half a year to squeal on people, though during that time they managed to have many prisoners put away. Peix also made his pretty boys disappear, one after the other, whenever they grew chubby and he became bored with them. He would tell them he had heard them coughing and tuberculosis was not a disease to walk around with, they should report to the sick bay, and there, within a few days, the SS doctors took care of them, without exception. Wherever Peix appeared, everyone tried hard not to cough. Strong, large men especially had much to fear. Kramer overlooked Peix’s ongoing manhunt, or he forced himself to pretend not to notice what his friend was doing. He overlooked many things he could not help noticing, in hopes that one day, with his help, Peix would come to his senses and realize who he really was. In the depth of his soul, though, he had long understood that, shameful as it was, all his apprehensions had come true. From this icily cool-headed boy he learned much about the lives of criminals and their ways of thinking; without these experiences the communist cell could not have taken up the struggle against them in the camp; but he had failed miserably with his own pedagogical strategy.

What the boy willingly took from him was never what he had wanted to give him.

But what was he to do if this boy was the only human being in the world whom he loved so much. Perhaps he loved him because of his irresponsibility and unpredictability. The boy was more levelheaded than anyone he’d ever met, but still, his soul was crumbling in the depths of madness. The truth was that Peix loved him even more than he loved Peix, Peix loved him immoderately, with all the inner turbulence of his madness. He usually feared robust, big men like Kramer. It was hard for him to get used to the knowledge that Kramer would never hit him or punish him. In Buchenwald, he jerked away his head if Kramer stepped closer to him or addressed him in a loud voice. Kramer managed to laugh hard when this happened, because he understood the boy well; and the boy was ashamed.

Kiss my ass, he yelled at him, get your kicks somewhere else, not with me.

And what would happen if he did hit him once, Kramer often wondered, would that be of any use. Because the jerking of his head meant that, except for being hit, the boy would not accept any other proof of love.

Lemme alone, already, Peix shouted, stop bugging me. Beat your meat, play with your cock, that’s what you should play with. Find something else to do. Get off my back.

Kramer laughed at Peix’s fits of rage; he kept laughing at him very loudly until Peix gave up.

You garbage, you shit, Peix would hiss, as if his teeth were being pulled; you pig swill, you shit, he hissed.

But why would he hit him.

He had never loved anyone like this, so senselessly, purposelessly, and unconditionally. As if he were wishing to redeem the other’s soul with his own. He loved him with every experience of his life, with his entire social wisdom honed on Marxism, with his messianic fervor; he loved the future in the boy. Then how could he possibly admit to himself that he had made a mistake. They should at least have killed Bulla. I made a big, big mistake, he said to himself. Although he could not acknowledge, not even to himself, that it was not a person’s circumstances that determined how that person would go. Not even birth was an influence strong enough to make a person good or evil. In Buchenwald he managed to convince his comrades with the same arguments he had used on himself, but here they reached the very end of the human world’s possibilities, and now he sees that there are no more possibilities, there is no future tense and there never has been one. Yes, here, in the very center of human misery and baseness, here, in hell, he wants to prove, he thundered to his comrades, that no one is born a criminal.

Where else, my dear sweet comrades.

But in the matter of criminality, the others had eyes too. They quickly called him to account about Peix, and he could expect the very worst.

He laughed at them lustily, at what they might have been thinking about him.

The comrades did not see how brazenly he was lying. But his comrades could see that a man who spoke and laughed like that was probably unaware of his own dangerous nature.

It was a very telling indicator that they called a meeting of cell leaders for Sunday afternoon without him. Bruno Apitz was there, in the bathhouse behind the laundry, and Fritz Lettow and Gustav Wegerer, and they sent for him only after they had made their decision about him.

They were going to withdraw him from circulation.

It was spring; the sun was warming everything.

A wondrous spring in the indecent woods of Buchenwald. A time when a man walking thinks, well, I’ve managed to survive this hard winter. And that he’s not alone. This is what he was thinking as he walked, because he really was not alone. Now only better things can happen. Birds were making a din, singing. A gigantic oak stood in front of the laundry. It had to be at least four hundred years old. The prisoners liked to think of it as Goethe’s tree under which he used to rest with Eckermann, who in some way must have been his friend, after all.* The way Peix was his. And when he thought of this, he somehow forgave Goethe too, which made him feel as if suddenly he’d found an explanation for nature’s terrible indifference.

Anyone going to the bathhouse had to pass in front of the laundry, but few people were allowed to walk freely on the camp’s roads and footpaths except for Kramer. The terrible bathhouse was an enormous white tiled hall, with more than two hundred showerheads in the ceiling, of which about two dozen were dripping, the sound of the drops echoing loudly. Through the multipaned windows, open on this Sunday afternoon, one could see the famous oak from a slightly higher angle; the woods were lower down and much farther away, vanishing into infinity beyond the electrified barbed-wire fence. The three men sat on a bench inside the bath, warming their backs and shoulders in the sun coming through the window.

He succeeded in convincing them that without the criminals they would not be able to win the battle with the criminals.

They asked him to wait outside while they made their next decision.

While they deliberated long and rescinded their earlier decision, Kramer waited in the wintry-cool shadow of the bathhouse, looking into the distance above the oak, above the woods. Until they called him back in, he shuddered slightly with fear, though he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid that his comrades would kill him. That would be more like a kind of mercy. There was no point in hoping or knowing that in the end his comrades would see reason. He was trembling a little. They can do nothing else, and he cannot do anything else. It was not his fear of death but his dread of life — that is what he feared so much, that they would thrust him out from among themselves, and then his entire life would become senseless retroactively and his death would be senseless too. All his activity until now would lose significance. There would not be an iota of sacrifice in his death.

But now he wanted to say good-bye to him; he was taking leave of his sensible life.

Gregor, he said quietly, and this was exceptional because in the four years when they lived in each other’s soul and physical proximity he had never said the boy’s first name out loud. In the barracks, the name sounded so scandalous that he instantly recalled the plank wall, warmed by spring heat, which even the fragrant cold of the woodland night could not quickly cool, where they, squeezed between two buildings, felt the warmth on their bodies. They were standing in the starless, deathly dangerous darkness with their pants pulled down, helpless and listening intently.

He knew a good place, Peix had whispered ten minutes earlier on his pallet. Kramer thought Peix meant a hiding place for something, like food, that he wanted to share; in a few minutes, he followed the boy. They carefully went around the latrines. Twice they had to wait for the searchlight’s beam to pass and then run quickly, one at a time, and then Peix led him here. Kramer followed the boy with alert attention and also with admiration; Peix had arrived only a few weeks earlier but was moving about as if he had lived at Buchenwald for years. As they stood trembling with emotion in the heat emanating from the two buildings on either side of them, Peix excitedly pushed his pants down and, shuddering with passion, groped after the cord of Kramer’s pants. It was as if they had washed the desire of pleasure into the sensation of danger and it was impossible to say which was greater. Kramer, surprised, rather felt, endured, or heard all this, but they could see nothing of each other in the darkness. Within the darkness was a more warmly outlined darkness, and this second quality of darkness was the other person. Which conquered them both, more than either of them had anticipated or wanted. Peix found Kramer’s hand and led it to himself, and for a while that sealed their fate, since from then on they could both justifiably believe that the other one wanted the same thing. Why would Kramer have resisted a kid in such a situation. From then on, the few significant moments of their lives were made up of hesitant, hasty movements like these, directed at each other, of which they were incapable alone and alone would not even have thought of, hasty, impatient movements that occasionally caused a bit of joy or evoked the memory of joy. These fractions of seconds thrust them close together, much closer than any closeness they might have known before. They were intent on fulfilling the obligation they imagined they owed each other, if that is how the other one liked it; neither of them wanted for himself the small amount of good every man’s body knows of the bodies of other men; they both wanted to give it to the other. But it all turned out badly; out of sheer consideration for the other, it became difficult to restrain their aversion, embarrassment, and urge to laugh, so after a while they stopped, giving up, at a loss. They stood in the hiding place, foreheads touching, hugging each other’s shoulders and waist as strongly and mercifully as possible. They were careful not to let their loins make contact again.

But now Peix was paying no attention to him, as if he actually neither saw nor heard Kramer.

Bulla turned to him, looking at Kramer with his wide, clever brown eyes, the man who had saved his life and who, because of him, must now go. If he didn’t want to go — he obviously had turned obstinate — they’d be there in a few seconds with their dogs and take him away.

Bulla thought Kramer might put up a fight.

Perhaps Kramer would approach them, embrace the little Huguenot, and then leave. Perhaps he would graze the nicely ribbed feminine lips with a kiss. Which would have irritated Peix extremely, as did almost any human contact or feeling.

Now he understood Peix’s intention, but this time he’d come too late.

He did not have time to shout or interfere, because Peix had already grabbed the low-hanging, heavy lamp, pulled it back as if taking aim, and with one staggering blow crushed Bulla’s skull. The skull opened from Bulla’s ears to his forehead, they heard something that might have been the beginning of a whimper, and for a split second the strong lamplight illuminated the soft, gleaming, pink, and motionless brain until, with a short thud, the body collapsed in the light.

Peix let go of the lamp, which, skirting sprays of blood and yanking its beam of light in all directions, swung back into place. While the Hungarian countess’s voice continued to crackle and soar, it kept swaying fitfully.

We can go then, Peix answered the loudspeaker, somewhat later, and in his joy he let out a loud neigh of a laugh. He rarely laughed aloud, but when he did he sounded like a whinnying horse. Kramer particularly liked his infernal laugh; it was as if he were shouting to someone, good job, man, well done. And that’s how it really was, they could go because at that instant the loudspeaker fell silent again.

Obersturmführer Döring, who had just called Kramer to the south gate, now simply said, Peix to the south gate.

Across the vast Appelplatz they could go side by side, heads bent sharply down; they never looked at each other, not for a moment. They looked like two mutually offended people parting in extreme anger though neither of them could have named the reason for it. On the other side they were waiting for them with their dogs; from there, they accompanied them farther but separately. Out the large gate that was always brightly lit by floodlights, both its wings, unusually, open. Along the darkly glittering asphalt road for a while, their wooden shoes clacking between the leather boots. They turned off the road where the floodlights faded almost completely. The sky was slowly brightening. Out here, the loudspeaker could not be heard clearly anymore. All one could tell was that somebody, a woman, kept singing the same thing over and over again. But they could hear the cannons more clearly and they could see, at the bottom of the lightening sky, the reflected lights on the western horizon that preceded the flash and blast of firing. For Kramer, these images made it clear that what they were doing to them was being done in the penultimate moment. The huge cauldrons would not be brought again; there would be no more turnip soup in the camp. That’s why today there had been no morning Appel, which usually lasted for hours. He was a bit amused that he’d managed to glean this bit of fateful information but could not pass it on to his comrades. They will kill the two of them and then, in orderly files, they will lead the entire camp out the wide gates and away from here. The Krankenrevier and the Karanten, together with the sick and the convalescing inside them, they’ll simply burn.

And that is how it happened.

But even Kramer did not imagine that they wanted to drown Peix in front of his eyes.

When Döhring raised his cane under his chin and the other man twisted his arms behind him, a position that, as the result of having been tied down for so many months, immediately caused him terrible nausea and involuntary retching, he understood this too. He could endure this much pain only if he could go on retching. Peix had to undress; no matter how badly they were beating him, the undressing progressed very slowly. His nakedness emerged from the darkness before Kramer’s eyes. He would have preferred to suffer Döhring’s blows to seeing what they were doing to Gregor. In his mind, he was praying for him like a child. By now no man could have held Kramer up. And Döhring could not at the same time prop up Kramer’s chin and hit him. Several men rushed to help him, the dogs were raging on their short leashes, and they beat him — but not so that he would lose consciousness.

He did not look.

No sound passed his throat either; he was retching silently.

That was all he could do; in his mind, though, he was shouting his prayers for Gregor, for him he was ready to address God and even call for His help.

No matter how hard they hit him, how loudly they yelled at him to open his eyes. The pain made him vomit. They had to leave off for a moment. They even let go of him. But he had to open his eyes and he saw what they were doing with Gregor’s body. They had to jump back to avoid his puking on them. Salivating bile, he kept yanking his head in their hands and felt his pain for Gregor as if, along with all his innards, his entire physical essence were turning inside out, pouring through his throat and mouth, and he no longer had air to breathe or a voice with which to speak. He ended on the ground. He barely felt the blows, they pressed his face into his vomit, but more strongly than anything else he felt the frozen ground and the rich wet fragrance of the grass. For a good while he could still see the green, only the green, a thunderous green, nothing else, such a lively, vivid green that he could never before, and particularly in that moment, have possibly seen.

They realized they were torturing a corpse only when Gregor was no longer breathing under water; with one huge heave they lobbed his lifeless body into the river.




VOLUME III: The Breath of Freedom





Anus mundi


You won’t be the first in the history of the world, my pretty one, don’t be so conceited, but I can tell you now that you’ll panic as badly as if you were.

She must stay on top, must not slide back. If she can’t find the notes and be confident, if she keeps sliding back, she can say good-bye to a singing career.

Take my word for it.

Randomly she hit a semitone on Mrs. Szemző’s piano.

Again, the same F sharp.

The living soul of destroyed people and objects made themselves heard in the summer evening, and she followed them willingly with her voice.

After a beat she sang the note and then hit the key again and sang into the sound. She was very sensitive to sounds her own hearing longed for. She had ideas about tonality that she tried to formulate with her own vocal organs. But producing sound always kills hearing; she could not hear herself from the outside when singing. Once again, as if to double-check, she hit the key and paused, but the pause turned into emptiness and she quickly told herself, no, this won’t do, not like this, not this.

I won’t find it, she said to herself, I can’t find it.

She would have had to synchronize different elements.

She was also struggling with an urge to weep because of Ágost.

Yet she couldn’t have said why, since she was happy with him.

I simply blame him.

Why is everyone allowed to humiliate me with what they know, she shouted to herself, torn by doubt, even though she was so happy that nothing could crush the strength swelling in her body at this moment, spreading and working in her cells.

Everything was swelling and expanding.

You, Gyöngyvér, she admonished herself in Margit Huber’s voice, you keep on blaming others for your own weaknesses, and she readily owned up to this recurring error for which her teacher often rebuked her.

Pardon me, my dear, but that is ridiculous.

I do make myself ridiculous with this man, but how can I stay away from him.

Actually, she could not have expressed what she had heard in the night, or what she was looking for, or whether she’d find in her memory what her hearing continually whispered to her from behind her inner speech or offered in place of inner speech — what she desired so ardently that she’d want to sing it.

It’s impossible to sing in general, dear child, you should really understand this and accept it as an axiom.

She’d like to give musical form to her need to weep.

Just because you won’t accept it doesn’t mean it isn’t an axiom. It still remains an axiom that you must give everything a form.

She had no reason to be bitter; she should have been truly happy with this man. She patted her tight little belly several times with her spread fingers to check whether she might have suddenly conceived.

You have to give form even to formlessness, don’t you understand. Why don’t you understand.

You can sing only something and only somehow, Gyöngyvér, and if you don’t find an original form for it, said Margit Huber, raising her voice and pounding wildly on the piano to show this stupid girl what happens to sounds without any original form, chaos, that’s what happens, nothing, nada, and then all your weltschmerz isn’t worth a brass farthing. Your enthusiasm is also worthless, worth nothing, hysteria, zilch, do you understand, dear, nothing, she yelled as she banged frantically on the piano.

But she hadn’t relinquished her ethereal smile, which still managed to enchant Gyöngyvér.

When you take a breath just before a phrase, you should already know what you are going to do with it.

Those two F sharps, for example, slipped away again at the end.

Careful, don’t grasp the sound from below, Gyöngyvér.

Instead of the sought-after forms, Gyöngyvér Mózes found all sorts of things that only made her want to weep more. How can I know why and what I do when I’m singing, or why I can’t do something. For the sake of forming the right sounds, time should be suspended; she was just chasing a little girl’s wishes, empty daydreams. How wonderful it would be to become a famous singer instantly, all her efforts in that direction suddenly and simultaneously to bear fruit, and she, with her grand feelings, appearing on the stage of every great opera house in the world. Little Médi would stare at her with wide eyes, wouldn’t she. She could see herself getting out of the taxi, gathering the collar of her mink coat close about her neck, and not giving a single autograph to anyone.

These grand feelings included the belief that she actually spoke Italian; all that was needed was enlightenment.

No big deal.

Sometimes she tested it; she waited long and patiently for her mind to become enlightened, the mind that used her present feelings to conceal many feelings from her earlier life.

When she concentrated long enough on finding what lurked behind these feelings, she saw clearly that consciousness of things past glimmered through them. It was only from her earlier life that she could summon the idea that she’d once been a man, Italian and castrated, and only infinite modesty and bashfulness kept her from making contact with the genuine knowledge she had accumulated in her former life. All right, she doesn’t know the words in Italian, or doesn’t know their meaning since in her former life she did not know Hungarian, but gradually everything will come to her and then, based on her present Hungarian knowledge, she’ll be able to analyze all the things she’d known before. It’s not a matter of her learning them, because Italian words and Italian grammatical structures are already in her brain. She must find the way to reach them somehow. Whenever she struggled to find her way back to forgotten knowledge, making crude mistakes and discovering silly technical inadequacies in the process, problems appeared in her consciousness that were the very ones to which Margit Huber continuously called her attention and which nonetheless she could not solve.

You’re always after success, my child.

But it’s impossible to note the many things you asked me to, all at the same time, and to remember them.

Stop sniveling. Feeling sorry for yourself won’t help a bit.

If every single day you warmed up your voice by practicing scales several times, you can be sure you’d find it.

If only she could at last sing freely, instead of this eternal practicing of scales.

Maybe if you didn’t make me stop so often I could sing.

After so much uncontrolled shouting, I can’t be expected to have a voice, she thought, very content with her exhausted and naked body. As if in her great self-satisfaction she were saying, all right, so I’m not talented; no matter how much I may blame Médike I’m a complete antitalent, irresponsible, and the laziest person in the world; and it’s true I don’t practice enough, and anyway I imagine I’m a great natural talent who doesn’t need all this practicing. I’ve got a great body and I don’t lose my musicality even when fucking, nobody can doubt that; and this time this guy really fucked me but good, I think in this great fucking session I finally found my match.

No matter how much I rail against him or he pretends he doesn’t want me.

For him, at least, I am one hot female.

You undress them and right away see what you can expect. That’s good for the woman, she can see by looking at their briefs.

And now he’s fucked my brains out and I’ve screamed my voice to pieces because of him. And Jesus, did I ever try to hold myself back. Not to harm his delicate ears, such a gentleman. He was screaming too, like an animal; no wonder I’ve gone deaf.

She felt she did not love this man either, no, not really; she felt only contempt for him. And this stupid feeling was frustrating her intentions. That’s why she does not like what she nevertheless wants so much from him.

If we keep this up much longer, I’ll lose my hearing, not just my voice.

A strong smell of catnip pervaded the warm summer night air trapped in Mrs. Szemző’s rooms.

Now of course he’s fallen asleep exhausted, my sweet, my darling, in his own good smell, oh my God, look at him.

If she could, she’d have run back to be with him on the bed in the maid’s room, this wonderful man who caused her those insane climaxes and whom not one of her nerves could get enough of. No, she couldn’t get enough of him. She encouraged her nerve endings: tomorrow, later, in a minute, next week, everything will come true, ripen, and she is very grateful to him for this, for this promising future. Everything she needed for singing, her heart, her mind, her lungs were full of him, her head and her chest almost exploded with the memory of his fabulous fragrance now emanating mostly from her own skin, her short-cropped hair and her dark, rich pubic hair.

A great singer should be more careful with such unbridled screaming sessions.

Good thing I’m not a great singer yet, she said to herself, and until I am I can fuck to my heart’s content.

As if she had a terrible, strong suspicion that she’d have to squeeze all her stupid artistry into this woeful world so as not to be just a coarse female, a stupid little bitch who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life.

She wouldn’t even need men. That’s why she should reach the pinnacle of the art of singing, so she wouldn’t need them anymore.

Stay on the hilltop, Gyöngyvér, sweetheart, if you can’t climb Mount Everest, and you can see for yourself you can’t. No backsliding, no constant tripping up on little stupidities.

I’m not Médike’s sweetheart.

Except for her ambition, though, she has nothing; she can’t give up her ambition just because she lacks the necessary technical skills.

And the ugly old beast never tired of enumerating just how many skills she lacked. Once in Gyöngyvér’s presence she called somebody else a born dilettante, and Gyöngyvér was afraid that one fine day Médi would brand that on her skin too. I would never have thought this of you, Gyöngyvér, but you are a born dilettante.

And she had to have such an old fart for her singing teacher.

This was another reason she wouldn’t have dared disturb the merciless silence of the universe with practicing scales. She’d be found out as a born dilettante, born dilettante, it echoed in her head, born dilettante. But she did not go back to him either, to the bed in the maid’s room. She’d had enough of all those maid’s rooms and of men. Going back meant waking the poor man, whom she had brought up to the apartment despite Mrs. Szemző’s many bashful requests, and then they’d go back to doing it. Go ahead, sweetheart, rest; I’ll guard your sleep. They had no place else to go. They didn’t know how not to continue; they didn’t even have to touch each other for it. She felt as if they were still doing it. During those four days they had been to their family vacation house, to Visegrád, to the apartment of the man’s friend with the funny name in Ó Street, but no matter where they went every move of theirs was directed toward the same goal. The worst that can happen is that Mrs. Szemző will kick her out. I’ll just go somewhere else, a place with no piano, of course. One can’t go to bed only with men who have their own apartments. She didn’t go back to bed, because the other person would have crushed her ambition if they’d continued. She hadn’t acquired nice mink coats yet, I won’t be able to put together enough for a rotten little apartment, and with this constant fucking he will deprive her of her never-acquired jewelry.

I can’t ruin myself because of him.

The two-story villa, the villa with a sunny garden, the successive waves of applause from the balconies, along with insane cheering and frenzied ovations — she would have to give it all up in exchange.

She had better pay attention to developing her art.

Every previous occurrence had been arrested and stuck in the stale air within these dreary walls. She neither imagined nor fantasized but literally felt and lived through the entirety of past events, in the most minute detail, and all over her naked, shuddering body. While thinking she was daydreaming of her future or her opportunities, and it was not she but her audience who should be screaming with gratification.

Because occasionally, seriously and very quietly, Médike did reveal the secrets of singing.

And they will scream and carry on; Médike has nothing to worry about.

She was thinking about what this Médike demanded of her.

This is a very peculiar thing, Gyöngyvér, because you have to lead them to where you are headed, but you can get there only together with them. You don’t know them and it’s not advisable to get to know them.

Perhaps it’s not such a big problem, then, that men cannot satisfy her properly.

If only knowing this could satisfy her for once: that it’s not that important, nothing is that important, only her singing.

For all she knew they could go further, the two of them; this was the peculiar and painful feeling that was always on the surface.

And in this early morning hour it was clear to her that just as she didn’t love him, the man didn’t love her, but she would have been loathe to imagine that she hadn’t satisfied him, even though they had fucked so well together. She could not think of this, because at least in this she should feel herself to be perfect, in this big fuckfest.

Your audience must hear, my child, that even your highest notes are not strained, just as you can’t choke on the lowest ones.

She should sound as if she could go on, further, higher, so you shouldn’t be the one to strain, they should, because they are clambering after her last notes in a fashion that will take their breath away.

And she knew well where the final limit was.

Her vagina was burning, hurt from so much rubbing.

She could not choose freely among her sensations, and there was no musical note that, driven by a single controlled instinct, might have addressed and elicited a response from the enormous mass and weight of the impersonal past.

In the bluish-yellow early-summer night, transilluminated by moonlight, an aura of everything-has-passed settled on Mrs. Szemző’s rooms.

It settled stubbornly on Gyöngyvér’s shoulders; with the insanely yellow reflected light it settled on the entire quarter of the city, sunk in a nightmare. And the solitary semitone was not strong enough to address or lend body to the enormous mass of sensations of things past.

She could not muster enough strength to break through.

She has a singing teacher who never but never lets her sing. She tortures her, nags her, sadistic woman; how can she break through. Keeps making her stop all the time, in the interest of expression separately squelches every single note in her. So how can she sing effortlessly and naturally, how can she give form to her notes. This female frazzles my nerves completely; I don’t believe a word she says anymore.

There was no room to move in the historical thicket of objects, and she wasn’t getting anywhere with that damn F sharp either.

Those two F sharps, my child, you must really work them out.

I am not your child.

What I wish with all my heart is for you to be more patient with yourself.

Please note, I am not anybody’s child.

I know well whose child I am not, and I am not the child of Aunt Margit Huber.

I’m the child of my whore mother, whom somebody knocked up on the fly, if you understand this kind of talk.

You are susceptible to hysteria, dear child, and the question is whether you’ll be able to overcome this inclination of yours. And there’s another big question too: with what approach might I be of help to you. Giving a lesson to oneself requires self-discipline, that’s for sure. Now calm down, and let’s take it from the top. Like an ordinary technician, think of it that way, I’m an ordinary technician who ought to find the source of this damn breakdown in communication.

Let’s try it staccato.

We must hear what you deign to do with these two F sharps, for they deserve a better fate.

Please don’t tell me that I deign to do something.

You should put every note individually in its proper place, Gyöngyvér, not in general, do not sing in general. Try it staccato.

It won’t kill you, don’t worry.

There, you see.

If you can’t manage to bring out that sound when you sing slowly like this, carefully separating each note from the rest, what will it be like, for heaven’s sake, at the proper tempo.

Don’t hurry, where are you rushing to, for the love of heaven, don’t smudge it so roughly, don’t smudge it like that.

It won’t be nice if the high note is strained.

You have days, dear child, when instead of singing you try cleverly to avoid the notes; you want to get away with not singing. I know you’ll be offended again, but again you’ve failed to sustain it.

I’ll gladly lend you my ears, I’ll rent them out to you, but you must do the singing. You want to get away from the notes. A singer, my pet, should not sing in general, even though one’s stage instinct might suggest it, to pretend and pretend some more instead of playing for real, but please, don’t go that route. You have your own voice, yet you want to sing by cribbing from others.

That turns into self-complacency or self-pity. That is not your best voice, Gyöngyvér, it still isn’t your very best. It’s as if you are forcing it. To be sure to have every note, first you must bring your body into the right position and together with your emotions, we’ve talked a lot about this and in great detail. All along the way, one beat in advance, you should know what you want to do next. And don’t forget that in German the letter ü is short, even if the tempo wants it longer.

Repeat after me, Glück.

Glück.

Gyöngyvér, please, shorter, shorter. You are happy, you understand, happy.

Glück.

Because of the tempo, you may double a vowel, but be careful, no strange sound between the two vowels. Please don’t get in the habit of that embarrassing spl-ee-ee-ee-ting of words. You’re singing about happiness, not cooing to a baby.

Of course others do that, but we don’t understand them. All you’re doing is imitating the weak points of others.

You’ve got enough of your own.

Glück, say it after me, one more time, and shine, make your voice glisten.

Not with your little mug, Gyöngyvér, with your eyes! Glitter and glow with your eyes, shine them out of your pretty little face.

You can indicate by miming what you’ll do in your great happiness, for all I care, the dramatic situation allows for it. But you, my dear, are doing it the other way around: you are demonstrating retroactively what you failed to deliver with your voice. You make faces, but I want to hear something about happiness.

As it is, it’s worthless, nothing, zero, nada. It’s as if you mixed up cause and effect.

We can’t mix apples and oranges either.

You can’t give me the visual instead of the acoustic.

And now I’d like to hear at last that you’ve put the notes in their proper place.

Glück, I want to hear this shorter, Gyöngyvér, shorter, and let your voice glisten.

Gyöngyvér Mózes, filled with doubts, kept hitting the F sharp while outside it was fast becoming light, and at the very same moment the tormented and humiliated Kristóf Demén, not so far from her, made good on his promise to himself.

He was trudging toward the Pest shore, not on the Margit Bridge but on the Árpád Bridge.

He did not pick this bridge just because it was closer and seemed to be the safest way to escape the raiding police.

The others, who did not manage to escape, were soon beaten with nightsticks, the blows falling wherever their bodies could be reached on their backs, heads, and arms raised in defense. He wasn’t sure that other police units might not be combing the interior of the island; he couldn’t flee that way. And if he had good luck, the incredible luck to slip through the dragnet, he still thought that on this bridge he had the best chance of not falling into a trap again.

It wasn’t advisable to meet other human beings in his condition.

The chances of this happening were greater on the Margit Bridge or Lipót Boulevard.

In another twenty minutes city traffic would slowly wind down, but given his condition he couldn’t have gotten on a streetcar in any case.

He picked this escape route because the surest way of throwing himself successfully into the depths would be from the Árpád Bridge. Before meeting anyone. He only had to hurdle the railing.

As if his entire life until now had been nothing but preparation for this lovely nightmare that, lo and behold, came to him while he was still awake.

Under the blows of nightsticks, several men fell or collapsed into the tarry pissoir; they screamed, but the police went on beating them, they cried and begged for mercy while the police yelled.

Headlights of a police assault van provided light through the open door.

Will he have the fortitude.

Now he can realize it; all his great hopes lay in this last, long-gestating plan whose every little detail had been worked out.

In the glimmer of dawn, which had not yet obliterated the deep grayness of the world, he was running headlong, all alone, on the bridge. His bodily contentment was panting along with him, deriding his sense of morality and disgracing his conscience. He carried his joy with him. He was fleeing from policemen who were not pursuing him. They probably hadn’t even noticed that someone had escaped or, if they had, they were glad to have one less faggot at the station.

He stopped for the first time on the bridge, and thought of those who had perished here before him in the icy current, but he suspected this sort of thinking was an infamy to be avoided; then he looked back at the island, but the thick foliage hid everything.

It was summer now, with all its living, powerful fragrance. The grove of young chestnut trees swallowed up the cries for help, or there never were any. The summer dawn was lovely and serene. The gas lamp shone passively through the branches. As if nothing had occurred in the night just passing, the first birds sang loftily. He was dragging himself, he could not actually run in his fine, pointed black shoes, which had gotten so wet in the puddles, and his socks made sucking sounds.

No cars, no streetcars, no one, no movement at all on the gray asphalt of the bridge.

Dawn’s first blush appeared in the sky over Angyalföld, at the edge of the clouds mixing with factory smoke. It became improbable, it turned into an improbability, that he had succeeded in escaping, that he had really managed to escape from the screams, the dull thuds of blows, the shouts and implorations, across the blinding light, and that he had not been taken away. That they had not reached him with their swishing nightsticks. Although the arc lights up here on the bridge were still on, the great sky with the birds was becoming lighter. Gulls were screeching lazily at one another, and swallows on the shore sent their brief shrill messages as they swiftly flew about. Yet he kept hearing the plopping and thumping of bodies being piled on top of each other, the falling of rapid blows; his conscience registered and properly sorted everything, he brought with him visual illustrations of arms poised to strike or raised in defense, melodies of futile begging, swearing, someone’s screaming entreaty, please, don’t hurt me, you shouldn’t hurt only me, comrade policeman, the sound of tearing clothes, the curses, the cracking of bones in upheld arms; in his own brain cells he salvaged and brought to light of day the sounds and sights of horror and reprisal, which couldn’t have been more contrary to reason or comprehension.

You just wait, you filthy fags, you’ll get it now.

In the unusual silence, he could hear the streaming, helpless plashing of water around the base of the bridge’s piers.

You wanted cock, all right then, you’ll get cock.

It was summer, an ordinary early-summer dawn with its cool mist.

He was dragging his injured leg.

The tight pants chafed the oozing wound; the shin smashed on the iron railing was burning and painful.

He feared that the rounded-up men would be taken away across this bridge and then they’d catch him too; he’d have no place to hide or chance to escape.

His black shirt and black pants, wet with other men’s urine and filthy with their sperm, stuck to his back, chest, bottom, and thighs; they clung to him, adhered to him like skin, white-hot with shame.

Only a few seconds before the police raid he had struggled to his feet from the stone floor, wet with water dripping from the cracked sink and the streams of urine that had missed their target, where, earlier, the men standing above him and intimately busy with one another had reached their satisfaction or had hastily abandoned him because of others’ stiff cocks; his body had been lying there, motionless, for a long time after its own gratification. He figured he would do it when he reached the geometrical center of the bridge’s span between the island and the Pest shore, where he’d have the least chance of getting stuck on part of the bridge while falling or of knocking against a pillar below.

That was his big plan.

He could see himself falling, but he didn’t want to see himself shattered or mangled, not that.

Before the police raid, his personal fate had given him time to stagger to the sink, which in the darkness he had guessed was behind the wide-open steel door of the pitch-black public urinal.

This open door turned out to be his great luck.

He figured that it wasn’t by chance they’d left the door open at night; they did it so they’d all walk into the trap.

He’d barely had time to slap some water on his face, just enough to wash the filth of others’ pleasure off his face, rinse it out of his mouth before going home, when the quiet night was shattered by the engine noise of the assault van, the screeching of its wheels and its spotlights; the policemen were already yelling.

To herd together so many shouting, whimpering men and then squeeze them into the open prison van waiting farther off can’t have been easy; if only because of the policemen’s quick, violent fury the job couldn’t be bloodless.

Huddled behind the open steel door, he was out of danger for a few seconds. But he thought that before doing away with himself, he should take off his clothes soiled by urine and other human secretions.

Should roll them up and make a bundle of them and his shoes, which later he could throw along with his shame into the depths before hurling there himself.

That the water should swallow it up, make it vanish at the bottom of its terrific current.

He would stand naked before his own death, with no way back, powerless to change his mind at the last moment.

He had nothing to change his mind about.

Ilona’s rice chicken crossed his mind, the leftovers waiting for him in the pot on the stove, nice and succulent, tasty with spices, unless Ágost had unexpectedly come home early, beaten him to it and eaten it right out of the pot. In this penultimate moment he was ready to develop a liking even for Ágost, whom he disdained because of his egocentric quirks, whom he could not bear, in fact, and who, with no consideration, would take for himself, and take away from Kristóf, every delicious morsel that Ilona put aside. Barely an arm’s length from his long-prepared death, he felt strongly the physical aversion that, given their shared family features, he experienced in his cousin’s company, the perplexing intimacy of familial aversion. On this night, however, Ágost had not come home unexpectedly early to eat his cousin’s supper but rather, lying on his stomach, one knee pulled almost to his chin, was sleeping peacefully and uncovered in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor flat.

At the moment before perishing, Kristóf wanted to understand Ágost’s crippling strangeness, to learn to love it as his own. But what he understood at most was that one is not alone even in aversion to one’s own body, because in family systems this trait too thrives in profusion.

He also remembered Ilona’s freckles and her pale little boy, whose fate would be no better than his had been. That’s what he thought about him. He felt sorry for the brooding, rebellious little boy and for his life to come. As if thinking that his own fate, which he was now leaving to these miserable survivors, might at least have someone in whom its cruelties would continue.

This child flesh will remain here, their common fate can rage as it pleases.

The idea that he might still have some of that rice chicken suddenly made him ravenous.

And another idea: that he would pass on his fate to the defenseless child, along with the leftovers of the rice chicken. Mainly, he was thinking about food because of the drop in blood sugar that comes with sexual gratification. The desire to stuff himself, gorge himself one last time. The way Ágost does; after each of his loud climaxes he gets up to wolf down something fast, eat jam out of the jar, be as disgusting as he is. If he were to stay alive, stay in this only life of his, the most dreaded thing would be his infernal climax, which the giant and his mustached assistant might somehow cajole out of his cool, insensitive body; he’d be an exemplar, a model to follow, yes, this is what you should strive for.

He should come back to them every night. Like two legendary heroes, outlaws, or highwaymen they had disappeared before the police arrived.

Which aroused his suspicion. Could they have been the ones who brought on the police to take care of the others — that’s what he thought, but he knew well that he could no longer live without them even if they were police agents.

He might even want them more if they were.

Only a few more seconds and he’ll be at the right spot and then, luckily, that scandalous thought — that nothing matters so long as they are willing to do it with him — will no longer live in him. Still, it was precisely this scandalous thought that made it seem that he was celebrating a victory over fate. After all, for the first time in his life he’d succeeded in attaining this scandalous bliss, and without getting caught or beaten up by the cops, avoiding the risk that his aunt would have to bail him out of one of the detention centers; he shuddered at the thought.

There is no punishment; there won’t be any. His last hour was becoming the best hour of his life; at least they could not humiliate him for it. His fate has no more time to invent and inflict new punishment. Death will not be a punishment for his innocent pleasure but, rather, a lavish present, a huge bonus, he told himself, and he did not fear it, not at all; he already loved it in advance, deeply desired it, desired nothing else. At least death knew how gravely fate had erred throughout his short life. He should have settled in another body because he was completely innocent, and he learned from his impending death that other people, when they were happy, were happy because of their damned offenses.

Or what sort of hope of happiness is it when the hope that men pursue treacherously abandons them, when they cannot give it up but it runs ahead, away from them, on swift feet. Thirst had parched his lips and the hollow of his mouth; nausea made painful sores in the corners of his mouth and chapped his lips.

It was uplifting — to be aware of what he had learned about himself and about other men for the first and last time in his life. And other men can just stay in this world with this knowledge if they want to.

He was taking with him the taste and smell of strange men’s lips, gums, teeth, saliva, and cocks; he cherished this, as he did his own imminent death, for which he had to take only a few more, possibly painful steps. He will take everything with him; he won’t share anything with anybody. And with the thought that he’d have nothing to relinquish in the new world, he wished that feeling would come back to his parched mouth, despite his nausea, yes, they should kiss it, thrust their muscular tongues into it, these other men, anybody. More than for the depth of the swirling water, more than for its surface made silky by the churned-up mud, he longed for the thick lips of the mustached man, the taste of his heavy sweat, the strange smells left by his spritzers, meat stew, and perpetual cigarettes. With his stinking mouth he should kiss the rest of his life to pieces, fuck him to smithereens. Gobble up every last bit of leftovers, wipe the juicy bottom of the pot with a piece of bread, chew clean every little bone and bite through every bit of gristle.

This somebody who temporarily was still himself was taking with him the stale odor of tar and urine in his pores, on his skin, on the fuzz in his nostrils, and on his wet clothes.

Only a few seconds are left, all he has to do is get to the middle of the bridge with this miserable creature. Nothing is more clearly known than this and never will be.

Joining these sensations was the silt-filled, all-pervasive smell of the water intermingled with the bitterness of smoke from nearby factories and, separately, the sweet breeze of jasmine.

On his short-cropped blond hair, a mixture of strangers’ sperm was drying.

And while she kept on trying, once, twice, even five times in one instant, because she didn’t want, just this once she really didn’t want to fudge it, she was really trying to put this fucking F sharp in its proper place as required by the sense and style of the phrase, treating it as objectively as Margit Huber, this Médike, demanded of her, and why shouldn’t she be able to treat it as a technician would, since after all she does have a brain in her head and knows I can hold back a little here and let go a bit there; still, defying all her good intentions, her shoulders trembled with suppressed tears.

Much pain and happiness intersected during this exceptional moment.

When Kristóf again broke into a run on the bridge, he was fleeing to safeguard the sweet and childish images of his own death from the images of Ilona’s rice chicken and innocent freckles.

Which would like to keep him here for his life and for his future.

He was the only one making a noise on the dully resonant sidewalk of the bridge with his running steps, and yet he acknowledged, with some delay, the sound of trotting coming close behind him. And he envied Ilona’s pale little boy, in advance, for his terrible fate. He was fully prepared to hurdle over the railing. Quick little taps like those made by a dog’s feet reached his consciousness first. The nails tapped more rapidly than he himself was running. His heart skipped a beat; the black dog was going to catch up with him, his black dog.

It had gotten free, broken out, or the night watchman must have heard its echoing, persistent barking. And now the dog was coming after him on the bridge so he would have to continue to live his life for its sake, for a dog.

No, this was too much.

He had to figure out something; he could not run any faster.

As if he could not decide where he was in time and space, what had happened to him earlier or later.

Good Lord, she sighed, and I reproached this sweet dear man, telling him he was working inside me like a stupid little technician.

Without a soul.

Cheeky person that I am.

It was Margit Huber again, speaking out of me.

She was surprised in any case by her delayed realization that this Médike had managed to get inside her and reach every part of her with her words so insidiously meted out.

What the hell was I talking about, that he was a technician, what a dumb thing to say.

Next thing I know she’ll decide what I should tell my lover; that’s all I need.

I can’t let that happen.

As if she had suddenly realized the intoxicating beauty and horror of the osmosis, the exchange of personality, the symbiosis that occurs between people.

This woman had moved inside her with her entire being, not only her stupid singing lessons; she had wormed her way into Gyöngyvér’s every sentence and every thought. In the end she’ll be telling me what I should say to whom in every situation. As if Médike, with her relentless smile, had expropriated Gyöngyvér for herself. Let the devil be happy with her, not me, let the devil shine and glitter, what I need is a man, not her artistic glittering. Or maybe Gyöngyvér had expropriated Médike’s being along with her smile, I’ve robbed her of her smile, though she still didn’t understand how a permanent smile like that worked, the one she had stolen. Such an illuminating, multifaceted smile — which displayed myriad colors and levels of emotional intensity, which flickered, wavered, and fluttered on Margit Hubert’s lips as she taught, and with which she compelled no one to do anything — was not calculated into Gyöngyvér Mózes’s dark and difficult life, only, at most, into her tuition. Not enough that I’m paying for my lessons, I’m supposed to be happy too. Let your damn mother be happy, that Swabian. Gyöngyvér was amazed, where does this Médike get the strength for her constant smiles. And as she imitated Médike, Gyöngyvér began to comprehend that the airily sustained smile indeed contained something cool, treacherous, and obsessively persistent that would prove indispensable to singing and that she could not do without.

And she hated Margit Huber for this.

These people allow themselves to do even this.

Sometimes, while talking to herself, she addressed Margit Huber’s smile as if it were not a single characteristic of a single person but the cause of her having to wage war simultaneously against the collective experience of several persons.

If something slipped out all right, if she succeeded with one of her phrases and Margit Huber praised her, beaming, yes, that’s it, Gyöngyvér, that’s how you should do it, this is what we’ve been waiting for, then of course she instantly felt her heart beat faster and she adored her teacher.

She was grateful to her for her earlier wickedness.

Médike was redeemed and Gyöngyvér adored her.

She wanted to get rid of this painful, newly acquired habit of hers, the relentless full-mouthed smiling when speaking or singing. The moment she eked out a good result from her many fiascos, she wanted to thrust Médike from her and quickly forget everything she had learned from her. What has this Médike accomplished in life with all her great knowledge, nothing. If she’d been able to make something of herself, she wouldn’t be teaching Gyöngyvér for fifty-seven forints an hour, she’d be singing. Others shouldn’t see who it was who had taught her to make her voice glow like that. This is a shameful betrayal. And though it would be painful to betray Médike immediately because, despite all her hatred, Gyöngyvér actually thought she loved her, I love her, the temptation for a quick all-out betrayal was greater.

And from whom can a natural talent really learn anything; from nobody.

She couldn’t have real pangs of conscience about the betrayal.

In Médike, she discovered a teacher’s unconditional humility toward her profession and her pupil. She’s a dumb slut. Which in Gyöngyvér’s language meant that in the soul of this elusive and merciless female was a spot where she’d left herself exposed. This entire teaching strategy was an impersonal passion that she too had experienced with the children in the kindergarten and throughout her whole singing history, and no less profoundly. She knew perfectly well that without children she too was vulnerable. Her own body gave her the insight into the other person’s passion for teaching; and she saw how vulnerable it had made her too.

If it was possible, she wanted to exploit her even more.

She can’t do without her.

The sheer thought that she would wring the last drop of knowledge from the old hag filled her with gratitude; she’d wring every bit of knowledge out of her. Then she’d toss her aside like a dirty dishrag.

Passions cannot be tamed without a cool smile; she must make every sacrifice for this knowledge. The woman must be squeezed like a lemon. So that Gyöngyvér could acquire a little protection, this little common secret of theirs, a bit of this cunning little advantage.

Even then, she won’t have as many fine expensive things as these people do who are always inheriting things from other people or family members.

It was as if she were learning not to sing but to smile superciliously and cheerfully in a hostilely indifferent universe.

Why should I be the one who never inherits anything from anybody. Well, I shall take things for myself, I’ll rob them and I’ll smash everything.

But out loud she couldn’t even say how grateful she would be to Médike; she could say nothing out loud. Because there was no sentiment in the world that this old bitch didn’t reject. And let Gyöngyvér drown in her own sentimentality.

Let’s not become personal, Gyöngyvér, please. We’re busy with something else now. We do not put our personal feelings on display, we look upon them as the object of our labors.

When will you be able to pay the overdue tuition, if I may ask.

And Gyöngyvér should be drowning in her love and gratitude, since she was not allowed to be free of these feelings. Just once, though, she’d like to tell the merciless bitch that she feels her gratitude in her loins. It hurts my stomach, in my cunt I feel my gratitude, you old idiot, you hag, in my twat, you understand.

How would this Médike know how one should sing onstage if she has never actually taken a cunt into her mouth.

Let me teach you, then, you old bitch.

Cunt.

Say after me.

Sopranos, of course, can throw hysterical fits for you, making their fine town houses resonate.

Oh, she understood the old bitch, she did indeed, very well.

As a contralto, Gyöngyvér, one should know one’s place in the hierarchy of the art of singing.

If only the old idiot would make an exception with someone, with me, for example, with me. She should make me her general heir. Anyway, she hasn’t got anyone. Mrs. Szemző doesn’t either; these women have no one and still I won’t be inheriting anything from them. Why doesn’t Médike understand her: that she loves her so much for her knowledge; that she wants her.

In my pain and embarrassment I’ll say to you out loud, I want you.

Why doesn’t she love me, what would it take for her to make an exception just once; after all, her drawers are full of jewelry and her apartment’s got nothing but expensive paintings and carpets; what more does she want, why isn’t she more tender with me.

She would like to be a male dog; then Médike would let her climb on top of her.

She couldn’t have many students who respect her this much.

At most, she could call her Médike, and the wicked witch couldn’t object to that. Those pampered ladies, those posh women friends of hers, they called her Médike.

Well, I’ll give you plenty of Médike, to have your fill.

Out of pride, Médike had to pretend not to have grasped how much Gyöngyvér adored and disdained her whenever she called her Médike.

I’d kill myself if I had huge, wrinkled, freckled breasts like hers. Médike was one mean-spirited bitch and because of her Gyöngyvér had to suffer so much. I shouldn’t have breasts larger than a boy’s. She had paid a lot to be able to suffer from Médike, true, but she also hadn’t learned so much from anyone as she had from this dear woman. A slut of a Swabian woman like this could be so damn stingy and with her an hour was only fifty minutes. And even after the lesson one couldn’t chat with her for free, oh no. For five minutes of yakking she charged a whole hour, and on top of that she pretended not to understand your indignation.

Gyöngyvér would have liked to sink a good long knife into her for such pettiness.

Or, good Lord, to fall on the harridan with her bare hands.

Good Lord, imagine that once upon a time a man must have loved this ugly woman.

And properly strangle her.

When she could no longer listen to her remarks, neutralized by her smile, that this was not to be sung like that, nor that like this.

In full voice, Gyöngyvér, not loud.

Watch the descent.

As if you were squeezing it.

It was intolerable that everything was supposed to be done differently from the way she was doing it or hearing it. That her feelings should be discounted. And if she had a shot of something to help her get through an hour’s worth of anxiety, even smile back at her teacher and feel just a little better about things, Médike had the nerve to tell her she could smell it on her breath.

If you’ve had a drink, Gyöngyvér, don’t come to the lesson. Please, do not let this turn into an inveteracy.

Inveteracy. That’s the sort of thing she says. Neither her colleague at the kindergarten nor Ilona Bondor knows this word.

She chewed some coffee beans after her drink, that’s how she tricked Médike.

It can’t be that in one person everything works the wrong way.

At least a good cognac before the lesson, she should have at least that. All right, maybe two.

How could she remember so many things at once. The old crone bleats so much because she wants me to take more lessons. The old hag could fill all her waking hours with lessons. How could a person satisfy so many demands. You don’t have to tell me. Yet she couldn’t even find an extra free hour for you to make up a missed lesson.

I can’t learn three foreign languages simultaneously. She can’t shove every stupidity down my throat.

It did not seem reasonable to put up with so much shame and humiliation and to pay so much for it.

But she did not give up, she kept hitting that fucking F sharp on Mrs. Szemző’s piano, following its sound with her voice.

In the meantime, she was locked up in the chicken coop.

When did anyone lock up Médike in a chicken coop, or Irmuska and the famous Mária Szapáry and the rest of the grand ladies, when. Never. They gave her nothing to eat, she drank out of the trough, she had to drink out of the cattle trough.

Out of what else.

When had these women ever suffered as much as she had, and she couldn’t have known that this was mental suffering because she hadn’t learned the appropriate words from them. In the morning they gave her a turnip to chew on. She’d never tell anyone that she had picked a live worm out of one and eaten it. How could she have known there would be punishment for that too.

She did not understand what sins a little girl like that could have committed, or what sin was. And she did not know what a little girl or little boy was because they kept her as if she’d been a dumb animal, and also punished her for being one.

She drank the chickens’ water.

She was capable of doing it, that useless thing.

She looked for her uselessness everywhere, tried secretly to feel it on herself, where it might have entered her, and to figure out what made other children so useful.

And they always shoved her back here, hungry and thirsty, and she felt that anybody could put her to shame, degrade and humiliate her.

She could never be free of this. The only reason she could endure the long hours, the whole nights, in the chicken coop was that she didn’t know she might die or that she had been born; how could she have known. How could she have known any of the things other children knew. The bolt clicked again, they locked the chicken-coop door from the outside, and this was her punishment for drinking from the trough again.

Ain’t yah a disgustin’ li’l animal drinkin’ the water o’ them cows. What am I wastin’ time teachin’ yah what to do, an’ aks fur water when yah thirst. Didn’ I gi’ yah turnip. I’ll leave yah here all night, but if yah budge, the ugly fox come take yah away an’ bite clear across yer throat.

From the depth of that night, there glimmered in Gyöngyvér’s brain a realization about her first foster mother. She could not remember her face, only her meaty arms tanned dark by the sun, her approaching heavy steps, and that strange large man and what he had done, in the midst of intimate and ominous sounds, to this larger-than-life woman who now seemed to have been the Médike of her old life.

That is why she is so terrified of her, or of Médike, and of men in general.

These figures metamorphosed into one another; she could not be rid of them.

That is why she can’t learn from Médike what she should, not because of the cognac.

Paying her in vain.

She will kill her.

She’d like to take my entire salary.

These two very different things, her unconsciously committed sins and her sheer existence, were inauspiciously coming together. This was not something she thought; she actually witnessed it. She saw the fox from very close up; in her life, not in a fairy tale, the fox and the rat came in the night and kept chewing and pushing at the coop’s boards until they got to a hen or rooster and they took away the little girl too. That was actually good, taking her away, because then there’d be quiet at last; or maybe it was inside her that something was forever rent asunder, something that could not be mended in her lifetime and it is only her that God punishes like this so cruelly.

The fox did come.

To pick at the bolt from inside wasn’t easy, but she kept at it for a long time and finally got it to move and managed to escape. She threw the bolt into the nettles. So they couldn’t lock the coop door on her again. But they did, they also beat her around the head and locked her up using something other than the bolt, seeing how incorrigible and useless she was.

Not only did she escape, she also drank the chickens’ water, the mean thing.

She’d better talk or answer me before I knock her dead.

With what remained of her senses she understood that the world order was different for other people; they wash up and go to church. She didn’t understand why they stuffed soap in her mouth when she did not know how she should have answered, or what her sin meant to her and why she was so filthy and smelly, and why she had scratched her fleabites again until they were bloody.

Mrs. Bizsók did not do things like this to her but she slapped her face and spanked her bottom mercilessly.

Though she won’t forgive her for beating her with a vine pole.

Don’t yah fret, nobody’s gonna look for yah if I beat yah to death.

She did not lash out at the others whom she wanted to understand, to win over, love or bribe to compensate for the heat of the chicken coop, the constantly fidgeting hens, and the scratched fleabites. She wanted them to accept her, take her in; she’d show them that she too could be useful or that at least she wasn’t useless. This was the reason she paid so much money to Médike. Fifty-seven forints for an hour that was only fifty minutes.

They should not do this to her.

She threw up; in her alarm, she vomited on her little dress when they were taking her to church, but how could they take her wearing something she’d thrown up on.

In the coop, it was also hard for her to learn how to avoid the rooster.

She had the runs because of her fear; they tethered her to a tree because she soiled everything in the summer kitchen.

Or to stick a knife in them, that long-bladed knife her foster mother pulled out from behind the saltbox to slit the throats of the geese and let them thrash between her legs until they bled to death, down to the last drop.

She was quick to flare against those she could not strangle with her hands.

She desperately envied them for their always different lives, none of which would ever be hers.

Not to turn around or look back.

At first he only quickened his steps, trying not to limp so much, but the dog’s tapping feet followed him even faster.

He did not want to take the starving cur under his wing now that he was so defenseless himself.

Only not to turn around.

Then, as if hit by lightning, her brain was shot through with an electric discharge.

Whereupon her hearing seemed to open onto her voice, and the voice, small and miserable because of all the secret crying and infinite joy of having possessed that beautiful man, now breaks free, is liberated, and this time she is the one chaining someone to herself. Who is not right for her. Although she had been with a man like that before, this is not the first time she has done it with them, Jews. If he is a Jew — he says he isn’t. And she felt the joy because of this incredible exhaustion too, and her elemental fear of him, being so exhausted because of her. All right, let him be half a Jew, what do I care, it’s all the same to me. Anyone can wear you out in three days, that’s for sure. Why should I be scared of things that are good for me. Because of him, she won’t be able to go to work today, yes, because of him. And she trembled because of her constant anxiety about having the money to pay Médike. I should be ashamed of what he did to me, ashamed that with me anybody can do anything; he can make my knees shake and my soul tremble at the same time. My head will explode, because I’m such a miserable creature, God put me down at the wrong place, Providence slipped me into the wrong body and there isn’t a person in the world who can help me.

Everybody gets my goat and I have to be afraid of women too.

Yet she had never before experienced such profound sexual contentment with a man.

It was more than ever before; simultaneously, she moved with him in various deep layers and on high plateaus, simultaneously.

Well, goddamn it, it’s not all the same to me.

It was new and shocking, just thinking about it was enough to make her brain cells come, but she was just as enthusiastic about that old saying she had heard in Tiszavésztő, that humans are mortal and licentious. She must have picked it up during a Bible lesson, or maybe it was from a familiar psalm, but which one.

Then it must be something by Bach. She vainly searched her mind for the fucking psalm. So she could quietly console herself with it in the endless city night.

Which made her realize for the first time in her life — she in fact saw — what a wide ditch yawned between physical and mental gratification.

If this was so, then all these years she’d been getting fucked in vain.

Only for things to be a little better.

I’ve been getting myself screwed for nothing; with their puny cocks, these wretches could give neither of those gratifications. If they had the cock for it, they lacked the necessary rhythm. What’s to be done if, in her case, one ability does not exist without the other. They can reach neither her body nor her soul. They could never get it up enough to screw her properly or, who knows what and why, something was always off. They stayed too far away or pushed themselves too close and left her no room to feel, but feel what. Because of her mortality and licentiousness, then, she had thrown away her soul’s opportunities. She’s been wandering soullessly in this earthly existence, but this too is but a psalm.

Because this one too will be only a dumb little technician in her life; they try hard, they pant, they hope to make every effort, which is why they shove, push, chew, and lick so desperately and so fast.

The moment they stop, their things droop; men become miserable because of me.

With his beautiful body, he works very nicely for me though he’s completely soulless toward me, as I am to him. I don’t love him, that’s the truth, I just needed to chalk up one of these well-educated men. She saw her fate before her; the terrible ditch opened up like this, like a wound. To this day, she knew exactly where the ditch ran between the reapers. Only the big boys could jump across it, in the spring, when the ice began to melt and the ditch filled with water. She couldn’t jump across it, but she thought nothing of getting into a fight with them. You weren’t careful with your clothes, were you, you snot-nose, you little shit, you useless thing, you, who will buy you clothes now, you barren creature. From the very beginning she had to give up things because she not only had been born a girl but was a foundling. Children can jump that far only if they get their milk every morning and without the sweet cream taken off the top beforehand, and if they also get potato noodles. She understood that the Bizsók boys had to have the cream so that their noodles would grow better, but who decided that she shouldn’t be a boy but a foundling, this she did not understand. Mrs. Bizsók made the decision. She understood that girls did not have to grow as much as boys because girls didn’t have noodles between their legs. Mrs. Bizsók beat her soundly when she got her dress wet in the ditch. She’d done something wrong, spoiled something again. But Mrs. Bizsók always had some cream, so why didn’t she have one between her legs, and why wasn’t she more understanding toward her. You knew I forbade you to jump across, but you went ahead and tried just the same. I always ruin things because I don’t understand what I have to give up. A foundling should behave herself, lie low. You can’t have anything to demand of us, not even before the law, little girl. And a female child should be especially obedient. You should be glad I’m teaching you, you useless thing, you. Who will slap your face, you little shit, or spank your butt if not your foster mother. And she always talks back to me, this state orphan here.

She barely sticks out of the ground and she’s already working her jaw.

We barely get anything to raise you on, you hear me.

A father only has to beat his son, can’t your tiny little brain remember even this much. You’d like your foster father slapping your ass, wouldn’t you.

I’d let him have it for that, I would.

She’d like that, yes, she would.

It’s always her impatience and her demands that ruin her life. She’ll fuck things up with this lovely, ravishing man too, just as she fucked it up with the old Jew, which is why she hasn’t inherited anything, but what the hell am I talking about, I can’t believe the things my mind can dredge up. At least his feet don’t stink. You’re safe with these people, you can even lick their asses. He not only shits but properly washes it for himself. And he also knows what is where in the other person’s body, he knows what he’s supposed to lick patiently, for a long time, oh, so delicious, what to keep softly sucking or what to stab with just the right force.

And if she loses him, it would be just as it was with Bizsók. Or with Médike, from whom she could really learn, finally, where to look for what in her own system.

Her dumb adoration and thirst for revenge scare them away.

She must be on her guard.

This time — because of the hungry hatred she felt for them, her will to take everything and learn everything from them, feel contempt for them, be better than they and better than everybody — the F sharp found its right place.

More correctly, several necessary things found their proper places all at once, and because of that she could at least put the note in its right place. If not her entire life, retroactively and in anticipation. She was busy contemplating her hatred — clearer than daylight — and remembering Médike’s prediction that if and when she ever put the note in its right place she, Gyöngyvér herself, would hear it.

She would feel it as though she had acquired an entirely different system of hearing.

The Holy Spirit or some such thing must have seized her.

You’ll be standing next to yourself, listening to your singing.

To hear what you’ll be hearing then, you won’t need your ears, my dear.

Or perhaps sweet Médike lent her own hearing to her.

A feeling of triumph will be swelling in your body.

In her joy, she felt like pissing on Mrs. Szemző’s old piano stool.

It was only her dumb urge to pee that put the note in its place. Of course, in this miserable maid’s room, where she could hole up thanks to the generosity of these grand ladies, she’d caught another cold. Sweet Médike would be glad to predict everything for her. Now she can suffer again for weeks with her bladder infection and ovaritis; she’ll be bleeding and then she’ll have to send away even this rotten pretty boy too.

Experiencing the convergence of so many different things enthralled and moved her so much that she propped her arms on the keyboard and then lowered on them her migraine-tortured pretty little head. She continued with her infinite self-pity, lamenting that she had been dealt such a cruel singing teacher who was nevertheless the best voice coach in the city. That she pays fifty-seven forints per hour. Every month she has to give half her salary to this woman; she can’t buy herself a damn thing, every one of her best pieces she has had to charm off somebody. How could she be so hapless, such a shiftless, hopeless case who can’t exploit her own talents, such a useless mortal. Doomed to suck cocks as babies do tits, but without finding a man who at night would give her what’s rightfully hers and love her tenderly.

There is no such man and never will be, but at least she knows where to put this shitty little F sharp.

And not even these people can take this away from her anymore.

In the meantime she’s making ungodly noises with her helpless limbs on the superannuated concert piano.

What makes you think that such a pampered pretty boy would give you yours, of all men, such a Lothario. Don’t hold your breath, the young gentleman looks only for his own pleasure in you.

Why must we women be such dumb whores.

Why should I get him a blanket. Why should I steal a nice warm blanket from Mrs. Szemző’s closet for him.

Let these pretty boys look to the Almighty of their decrepit old mothers, why don’t they go lick and suck Him.

Oh, my good Lord, I shouldn’t be thinking of Him like this.

I’ll slap your mouth, little girl.

Only don’t turn around; and while he prayed like this, which made him shudder, he began to run. But on the bridge there was no place to run to and running made his injured shin throb terribly.

The moment he stopped to chase away the dog panting at his ankle, to beat him away cruelly, mercilessly, however he could, no stray dog like that should follow him, and to do this he had to turn around, he felt the dog’s feet on his shoulders and a warm wet tongue on his face.

From then on Kristóf wore on his face the stamp, as it were, of the dog’s wide, warm tongue. Although not everyone could see that he constantly rebelled against his own goodness with all his might and wanted to hear nothing about any kind of mercy or compassion.

He staggered, yelled, and shoved the dog off.

In an instant disgust and nausea covered his entire body with spots and pimples, and he swallowed helplessly.

Enchanting, you’ve done it magnificently, my dear Gyöngyvér. Sie haben es geschafft, geschafft. I worry only about your impatience and hysterics. But this, das hätte ich nicht geglaubt, nicht gedacht. Don’t become overconfident.

And then I fuck it all up again by thinking all these lousy, obscene things about this gorgeous and darling man.

Who doesn’t shit on her.

You’ve done it wonderfully, but let’s look at it a bit closer. Did it happen by chance.

Nobody is going to tell me what to do. Why shouldn’t I be overconfident.

First, I’ll give you a few F sharps, listen, Gyöngyvér, but I want the same thing in the right tempo and with the text.

Áperté, we’ll see whether you really found it this time.

Shit on you, Médike.

I think you can do it without all that nodding. Don’t keep nodding so much with the text, just sing, sing, damn it.

Don’t open your mouth so wide. Gaping like that won’t help you one bit.

Stimme, how many times do I have to tell you, Stimme.

I don’t want to see you making grimaces.

Let’s take it again from the top.

I really couldn’t care less what you’re saying, I shit on all of you.

I shit on the listless cocks of all those jokers.

I want to hear your voice, my dear, not see your mimicry. Your little-girlish hatefulness doesn’t interest me at all. You can’t conjure voice out of mimicry, and hysterics can’t help you.

Please don’t open your mouth so wide, it’s ugly and unnecessary.

At the memory of this note, Gyöngyvér Mózes pricked up her ears, raised her head, wiped her tears, and listened into the mute night.

Was she hearing the noise of the elevator rising in the glass tube of the stairwell, which echoed the slightest little noise. She heard thuds, the pounding of running feet, booted and coming closer, shouts and then rattling, as when a window is smashed with a rifle butt.

She looked around for a hiding place.

That night of the second day of Christmas when a group of Arrow Cross thugs broke into this building and rousted everybody just as they found them out to the snow-covered street, Mrs. Szemző and her two sons had been long gone from their apartment. Alajos Madzar had placed very few objects in any given space, and with Mrs. Szemző he had a very easy time when it came to minimizing the need for objects. He put very simple, etched-glass-covered sconces with matte chromium-plated armatures on the rustically splattered walls. And in that space Gyöngyvér Mózes heard many notes she could not possibly have heard.

Perhaps her heart pounded so loudly in fear.

Somebody was shouting in the stairwell, imploring others that if they knew any kind of god, if you have any soul in you, you would not do this.

Do this, it echoed.

At least have mercy on my elderly mother.

My elderly mother, derly mother, mother, other, it echoed.

Then everything fell silent in the stairwell.

If it had been Mrs. Szemző coming up in the elevator, Gyöngyvér would have left the piano and quickly returned via the bathroom to the maid’s room, which Madzar had turned into an office for Mrs. Szemző’s assistant.

It would not have been the first time for her.

No, they would have no mercy.

And it was as if she heard a single piercing scream, then again a rattling and a crash. In her many sublet situations, she had learned how to listen to and hear things above a general noise, sneak and scurry through hallways and corridors, take furtive bites out of other people’s food, use strangers’ belongings silently and unnoticed. Towels, the landlady’s cotton, a few tea leaves, soup powder, break off a piece of bread, slip a couple of cigarettes out of a pack, take a swig out of the milk bottle. Leave no traces.

Had she known she was listening to the past, she would have turned to stone.

Not to make the floor creak.

But it was not Mrs. Szemző now, and Gyöngyvér did not move from the piano stool.

Mrs. Szemző said, Gyöngyvér, listen to me, you should probably sing Monteverdi, the sweet, seductive, and terrible Gorgone, for example, yes, and she asked if Gyöngyvér knew that role.

How in the name of cunt could she know everything. Why was Mrs. Szemző asking her such dumb things.

Sure, Irmuska believes they were playing Monteverdi for me in the chicken coop, right.

Madzar had carefully worked out who was to go where in the psychoanalytic clinic because Mrs. Szemző’s patients should theoretically not ever meet even in this unpleasantly echoing but otherwise most attractive stairwell. At least that was the demand, which Madzar kept well in mind: that patients should not encounter each other. But the pounding increased as they approached from floor to floor, step by step, with their rifle butts knocking on the apartments’ thick oak doors.

If you listen for the inner world of your voice, Gyöngyvér, you will turn to stone, that’s how strong the primal force is in it, and the horror. Your voice cannot be loved, Gyöngyvér, don’t ever expect that, but you will be idolized, your voice is einmalig, I can tell you that much, einmalig.

Don’t mind me saying this to you, you must make use of your terrible thirst for revenge rather than being ashamed of it, don’t be afraid, if things turn out well you’ll be paid a bundle for your vengefulness.

It’s best for me, Mrs. Szemző explained to the architect at the time, if my patients remain ignorant of one another.

There are nights, however, when the walls of Budapest apartments reradiate the sounds they once absorbed.

The architect questioned the woman in detail, tried to follow her. Based on what he had heard, he figured out where her patients could wait for a few moments to avoid unexpected confusion.

Gyöngyvér could not have known anything of this, of course, which is why she did not believe her ears. That night, the Arrow Cross thugs led by an eager theology student named Mayer threw every piece of furniture out of the apartment windows and, so that Jews in hiding could never use any of the other apartments either, they turned on all the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom. The water rose for a while and then spilled over the threshold and began streaming down the stairs, at first only at the sides, and during the next days it froze, getting thicker and thicker.

With the double-edged characteristic of visibility and concealment in mind, the architect decided that a folding screen should be put here, or something reminiscent of a folding screen. The moment a person entered the clinic, she or he had to be reassured that one could find refuge if the need arose in this bright space. He placed the screen where the black concert piano stood now in the hallway. He also arranged for more seating than one might expect in this space, using only the chairs and armchairs he built himself.

He asked Mrs. Szemző to please observe which seating accommodation each patient chose.

These objects must stand on their own in the space, he explained, and Mrs. Szemző had to concentrate hard to understand him.

As if they each had an individual personality and, believe me, they will. I don’t try to make my objects beautiful, but they should be independent, with a strength that is uniquely characteristic. One of your patients might sit only on this chair, while another would prefer the armchair.

That’s my observation: different chairs, different human types.

Come on, my dear architect, don’t irritate me with talk of human types and my patients. You know very well, and I’ve explained it several times, for me there’s no such thing, for me these things do not exist.

It’s a good thing you haven’t started in on theories of racial purity.

There are no human types. At most, people’s socializations differ. Or there are problems in their social interactions that make them behave oddly, but that doesn’t make them sick. Both of us should intervene with a person’s systems of interaction. Believe me, we are traffic police, nothing more. I cannot cure anyone. But sometimes a single inspired suggestion is enough to change the inner conditions of mental functioning and for the change to have an impact on the historically altered surroundings.

At least in theory.

Madzar had to focus hard to follow the woman’s words. He also laughed at her a bit, making his own analysis a little easier.

Well, now, don’t be so afraid of me, he said, laughing at both the woman and himself, in theory I’ve understood and noted everything, but I can’t say your concepts are finding their way easily into what I say.

Or into my mind, of course. That’s true.

I only take my patients on a journey of discovery. Your space and the objects in it should give them similar impulses, and you can leave the words to the patients.

Mrs. Szemző’s strictness made Madzar chuckle. He recognized himself in her asceticism adopted in the interest of utopian ideals, and this irritated him, yet she remained a woman, and that also irritated him.

We won’t get anywhere with ancient concepts such as ill patient and mental illness, symptoms and human types. You can’t work against me so obviously, or if you do we might as well say good-bye to our shared ideas.

Stop, please, hold it. Madzar was laughing.

Don’t go so far. Sometimes one assigns certain borders involuntarily, but I take it back, I beg your pardon, I take it back and join you in declaring that there are no limits.

Between ill-being and well-being there really isn’t a border or bright line, my dear architect, no matter how often you joke about it.

But why would I be joking.

Even the classical scientists admitted that at most we can speak only of degrees. It’s a nice romantic idea that there are borders between people or even within a single human being. An individual has permanent traits, yes, but the essence of humans is easily permeable, and the traits themselves are malleable, showing different faces in different situations, which means that they offer us different inclinations. What else would make people so accommodating. I willingly admit that this lack of borders or limitations is very difficult to grasp or follow linguistically. Linguistically we are always pitting something against something else. If I say black, you add the thought of white but not the many hues of gray, one more beautiful than the other. If you say madness or speak of mental illness and its opposite, then you also have the murderous commonplace, the stereotype, the destructive linguistic convention, and you don’t even notice that you’ve passed off a culturally well-prepared sentence on others and yourself. Using that concept separates you from what is archaically common to us all, which none of us can escape. Using stereotypes and conventions, you gloss over the collective traits of individual humans. I hope you’ll forgive me for accusing you of such common crimes.

Even in a jungle, you can’t put down two stakes and declare that the area from here belongs to this one, from there to that one, because after the next rain new growth will cover everything.

Of course, you’re not alone with this mistaken notion.

And don’t forget, either, that it’s not in the negative but in the positive sense that no border exists between illness and well-being.

I can only guess what you mean.

I just want to reassure you that you don’t have to be either defensive or offensive when you think that way; after all, the absence of illness is health.

Now I really don’t understand you.

If I remember correctly you’ve already read Tonio Kröger.*

I can’t say it was easy.

Then you must know exactly what I mean.

They both had a hearty laugh at this.

For Gyöngyvér at this strange moment the physical mission of her naked, shuddering body became evident.

She does not have to escape via the bathroom, not yet, because this is not yet Mrs. Szemző, this is not the elevator. She hears shouting, but in reality there is dead silence on the street, in the stairwell, everywhere. The sounds she hears are unfamiliar; therefore they do not exist. I am so tired I’m hallucinating. And she reassures herself with this word, though it’s the very one that should alarm her, given what it describes. She did not understand where Mrs. Szemző tarried so late. At the crack of dawn, what could she be doing with her friends. Somebody should report her to the police, that would put an end to her staying out so late, and Gyöngyvér’s apartment problem would be instantly solved. But no matter how frightened she was or how many accusations and hateful statements she was making, she thought she should tempt again that miserable little F sharp. Now she knows where to put it. During the singing lesson it had happened by chance, rotten little Médike was right again, because she knows everything ahead of time, but this time, in the hallway, Gyöngyvér deliberately raised it to its proper place.

She had lifted it out of her violent hatred.

I am a sounding board, she thought triumphantly, and adored her taut, naked body in its shuddering skin. I bring the sounds of hatred with me, she thought triumphantly.

And the living souls of destroyed objects found their voice in her.

As if she were saying, I am not a person, not a mere structure, I wait in vain for live people to address me or make me speak first.

Her entire miserable childhood had been spent in not being able to speak. At the sight of people, fear and astonishment kept words stuck inside her. I must be the one to address this depressing space.

Madzar regarded furniture, especially chairs, as being like statues. He followed Rietveld,* who said that when a person is about to lower himself into a chair, the dramatic connection between his corporeal sensations and the place he takes up in space becomes clear. Because Madzar had thought a lot about this, Mrs. Szemző’s explanations and objections excited him. Indeed, a chair must grasp the dramatic relationship positively. This is why he was revolted by Tonio Kröger’s cataclysmic decadence, though he saw that Mrs. Szemző positively enjoyed his revulsion, which is why she had insisted he read it. He must first accept that he found decadence repellent before he could see it objectively, and only then would he understand it. Yet she always provoked a smile, no matter how many interesting things she told him about decadence, because she remained a woman he was attracted to, or could not be not attracted to, which raised them to the level at which visceral forces are at work.

As if they should have a fuck simply to understand something much more essential and basic.

In Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he must represent something strong, headstrong, and primeval compared to the timid, probably impotent Tonio Kröger. In her imagination he was the embodiment of archaic man — he tried to follow Mrs. Szemző’s thinking — which I’m not, he thought, and never was. She needs a weakling like Tonio Kröger, but she lives with a brutal character like Szemző. He was flattered that in Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he differed so greatly from whining Tonio Kröger and perhaps from her husband too. It would have been better to resemble brutal Mr. Szemző than Tonio Kröger. A chair cannot give in to nostalgia, to a catastrophe or to the small tragedies of personal life, not even to pleasant sorrow, like Tonio Kröger, whose physical fits of madness never ruffled him because he did not give in to them; a chair can’t put on airs. Madzar knew almost everything there was to know about what a chair should have; he was sensitive to objectification. And in the perspective of this utopian knowledge, he considered it imperative to be repelled by German decadence. And, no less, by Mrs. Szemző’s Jewish decadence. And not only did he read Thomas Mann with great aversion but it was also very difficult for him to listen to compositions by Wagner, Mahler, or Richard Strauss all the way through to the end; they nauseated him.

Years earlier, when studying in Weimar, the chair had become Madzar’s specialty, and if he ever was dissatisfied with his work, he never doubted his ability to deal with matter, any material, or his perfect sense of space. He had problems with his constitutional love of comfort and his archaic slowness, though, which is why he well understood what the Jewess from Budapest was talking about or had in mind. He could not free himself from the rhythm of the surroundings he came from. He acknowledged this, but dreaded awareness of it as he would a court sentence.

He was always lugging Mohács around with him.

At best he should try to find the key to his slowness and lagging; he realized that being a slow laggard might have advantages in a foreign setting, but to benefit he had to enjoy the perennial loser in himself. To learn to love Mohács’s destructive decadence. But he felt mainly indifference toward himself, and the same toward the abandoned city. He could not learn to love a place within himself where his last panic-stricken compatriot had been lost centuries before. He could not love the river’s wild maelstroms and great floods, which swallowed and carried away any person just as they would a helpless object. Although, on this last, perhaps very last summer in Mohács, despite the mental anguish and irritating technical dissatisfaction he had managed to deal very economically with historical and personal time, as well as with asceticism and decadence.

He had to create fifteen pieces of furniture during a few stolen weeks.

He stole the time from himself, who else. He shouldn’t be frittering it away; he could have followed Mies van der Rohe to America.*

But with the saturated sleepers he was very lucky, inexplicably lucky. The mysterious saturant had an unpleasant odor reminiscent of valerian, but it left no visible trace or stain and lent a deep-purple tone and a most exceptionally silky surface to the wood. While masons and roofers were busy inside and out with the Buda building on Dobsinai Road, he could make good progress in Mohács, working on the deep-purple silky-surfaced furniture for Mrs. Szemző’s clinic. Of course, they had barely delivered the sleepers from Gottlieb’s about-to-be-liberated lumberyard when Madzar discovered that it was going to be harder to take possession of his father’s abandoned workshop than he had thought. During the long years when the workshop was closed, woodbine had crawled into the roof space between the tiles and the gaps in the roof timbers and cracks in the corbels, across the splits in the adobe, looking for openings in the roof beams and planks, and it descended from the ceiling like a curtain. It was lovely, striking, and not hard to remove, but its tendrils had dangerously invaded the walls, the tool shelves, parts of the machines, and with its adhesive pads was grasping objects from all sides. He couldn’t just go at it, yanking it off, with impunity; tools, boxes, and shelves then went flying and crashing in all directions, screws and nails scattered everywhere.

At the same time, he didn’t want to rush anything. Which meant that he had completed only three important pieces by late autumn, virtually minutes before his departure.

After that he had time only to put the objects in their designated locations and call for the photographer.

It was better that way, because he and Mrs. Szemző had no time for a sentimental farewell.

Which only increased their mutual admiration.

They’d never see each other again, how fortunate, they thought, looking into each other’s eyes, and thus they managed to glide through their relationship unscathed, almost.

But in that early April heat, Madzar began his work on the chairs and armchairs. Soon the weather turned cool again, it rained a lot, and occasionally he had to light a fire in the potbelly stove. For him this was the greatest excitement and pleasure, the chairs. He hardly ever listened to news on the radio or picked up a local newspaper, for he didn’t want disturbing news to interfere with his work. Sometimes, information about what was happening around him reached him days after an event. He thought of the Germans’ strategic ideas as a material form or structure. To stupefy the unsuspecting world with revisionist demands, as if peaceful solutions still had a chance. War was imminent. And he did not need Bellardi to convince him of the dangers in German expansionism.* In his aesthetic struggle against decorative decadence, he kept a modicum of indifference about the threatening events. And he went on being annoyed by the nonsense he had heard from Bellardi. He could not get out of his head the childish drivel a spoiled aristocrat like him could come up with. Having seen Bellardi’s childishness, Madzar appreciated all the more the simple yet unusually speculative mechanism of Mrs. Szemző’s thinking. What disgusted him most was Bellardi’s dramatically conceived patriotic sense of responsibility, which no matter from what angle he looked was nothing but empty self-complacency and self-indulgence, just like Tonio Kröger’s many sentiments. He learned two days after the fact that Prague was next to fall, Vienna having been first, though the Czechs were defending themselves, their army’s motorized units were concentrating on their borders with Hungary and Germany. Or perhaps this too was nothing but provocation. While he worked, the thought that he should start packing was always with him, and he could see himself catching the last ship out of Genoa.

For a few days he followed the news persistently and even bought the miserable local papers.

He tried not to think about Mrs. Szemző while he worked, because he wanted to forget he was making these objects for her. Interestingly enough, the chairs were going to be heavier than they looked. He had to be careful not to make this work into a confession of love. He would have found that ridiculous. He was making the furniture out of military sleepers that were supposed to have been used in the war effort. He tried to be amused by this devilish twist of fate but couldn’t be; the coincidence that had brought the wood to him seemed too ominous. Secretly he hoped that Bellardi would stand by his promise and show up unexpectedly for the answer to his question.

It was a matter of just millimeters; there was practically nothing more to simplify in the chairs. Compared to Rietveld, he could at best change some of the proportions, giving greater emphasis to the texture of the material, but the material itself produced that. The emphasis was even stronger than Rietveld’s, and only Madzar knew it was nothing but pure luck.

He was particularly proud of this success of his, which seemed so improbable.

But he did torture himself with waiting for the unexpected.

Or was tortured by the rediscovery that Bellardi existed, that he still loved him, that he loved him despite all his ridiculousness.

But think how well you’ve been getting along without him.

It was not only the obligation he felt toward Mrs. Szemző that held him back from packing and leaving. This was a dangerous place. Dangerous things came to mind concerning Bellardi or, rather, because of Bellardi he mulled over sweet, desirable old issues that in no circumstance did he want to recall. At least while he was thinking about Bellardi he didn’t have to think about Mrs. Szemző; he could not help waiting for him. Or he wanted to forget the things he couldn’t help thinking about without connecting them to Bellardi. When he went to Buda to check up on the work on Orbán Mountain and to look in on the cabinetmaker on Szív Street who was working on the interior furnishings, he took the train to be sure not to meet him. He contacted Mrs. Szemző exclusively by telephone, emphasizing that he had to return to his workshop because after all he was laboring diligently on furniture for her clinic. But he did not dare tell himself that the work was more important than she was, and in addition Mrs. Szemző spoke to him very reservedly.

Which caused him immeasurable pain.

It was always because of Bellardi that he hastened to return to Mohács, and he had neither reason for nor the right to such pain.

He worried that Bellardi might be looking for him in Mohács and that they might miss each other, perhaps for life. He wanted to avoid the woman, and used the furniture as his excuse, but he also didn’t want to miss Bellardi.

Sometimes, when he was listening to the news, he caught himself not paying attention. How can he hear what they’re saying on the damned radio when his mother is so passionately chopping parsley.

Stop for a moment, Mother.

Can’t you see I’m trying to listen to the radio.

After a while, he could not but notice that his irritation was unreasonable. Every incidental noise bothered him. One can’t say that noise bothered him in his work but, rather, in that intimate process, that inner monologue of his open to both past and future that had become integral to his work. And the sharp shrieking of the riverside swallows brought Mrs. Szemző so close that, no matter how hard he tried to distract himself with thoughts of Bellardi, he was always thinking about her to a small degree. As if in his imagination Mrs. Szemző had to be the one to strike Bellardi dead and, if this was impossible because of the swallows, then the other way around.

Slowly, summer came into full bloom, and soon he realized that the birds were indeed swallows and that the days were becoming hotter.

Because of a third person, not to think of the person he was thinking about. How lovely it would be to go for a walk with Mrs. Szemző along the river, among the shrieking swallows. And he decided — in order to bring about some quiet within himself after being buffeted by these two — to bow to Bellardi’s request and not oppose him. And he will not yield to Mrs. Szemző’s attraction, that won’t do, it’s quiet just working for her. After all, the reason he imagines there might be something between him and Mrs. Szemző is so as to forget that poor woman in Rotterdam who stayed with her husband, or rather, to forget the husband, about whom he knew everything, which proved to be too much. He did not want more knowledge now, especially not of another man. And, being human, he did forget the husband, though the woman would not leave his limbs, his hair, the taste buds of his tongue and palate. He had no time to get mixed up in new adventures just to forget her.

He should stop stealing time from himself.

There will be plenty of Jewish women in America.

But to Bellardi he would say yes quickly, this he did decide, he would surprise him with a quick and decisive yes.

He could no longer stay here, if only because of Bellardi’s stupid plans with that secret society.

I’ve thought it over, I’ve changed my mind, he’d tell him.

He wouldn’t let them draw him into anything, of course, that’s out of the question, but this is what he’d say, this is how he’d solve the problem, with a manly yes. Nothing was farther from him than the cause of Hungarians and these childish things, these little conspiracies. But he understood that the undertaking did have a logic to it; it wouldn’t be hard to pretend to accept it. He’d do exactly what Bellardi would in a similar situation: wrap his reservations in inquisitive questions, show enthusiasm and admiration for the cause, then wait and listen, under no circumstance argue with anyone, and thereby hold all the strings in his own hand.

Hungarians never make decisions about anything; instinctively, he too wanted to avoid that.

He didn’t want to lose Bellardi’s goodwill, though he could not tell why he needed it. Or even if there was some mysterious need in their relationship, with ancient history behind it, like having been bound together by something from before their births or possibly by the dazzle of their shared childhood, he still couldn’t tell, though he couldn’t deny it either. But even so what benefit did he derive from it.

As though friendship’s temperature were measured in units of utility.

Why would he need such a wretched man, what have I to do with such a high-class fraud.

First, he had to cut everything down to size, but that made so much noise it was hard to think about certain persons. He made the necessary drawings in an oversize English sketchbook. He enjoyed drawing and while doing it he worked out every detail of all the possible answers he might give to Bellardi. Now and then he caught himself making his sketches unpleasantly violent because of his thoughts. Violence stared back at him. The simplest way to reject Bellardi’s suggestion would be to show enthusiastic interest in it. Sexual violence, said his sketches. Several times he also drew his mother as she stood in the workshop door, leaning on the doorpost, her white kerchief tied behind her head.

She liked standing around, in the noise of chiseling.

When I was in the store today, I heard the Gottliebs went to America.

To where, who, Madzar shouted back across the noise; the news so surprised him he could not comprehend it.

While drawing, he’d chisel smooth for himself the appearances he wished to maintain in Bellardi’s and Mrs. Szemző’s company, and, for this effort to succeed, he violently tore the violent sketches from his book and crumpled them.

He will take with him to America one sketch of his mother.

And he will transfer his money to another bank.

For that, he will have to go to the capital again.

But he won’t risk it now because if Bellardi hasn’t come for the answer by now, he must surely come any minute. He made a few drawings of him from memory, full-figure drawings, but he tore them up and, finding that inadequate, burned them, though he wanted to turn his image into sketches of attractive nude boys. Each time he burned a drawing, he had to make a new full-figure sketch as a basis for future drawings — until he had another fit and burned them all again.

Consulting the schedule of the Carolina, Madzar figured out when Bellardi would be in Mohács.

He had so much figuring to do anyway, and these various calculations persisted in crossing and accompanying one another.

All right, he said, he didn’t come today, but he might come the day after tomorrow. It became almost unbearable to think that every third or fifth day Bellardi sailed by on the Danube, touching Mohács, but didn’t get off. He made his calculations because he did not want Bellardi to surprise him. Today he didn’t come, so now there’s a respite for a few hours. Thank God he’s not coming. He could not endure his former friend’s capriciousness and inconsistency. When every third or fifth day the critical hour arrived and the moment was approaching, the blood jolted in his head and he felt himself blushing in shame.

His heart beat loud at the sound of the ship’s horn coming close.

Then he preferred to think about Mrs. Szemző; he made as if to think about her but in the end did not. His hand slipped; in alarm he had either hit or grasped something the wrong way. His old friend might show up in a few minutes, though he wished he wouldn’t come — now or ever again. He even sighed and moaned in his wild joy. Such an emotional turmoil was not without its danger because the old power saws made by the Langefelder machine factory had hardly anything by way of protective devices. He was embarrassed to think such thoughts and to be making little moans instead of watching what he was doing with his hands, but he had to admit he had good reason to tease and make fun of himself.

He was indeed waiting for his lover.

So what if at least twelve years had gone by without giving him a thought. Which, of course, was not even true. Bellardi might come this afternoon. Or if not this afternoon he might come five days from now in the middle of the night. The latter was the more exciting image, that he’d arrive at night. They’d sit on the veranda with a bottle of good wine until dawn, he’d ask his mother to bake some of her pork-scraps round cake. He wondered whether he should tell his mother in advance about Bellardi’s possible visit.

Mother, please be prepared, I might have a guest soon.

But he said nothing about it to her.

Yet his mother spoke, from behind his back, asking whether she should count on anyone coming, perhaps a guest.

Yes, he shouted over the noise of the power saw, but don’t make a fuss. If he comes, he comes, if he doesn’t, nobody else will be coming.

And to keep his mother from asking more questions, he quickly asked her whether she knew what had happened to Gottlieb’s dogs.

What dogs, his mother shouted back in German.

Madzar stopped sawing; only the drive belt was making repeated clattering noises.

He had two large dogs, didn’t he.

How in hell would I know what he did with them.

So his mother didn’t dare ask whom they might be waiting for, though she remained for a long time in the workshop doorway, standing silently, watching her son measure everything more than once and make new marks before putting the logs to the saw.

Her son did not like it when every so often she spoke to him in German.

Mother, you probably beat those dogs to death yourself, he said aloud later; he had long wanted to learn the truth from her.

What dogs, son, his mother shouted back, this time in Hungarian.

When the subject was unpleasant she preferred the foreign tongue.

Well, our two big white dogs, the komondors, I’ve been thinking about them, said Madzar, as if in passing, as if he weren’t truly interested and might not even hear her answer in the noise. He did not look up from his work; with such transparent maneuvers he thus occasionally managed to trick his mother.

Oh, son, that was so long ago.

Once again, only the noise of the drive belt was heard. They said nothing for a long time, but as she looked at her son’s strong back while he was checking the cutting surface, she knew that if she did not give a straight answer she’d have to leave, because her son would be angry with her.

First, I killed only one of them, the bitch, she answered.

But why did you do it, that’s what I want to know.

The female was the wilder one. I couldn’t cope with them, because they listened only to your father, son. They were partial to him, how could I live with them.

Now the silence felt better.

The sheer mention of Bellardi’s name always provoked excitement in his mother, so for his peace of mind Madzar did not risk invoking it. She was more in love with Bellardi than he was, if that was possible. She treated him, even when Bellardi was a small child, as if the Lord Jesus had come down to them or had sent the little boy with his schoolbag in his stead.

Ultimately, the Bellardi-Montenuovo clan has always been and will forever remain the first family of Mohács.

Madzar knew this was the right opportunity; he could make it easier on himself because he wouldn’t have to wait alone for Bellardi, but he said nothing. Yet the very next day silent preparations began for receiving the guest; his mother was baking, I’ll bake some cheese bundles ahead of time, she said.

Which made her kitchen bloom with the sweet smell of vanilla.

Maybe you should bake some pork-crackling cones, Madzar said incautiously, for with the crackling cones, which Bellardi could never get at home, he revealed everything to his mother.

He blushed so hard he had to turn away.

I already did, son, don’t worry, just the way you like them, she added tactfully, as if she had no suspicions regarding the possible guest, I cut the pork crackling very fine before mixing it in. But it’s not my own anymore, that’s the problem. I had to have crackling delivered from Lehmann’s this morning. At least he has it fresh twice a week.

She cleaned the spacious veranda, the large living room, and the bedroom, where they might have to put the overnight guest. Unless he plans to spend the night elsewhere. Very few tradesmen’s families in Mohács could boast of such expensive bedroom furniture. These pieces had taken up an entire classroom of the local school when they were displayed as part of the great industrial exhibition, which His Excellency the regent came to see as did the royal princes, together with Magda Purgly, not to mention Archduke Frederick,* the prince of Montenuovo, and the Odescalchis. The furniture, made of pure Finnish poplar, was the masterwork of Tóni Windheim Jr., made after he had returned to his father’s plant from his wanderings. They had the wood brought from Finland; Sanyi Csikalek prepared the upholstery for it. The old Windheim manufactured an entire set; we bought ours from the first batch. He also sold a lot in Vienna, he shipped them there himself. Along with old Csikalek, they received a gold medal for it. But they got their medals separately, each for his own work. That’s when your father also received his, in 1926, when the grand exhibition was held on the four-hundredth anniversary, but you do remember that. Old Windheim was still with us then. They were standing like this, I’m telling you, your godmother to my right, and in front of her the whole big Windheim family, including the relatives from Pécs. Don’t forget, they are also our relatives, all of them. I’m saying it just like that, just as we said back then, not only the Catholics, we took an oath and everyone cried, everyone who came to Széchenyi Square that day. No stranger will ever set foot on our homeland as long as one Hungarian is alive. How could we forget the Serb rule. You can’t know about this, what are you laughing at. But Archbishop Zichy could not say this then because the Serbs were standing there crying. My, the things those people did, son. They broke down the door of our house in the dead of night. To this day I cry, son, when I think of that devastation. It was beautiful; you can laugh all you want. We’d swear there would be no discord, no disagreement. But the poor man could not get the gold medal himself, our young Tóni did, though it rightfully belonged to the old man.

Mother knows right well what I’m laughing at.

Hungary’s always been lost because of discords. There’s nothing to laugh about there.

Haven’t you been lost yourself, haven’t you said the same thing yourself plenty of times. Then why are you laughing at others. Just because you’ve seen the world, you don’t have to put your nose in the air.

The cover on the double bed, piled high with eiderdowns and pillows, was made of smooth, glossy yellow cotton twill, as was the upholstery on the two chairs, the round pouf in front of the dressing table, and the armchair, all of which were overlain with heavily starched handmade lace. Whenever Mrs. Madzar reminisced about the oath, Madzar had to smile because his mother truly did not consider herself Hungarian. We are German, she would say proudly, raising her white-kerchiefed head high. She said it as if she were removing her son from among the Hungarians.

Luckily, my son, she always said, with your nature you take after me more than after your father.

If only you didn’t urinate on the roses the way he did.

She moved out into the summer kitchen, sleeping on the cot, so that the precious bedroom would remain untouched until the guest’s arrival. A commodious white porcelain chamber pot was also part of the furnishing. They had never used it, because inside and out it was painted full of pretty little blue forget-me-nots. Still, during every spring and fall cleaning, Mrs. Madzar scrubbed it spick-and-span. Since she has been alone, she uses a blue, zinc-coated bucket at night so on cold nights she needn’t leave the bedroom and go outside. She was afraid, scared of every shadow. But she did not want more dogs in her life, because she’s had to beat enough of them to death. Earlier, they kept the bucket, if not this one, out on the veranda. It was not nice to let the man hear the woman’s dribbling. But even in the coldest winter nights her husband thought nothing of standing on the steps of the veranda and pissing from there.

I’ve never regretted marrying a Hungarian, but this I could never forgive the two of you.

That you have to piss on my roses, making the whole yard stink.

I can’t understand how Hungarians don’t smell their own stench.

Since they talked about a possible guest, she had been airing out everything, mercilessly chasing the tiniest flies and numerous mosquitoes. Every evening, she collected the day’s eggs in separate baskets. Her zeal irritated Madzar, her humbleness and servility because of the supposedly upper-class guest.

Why must you prepare so much, Mother. But he restrained himself, did not say anything. They talked very little anyway. Unless his mother was doing one of her well-practiced monologues, silence reigned in the house and above the yard. At most, the power saw screeched on the wood. The feeling itself was unjust toward his mother. Still, he did not show his real feelings. And Mrs. Madzar was very indulgent with her son, that was the reason — not thoughtlessness — she always talked with him about something other than what they should have talked about.

There were so many things that a mother could not talk about with her grown son, anyway.

She did everything not to hurt her son.

Because what she feared most was that this, her last remaining son, was about to leave her for good.

He was in such a hurry he did not even bring any luggage and he walked around in his father’s clothes.

Very carefully, she said to him, son, people will laugh at you in your father’s clothes.

Actually, her son confused her in these clothes.

You’re paying for your expensive hotel room in Pest instead of bringing your fine clothes here.

I’d keep them in fine order here.

Come on, Mother, who would laugh at me, I don’t know a soul in the whole city.

The city knows you’ve come home, son. At least when you leave the house you should wear your own clothes. Can’t you see how much you take after your father. He also saved money on things he shouldn’t have.

Oh, Mother, stop chewing my ears off.

As if you were only a tradesman, that’s what you look like in your father’s clothes.

Well, Mother, what should I look like.

You’re working here and paying for your expensive hotel in Pest. Gottlieb’s older son has two cars in America. I’m afraid your studies may have been in vain. The way you’re going, you’ll never have anything.

What have I got to do with Gottlieb’s older son, Mother.

He uses one to deliver merchandise. In the other he takes his family on outings.

How many times have I asked you not to interfere with my life.

But try as he might, no matter how much he felt he was behaving very properly, exercising the correct measure of self-discipline, with his mother he was unable to use a different tone.

Please be quiet.

Don’t you tell me to be quiet.

I know what I’m doing.

In a few days, he could see how thoroughgoing her secret preparations had been. And he also failed to banish Mrs. Szemző from his mind, because whenever he finished his daily work — before twilight, for he did not feel like working by lamplight on this sensitive wood with its delicate color and proportions so easily distorted by electric light — then suddenly he felt very lonely. There was nothing to be done about it, and he was disturbed by the thought that he had no way of knowing what he was doing.

He sensed, like a heavy premonition, how utterly alone he would be in America if he ever got there.

On top of it all, the day was approaching when he would have to interrupt his work here and go back to Budapest for the work on Dobsinai Road. And he worried that the apartment would not turn out as he had hoped. That it wouldn’t satisfy his demands for architectural purity. Don’t let the telegram come just yet. If Bellardi arrives at night, he’ll be getting off at Mohács on his way from Vienna. Or else he might come five days later on the ship arriving from Belgrade at four in the afternoon.

But he did not come at either time, and Madzar again had to wait three more days, and he could be glad that no telegram came either. In his great expectation, he went so far as to leave his work quietly at the relevant hour and take a leisurely stroll down to the boat station. He went as is, in his father’s work clothes, to see with his own eyes whether Bellardi would disembark or not.

But he did not see him on the bridge.

He could have sent him a message, because he saw the Mayer boy.

But, outwitting himself, he had to pretend that only by coincidence was he observing from the willow trees along the shore the Carolina’s spectacular and noisy arrival and then its painful departure. When the Carolina was receding from Mohács, with its streaming, clattering wheels turning against the current, the wailing of its horn lingered for a long time. At such times, Madzar usually stopped either behind the customhouse or at the silk factory’s stone wall, but from there he did not see Bellardi either when the ship came or when it left.

Sometimes he would run out of the house at the doleful sound of the horn, just as he had in his childhood, hurry down to the dock and from the old fishing-boat landing watch the slow passing of the Carolina.

Once he saw Chief Counselor Elemér Vay get off, on his way back from Belgrade; the Mayer boy lugged his suitcases behind him. The smartly dressed, severe-looking gentleman was conveyed from Fish Market Square in the Hotel Korona’s black, crest-adorned carriage, while simultaneously, amid much blowing of its horn, the ship set out upstream, taking its passengers leaning on the railing. And this not only pained Madzar but also made him dread the pain of longing to be off.

Which should not have touched him. He did not want to admit that his life had various mysterious processes and phenomena that he could not clearly see even in retrospect and that no sober reasoning helped him anticipate. He feared them the same way he did bodily contacts he considered improper. And when once again Bellardi did not show up in the afternoon, and Madzar was left with only the Danube’s enormous currents and muddy, layered whirlpools, he took off on a longer stroll to work off his anger with Bellardi.

He should pick up at least two bottles of good wine; that way he wouldn’t be going home alone.

At least they’d have good wine when Bellardi came.

North of the city lay ridges and series of hills, covered with loess and divided naturally by vales that seasonal streams had created, where even in Roman times grapes were grown and where, thanks to Levantine wine merchants, the very demanding viticulture survived the century and a half of Turkish occupation. At some places, the ancient wine cellars had long since caved in. Above the buried, walled-up medieval labyrinths sat small windowless grape-crushing sheds and proud, richly decorated houses belonging to rich Swabian smallholders, with wooden porches and tripartite wooden facades overlooking the river. He made his way up here on banked, carriage-wide roads between vertical loess walls. He was recalling in more depth and detail what once had happened to him and Bellardi. It felt good to go for a long walk after a full day’s work. As if he were thinking that with these pieces of furniture he might be able to make a present of his childhood to Mrs. Szemző. Recollection itself was not surprising to him; he has had ample practice in it. While working, one concentrates on the details of details, and parallel with them all sorts of other things come to mind, details and images from his life completely unrelated to his work. Except that now this was happening in the city of his birth as he walked along fences and stone walls, among raging dogs, or clambering upward in the grave silence and green dimness of the banked roads. Preoccupied with a technical detail, such as that something needed oiling, he would recall the giant willow that arched over the swelling river, in one of whose branches they had spotted the little cripple, look, there he is, reading, because he was always reading, taking his books everywhere with him, and in the next instant he would suddenly realize that the V-shape belt of the electric saw was loose, and so on; thus his thoughts kept chasing one another.

Or in the midst of having to deal with some quintessentially technical detail, he might think, we are the culprits, and he would brood on this if he could not suppress his memories.

Bellardi did not come.

He wanted to give up on him, but anxiety, aversion to the other man’s capriciousness, elemental wonder at the sight of this strange man’s behavior, and existential fear about the future remained much too strong in him. He won’t even have one car in America, let alone two. I’m a dreamer who doesn’t do anything. And why in hell did Gottlieb have to go to America of all places.

Why couldn’t the Gottliebs let him have that pleasure for himself.

He decided to wait for him anyway, to be prepared, and not to let Bellardi surprise him. And the telegram still hadn’t come from the head mason or the cabinetmaker telling him to come to Buda. He and his mother ate up, or gave to friends and relatives, the plum-jam tarts, morello strudels, and cherry pies; his mother kept bringing fresh fruit from the island. At night he drank the light white wines he had brought from the Süssloch or from the valley of the Csele river, from the Stricker relatives’ vineyard, sitting by himself on the veranda, in the dark. He wouldn’t turn on the light. But why should Bellardi come to see him. Bellardi’s life was nothing but a series of promises he couldn’t keep, not even for himself. What cause could they have in common, no cause at all. Yet Bellardi must have felt bad about having been so firmly rejected. But Madzar couldn’t imagine not rejecting him, how he could have been less rejecting, what he might have done so as not to reject Bellardi’s proposal. What part of the proposal should he accept. Still, the following day he walked out of the city again to get wine, taking with him an empty demijohn, sat around again with the old men he knew, sipped wine with them until it grew dark above the cellars.

If Bellardi comes now, he won’t find him at home.

Sometimes it rained for long spells and he could not go out for days.

Gradually he had to admit to himself that during the twelve years of his forgetfulness, he had not only guarded the safety and strength of his emotional attachment but also nourished it, kept it alive. He allowed his most secret images to return to him, repeatedly, mutely; he reveled and delighted in them. Even though, along with Bellardi, he wanted to forget Mohács. The place where unsuspecting people go to hoe their vineyards, tie up their vines or pound vine props in deeper, and then suddenly the ground opens up beneath them.

Collapsing medieval cellars swallowed up and buried many of them.

The Gottlieb boy sat on a branch of the willow tree, and they were throwing stones at him.

He could not remember which of them started it. First they lobbed small pebbles from the shore, and the boy kept jerking his sharp little head away from them, and the two on the ground laughed silently, writhing like snakes; they could not completely suppress their laughter but at least held back the sound of it. At first, the little humpback could not understand where the pounding pellets were coming from; both Madzar and Bellardi were good shots. Somehow, it was also part of the game that the two of them were so strong and well developed while the other boy was a pigeon-breasted hunchback. They left the little grub alone for a while, let him reimmerse himself in his reading. Then they bombarded him again with handfuls of pebbles, burst after burst, let him beware and feel the pain.

It became more and more serious.

Let him hold on to the branches so he’ll drop the book.

After a while they saw that the cripple understood but in his great Jewish pride pretended to care about nothing but his book.

They were no longer laughing.

With bigger stones they were more certain to hit him. The stones thudded on his body, then splashed into the water. No other noise disturbed the grand summer landscape.

He was still pretending not to notice the impending danger, as if he were absorbed in his reading, and he did not hold on to anything. But he waited for the next missile with his thin little neck pulled in, risking much. With the hard cover of his book, he tried to protect at least his face, but of course he was always late; they hit their mark well. He not only made himself ridiculous but ran the danger of losing his balance and falling out of the tree.

They’ll get tired of their lousy prank and go away; that is what he must have thought.

But they did not go away, out of spite, because they figured that eventually he would climb down.

He uttered not a word from where he sat.

Then let him stay up there, up where he’d climbed by himself.

We’ll see who can hold out longer.

If he made a move to sit more comfortably with his book, they right away fired at him. And they did it when he stayed too long in one position.

When another gang of noisy boys arrived to fish for driftwood, their enterprise could no longer be kept secret and these newcomers were certainly not going to let the hunchbacked little Jew climb down from the tree.

He might have begged the two of them for mercy, but not the newcomers.

He and Bellardi might as well go home.

And when he returned one evening from the vineyard hills, a bit tipsy, not only was his supper waiting for him in the immaculate kitchen fragrant with freshly baked morello pie but his excited mother held out an unopened telegram, which reminded him of Bellardi’s long letter from the Trieste Naval Academy, every sentence of which had also surprised him.

Sometimes, Madzar left home so as not to be there if Bellardi showed up unexpectedly; it was a way to ensure his own surprise — to return to find Bellardi there.

Although the possibility of such a visit had never been mentioned, in the telegram Mrs. Szemző announced her arrival the next day.

Telegram in hand, the text much too long with too many detailed explanations, Madzar stood, overcome by the news as if hit on the head. He managed to read the first sentence all right, but he gave only a cursory glance to the rest. How could he prevent her. He turned red right under his mother’s watchful eyes. Bellardi must love him greatly, after all. There was no possibility of replying; the post office was closed at this late hour. He did not understand what this meant or what he had read in the telegram, because he hadn’t expected Mrs. Szemző to be interested in his work; this was too much for him. What did each word mean in the sentence about needing to clarify unresolved questions, and his mother wanted to know, and quite loudly too, who, when, and how many guests might be arriving. Or perhaps he had to go to Pest. Just to be on the safe side, as soon as the mailman left she had quickly slaughtered a chicken. Should she add another one. She had cleaned the vegetables for the soup and she would put it on the stove at dawn, but would her little boy tell her whether she should pick more carrots and turnips. It was as though each of his mother’s words reached him from a great distance, along with one of the telegram’s words hovering before his eyes, or as if the words had not reached him at all.

She already has nice new string beans in the garden. It’s a good thing they don’t grow just on the island.

They should pick some before it got completely dark; she’d make some bread-crumbed beans.

As if in her convoluted explanation Mrs. Szemző could conceal why she was coming and why so suddenly.

His first thought was that he should get some water from the soda man who had an artesian well; finicky Mrs. Szemző should not have to drink the stinking water from the Madzars’ well. With all those expensive words in the telegram, Mrs. Szemző revealed that her pride and standoffishness had collapsed; she couldn’t bear being without him, and putting aside propriety and decorum, defying the social differences, she was on her way.

He became inordinately cheerful and excited.

What came promptly to mind was Mrs. Szemző’s laugh, showing her big ugly horse teeth and bare gums.

Well, then, it’s happening after all.

At the mere thought, his prick stiffened and his sphincters contracted. But how would he tell his mother that she should expect the visit of a married woman. He quickly folded the virtually unread telegram and shoved it into his pants pocket. Because it occurred to him, and the possibility truly alarmed him, that tomorrow, on the very same day, Bellardi might also make his appearance.

Both of them might show up on Wednesday.

And in that case, responsibility for the death of the Gottlieb boy rests with them. Which neither of them would ever admit and Mrs. Szemző would never forgive if she knew about it. Luckily, it was only an accident. There was no summer without somebody drowning in the Danube. And why would the two of them have talked to each other about such matters. The water around Mohács is unpredictable enough.

They turned away from each other when other people spoke of the accident.

What time is it, Mother, he asked, a little sobered from his good mood.

He even asked if today was Tuesday.

Outside it was becoming quite light; birds began to chirp in the trees on Pozsonyi Road, though the first streetcar had not yet come.

I’ll go out for a walk, Madzar said, while thinking, no, I can’t do this to my mother, she’d die of shame. She’d start shouting about why should they host a rich Jewess and how could I even think of bringing a married woman into her house. And to do this in full view of the town too; she’d never live it down.

Maybe I’ll reserve a room for her in the Korona, then.

He imagined such a room, the kind he would reserve for Mrs. Szemző in the Korona and where the next day everything would happen between them.

But who is coming, son, his mother called after him hesitantly yet desperately.

Gyöngyvér’s hand rose properly above the keys as if she were certain what she must do with the conjured-up phrase. But everything happened differently. Could she accompany the sounds issuing from her on Mrs. Szemző’s piano.

Mrs. Madzar grumbled a bit more but then decided that she’d pick the string beans no matter what. She would prepare a good tomato sauce, brown the roux nicely no matter who came to visit; she’d serve that with boiled chicken and steamed string beans. In the seventh-floor apartment, it grew light earlier and dark later than down in the street, under the shade of the elms and above the insanely yellow pavement. With her keyed-up imagination she was moving forward in the pale light of Madzar’s remaining lamps, her flawless naked body caught up in the momentum.

In the end, she had the courage to hit only the lonely F sharp, waited patiently for the F sharp to address her body and then let her voice sing out, nice and round.

Well, at least it came out right again.

Again but only once and only by chance; she was actually preparing for something else, not this. She was preparing to take Mrs. Szemző’s impossible idea seriously: now I may be talking nonsense, but you tell Médike that not only should you sing Monteverdi, but you should also switch to contralto. And with that, Mrs. Szemző rose from the piano and began excitedly to look for the right sheet music. In the escritoire, the only piece left of the furniture Madzar had built, from which the unknown saturant was still emitting a faint scent.

Gyöngyvér also got up from the piano to get the sheet music but in the meantime she remembered where Mrs. Szemző kept the blankets. And the black dog on the bridge attacked Kristóf, knocking him against the railing and licking his face again with its huge tongue. The young man instinctively shoved the dog away; the touch of the strange beast inflamed his mouth, but his move came too late. His palate turned blistery, he thought he’d choke to death on the spot, but the dog thought that now they could begin to play.

It was snarling at him in happiness.

The next morning Mrs. Szemző arrived in Mohács, and not alone.

Then Ágost was startled by the sound and noticed with surprise that he was alone in the bed in the maid’s room. At least he could make himself comfortable. He was a little cold, he realized, irritated, where is she with that blanket, he thought wistfully, but then he fell right back to sleep.

At 11:20 in the morning, four minutes before the expected arrival of the woman, the unsuspecting Madzar was already waiting on the platform at the old railway station shaded by aged chestnut trees, sporting his father’s best summer suit, a light-green tropical worsted. He had worked until dawn in his father’s workshop so he could show Mrs. Szemző at least the sketches of all the objects he was making for her. He held his father’s panama hat in his hand, twirling it nervously. During the long night he had managed to assemble roughly every piece of furniture except for the desk, the folding screen, and the davenport, including the all-important delicate couch of which they both expected so much. If only he could put together in fitting layers the experience of several centuries. The practical question he had to answer was this, in what manner does a relaxed body lie on a couch. His body shuddered in the early dawn light; the weird exhibit he had prepared surprised him. The hastily assembled pieces of austere furniture were propped up with other objects and implements and stood forlornly among the machines. He knew that no one in the world had ever received such a worthy confession of love, and fortunately no one besides him could know this; a stranger could not possibly understand. Mrs. Szemző will not understand either. Yet secretly he hoped she would.

The panama hat, however, was too small; until the very last minute, his mother begged him not to put it on unless he wanted to become the laughingstock of the town.

Come on, Mother, then what the devil should I do with it.

Hold it in your hands.

The sky was a little cloudy on this Wednesday but the heat was great, with hardly any breeze because of the heavy humid air.

A real Hungarian summer, whose smell and heat he had thought so much about when he lived in Germany and Holland.

His ability to discipline himself notwithstanding, he felt he would have a long wait for any anticipated fulfillment. First the train had to deliver Mrs. Szemző, then the two of them would have to stroll back along sunny Danube Row to the parental house, and only then, finally, in the workshop could he show her the neat, elegant objects so enriched by their inner life. Beyond the railway station, beyond the black hills of the coaling dock, on the estate of Archduke Frederick of Lorraine two harvesting machines were at work; one could hear the harvesters’ drawn-out shouts locked in the machines’ monotonous noise. In the summer seasonal laborers from Göcsej worked on the archduke’s land. Perhaps those were not shouts but the singing of laborers as they lay in the shade of acacias waiting for the midday sun to relent a little. Here, on the flat expanse of Sátorhely, where according to the old historians the Turkish and Hungarian armies had marched against each other in 1526, the fertile, much envied fields stretched all the way to the grape-growing hills. Madzar was not alone on the platform; other people were waiting for the train too. In his excitement he paid no attention to the exceptional human sounds, and there were many other kinds of noise as well. The tipcarts at the coaling dock were rhythmically clanging and clicking; from the loudspeaker at the nearby swimming pool the melody of a popular tune radiated as far as the station. In the surrounding landscape irregular pulsating shouts sounded like a work song filled with accusations, or like a recitative proclaiming the desolation of fate. When the short train with its stocky engine approached and then pulled into the station, activities intensified; railway workers and porters moved out from the shade, and to his astonishment he quickly recognized, in the slowly moving window of a first-class car, Mrs. Szemző’s two sturdy, aggressive little sons, surrounded by young girls or rather young ladies. They were literally hanging out the window, eagerly showing something to the brightly dressed girls who in the wind created by the train were holding on to and waving their hats. One could also see two well-fed rats running between the basalt track bed and the concrete wall of the platform, along with the train. In the noise of the braking train, Madzar had no time to become used to the thought that Mrs. Szemző was not alone.

He felt like blaming Mrs. Szemző for this first surprise, as for a serious misdeed, and also like making excuses for her.

When the conductor finally opened the doors, Dr. Szemző’s bald head and beaming face shone down on Madzar.

In his utter confusion he did not understand anything. He had been through many things, but for the first time in his young life he felt he would perish, he could not bear it.

He felt as if he had been caught with his desensitized feelings showing, without time even to blush. Mrs. Szemző cannot be without her sons and the sons cannot be without each other. What should he do now, he wondered, but he had no time for such questions. At any rate, his familiar world was turning upside down, about to fall on his head. Something was happening, or was beginning to happen, independent of him, which he could not comprehend. It was as if in this very exceptional moment he confessed to himself that he could not be without Bellardi. First, he had to greet Dr. Szemző, to acknowledge and reciprocate the man’s obvious pleasure in seeing him, which must have been genuine, seeing that Madzar was building a big new home for him with the best available materials and equipped with the highest achievements of modern technology. At last he glimpsed Mrs. Szemző, who, in the company of a very fetching, fragile woman about her age, was coming toward him.

They smiled at him from the midst of their intense conversation.

It soon became clear that the woman had been one of Mrs. Szemző’s classmates in school. Laughing and cutting into each other’s words, they were telling Madzar that only two days earlier they had been together at an open-air concert on Margit Island, and now they had met on the train completely by chance. They were laughing about how insane such coincidences were.

Every summer she brings her pupils, students at the Hungarian Royal School of Industrial Design, to Mohács, and they, she and Madzar, might have met before.

The woman rather dazed Madzar.

You know, I’ve lived abroad for a long time, he said politely and a little as if excusing himself.

They are all studying textiles, the woman explained, shining her large bright eyes on him, and for years the city had been kind enough to put the rooms of the empty hospital for infectious diseases at their disposal.

Which is ideal, enthused Mrs. Szemző, who felt she should mitigate somewhat the excitement generated by this unexpected encounter.

Ideal indeed, and not only because it’s comfortable there and the silk factory is nearby, not just that, enthused the rail-thin, black-haired woman dressed in layered silk. You’ll see for yourself what a splendid chestnut-tree park the building has, just splendid, she cried, and with her enormous eyes glanced at the architect, who surely knew this splendid park.

There, outside, we can do our watercolors under the trees, to our heart’s content.

Madzar was looking at the scar on the woman’s face.

Otherwise, we use the empty wards as studios, when it rains.

Luckily we don’t have to be afraid of some devastating epidemic. The two women laughed together.

Originally that property belonged to the prince of Montenuovo, Madzar remarked quietly, to be part of the conversation somehow. This family, you should know, has a special standing in Mohács, where frugality would not be exceptional. The Montenuovos disliked plants that were merely decorative. For them, every plant had to make its own profit. That is why they had so many chestnut trees planted, back in the day.

He wanted to step between them, both to observe them and to end this senseless female shouting and giggling. As if to his shame he had no choice but to put himself in the middle of their chaos and cacophony. Again things were happening some other way, not his. A woman had again done something to him, and had brought another one along to boot. He was outraged, and for a long moment the two women sent searching, penetrating looks from under their large hats at the man who seemed to be emanating aversion and rejection. They also smiled at him politely, appreciating and at the same time assuaging his embarrassment.

Sizing up the expert who will be their splendid guide in the next few days.

He’d probably enjoy being their tourist guide.

It would be truly ideal, if only he were willing.

And while they continued to chat like this, they kept looking at him from under their hats and wondering what had gotten into this attractive though rather preposterously dressed man.

Her pupils would be so glad if he looked at their work.

With your belated permission, my dear architect, I told Miss Dobrovan that I had seen your wonderful drawings.

So it’s no secret to me that you have a great talent as a draftsman too.

She is flashing her bright eyes at me so that I won’t look at her scar.

Madzar did not fail to see that the women were playing an old, well-rehearsed game.

But the scene was brief, with every word passing smoothly and quickly among them. They prattled on as if their words scarcely touched them. And then they had to be busy with the luggage, giving orders as to where to put what. Hired carriages were waiting in front of the station. The porters put the bags and suitcases of the young ladies and gentlemen, along with their easels and drawing boards, into a bus. Waiting for the Szemzős was the Hotel Korona’s black-lacquered, crest-adorned light carriage with its cheerful coachman and two black horses, groomed to a high shine.

The spoiled little city boys ran to them, they wanted to make friends with the horses or at least to stroke their nice shiny coats. But the horses were leisurely and contentedly feeding from the nosebags hung around their necks. They swatted at horseflies with their tails, their skin quivering, or, by way of warning, kicked a bit in the rapturous boys’ direction.

Madzar did not understand how the black hackney could be waiting for them since he hadn’t ordered it the evening before, but he was also busy thinking that the boys might soon get into trouble. Anxiously he watched how the horses endured the boys’ aggressive adulation.

But I expected only you, he said stealthily to Mrs. Szemző. His stifled voice was filled with rebuke.

I reserved the nicest corner room for you.

As if asking, how could I have known you’d be coming with your entire family.

Which was something Mrs. Szemző did not understand. She had so many other things to worry about in any case.

Where did you reserve and what sort of room — in other words, she didn’t know what to do with the amorously reproachful emphasis in his sentence. No doubt she was embarrassed occasionally by her own quite erotic fantasies about Madzar, that they would do this and then that, and how the man would behave in this or that position, but their real contact neither allowed nor called for such delicate intonations and details. Cautiously, seeing Madzar’s agitated state, she quickly came back with a question as to whether he had received her telegram.

Of course he did, came the man’s indignant, aggressive reply.

Why would he be here if he hadn’t.

I should have wired earlier, Mrs. Szemző added apologetically, and speaking a little too loudly. Doing this at the last minute wasn’t very considerate of me, I admit, and her hand in the white doeskin glove rested for a brief and intimate moment on Madzar’s arm. As she had done a few weeks earlier in the empty seventh-floor apartment from where they could look out, between the blocks of the Palatinus apartment buildings, at the same Danube.

It was dizzying to look at the same river here, and this shared feeling — existing simultaneously in past and present — dazed them a little, as if from the renewed thrust of another insult.

And the reason I didn’t was so as not to burden you too much, Mrs. Szemző continued her sentence. So that you wouldn’t have time to make any preparations, and she was surprised to see how simple it was, despite the proximity of her children, to keep her composure. And wouldn’t even think of changing your schedule because of our family’s little excursion.

Madzar could not control himself so elegantly.

What do you mean by not wanting to be a burden, he asked in the same reproachful amorous tone he had used before, but then quickly regretted having opened his mouth. The emotion bruised the flattering image he had created of his own self-discipline. It’s not just me, my mother is waiting for you with lunch. For weeks, I’ve been doing nothing but work for you, he cried in a voice of stifled desperation.

And what shouldn’t I even think about then.

Oh my God, how embarrassing, cried Mrs. Szemző. If only we hadn’t already promised. Who would have thought your mother would be so kind as to wait for us with lunch. But now I really see my mistake. I should have asked well ahead of time if such a visit would be convenient for you. But I could not restrain the boys from going to Mohács — they do not know Mohács at all. You won’t believe me, she said, and reluctantly let go of Madzar’s arm — but the feeling of closeness only increased and remained in the flesh and in the marrow of the bones.

And now her voice changed too. For me, she’d be waiting with lunch for me, she asked, her voice no stronger than a breath, her eyes wide and wet.

As if they had mutually insulted the other’s sacred, grand human secret and foreignness.

Neither of them understood the other, and that hurt them both, or rather they both had to pretend not to understand the other. In Madzar’s mind arose the painful suspicion that indeed he was fatally misunderstanding or had fatally misunderstood something, though he could not comprehend what. It would have been senseless to ask who had deserted whom since their last encounter. At any rate, Mrs. Szemző looked out to the water, to the water flowing past ever since then, displaying on its surface the power of the driving current and the unevenness of the riverbed. It is my fault, ultimately, only mine, she thought, continuing to cry out inwardly. Their respective work had revealed themselves to each other, and she had ended up too close to this man.

Their glances, made painful with self-accusation and mutual incredulity, met once again.

They did not have much time for clandestine glances or stolen moments in which somehow to comprehend this, their very first public lovers’ quarrel. As contrary to their intentions, they found themselves in an impossible situation and had quickly to extricate themselves from the incomprehensible awkwardness, but they could not clarify anything: swishing her silken skirts, the black-haired lady approached to take her leave of them. But not before she made Madzar promise that the next morning he would come and join the students for sketching and watercolors. And in a moment she had read it all on their faces, perhaps more than was realistically possible, but she gauged everything by their stiff posture, in which one could not separate reality from opportunity. The two of them tried hard not to let her see anything. Nor could they have forgotten Mrs. Szemző’s energetic husband in his white linen suit, standing only a few steps away, busy with the porters and sending urgent glances in their direction because of the children. This is no time for long conversations. But luckily the two boys, all excited by the horses, were running back toward their mother. They ran to her in their identical white shirts and dark-blue pants fitted with suspenders, as if the horrible realization hit them like a blow to their bodies that a total stranger was now threatening their absolute power over their mother. They hung on her neck, pulled her down with their weight, telling her to come see the horses and, mainly, not to leave their father’s side for even a moment. They were demonstrating to the stranger, brazenly and shamelessly, their unbelievable power over everything. Madzar could see with his own eyes that this Mrs. Szemző was not an independent person; her two sons had her branded and shackled. Dr. Szemző, on the other hand, could relax and feel that they were all safe for at least a few moments. In all this emotional and social chaos and cacophony, the black-haired lady, swishing her yards of silk and rattling her ivory bracelets, whose name Madzar did not catch at the first or second hearing, arranged to be at the Hotel Korona with the Szemzős in an hour and a half.

For a drink, as she put it.

By then it would be clear whether they’d all go together for lunch somewhere, or to some restaurant, which someone must have already arranged with someone else.

But not with him; all this had been done without him.

This new information stunned Madzar, but he took a firm grip on himself. He politely accompanied them in the hackney to the hotel, enthusiastically pointing out and explaining things to the boys, so as not to feel his own pain.

Standing in the hotel lobby, which was dark, wainscoted, pleasantly cool, the Szemzős told him by way of good-bye that after supper they wanted to pay a visit, if only to make the acquaintance of his mother. Of course they’d come without the boys so as not to be too much of a burden.

Oh, not at all.

There was some give and take about this — perhaps they should all come for supper. They oscillated between yes and no.

And would he kindly excuse them for missing lunch, begged Mrs. Szemző, which Madzar could not understand — indeed at that moment he didn’t understand anything and nor could Dr. Szemző.

What lunch did we miss, darling, the latter asked.

The head of the hospital, a dear colleague of her husband, is expecting them at the Drágffy restaurant for a fish lunch, explained Mrs. Szemző almost desperately, so that at least one of the two men would understand the situation.

And the longer they tortured themselves with the obligatory politeness, the more embarrassing and painful the situation became, though individually none of them could have specified why.

As if here, in the city of his birth, perfect strangers were shutting him out of his own life.

He has the reputation of being a courteous man and therefore his life becomes one of slavishly satisfying other people’s wishes.

This is how Madzar was fuming inside.

But Dr. Szemző was also taking a good look at the place where he had wound up, asking himself what he was doing in this decaying country hotel.

Well, then, until eight tonight, all three of them were saying, making their parting sound light and cheerful. They were about to move out of the humiliating situation, but trouble never comes singly. Down the red-carpet-covered steps came Chief Counselor Elemér Vay.

Baron Bellardi had hastily introduced Madzar to Vay on the Carolina, and the chief counselor vaguely remembered that, yet he had no idea who the plain-looking young man was who was now receiving him with a smile at the bottom of the stairs. They could not avoid exchanging pleasantries; after all, they had been introduced. But why would Chief Counselor Vay have remembered such a person. In general, he didn’t care whom he talked to, just as he hadn’t cared on the Carolina whom Bellardi might introduce to him. Unimportant people did not interest him, and since he had spent more than forty years at various levels of public administration, he rarely erred about people. And he remembered having quickly registered that with this acquaintance of his, Baron Bellardi had once again made a blunder.

In the new situation, however, Madzar could not but obey the rigorous rules of civility and introduce to this high-ranking, authoritative government official the couple at his side, who smiled obligingly, and then help them exchange a few brief, smooth, and totally noncommittal lighthearted remarks. He saw to it that all four of them, expressing the very best wishes and compliments, mutually bowed to one another and then parted, in the merciless coolness of the bowing ritual and the friendliest possible spirit.

As befitted the chief counselor’s rank, an automobile was waiting for him outside the hotel, a sparkling dust-gray Mercedes Nürnberg with its enormous, immaculately glittering black fenders and comfortably wide running boards; the prince of Montenuovo had sent it.

By now, Madzar was seething. No one saw any of this on his face, of course, whose features were set to support an affable smile. All of them were showing their teeth; this was the odd way in which they reassured one another of their peaceful and friendly intentions. As if to say, just this one last time, that they were willing to forgo their dangerous bestiality. Elemér Vay was not overly pleased by this chance encounter, however, though responses like this could never be seen on him, and he made his way through the lobby looking quite content. He was clean-shaven; he had brought a cloud of scent with him, and now he was taking the cloud away with him. His suit, of the finest gray cotton, was freshly pressed; the crease of his pants could cut like a blade’s edge. Around his neck he wore a much too colorful silk cravat, unsuited to his sober appearance; it was a gift from his young wife and contrary to his social position, as it were, and it pleased him to wear it. His brown-and-white two-tone shoes had been polished to a glittering shine by his manservant, who had made ample use of his spittle in the effort. Given the strictly confidential nature of his conferences, the chief counselor could not deem this chance meeting pleasant.

And because of his high social position, sometimes it was difficult, occasionally impossible, to reach the real thing via appearances, but it was not always necessary for him to reach the real thing.

Bah, he would then say to himself, small stuff. Why should something I don’t know be important.

The chief bellboy rushed from behind the counter and, bowing and scraping, accompanied the distinguished gentlemen to the waiting automobile, which several small dirty children, scratching constantly, most likely from impetigo, were watching from the other side of the street.

Elemér Vay often pretended that servants were a burden to him and, as if to overburden the illusion, he looked through them as through air, but in fact, he approved of their eagerness to serve him. He looked at the bellboy from beneath half-lowered fleshy eyelids, which suggested sleepiness, just as, a moment ago, he’d given a quick glance to the features of the couple and their children and concluded they were Israelites, realizing that he would have to spend the night under the same roof with them in this decrepit hotel. He had found them and their exaggerated politeness unpleasantly importunate.

Not to mention the conspicuous absence of dignity emanating from these persons, with their desire to make friends, something he knew to be characteristic of Israelites. He had no time to waste on such silly episodes. From a social point of view, however, he could be satisfied with the complicated ritual of the introductions, which had gone off well. In Elemér Vay’s language, this meant that these persons had demonstrated the proper respect for him even if they were themselves not — because they could not be — flawless; put plainly, they were not socially competent. First Madzar had asked permission to introduce the head physician and then the two of them made bold to introduce the chief counselor to the lady. He had to accept their uncouthness magnanimously, con grandezza.

In the company of the retired county subprefect, Chief Counselor Elemér Vay had held discussions during the previous days with the town clerk, Vitéz Antal Éber, about the particularly delicate and confidential plan to draw up a complete inventory of Jewish wealth in the city and about the legal contingencies and procedural details they might consider in connection with relocating the Jews and confiscating their wealth. Besides the chief counselor, very few people were familiar with all aspects of this rather adventurous plan, requiring exceptional circumspection; it had been prepared two years earlier and now, in light of the latest diplomatic reports, seemed advisable to revive.

The secret plan did not follow the usual county public-administration network and therefore did not necessarily feature the county seats; instead, the most important transportation junctions were its focal points. The plans were drawn up when information gained through diplomatic channels had made clear that the Germans were going to relocate their Jews to Madagascar and, since through the same channels there was hardly a trickle of diplomatic protest against this plan, Hungarian diplomats concluded that the silence of European powers would be the equivalent of consent.

According to the plans, Hungary would be divided into seven relocation regions, called sectors or zones, as they were listed in the German-language information material. In the following weeks and in the least conspicuous manner, Elemér Vay had to visit all seven zones and evaluate the technical and personnel requirements necessary for the plan. The Jewish population to be resettled would be transported from these zones to Mohács, where, from the city’s cargo dock, they could be shipped smoothly down to the Black Sea.

The chief counselor was on his way back from Belgrade to Buda, where he had to make his report to His Excellency the regent about the state of the lower Danube harbors, but since Mohács was on the way, he got off there to take care of the equally urgent matter of gauging the city’s actual facilities, killing two birds with one stone.

In the center of every zone, within the official system of public administration, he was supposed to establish a separate unit with access to up-to-date information, in constant contact with the secret police and local police authorities and ready to be activated at any time, so that at the appropriate moment it could officially take over the management of all public matters. Legally, the undertaking had weak points. In borough councils, magistracies, and land registries, in the various chambers of commerce and law as well as in societies, clubs, and unions it was not difficult to obtain reliable data, most of which had been available for years, but they also had to get to the accounts of smaller banks, not to mention making a jewelry and art-treasure inventory; they should be able at least to give reliable estimates that might later be confirmed. Which meant that without the network of secret police agents, it would be impossible to tackle this job.

His mission called for the establishment of a nationwide network. He had to entrust the preparation of it to experienced officials who were above suspicion. To avoid any misunderstandings or mistakes in the delicate matter of selecting confidential personnel, he consulted with members of the supreme council of the powerful secret organization Magyar Hadak, or Hungarian Hosts.

He eagerly accepted their personal recommendations to ensure the best possible tailwind helping him to go forward in his work.

But at this first and perhaps most important station, given the central role assigned to Mohács, he realized with some consternation what an infernally difficult project he had taken on. Not because the city lacked good facilities for moving masses of people on a large scale. Mohács had gigantic easy-to-guard storehouses, an empty lime-burning plant, a hospital for infectious diseases that had been state-of-the-art for decades, a comfortable barracks built during the monarchy in which very large combat units could be quartered without difficulty, and, most important, ancillary railway lines that ran from outside the city to the cargo dock where black coal from Pécs was loaded on huge, capacious barges.

But it was very hard to make the rich local aristocrats understand that they should cooperate and proceed in step for a better future when the chief counselor could not inform them in detail what that might mean. They took his straight, manly speech as an insult. The realization hit him as if he were stabbed by a dagger that he could no longer count on the natural sense of hierarchy understood by monarchist aristocrats known for their loyalty. And if he encountered obstacles like this in Mohács, what could he expect in the Alföld* zones, where the local nobility’s stubbornness and wrong-headedness truly had no limits. In his eyes, the insidious spread of liberalism and freethinking was frightening. As if the secret institution meant to protect the Hungarian nation had been eaten through by pathological principles it should have already tackled and overcome. Put boldly, perhaps the Hungarian Hosts were no longer ready to act like a mighty army. But the chief counselor did not breathe a word to anyone of this alarming and perhaps overly hasty thought of his.

Lesser aristocrats were active in core cells, called tent units; in families; and in clans of the secret society where an almost freemason-like spirit prevailed. They did not understand why Vay was so secretive about a matter that was, for them, ultimately not a secret but rather the constant subject of their confidential conversations — and had been for many decades. Why shouldn’t they be accustomed to and enjoy the special freedoms granted by their offices, why should they bother to heed any authority. While engaging with these aristocrats, at best one could bolster one’s argument by referring to the authority of His Excellency the regent, but they, positioning themselves behind this same reference, immediately engaged in intrigues designed to help them evade their task or at least interpret it with an eye to the profit they might gain from it.

Vay explained to them the procedure, requiring exceptional and particular circumspection, saying that a pioneering law was in the making, much more severe than the one enacted last May,* as he put it, and that is why the interior minister needs this secret inventory. Finding it was but the first step in a grand, long-range plan, he added before falling silent.

At which moment he had a most unheimlich feeling that, with this obligatory silence, the lords were looking at him as if he were an agent provocateur.

Now these three men had been invited to the Montenuovo castle, some distance from the city, where the prince, whose sentiments regarding the Hungarian cause were unquestioned, was giving an exclusive luncheon in honor of the chief counselor. It promised to be a pleasant meal, since in the most delicate matters Elemér Vay and the prince held identical views and they both knew this of each other. Vay looked to the prince for a quiet sort of reinforcement against the other grandees who professed radical emotions and liberal views — for a loftier opinion unequivocally pronounced. The prince had been informed of details that, given the nature of the matter, the retired subprefect and the town clerk could not know, so the chief counselor could expect to receive the reinforcement as early as during the aperitif.

Only no ressentiment, gentlemen, no ressentiment at all, the prince responded severely to the subprefect’s first, rather emotional words.

By which he meant that such a tone, in his princely presence and on this question, was not permitted.

Over his glass the chief counselor shot a grateful glance to the prince. The two of them, unlike the others, did not surrender to emotions and sentiments when this subject came up; they were interested only in what was useful and whether what they considered useful was also plausible. Not only did they think that emotions had no place in the discussion, they had no use for views and opinions about foreign nationals. Which did not mean that they had not done the arithmetic showing the losses and gains of the proposed plan. If Hungarians, given their mental makeup, are more likely to hate Jews than hate subversive revolutionary ideas, even though the world has more to fear from the latter, then we need appropriate movements and arguments to protect them from a major Bolshevik upheaval. Therefore, not only is the inversion of cause and effect not problematic, it is downright fortunate and desirable.

And if others are already saying and doing this, it would be pointless to stand in their way, though it would also be a mistake not to keep this clever maneuver tightly controlled.

The final solution of the Jewish question may be achieved without further ado, for all time and to the complete satisfaction of our radicals.

But by itself, even the most thoroughgoing pogrom would be insufficient, as the prince was wont to say humorously, and it also would be foolish to play into Germany’s hands just to please the crowd.

They both inclined to consider beyond dispute Professor Lehr’s famous thesis regarding tactical accommodation, and regretted that our romantic compatriots tended to forget that today’s German interests differ from those of the much hated and much missed Habsburgs. Subjugating or weakening Hungarians is far from being in the interests of Germany today. We must remember that according to the most advanced genetic studies, only the Hungarians, along with Norwegians, can revitalize the German race. And with these words, Elemér Vay was quoting a foremost authority in the science of genetics, Professor Otmar Baron von der Schuer. From our point of view, of course, this scientific claim is unacceptable, but it does make clear that the survival and vitality of Hungarians is of basic interest to the Germans, not only for their selfish racist reasons but because Hungarian and German plans coincide at several vital points on the political level. And it would be a fatal mistake not to exploit these points in order to strengthen the nation’s position. Our task is to maintain a calm, dignified, self-respecting, resolute, and, mainly, ever-polite attitude toward the German element. Spiel mit, aber sei Dir dessen stets Bewusst, he shouted triumphantly.

We must help them as best we can so that they may take up arms against our greatest common enemy, Bolshevism.

Many people say that tactical accommodation demands too much sacrifice, too much self-discipline, and is too risky. But we must play along with them without ever forgetting what we are doing. Our responsibility, said Elemér Vay, with his practical way of thinking rounding out the professor’s abstract argument, is to maintain a sensible balance between cooperation and resistance until the German element arrives at a point where it can carry out its far-reaching grand design.

Et puis il y a toujours la Sainte Vierge, as the prince said in his inimitable way, to jovial laughter, concluding the dinner-table conversation.

Blushing was becoming permanent on Madzar’s face, it ebbed and flowed on his milk-white skin.

He walked away from the hotel with long strides, stood for some time in the hazy heat but could not calm down outdoors either.

He watched the car receding in clouds of dust, absentmindedly greeted approaching and receding strangers a little way from the hotel, near the blinding white walls of nearby buildings. There was hardly a soul abroad in the stifling midday heat. He felt like breaking and smashing things; only when nearing the parental home did he slow down a bit. If at that moment his mother had appeared, he would have raged at her, he was sure, as his father used to rage. But reason told him he should enter the house quietly, very quietly. He had the urge to scream as he crossed the empty, dead yard. He went the long way around to avoid peeking from the corner of his eye into the workshop, whose doors were wide open for the expected guests, and to keep from rushing in to demolish the ridiculous furniture. He wouldn’t have had to do much to make the pieces fall apart, along with their puritan discipline.

I am ruining my own life.

In the summer midday, motionless silence settled over the city and the river.

An occasional stray fly on the veranda window, shaded by the grapevine bower, provided the only movement. There, in the middle of the veranda, stood the table set for three awaiting Mrs. Szemző. The plates decorated with a cheap pattern, the vulgarly colorful and barbarically cut glasses, the cheap, polished-to-death cutlery. He took off his jacket, let it slip from his hand, he had no more use for it. Quietly he kicked off his ugly perforated shoes, careful that they made no noise on the stone. He gazed at these shoes made especially for festive summer events, but what he was really looking at were the indentations his father’s feet had created in them. He kicked off his pants, quietly. Last, he literally tore off the short-sleeved shirt, which had become drenched under the jacket. He remained half-dressed like that for a long time, in his father’s long underpants and his own milk-white skin.

He could not sit down because the armchair made of willow twigs would make a loud cracking sound.

Eventually he stopped wanting to sweep the settings off the table, as his father had done more than once at a Sunday lunch, or to smash everything to pieces.

But there was no part of his body unacquainted with the joy of breaking things.

And then his utterly humiliated mother would come and pick up everything from the stone floor and even be glad no one had beaten her. She has spent her life as my father’s servant and she’d be glad to become mine. Which would break his heart, he felt. He heard no noise from the corridor because she was probably waiting on the other side of the yard, in the summer kitchen, with all the food ready to be served.

Would that God, that son of a bitch, might bring the heavens crashing down on this fucked-up world.

As he carefully lifted his neatly folded work clothes from the top of the hope chest, he had to leave off with the cursing.

He managed to cross the corridor silently and close every door of every room, always darkened during the midday hours, without a sound.

No door handle clicked in the stillness.

He lay motionless on the sofa for a long time.

The mute summer sizzled through the cracks of the drawn shutters.

He had spent his nights on this living-room sofa and maybe he slept on it now for a short time. Because suddenly he jumped up, startled, as if someone were about to kill him. He had to go to work, otherwise he would not finish on time, let others have a ball, and he quickly reached for his work clothes, as he did every morning. Both his feet were in the legs of his cotton pants when he remembered the previous night, Mrs. Szemző’s telegram, his own ridiculousness, and the arrival of all those people. With his pants pulled up only to his knees he sat back on the sofa, took the telegram out of his pocket where he had shoved it, blushing, the night before, and spread it out on his knees. In the dimness he had to lean close down to the paper, which made him look like a child. In his shame he then leaned farther forward, as if he had to vomit. In his shame he buried his face in his hands. He did not understand how he could have sunk so low. Because, although obscured by a convoluted style and labyrinthine phrases, everything was there, spelled out in the telegram.

How could he have misunderstood it so badly.

The previous evening he had seen not what was in the telegram, with the peculiar letters of the telegraph machine, but what he recognized from his ridiculous daydreams in those letters. How could he have made himself so vulnerable to this woman.

So, that’s how low I’ve fallen.

Of course, now he saw clearly how it had all happened. As if, locked in his body, he’d been forced to live simultaneously in several parallel worlds and, given the current tensions, had by accident mixed them up and replaced one with the other. And thus he had indecently revealed to Mrs. Szemző one of his hidden selves, which she, luckily, not being familiar with his other hidden world, couldn’t have understood.

When he recalled these events long decades later, he sadly acknowledged that despite everything he had never been happier than he was during the next few days which the Szemzős spent in the city of his birth, and that he had suffered untold agonies in wanting the woman’s body so much.

He could no longer tell himself he was not attracted to her.

On a single occasion, they embraced each other in the afternoon quiet of the workshop, among the pieces of furniture in progress; then they could feel it.

His happiness was brief, the kind one never comprehends except when unexpectedly one remembers it.

Or, if he was happy sometimes, he may have felt it even more deeply and free of dramatics, but never so darkly and so lightheartedly as back then.




Like Fine Clockwork


Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of tearing you away from your dear Hungarian friend, how could I, replied Otmar Baron von der Schuer when he heard Baroness Thum’s feeble protestation, and amid the throng streaming from pretty St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem he stopped unexpectedly.

Please forgive my thoughtlessness, he added, speaking loudly in the sunny, cheerful cacophony that followed the somber service. He had it easy, since he towered over the crowd, but the two ladies had to make quite an effort to resist politely the thrust of the human current around them.

The late-August morning was redolent of resin; people who wanted to chat had to shout over the two bells ringing their farewell to the faithful.

Which made a peculiar impression on them.

Both of you are more than welcome at our table, nothing could be more obvious, of course, naturally, without a doubt. And he briefly bowed his handsome, smoothly chiseled soldierly head to Countess Auenberg, whom he had just met for the first time in his life. He sincerely hoped it was not for the last time; if she would be kind enough to oblige him by accepting such a hasty though heartfelt invitation, he said more quietly after the two bells fell silent, having sounded two small belated rings, please believe me, and above the human hubbub one could hear the singing of fieldfares, guarding their second batches of eggs.

Countess Auenberg had no idea what she should believe and why the baron was padding out his speech so much, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. Silent and bewitched, they looked into the depths of each other’s eyes, seeing through their cambered lights and reflections, which Baroness Thum did not fail to notice; indeed, their lack of restraint all but took her breath away.

The fieldfares singing on high, the wrens whistling at shoulder level, and the flocks of sparrows twittering at ground level amplified their sense of the space around them.

They gained a good insight into each other in a twinkling of the eye, as it were.

Yes, surely, with pleasure, replied the countess with some reserve and also some confusion about the depth of their mutual gaze and the capacious feeling of her inner space. Almost with reluctance. Which she must have heard in her own voice, because she tried to balance it with bubbly but not completely convincing freshets of enthusiasm. She lifted her voice above her own sentiments because she saw clearly that Schuer was not at all the decent fellow he wanted the world to see him as. The throng was carrying them along the meanwhile, and each of her sentences sounded like her last. She’d be separated from the one she had just come to know. She hadn’t counted on being the guest of such an important scientist, an unhoped-for honor.

But despite what she had seen in the depths of his eyes, she could not deny her attraction to him, and that made her edgy.

She owed him her gratitude in advance, she said, accompanying her words with a nervous little laugh, which made her face even prettier, because she wouldn’t be able to resist flooding him with questions. The baron might not believe her, but she was greatly interested in race biology and genetics research.

But Schuer found the countess’s enthusiasm neither amusing nor fawning; in fact, he did not believe she could be interested in anything, for in the depth of his soul he never seriously believed women would ever have a prolonged interest in any scientific topic or subject. For a moment he stared inexpressively at this shocking feminine phenomenon and then stopped listening to her altogether. Anyway, he had never heard of a family such as hers, which made him distrust the Hungarian woman with a German name. Regarding women, the most he was willing to concede was that they had patience for details or were good at collecting data. At any rate, he continued in an entirely different, rather soldierly manner as he turned to Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, I must exchange a few very personal and at the same time strictly official words with you.

You will understand, I’m sure, he added, but this too was more because of the presence of the foreign woman. The relationship between the baroness and him had been very tense, so he measured his words; they had to avoid arguing. Although it would not have occurred to the baroness that the unexpected invitation to lunch could be refused or that the baron might provide some explanation for his uncivil behavior. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the research workers were terrified of Schuer’s threatening countenance. There was actually nothing threatening in his appearance — on the contrary, everything about his mood, his manner, his attire was smooth, flawless, and poised — but with his perfection he reminded them of their own human imperfections, and almost all of them felt this.

They hastened to satisfy his every wish.

At this moment, Baroness Thum, with some anxiety, was hoping that her old wish would come true and that she would be sent to Rome. Her boss was not known for personal conversations or insignificant invitations, and given his high position, his house ran on a busy schedule and he had his share of social obligations.

There could be no other reason for this sudden lunch invitation but that the professor wished to give her confirmation of her mission to Rome.

At least the baroness could not think of any other.

Indeed, in Schuer’s life obligation had a larger part than pleasure. Like fine clockwork, he was reliable, quick, dutiful to the point of humility because he wanted to satisfy his idolized father’s never-uttered demands for quality; and for the same reason he was diligent and painfully impartial in his judgments; it would be very difficult to accuse him of cringing before authority. He had the reputation of being a deeply God-fearing man, and in some way he may have been one. To this day, he feared nothing more than the withholding of love, though he himself was more likely to do anything than to express love.

His pagan experiences had compelled him to be an even more perfect Christian.

Whenever he agreed with the Nazi leaders, he was basically obeying the commands of his own conscience, expressing his own convictions, but he was far from agreeing with them about everything. Because he always kept a higher scientific or religious standpoint in view, his opinions had great persuasive power, which allowed him occasionally to resist or be blunt.

The prestige of his science increased steadily, for it proposed many direct or indirect solutions to problems concerning growing human populations, problems to which the governments of fast-growing mass societies throughout the world, whether aristocratic or democratic, were but helpless bystanders. There was a need for definitive solutions to a number of provocative issues concerning population hygiene. And the more pressing the demands for his science became, the more rapidly did his career blossom. His fairness and selflessness were above suspicion, and with his powerful insights he unerringly separated the essential from the unessential and was excellent at managing and controlling things. He also had long experience. After his professor and mentor Eugen Fischer* retired, they could not have found a more energetic and ambitious man for the delicate job of running the world-famous institute.

One might say he had the proper education and expertise to take the helm.

Of course, his appointment would not have been even considered had his origin, traced back to the distant past, not been pure Aryan. He instinctively kept his distance from racist groups because of his deep contempt for the hoi polloi, and he favored neither absolutism nor anarchy, although he had an aversion to the physical proximity or even spiritual presence of Jewish persons. The characteristic traits of Jewish thinking disturbed his composure and indeed his entire mentality — their penchant for emotional exaggeration, their spectacular ideas, their fiery gesticulations, their scientific bluster, their effeminate features, and their hedonism — but he never talked to anyone about these reactions of his and in fact fought them heroically, mustering the full power of his Christian conscience, as if he were trying not to feel toward Jews what he felt about people beneath his rank, and he was loathe to wind up being influenced by other people’s extreme expressions.

On his maternal side, he came from a noble Baltic family, on his father’s side from a no less ancient clan in Kurhessen, whose men traditionally became members of Hesse’s order of knighthood, the Althessischer Ritterschaft. His father had often taken him down in the mines, which were frightening but where they would walk for miles; Sundays were the days for these shared excursions, after church and before the traditionally late lunch. In mine baskets powered by horse-driven winches, they would be lowered hundreds of meters underground, and he learned, from his father’s instructions and also from the pressure he felt at the top of his skull and in his lungs, to gauge how far down they were at any given time. Heat and darkness ruled, yet strong, cool airstreams blew; the beams and support poles creaked in the silence. Dampness dripped everywhere but in some places water gushed in torrents only to vanish with strange gurgles into openings that looked like gullets of hell; at other places abandoned strippings might suddenly shift, with rubble slipping and slamming noisily into the tipcarts.

The family was not simply in the business of mining; it exercised the Schuers’ ancient mining rights.

Otmar and his siblings spent their childhood summers on their maternal grandfather’s estate, where early on, and not only in the mines but also on the land itself, the children learned how and why they should control and take care of others for the sake of their own family. The art of disciplining and being disciplined captured the boy’s imagination, one might say. This is why he felt a strong calling for a military career. He was lucky: just after he was graduated from school, the war broke out, and in September 1914, on the memorable day when news came from the western front that in the face of relentless German attacks, Albert, king of the Belgians, had been forced to abandon his carefully guarded fortifications in Antwerp, Otmar was able, in the company of other noble and enthusiastic youth — oh, how they would have loved to have been there at the siege of the fortresses! and then the road to Paris is free! — to join the Gersdorff Rifle Regiment of Hessen as a Junker ensign. It hardly needs mentioning that he was a volunteer, thrilled no end not only by deep patriotic feelings but also by the peculiar circumstance that had several hundred young men from the best families stripping to their birthday suits simultaneously in order to appear in that condition before the health commission.

This was the first time for any of them that they had to stand so closely together, exposed to one another’s gaze in a mass of similar skin colors and bundles of muscles. Once they were free of their clothes, silence reigned in the enormous hall, the silence of bashfulness. At the news of successive victories, crowds of people gathered on the street outside, exulting and celebrating; complete strangers hugged and kissed. In the hall, the young men smelled one another in silence, and the thought occurred to most of them that from now on they knew something about one another that no one else did.

Countess Auenberg was thinking how much the renowned scientist, with his conspicuous physical attributes, his build, the sensitivity of his features, and his incredible strength, not to mention his seriousness and levelheadedness, reminded her of her fiancé. She sighed to herself, my, my, a truly experienced man, a man’s man. The resemblance caught her off guard. But Mihály was much kinder. He had nothing to hide. And he was more open; but of course he was, since he had nothing to hide. At least, once the thought occurred to her, she hoped he didn’t.

She couldn’t stop comparing all the young men who came into her view with him.

Yet in vain did she tip the balance to Mihály’s advantage, because she couldn’t deny that she felt a similar attraction to male bodies she judged to be similar to his.

Her strong attraction to Mihály, demonstrating which was frustrated by prevailing etiquette, had often shaken her physically and made her dizzy for long minutes. The reason the same attraction failed to seize her now, a feeling she would certainly have found out of place, was that they had brought with them some of the coolness of the church’s interior. Occasionally, it was enough merely to think of Mihály and she’d ask for a chair or a glass of water. As if she were not totally there, at the place where in fact she was. As if it were not she who saw and sensed the other person. As if her conscience unexpectedly claimed that she sensed their identical being by her physical attraction, even though she knew well — vehemently protesting her own thought — that this was but an illusion, a sensory error, surely nothing else.

Just because she missed him so, after only two days she did not suspect him.

Or this strange man.

Schuer indeed deserved the accolades due his sex; he was indeed a man’s man. He had been seriously wounded twice in 1917 in the western campaign, on battlefields in Flanders, and once earlier, with lighter wounds, at the siege of Gorlice, in Galicia, and on all three occasions he had received the silver medal for valor, along with the title vitéz; for exceptional bravery, he had also been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class. At the end of the war he was honorably discharged with the rank of captain. Then, in truth, he was obliged to hide his experiences — Countess Imola was not mistaken about that — and his mind was much tortured by what he had to hide, even though he seemed to lead an orderly, cloudless life with his wife and three children in the sunny and lovingly tended directorial villa on Ihne Street.

With Germany’s enormous wartime collapse, he had to give up his plans for a military career, had to abandon the flag to which he had pledged eternal allegiance in the summer of 1914; he had no choice, he could not have continued. His earlier convictions evaporated or, rather, deserted him. Yet even after two decades, his war experiences pursued him in the form of menacing images, not picturelike images but mostly visions and apparitions. He could never tell whether he saw, imagined, or only envisioned in his memory the impact of the bomb that had lifted the torso of his machine gunner, along with muddy clumps of earth spraying the sky, high into the air from a spot now emptied and exuding only heat, and, while the torn-off arms flew off in different directions, the gunner’s trunk, pared down to its bare frame but still alive, was skewered on a tree branch.

Had that really happened; had he in fact seen it.

Put another way, fear of insanity quietly, almost imperceptibly transformed his patriotism, and his strict upbringing has not allowed him to speak of this terrible renunciation to this day, not even with his friends.

He has hardly any friends.

Because he could not afford to engage in what he might rightfully have assumed to be friendship.

On the one hand, a feeling of friendship doesn’t pick and choose solely among people of the same rank, or according to rank or title. On the other hand, neither religion nor tradition can explain the shy physical tenderness and cruel physical brutality he had seen and profoundly experienced in water-soaked trenches, among barbed-wire obstacles, in the miserable barracks of military hospitals, and in overheated whorehouses reeking of tobacco in small Galician towns. Everything was beyond what could be measured by any social standard. When he returned, neither his mother, coming toward him in her clouds of perfume, nor his father, having in his model austerity grown very thin, could have known anything about the wild animals dazed with hunger and thirst who wandered aimlessly in forests razed bare by bombs, and about the camaraderie patched together out of cruelty and brotherly feeling — yet their youngest son had seen it all and lived through it all.

Regarding him, they became unsuspecting.

He could not but feel that with his war experiences, with everything he had done for the homeland, he was basely misleading his parents, and that with the moral state of his inner life he was deeply disappointing them. He could not play the good boy for them much longer. He carried with him everywhere his life of lost innocence. Which is to say, he did not understand how he might come to love, passionately and irresponsibly, another person of any rank or sex — an injured comrade or an unkempt Ukrainian whore whom he twice used, with their smell, their weeks-old stench — if at the next moment he could hand them over to death without a second thought. He could not get over the dreadful shadows of his own bravery and steadfastness, over the mass slaughter that he had participated in from start to finish and that, for the first time in the history of warfare, technology had required as a condition for military victory. He always had to be conducting something — given his responsibility to others he had no choice — but what happened never turned out to be what he had intended. When five years later he returned to his completely unfamiliar civilian life, where to his great surprise everything was predictable, his difficulty was not in forgetting the fallen or the images of hand-to-hand combat, but in being unable to forget those of his own comrades who had been maimed by bullets and whom no one could help, or those who had gone insane and whom he had to shoot or have shot.

Willi, for example, who for two difficult years had been his orderly and whom he had been calling sweet little Willi ever since, even though the resourceful, round-faced, always grinning peasant from Eifel had been everything but sweet. He ate human flesh and not because he was hungry; he was fascinated by the taste and offered it to everyone, since they all, being cut off from their supplies, were starving; he did this because he had gone mad, or he went mad because he ate human flesh. Sometimes, when he was lost in these thoughts, Baroness Erika had to raise her voice and call her husband two or three times before he realized she had been invoking his name.

The barrel of the pistol raised for firing probably sobered up the madman for at least a second; with his arms spread wide, he clung to the slippery wall of the dugout, his alert eyes sparkling, hoping that Baron von der Schuer would not do it.

Not to him.

The baroness had to call him ever more loudly until he finally came around and not only saw but knew where he was. Luckily, the naturally lively little woman probably thought her husband was preoccupied with some scientific question. In fact, his thoughts ventured into areas not yet illuminated by the sciences precisely because he had been thinking of scientific questions.

He was looking for the basis on which he could build his science.

That he was a nobleman, scion of an ancient clan, raised to behave honorably and chivalrously, and that he had been entrusted with the lives and fate of others — these facts had lost their purpose and significance in the war he had left behind. There, bare undisguised fear of death ruled, a mere desire to survive; no discipline or self-discipline could spare anyone’s body from it.

He had not been afraid; his body was afraid in his stead. He began to search for God in this bodily fear, sitting inside the fear, desperate and full of doubts; he searched for God so that in the blood, snow, mud, and feverish shivering he should not falter or go insane.

In the mass fear and suffering, God seemed very different from the God of his hours of childhood gullibility and adolescent rebellion. This God probably had no place in human events, and for Him to be absent He did not have to leave the stumps of bombed-out trees or bodies abandoned in their pain. In the absence of gullibility, Schuer wanted first to understand the body — easily offended, exposed to desires, subject to feelings, in which it is so simple to silence or snuff out reason and soul. For theological reasons he had confidence in the sciences of human anatomy and biology. He was interested in the body’s mechanics and chemistry; he had confidence, one might say, only in his apostate mind’s ability to reach a higher sense of bodily functions and then, perhaps, to find a god higher in rank or more ancient than the God of Christianity. He had once enjoyed reading Silesius, and because of him he fantasized about the god who lived separately in individual bodies, about traces of this god that had been left in each organism and could be measured by natural-scientific or mathematical means. He wanted to find that quality which everyone chatters irresponsibly about because it’s the primal reason for everyone’s existence, but which has no palpable sign either in history or in any form of man-made matter. He was so confident that in the body he would find this ancient sign, a trace of its origin, that he was ready to transfer his faith and conscience to science.

In this state of mind he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Marburg, where, after a few months spent in spiritual daydreams and mental convalescence, he could not avoid being entrusted again with a military mission. There might have been other candidates suited to the job — in those postwar semesters the student population was swarming with demobilized soldiers — yet they made him the commander’s adjutant because he had spent the most time in a staff position and in combat. General Walther Baron von Lüttwitz* was himself considered a very good-looking man, and he insisted on Schuer. He had kept his eye on this attractive, wealthy young man from a splendid family; frankly, he wouldn’t have minded if his daughter married him. As if he were saying to himself, yes, I would like to have my grandchildren come from this bright-faced, slightly indolent fellow. He evaluated the young man’s physical attributes with the reckoning of an experienced horse breeder. He was very proud that in his own case, past fifty, his muscles remained not only hard but also boyishly supple.

When a communist uprising began in Thuringia, at Lüttwitz’s wish Schuer, alongside his commander, led units of the Studentenkorps against them. Lüttwitz expected a lot from the difference in the condition of the two leaders’ musculature. Sometimes he’d grasp Schuer firmly by the shoulder, pat and squeeze him, or press his hard arms to feel what he saw. The homeland faces the greatest danger, godless civil war, brother against brother, as he put it in a famous public address. Armed bandits plunder, pillage and fornicate, murder, rob, ransack, and set things afire in ancient German cities.

Of which not one word was true.

In hours of need, everyone should suspend all personal concerns and devote everything to the cause of the nation.

Schuer did not have to suspend his personal concerns; on the contrary, in his heart he was happy about his new assignment, which he was to carry out alongside Frigate Captain Baron von Selchow, only a few years older than he. It offered him a good pretext, his intellectual doubts and devastating loneliness notwithstanding, to enter military service again and, on an apparently not too dangerous excursion, to reimmerse himself in a familiar milieu of simpler, rougher things.

Though cleansing operations and methodical house searches were not exactly to his liking, after the suppression of the rebellion and the temperate carrying out of the inevitable retaliations, he received the Large Cross, decorated with a saber, of the Order of the Lions of Zähring, Germany’s highest decoration for a soldier.

He could thank Lüttwitz’s silent intervention for this.

This police venture — it could hardly be called a military operation — which ended by early April with very few losses to his men, brought about a thorough change in Schuer’s life. Once the Spartacist uprising had been put down and republican forces throughout Germany had triumphed over the mostly monarchist advocates of a coup d’état, the Weimar authorities charged Lüttwitz with a long list of terrible crimes. To avoid arrest, he and his family escaped to Budapest, where the godless reds were routed by August and there was no fear of republican rule.

In truth, the change had already occurred on the early March afternoon when previously established units, six companies to be exact, assembled in orderly columns under Schuer’s single command, wearing their new pike-gray uniforms without stripes or chevrons, marched smartly on the Marbach highway to the Dammelberg. That is when, almost imperceptibly, many things changed in his life; thanks to some vision or realization, as it were, he found his ultimate vocation. They lit enormous fires, they sang as loudly and energetically as their throats would allow. Although his musicality, honed on several instruments, did not go to the point of his singing along with his men — he merely mouthed the words feelingly — Schuer unreservedly entrusted his body to the waves of shared sensual intemperance, while, his eyes blinded by the light of enormous fires, he observed the fields sunk in mist from the nearby river and the twilight-reddened walls and turrets of the imposing fortified castle of Landgraf, surveying simultaneously, as it were, the living, the historical, and the lifeless. The warm sensation of his left-behind but oft-missed wartime life returned generously to his limbs.

There were hardly any greenhorns among them. Almost all the men were officers, war veterans, athletic, strong, and healthy men who had survived their wounds and now wanted to study or to continue their scientific careers, which the war had interrupted.

Never again did he feel abandoned or alone with his wartime experiences.

He saw clearer than daylight that he hardly differed from these men in anything, and that was his good fortune.

He belonged, though in all probability had no individuality.

Or perhaps what liberal thinkers call one’s individuality in fact plays but a very small part in nature’s grand scheme. In itself, individuality probably isn’t worth a grain of rice. Among these wonderful men, individuality makes a difference hardly worth mentioning.

We are but samples, he thought with no small amount of fright.

In reality, the chosen ones of nature and divine Providence. Not only fit for reproduction — our dead would have been no less fit for that — but the most deserving of this purpose from a racial viewpoint, if one may put it that way, and all this has nothing to do with the individual soul or individual peculiarities. Who else should be multiplying if not these men who had withstood the crucible and survived.

What else could Providence have wanted when it so mercilessly destroyed our weaker mates.

This soul-stirring, painful realization overpowered him, though the great smoke and infernal noise might have played a part. In a nature suffused by divine Providence the theory of natural selection works more brutally than the power of Christian charity. Within decades, this brutal reality will turn Germany’s devastating defeat into a universal victory. And under the influence of this realization these magnificent men became for him like members of a blood alliance sworn to secrecy: the future of the nation may be entrusted to the contents of their loins.

He became alarmed at this pagan thought, but could not help thinking that the ancient God who cast off His Christian charity loved those whom He decimated.

Was not the treasure of the Holy Grail a secret code of advantageous racial characteristics, he asked himself, and he had no doubt about the answer.

Or rather, it seemed to him that God had taken off His Christian mask before him and would never again show His barbaric face to anyone. He shuddered to imagine seeing God face-to-face. Blessed be He, he would have said to himself, but right now he could neither pray nor express his gratitude; he could only think, very rapidly.

He was counting.

Altogether two generations, four at the most, and we’ll come out of this ignominy stronger than those who suffered fewer losses and who with their flawed individuals are now lording it over us. The enormity of this realization made him falter, he had to lean on someone, and an unknown mate standing next to him instinctively hugged him, held him up with his strong shoulders.

Among noblemen, behavior like this was not a matter of course.

He felt gratitude toward his mate and more profound love than toward any woman, or than the love he should feel as a Christian toward a helpful fellow being.

When the fires had burned down to smoldering embers, the beer was running low, or the men were becoming short-winded or somehow seized by sorrow over the lost war and terrible peace, and suddenly they felt surrounded by memories of their fallen comrades, they formed a huge circle, standing shoulder to shoulder, opened the slits of their pants, triumphantly and ostentatiously thrust forward their hips to honor the ancient Germanic custom of high-arced cross-pissing before setting out on their dangerous mission, which demanded much good luck.

Contrary to all his earlier vows to preserve his seed until the day he found the person worthy of it, whom he would marry, as was only proper, that night, for the first time since his demobilization, Schuer went with the other men to a brothel. He knew he was breaking his vows, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was doing so not for himself but because of the others. He did think of the Lüttwitz girl, the charming and educated Andria, but felt no special pangs on her account. He knew and no longer had any doubts that Willi had had to perish at his hand because of Providence, so that only the strong and mentally healthy would stay alive. He was repelled by the thought of having to marry a girl with a congenital hip dislocation just because of the obligatory propriety prevailing among his peers, and now, for the first time in his life, he accepted his revulsion. Willi was backing away from him, backing away and looking at him as he walked cheerfully with the others on the nighttime street, quietly dreading a future that he happened to be avoiding. I could not have done anything else then, and I cannot do anything else now. He no longer had to justify or feel ashamed about his natural revulsion at the cripple.

What happened to Willi hurt him more than what would happen to Andria, left to her fate.

That last lucid moment on the dirty face, its human flesh fried to a sooty black; that last look on his sweetly, trustingly shining face.

He felt that his terrific climax in a randomly selected woman was due to the tremendous strength and magical joy of belonging among survivors, and he ejaculated into her with a hitherto never experienced intensity.

He screamed and bellowed in the messy bed of the woman’s cubbyhole reeking with face powder and bleach, just as he had when being prepared for the removal of a bullet from his shoulder and the surgeon suggested that he not bite his lip, which would only damage more flesh, which he’d have to stitch up, that he not hold back but let all the pain pour out, but that he not move.

I told you not to move, Lieutenant, damn it.

In his infernal pleasure, his entire being was possessed by awareness of a power linking him to other people’s bodies. He knew well that neither the loins nor the unpleasant perfume of the cheap little woman from Marburg had anything to do with it. Because at the instant of ejaculation males freeze and do not move. Or rather, such a shattering gratification could have happened only in her, in such a depraved woman, whose hastily rinsed vagina was still sloppy with someone else’s seed — no denying that. The shock was so intense and so unprecedented, and he was drained for so many hours, that he wanted to know what had happened, or what was happening at times like this in the impassively functioning universe.

And he remained consistent throughout his subsequent scientific activities in his efforts to clarify this question.

In such activities, one becomes stuck on Creation, as if nailed to eternity.

As an experiment, the night before deployment, when the cars of the train were being hooked up and the freight wagons packed, almost a thousand volunteer students, horses, fodder, machine guns, and fourteen cannons ready to start for Thuringia at dawn on March 19, as if going to the front, Schuer went back to the woman, who was happy to see him, but the shocking pleasure could not be repeated. It became the usual forced, dull little gratification and in the circumstances humiliating rather than pleasurable — almost identical with those pale sensations, barely rising above the monotony of thrusts, that later accompanied him throughout his marriage.

However dubious this may sound, this turned out to be his first successful, though isolated and inconclusive, anthropological experiment.

When the students returned from Thuringia to the university in April, he once again stole into the brothel, as if to hide his scientific passion from himself, but he did not find the woman. The rest of the girls there, strangely, kept quiet. As if trying to avoid answering him, as if not hearing what this young man, a medical student well known in the city, was so curious about.

Or they could not comprehend what more he wanted when everything was already at his disposal.

The Order of the Lions of Zähring, its medal a numismatic rarity, worn by its recipients on a green-gold brocade ribbon on their dress uniforms or on immaculate shirtfronts when they were in tailcoats, had been founded a century earlier by the grand duke of Baden, Karl Ludwig. The chancellery appointed to grant the award commissioned Moscow’s most famous jeweler, Fabergé, to design and make the medal; later on Le MaÎtre too made a few exquisite samples in Paris that were perhaps more beautiful than their predecessors; and the requisite ribbons were always woven in the Venice workshop of the Montenuovo princes. The medal itself was made of finely and fastidiously combined elements: a lacy frame made of red and yellow gold imitated bizarre converging acanthus leaves and gave the impression of a jewel; on this frame was a cross, enameled with molten green glass and lined on both sides with silver foil, at the center of which, on a beautifully cambered heraldic shield decorated with hair-thin strands of spun gold, one could see a tiny masterpiece of enamel painting. The incredibly detailed miniature, painted under a magnifying glass, depicted the ruins of the Zährings’ fortified castle, richly overgrown with centuries of vegetation. They referred to it as their family castle, but it was a feared medieval eyrie, the kind of fortress surrounded by thick bastions that is believed to be impregnable and impossible to take. Obviously the award had to signify that lo and behold its valiant recipient had managed to prevent total ruination against all odds.

On the reverse of the cross, on the shield decorated with spun gold, the embossed miniature of a muscular rearing lion was depicted.

It became clear to Schuer — perhaps he concluded this from inexplicable signs — that the poor woman from Marburg must have killed herself, slit her veins or drunk caustic soda, who knows, so he could not count on further experimentation. For a long time he toyed with this notion — that she had committed suicide because of him. That she had done so because of the extreme and merciful good that Schuer had been compelled to experience in her specifically and in most ignominious circumstances. He was very curious to know whether the woman had experienced the same thing. After all, it was for that knowledge of hers that he wanted to return to her, he kept telling himself. And why would she not experience the same thing with him, even though she’d shown no signs of it. He wanted to know. Was the extent of pleasure a function of personal characteristics or a mechanism to ensure the dynamics and frequency of the reproductive act — thus disconnecting, or lifting, the individual from the system of his or her own characteristics. This question truly excited him.

For more than a century the grand duchy’s chancellery had debated its choices in the greatest anonymity. Given the delicate nature of the matter, to make their decision they needed information from as many sources as possible, and checked as thoroughly as possible. The candidates not only had to have accomplished exceptional military feats that helped to protect the country from ruin, but also had to be men of flawless reputation, which would guarantee that they would never disgrace the respectable knightly order. Otmar Baron von der Schuer not only had the reputation of being such a man but, despite some weaknesses and occasional lapses, was such a man.

The one thing that might have induced the chancellery to further deliberation would have been knowledge of Schuer’s regular visits to the brothel.

And as he had never done before, driven by the desire to remain faultless and to assuage his inauspicious announcement well in advance, he now placed his hand on Baroness Thum zu Wolkenstein’s arm, richly encased in fluttering white silk. A gesture in which there was a touch of unpardonable condescension; a well-bred person would not behave like this with his peers.

The baroness was not, in her origins, socially inferior to Schuer, nor was she a woman without means, but in conformity with her scientific activity and puritan inclinations she usually dressed very simply, sometimes not even elegantly but in a plain skirt and blouse. Now, however, she wore an intricately collared shirtwaist with puffed sleeves reminiscent of national costumes and wide cuffs at the wrists; it was quite fashionable, as was her slender, slightly bell-shaped skirt of raw silk, slit high on the sides, which gave her a girlish silhouette. She had made an effort today because she did not wish to be underdressed when with the countess. It was part of her dressing peculiarities that she never wore jewelry now, but she purchased the finest and most expensive shoes and handbags, which she selected fastidiously and in great quantities. She knew no moderation in this, for she adored odd and whimsical items on her hands and feet.

It seemed that the strange men in the Lützow Street bar also knew about this passion of hers, the men who grabbed her legs and felt them up in the dim reddish light of the private room. Not only the plush seats but also the walls and the ceiling of the Boîte Rouge were covered with red velvet, and there was hardly any lighting. They held her arms, their strong fingers made their way up from her ankles and down to her elbows, but she did not let them touch her breasts.

Which did not occur by chance but because of the shame she felt about her excitement.

But at this moment the baron’s unpardonably intimate gesture was not meant for her; it was his way of introducing himself to the Hungarian countess. As if he wished to initiate the woman stranger in the depths of his tenderness, even if with his gesture he was suggesting depths to which he had never descended since to his great sorrow he had never been able to love anyone, though he had seen with his own eyes people who were capable of it, even of mutual love.

The hand that Baroness Thum’s arm could not forget even hours later was a comfortably heavy, strong hand.

As opposed to her older friend, the Hungarian countess was dressed with heart-warming elegance. Lately the darling of diplomatic circles for being the betrothed of the regent’s son, she had arrived in Berlin two days earlier at the invitation of Emmy Göhring,* that truly charming grand patron of the arts. As part of her semi-official visit, and accompanied by Emmy and other highly placed ladies, the countess was supposed to drop in on Arno Breker at his imposingly large studio in Käuzchensteig to view the sculptor’s latest monumental nudes.* One might say the countess was unrelenting in her pursuit of cosmopolitan elegance, and in her own country this was considered a kind of muted political stance. She felt that a certain social extravagance was obligatory, and to society’s great surprise her future mother-in-law, Her Excellency the wife of the regent, enthusiastically supported her in this view. In Berlin, where her peers painfully preserved a semblance of modesty in their severe two-piece suits, sincerely hoping that they wouldn’t be charged with bowing to cosmopolitanism, she had a powerful sense of her provocative youthfulness and her obstinacy in matters of taste.

As if even with her extravagant wardrobe she intended to emphasize the semi-official character of her visit.

Count Svoy, the protocol chief of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, in a private conversation had given her to understand what was expected of her.

The count had most unpleasant-smelling breath and, in addition, the bad habit of leaning too close to his interlocutor to emphasize the confidential nature of his words. His country will not restrict its own freedom or relinquish its spiritual independence because of the two nations’ allied relationship or because of charming Madame Göhring. A statement that the countess, leaning back almost more than was possible in her armchair, understood well and endorsed wholeheartedly. Or at least, we preserve appearances in tune with our own foreign-policy interests. Now, peering out from under her mauve straw hat decorated with gently fluttering plumes, impudently pulled down on her brow, she followed Schuer’s daring gesture with lively interest and some repugnance.

The familiarity revealed to her more of the two persons’ tense and complicated relationship than they would have wanted to know or let the outside world notice. After such a moving sermon, continued Schuer in a much lower tone, in a voice adjusted to the intimacy of the gesture, one no doubt feels the urge to unburden one’s soul.

I’m sure this is understandable, he added.

Then again he interrupted his own apparently polite but rather absentminded sentence with a peremptory wave of his hand to indicate that he expected both women for lunch and hastily turned his back to join his family, which had been swept to the margins of the throng.

Daring, daring, stirring, an enthralling man, Countess Auenberg remarked, not without an edge to her voice, while with their gloved hands they both waved cordial good-byes over people’s heads to Baroness Erika, Schuer’s wife.

I guess you never know where you stand with him.

The sky above Berlin that day was brilliantly and cloudlessly blue.

No doubt, replied Baroness Thum with a slightly exaggerated severity, he is a stirring and unpredictable man, that’s true, but it would not be advisable to forget for even a moment that above all he is a wonderful scientist with a clear, brilliant mind, and therefore one can forgive him for many things.

And before they started off together on the shady street fragrant with the smell of pines, the baroness stole one more fleeting glance at the countess’s face shining with youth and health, to see whether Schuer’s rude manners had insulted her guest. It had been rumored that the Horthy boy, Mihály, would be elected Hungary’s king, and then this young friend, who was also best friends with Geraldine, queen of Albania, and because of that friendship already a frequent visitor in European courts, would herself become a queen.

And you know, she said with a small, raspy laugh, which resonated both with self-mockery and with admiration bordering on hatred for her boss, I can’t help myself, his manly beauty never fails to move me.

I could not help noticing that it affected you too, she added cautiously.

From under her hat Countess Auenberg gave her a rather inquiring glance, for she had unerringly caught the jealous edge and intention of the remark.

How can you say such a thing, how can you even think such a thing, she replied reproachfully, though not without some self-irony or defiance.

I don’t want to know what you think.

Oh, please forgive me. I’ve been carried away by my own lack of restraint.

Lack of restraint was a delicate subject for many reasons, and just as frequently as they managed to avoid it, they also fell into its trap. The two women were deeply devoted to each other, the girl to the grown woman and, oddly, the mature woman to the younger one. Which they both felt was unusual, and which they accounted for by the great difference in their ages and experiences. On the one hand Countess Auenberg and her two sisters had been small children when their pitiless mother left them; she’d run away with a trickster and they never saw her again; she and the trickster were allegedly living somewhere abroad in very modest circumstances. And on the other hand Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein had been blessed with a son conceived in a very early love affair, and ever since the little boy’s birth had been living in strict scientific seclusion, as if in continual penitence; she always found a place for the child, never giving up hope that one day her family would forgive her. For these reasons, neither of them thought silly and pointless sentiments were permissible, and naturally they did not speak of them — although there wasn’t much they could do about them. From the first moment of their friendship they had a secret language, and in their quiet, persistent rebellions, which they indulged in as a counter to their lack of restraint, they revealed much to each other in this language.

If I may be candid with you, Countess Imola said quietly.

I count on nothing but, said Baroness Karla dryly.

All right, his physique is pleasing, his mouth is beautiful, I grant you, and there’s something disarming in his facial expression too, as if he were looking into your depths and seeing your little feminine thoughts, but his nose, if I may put it this way, must cause alarm in everyone, in me it was real panic.

The baroness gave her a look. His nose of all features, his nose.

To be honest, I don’t understand your enthusiasm.

Of all his features you object to his nose, I’m very surprised, Imola — why deny it, I’m astounded. And how peculiar you are about the nose of your betrothed, my God, what do you want with all this. Yesterday, how thoroughly you described to me your future father-in-law’s snub nose. Involuntarily she thought of the red of the Boîte and the pretty little ivory godemiché; a mysterious good friend had made this his parting gift, as if to say that from now on she’d have to worry about her pleasures on her own.

He had vanished from her life the same way he had suddenly appeared in it.

Papa Miklós has a kindly nose, yes.

In that case, I must have misunderstood your annoyance.

It’s possible, obviously. That must have been it.

It sounds strange, it sounds more suspicious with every word. You’re acting very strangely today.

Deep in their own oppressive thoughts, a little bruised by each other, they walked on, silent against the pattering of their high heels.

She kept the little Chinese godemiché, shiny with centuries of use, in her bedroom, in the Chinese writing cabinet that could be locked.

But the association of ideas confused her, because compared to the angelic being clip-clopping next to her, who was obviously rushing unstoppably to her doom, she thought of herself as a deeply depraved person.

Someone looking back from the far side of the abyss of fateful things.

Don’t take this amiss now, said the countess, her voice both passionate and calculating, it’s as if he had not a nose but a trunk, a beak. It grows straight out of his forehead, she said, blustering because she was struggling with real emotions. She had to overcome her attraction to him at all cost so as not to endanger others’ attraction to her, which was more important to her than anything.

As if it were the beak of a marabou, he’s ready to stick it in you, or of a penguin, certainly not a human nose.

Big bird, she cried.

She has been observing Countess Auenberg for more than ten years.

Each time it surprised her anew what an enormous amount of destructive hatred this delicate, exceedingly intelligent being — blessed with an angelic figure and impectable manners — must deflect and stave off with the help of social conventions. How she must be raging inside. And this forced her to think once again of her own sensual life, condemned to muteness. Yet there was nothing personal in Imola’s raging, she remained truly naïve. Baron von der Schuer, whom she had just met, could not have elicited and did not deserve her concentrated hatred.

These obviously inherited neurotic symptoms were clear to the baroness.

Poor thing: these Auenbergs are capable of flying into rages over the most trivial things and in the most unexpected situations.

Being a bit taller and stronger than Imola, she looked down cautiously at her.

Lest she confuse her even more with pity.

And then she became angry with this silly pitiable girl; despite all her understanding and forgiving she became angry with her. She wants to take this man away from her; for that, the little one would have the finesse, wouldn’t she. She became so angry she almost began to rage herself, her own family’s neurosis being characterized by a dangerous absence of an ability to relinquish tranquillity and discrimination.

What a viper.

She is trying with her words to ruin, to pulverize my attraction to him, which I need for my career if for nothing else.

What a sharp little tongue she has. She is picking at me with her sharp little tongue.

Although she still felt the weight of Schuer’s hand on her arm, she knew that beyond their common scientific interest she had no chance with him. This stupid uneducated socialite beauty would have plenty of chances, however.

And she also had to acknowledge that no matter how many names she had called her — dizzy hen, silly goose, whatever — the woman was not stupid.

Sometimes we women are frightened by significant symbols of raw vitality, she replied considerately, as if she were ready, despite her excessive emotion, to protect the younger though probably no longer untouched woman, but there’s no need to blame anyone for this. Think about it, whom can you blame for a certain kind of nose. Come, my dear, don’t be so childish.

A veritable freak, the countess cried, hysterical and not to be calmed, as if with neurotic strength she would avenge the emotional injuries she had suffered a moment earlier.

If you ask me, he probably has other bodily deformities too, he must have, believe me, this man is hiding something.

And I know what it is, she exclaimed at last, enraged and almost desperate.

They burst out laughing at this, which satisfied them both. They naturally laughed with the same malevolent little-girlish joy; after all, they were laughing about a showy, self-satisfied man, and behind his back.

What a little devil you are, and you don’t even know what you’re talking about, my dear, said the Baroness Thum, laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes.

And the little devilry bound them together with a special strength. They would never behave like this with other people.

As usual you don’t know, how could you possibly, she said, and, clicking open the clasp of her wonderful little snakeskin handbag to take out her batiste handkerchief and blot her tears, she put on a deceitfully dreamy face to indicate that she was not ready to give away all her secrets.

Believe me, the corner of her mouth seemed to say, there are plenty of them.

In the meantime, her soul nearly froze with the pleasure-filled image. Her great scientific rival, at whose hands she had suffered defeat after defeat, might have on his body some carefully concealed and embarrassing abnormality. Because of which he should have had himself sterilized long ago instead of bestowing three children on the world.

This had never occurred to her.

He has three nipples. I will count his teeth. Maybe he’s got two sets of testicles.

Which this ugly little witch feels or notices better than I do.

Well, that’s wonderful, she cried.

I know it’s not proper to talk about things like this with you, the countess continued, enjoying the way she could show her worst side to Karla. As a matter of fact, it’s not proper to do it with anyone, but I can’t help it.

Fortunately Karla was able to cover her profile with the handkerchief while blotting tears from the corners of her eyes perhaps a little too carefully.

On the contrary, she answered, charmed by the countess’s openness, our famous science, my dear, consists of nothing but our debating just such questions and proposing all sorts of dubious hypotheses. This is what we are certified for, my dear, if I may put it that way. God creates many deformities and bodily abnormalities, and we carefully collect them, categorize and label them. Of course God did not specify what the norms of perfection were and we have no way of knowing whether he deposited them somewhere. Maybe it won’t interest you, but Schuer wrote his postdoctoral thesis on this very subject, and our bloodiest arguments are over questions of pathology. Ever since then, he’s been publishing the same paper over and over in all the racial-biological textbooks, to the point of becoming ridiculous.

Well, I shouldn’t burden you with this.

But you can believe me that every person is a freak, deformed from birth. If you take a closer look at them, you can see it with your own eyes.

Veritable monsters.

You can’t be so innocent as not to have noticed.

Only we are perfect and flawless, the two of us, cried the countess with painful pleasure, because she understood only too well what the other woman was talking about, and at this moment Baroness Thum indeed saw her as beautiful.

Which instantly made her feel younger and more slender herself, despite her torments of neediness and guilt feelings. She wanted to shout and protest, no, no, alas, alas, we’re not more perfect or more flawless than other people; it was part of her scientific credo that inherited deformities were intrinsic to a person’s beauty and indispensable for truly exceptional talent, which is why she opposed the sterilization of flawed individuals that Schuer approved and encouraged. She thought the practice of selection on the basis of racial biology and genetics was a crime against the German people, its consequences unpredictably destructive for the entire Nordic race. At most she approved of euthanasia for a much smaller part of the population, and certainly the deformed and mentally ill were to be kept from reproducing.

At most, making them disappear, putting them out of sight, which would eliminate superfluous expenses.

But she kept quiet, gave no voice to her scientific arguments.

Who else could be more beautiful, she cried with painful pleasure, as they gazed at each other, delighting in the reality of the person their eyes beheld.

I wouldn’t allow myself to say something like this to anyone else, said the countess quietly, almost somberly.

I believe you, I believe almost everything you say, my dear, said the baroness, though she was inexplicably irritated after their blissful harmony of the moment earlier. But I’d like to know how you came up with this foolishness.

Her silent admirer appeared to her in his physical reality, the one who with a certain regularity gratified her in the red-velvet room, while other men, total strangers emerging from the dimness, ran their fingers all over her spread legs and her bare arms raised above her head, but he never physically made her his own, never.

Even though, judging by the signs, he was not impotent.

The flavor of this dark adventure came from this insane lack.

Lack filled her life and made preparation for the one enormous gratification more exciting.

As if with her earlier comment, she had opened the gates and water was now rushing toward her uncontrollably.

What she knew of the man were his lips and his tongue. She made their acquaintance on her vagina, held open by her fingers, or on her clitoris; and she was also familiar with the peculiar fragrance of his bald head, damp with perspiration, as it rose from her loins; that, and nothing more.

Yet she penetrated the depth of the man’s passion; they shared their passion.

She let him do anything, but she would never touch her admirer. As if she were afraid that he would crumble to dust in her fingers. Occasionally, she would grab the strange men in his stead, the men who in the red darkness offered her their services, their hands, lips and tongues, and also their penises.

I’d be much obliged if you told me the sources of your information, she continued, still annoyed.

What information do you have in mind.

Where did you get it.

Get what.

Maybe I misunderstood you.

I rather think that I do not understand you.

But of course you do, you little beast.

What you say surprises me, I find your choice of words unwarranted, but I guess you’re no less a monster than I am.

They understood each other so well that they now, at this juncture of their conversation, faltered in enjoyable dread. Karla blushed — to her core, she felt — given the emotions and memories evoked by the loudly spoken words.

Obviously neither of them knew where to go from here.

You can’t be serious, said the countess, her voice gliding even higher than its usual high, sharp little-girl pitch, when you say you know him so intimately.

What are you talking about, said the baroness, becoming more entangled in her own blushing, you’re the one who spoke as if you knew the secrets of his body.

How could I, this is the first time I’ve ever seen him in my life.

They stopped, simultaneously, on the shady side of the sunlit street.

There was silence between them, the baroness did not respond or give any sign, and in the great Sunday serenity only the twittering of wrens could be heard in the distance.

In fact, Countess Auenberg didn’t want to know the answer to the question she had asked or at least implied.

Shameless, how can anyone be so shameless, grumbled Baroness Thum, rather enjoying the impasse.

Yet Imola did want to ask the older woman what might happen to her in married life. In this regard, the previous day’s visit to the atelier had quite upset her. She was not very young anymore, twenty-two years old; she needed to know many things about the male sex in general. She needed objective information. If there was such a thing. Would Karla tell her in detail what Mihály might do to her. There is no way of knowing such things. How should a woman give herself to a man without seeming to be either cold or lascivious. She observed the sculptor with his thinning hair and his statues, those enormous male bodies, with this question in mind. The sculptor quite resembled Mihály. And what would this famous unfamiliar man do with her if she took off all her clothes and gave him free rein. Or would men just pull up her nightshirt to get to her. She hadn’t dared risk the question of what she would do with such a man.

How should she give in to what she feels, when she’s never seen them naked and doesn’t even want to.

Not anybody.

Except, maybe Karla.

What did Karla do when she gave in.

What comes after a kiss, what should she do, she really needs to know. For her, letting another person’s tongue and saliva into her mouth was repulsive enough. Mihály behaved like a gentleman, kissing her only dryly at first, treating her gently, with consideration — only afterward. As if initiating her gradually. This made her almost explode with jealousy when she thought about it. It gnawed at her when she thought about what he had been doing. It was truly humiliating, disgraceful.

Surely he must have learned from someone what he was teaching her.

Or perhaps he too feared what the two of them would do together eventually.

Could he have learned things from dissolute women; but then he can’t possibly teach them to her.

Yet she was young enough — or, thanks to her flawless education, lacked enough practical experience and knowledge — to believe that she could tell her thoughts and doubts to someone, that these things could be talked about.

Like telling a story.

She came to have a secret hope that there might be a person with whom she could talk about such delicate matters — or anything else. She would talk it over with Karla. Slowly this notion evaporated. First she hadn’t formulated her questions. She did not get anywhere with that. The male nudes she had seen the day before, all of them ten feet tall or more, which Breker was making for the inner courtyard of the Reich Chancellery, depressed her so much she couldn’t have asked him anything. So this, then, is what a man is or would be like, she thought to herself as she looked at the sculptor, this man who occupied himself with these men who resembled one another and whom the sculptor resembled too. Her situation was complicated by the fact that she’d spent her entire childhood around stables and greenhouses; she was well versed in questions of animal breeding and plant cultivation, and knew almost everything about the reproduction of plants and animals and about their reproductive organs. She was truly interested in genetics, and it hurt her that Schuer considered her a silly woman. She hoped for a chance at lunch to show him that she knew about Mendelism. In the studio she had moved away from the group of women so that she wouldn’t have to stare at the monumental male nudes, which, by the way, did not differ from one another in the least. The experienced women she’d been with — Margret Speer, Maria von Below, and Magda Goebbels — were all married. She felt abandoned among them, and for a while she chose to look at the statues of horses decorating the fountain, but their rearing, too smoothly sculpted muscles failed to comfort her because they too seemed to be copies.

Guided by her physical desires and repugnance, she could well imagine the act of mating. It was clear that the world of plants and animals must have a structural connection with the human world, so there could be no great difference in the essence of the reproductive practices. But she persistently overimagined what propriety demanded that she underimagine. She could not correlate her wild adolescent ideas about reproduction with her own objectivity-seeking personality and with her upbringing built on appearances and formalities, just as it would have been hard to imagine Mihály Horthy without his impeccably tailored suits and neighing with pleasure like a horse.

They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled amiably.

Each smiled to herself, the two smiles unavoidably touched, and although the smiles meant something different for each of them, they could not know that. They felt that with their smiles they were stepping into a long-desired mutual space.

The really big question is, said the unflappable Baroness Thum, what am I going to wear for that luncheon.

I too thought about what it should be, a deux-pièces or possibly trois-pièces.

I’d been counting on a nice quiet meal for the two of us — comfortable and easy.

And I have the greatest need to have a long conversation with you.

My sweet little one, I understand, I too was looking forward to it so much.

I’d like to ask your advice about so many things, answers to questions that really go beyond accepted propriety.

If I may put it that way.

Believe me, there’s no question I wouldn’t love to answer for you, provided I have an answer.

Hearing this reply, Imola’s heart began to beat harder; yes, in that case she could ask Karla, and she would too.

She did not know what.

But the tone of her voice alarmed the baroness a little. Good Lord, what does this ignorant little creature want from me.

In the absence of mutual trust, they again laughed.

Ever since our engagement, no, I don’t want to lie to you, from the mere announcement of our engagement, our life has been nothing but fulfillment of duties. As if I were being given a taste of what is waiting for me in the future when it comes to public appearances.

And on top of that, I’m also burdening you with my own heavy obligations.

These people’s problem is not that they are monsters, believe me, but I’d never have thought that so many wonderful people walk around with bad breath.

Come, come, let’s not exaggerate.

I can’t help longing for the good old days.

What good old days, you’re still a child practically.

When on a beautiful summer morning she innocently got out of bed, walked out on the terrace, down the sunny steps, and kept walking barefoot in the dewy grass.

I am truly sorry to rob you of your free hours.

Oh, don’t make it into a reproach, this is only a bit of complaining, who else may I complain to if not to you. I am full of complaints, and you may have an explanation for my constant state of irritation, but I feel I shall be happy, I can feel it, very happy and satisfied. Mihály is a wonderful man, believe me.

I do have one saving idea, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, said Baroness Thum, somewhat dampening the other woman’s enthusiasm, and at this moment they stopped by a low ivy-covered fence. You can have a migraine at any time for any reason, and you need not feel an obligation or duty about anything on my account. Erika is a simple soul, you should know she was born a Vierort and because of dear Otmar she has accustomed herself to all sorts of bad habits.

If I am a burden to you at this lunch, I’d just as soon stay away, of course.

How could you be a burden to me, on the contrary.

What kind of family are these Vierorts, tell me, asked the countess evasively — she was somewhat irritated — it seems I’ve not been well informed.

Nothing special, bourgeois, said the baroness in a tone indicating that while she understood someone might marry below his rank, to do so far from a natural act.

With her, I can make any excuse for you, no problem at all, she added.

A long moment passed during which no discernable feeling showed on Countess Auenberg’s symmetrical face. Perhaps the surprise made her indifferent, but what surprised her was not that Schuer had married below his rank, but that her friend was willing to play devious games to keep her away from this fetching man. Imola could have continued her earlier thought by saying that she kept walking in the dewy grass until she reached the tiny lake hidden among old willows where, blinded by morning light, she had caught sight of Karla in the water up to her thighs. She had arrived only the day before, in the afternoon, but her dubious reputation had preceded her by years.

The Auenberg girls were dying to see this fallen woman at last, related to the Wolkensteins on the Tyrolean branch of the family, whose illegitimate child, only a few weeks after its birth and with the mediation of the girls’ stepmother, was placed with a wet nurse in a village on their estate in Fánt. They wanted to see the innocent baby as soon as possible. At supper the evening before, however, the fallen female relative had disappointed and surprised them. She was everything but a jolly debauched female. A serious, severely beautiful, not too well dressed student, pale from the difficulties in seeing her baby again, on whom nothing could be seen of a fast life. Still, for long minutes, standing in the lake, she seemed quite unlike her well-behaved self of the previous evening; and she did not notice the young girl spying on her. With her arms held out tautly, she was slapping the surface of the water around her like a child. Yet she was stark naked under the open sky where any of the servants or the gardener could have surprised her; she was so deeply immersed in herself that she seemed unaware of her brilliant nakedness.

Which, at the castle of Fánt, was not an imaginable thing.

To strip naked.

The Auenberg girls were given baths separately; the strict morals with which they were being raised forbade them to see not only other people without their clothes but also one another and, if possible, even themselves.

They begged their stepmother in vain to take their carriage and ride over to see the unfortunate little boy.

We are receiving Karla with sisterly love, their stepmother instructed them, she may come to us anytime she wishes to visit her little boy. To judge her way of life or to forgive her sins is not our business, but we are not bound socially to her illegitimate child.

This severity pained Imola no less than did thinking about her own mother, whom she could not, despite all her efforts, cast out of her heart. Sometimes she thought of the accursed little boy so she could tell herself it was his suffering that hurt her so much and not the yawning absence of her own mother. And Karla’s severely beautiful nakedness enthralled her for a lifetime; her sun-illuminated hair pinned up high on her head, the rich, dark pubic hair on the mound of her modesty so bright in the light reflected from the lake’s surface.

To this day, it was enough to gaze at her blondness, winding and twisting in myriad strands on her magically cambered high, strong forehead to remember her mound of Venus.

Actually, what on earth do you want of me, she suddenly cried, stifling her temper so forcefully that the demand sounded more like a plea. They could both hear the quiet street filling up with her voice, and they both disapproved of it. What reached her consciousness with a slight delay and surprised her was the kind of impossibility Karla was suggesting or, rather, demanding of her.

But the shouting did not ruffle the baroness.

I do, I do understand that you can’t give up even this invitation to lunch.

What do you mean, even this invitation.

Nothing, the way I see it, you cannot give up anything, and at your age that’s as it should be. At your age I couldn’t give up anything either. Even today, I can barely give up anything. A little feeling, a little love, today I hardly ask more than that from anyone, she said with a tense, constrained smile as she took out her key.

She could have said that she nevertheless needed the emotions denied her.

They had to take a few more steps to reach the garden gate.

Their footsteps made the only sound; the street was deserted.

But I’ve admitted it. How else can I put it — I’m terribly confused. I’m confused because of you, and I’m confused about my engagement. What else may I confess to you. That’s just what I’m asking, Karla, what should I do, what should I do against my passion, said Imola, suddenly plaintive and conciliatory, her voice stimulating her emotions to the point where self-pity almost made her burst into tears.

Claiming to have a migraine, I’d only make myself ridiculous.

In their language, this meant that during this short time she had managed to fall head over heels in love with Baron von der Schuer, a ridiculous and disheartening development.

More precisely, this is how she was defending herself against Karla’s senseless attack. Karla was looking at her with genuine annoyance and a certain aversion — though her performance, in the psychological meaning of the word, was not senseless. She hadn’t really fallen head over heels in love with the man, yet she could not bear anyone keeping her from getting to know him more intimately. She wanted to see the peculiar similarity that linked him to Mihály, to the sculptor, or to all other men. At the sight of these grown men she almost fainted in little-girl astonishment. She did not understand a word of the situation. Which is why she so readily revealed her emotional vulnerability. This required great mental strength but it helped to jolt her temper to a new place. Her urge to weep was prompted by genuine, devastating fury. She was ready to hate Karla, and she did hate her for trying to keep her from doing something.

She simply had to see whether this man would be good for her.

Not that she needed anyone besides Mihály.

Whether he would fit her.

It was the same as when her domineering older sisters or enchanting stepmother discovered secret wishes of hers. Except that Mihály included all the others within him. Quickly, she had to confess her interest in another man, confess anything, so that she might stealthily reach her original goal.

Of course, my dear, one cannot do anything against oneself, the baroness said airily and opened the garden gate.

There stood before them, in the depth of the shady garden, a spacious, well-cared-for house built in the old German style, its walls covered with red and yellow climbing roses, with two large ground-floor terraces giving onto a thick green lawn. The overall impression was somewhat somber and uninviting.

Silence reigned within its walls.

In the basement, their lunch was waiting for them on the large stove in the dim kitchen; this Sunday, Baroness Thum’s housekeeper had gone on a full-day excursion with the League of German Girls, which she would not have wanted to miss for anything. Not only was she an enthusiastic and active member of the league but, as part of her secret commission, she was charged with keeping an eye on the baroness’s affairs. She had a secret key to the Chinese writing cabinet in which the baroness kept her antique godemiché. She had to report not only to Kaltenbrunner’s office but also to the office of Admiral Canaris, which monitored persons involved in militarily important scientific research.* For some time, the girl hadn’t understood what was in that serious-looking box; she kept returning to it, almost daily, to stare at it, scrutinize it, take it out and hold it in her palm. It couldn’t be that this pretty little something resembled that other thing, because she couldn’t imagine what use this mysterious something could be and for whom.

Maybe it was part of the baroness’s science.

Or a very valuable work of art, though it seemed useless.

Whenever the baroness was away for several days on some scientific mission, her housekeeper would take it down to her room in the basement and in the dark, carefully listening for any suspicious noise, very cautiously introduce the object, guiding it inside. Afterward, she would wipe it clean on the sheet and each time solemnly promise herself never to do it again.

Now the baroness herself was supposed to heat up the food, send it up in the dumbwaiter to the ground-floor dining room, where the antique table from the dining hall of a cloister had been set for two. They had planned to eat lunch and then spend the rest of the day together, just the two of them; they’d have been happy to wash dishes together, but everything turned out differently.

After about forty minutes of dead silence, they both appeared in the living room, cheerful and well put together, ready to set out again.

While they had rested in their rooms on an upper floor, darkened by closed shutters, and afterward while quickly dressing with practiced movements, they each reevaluated the internal proportions of their own emotional turmoil and that of the other woman, trying to get at the possible cause.

Barefoot and in her slip, rubbing one sole against the other, Baroness Karla took a few minutes to plunge into the proofs of her popular educational booklet. The galleys were lying on the pearl-inlaid Chinese writing cabinet. She worried that because of this little booklet that damn Schuer would not appoint her to be the head of their sister institute in Rome. He thought she shouldn’t have accepted such a professionally dubious assignment from the Education Office of the SS. And later, in Lützow Street, they indeed would reedit the text so that it lost all its scientific ambition and credibility.

The dark little inn with its blood-red little rooms where her admirer usually took her after concerts was, oddly enough, located in this same street, not far from the Education Office’s headquarters but on the other side of the street.

In fact, what bothered Baron von der Schuer was that Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein, easily at home in office intrigues, had again outwitted him, gone behind his back again, again gained an advantage; a few days earlier they had found themselves in an intense argument about it.

But the Herr Professor gave his approval in writing, forgive me for reminding you of this, but with that approval I believe we both met the office’s requirement.

Because you, Frau Professor, and not for the first time, presented me with a fait accompli.

I reported to the Herr Professor well within the required time, and I requested permission for the publication in writing.

When my secretary told you I’d be away for thirty-six hours.

I demand that the Herr Professor retract this humiliating allegation, which is completely baseless.

I suppose the strictly confidential purpose of my trip remained no secret for the Frau Professor, either.

The Herr Professor now speaks of confidential matters of which I neither had nor could have had any knowledge.

In that case, the Frau Professor would not have known where I was going with Assistant Professor Mengele and Professor Butenandt,* or how long we’d be away.

How might I have known that, Herr Professor.

That is what I’m asking you, Frau Professor.

I ask you, Herr Professor, please, do not try to evaluate the reliability of your secretary by cross-examining me, and mainly by not trusting in my cooperation, because that would be very unfair to me.

I have no reason to confirm or deny the claims of the Herr Professor’s secretary.

On the contrary, Frau Professor, my perfectly reliable secretary informed me about what the Frau Professor knew when she showed up in my office and what she did not know.

I have no reason to confirm or doubt your secretary’s claims.

It would never have occurred to me to trouble the Frau Professor with a request of such a nature.

And I can only repeat myself, but I am not keen on boring the Herr Professor.

I have always found the Frau Professor’s politeness fascinating, yet I must call your attention to the fact that order must be maintained in the institute, and not only in formal terms.

Thank you, Herr Professor, you may be certain that I shall not forget your hortatory words.

But I suggest, having seen the proofs of your booklet, and let this be friendly advice, Frau Professor, that with one quick decision, like jumping into cold water, you correct not the proofs but the larger mistake of wanting to publish the booklet.

They went fairly far with their insults, reaching great depths together, and they could not but enjoy this eternal contest; neither of them lost patience in the bout, and in this virtue they found each other.

Take a deep breath, added Baron von der Schuer very quietly and obstinately, and either withdraw the shameful booklet or take your name off it. Otherwise, we shall not be able to solve this delicate problem.

As if with these sharp words they were testing their origins and their manners.

They could not afford to go too far, they had to be on guard because they each were aware of the not quite clean methodology of the institute’s research. They could not use against each other this secret, not even as a means of extortion. Against the outer world of science, they were bound together more strongly by their silence than by their tolerance — a function of their distinguished personal backgrounds — though neither of them could be certain that the other, eager to gain advantage, might not be the first to reveal the shared secret.

They could not name their subjects or the source of their experimental data in every case, which is to say that in certain cases they had to list false sources.

As a result, they had quickly and smoothly developed an argot which they used in the publication of their data. Of course, their silent agreement about this argot characterized not only the scientific communications and research documentation of Baron von der Schuer and Baroness von Thum, not just research done on twins or on the colors of the human eye. Their method seemed to spill over from one research area to other related ones. Several of their colleagues — in the Dahlem institutes and in public-health institutions elsewhere who were willing to be falsely listed as sources — used and understood the secret scientific language.

Claus Clauberg,* doing hormone research, was probably the first to think of looking for subjects in a place where he could check and supervise them at any time, where he would not have to chase after propositi, then convince or reassure them. When he found the place, he thought it a bit awkward; he spoke of it to no one for a long time, but the results later justified his choice, even to himself. This encouraged him to share his secret with his colleagues, though he dared not tell his mother or his wife. He was the one who gave the idea to Adolf Butenandt, who wanted to transfer his extremely successful sterilization experiments with rats to a larger, human group than he had. Researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute lunched together every Wednesday in the institute’s new dining hall, and there, amid the banter, Professor Butenandt complained to his colleagues about how complicated and humiliating it was to conduct experiments on the mentally ill.

Schuer listened quietly, rather shocked by both the complaints and Clauberg’s temperate response to them.

But Butenandt went on asking Clauberg questions with animated interest, curious about the smallest details; he wanted to be free of the mentally ill patients, who were neither funny nor innocent.

Then a moment came when their give-and-take faltered in mutual embarrassment.

Coffee was served in the large salon, where each of the three men rather abruptly — and separately — sought out the company of others.

One cannot say that their serious doubts concerned only the scientific purity of their published data.

But since they were constantly pressed for time in their research programs they were in no position to dismiss the idea: why couldn’t they consider these unfortunates as propositi, since they had to be isolated anyway because of their antisocial behavior. That was one side that had to be considered. The other side was that race-protection laws and measures promoting ethnic cleansing had loud and very positive echoes in the scientific world, even though the scientific hypotheses on which these laws and measures were based statistically had not been adequately verified. American, Scandinavian, and French researchers also had their own genetic-pathological hypotheses, and they earnestly hoped their governments would follow Germany’s brilliant example, so that they could raise their research from the level of scientific pastime to that of a national cause.

Clauberg and Butenandt had reason to fear international competition, but since they were not overly ambitious, they wished only to speed up their research a little when they agreed to this dubious solution. Perhaps they did not fully appreciate that many things run on parallel tracks in the scientific world and therefore the effect of moral scruples on the result might on occasion prove fatal.

So when Karla von Thum zu Wolkenstein unexpectedly showed her boss samples she had received from a hitherto unknown anatomical and dissecting center in the Weimar area, and without having asked for them, her face literally beamed. Of course Baron von der Schuer did not believe that it was a surprise — come, come, several dozen pairs of eyes without asking for them, come now, there are no coincidences like that — but it was clear to him that the baroness, in possession of such a rich supply and promises of even richer supplies in the future, would soon establish a new system for defining genetically the color of human eyes, a subject on which he had been working for more than five years, struggling with a constant dearth of human material. He decided immediately that he too would put an end to the era of dilettante improvisations.

He wouldn’t be bashful anymore either.

He’d take the matter in hand, organize it properly, and above all would accept the support that, with the intercession of his assistant at the university, Himmler had already offered him.

Because of his foolish scientific attitude, he hadn’t accepted it the moment it had been offered.

What idiocy.

The richness of the pool from which he could now draw dazzled him, and for a long time it compensated for the missed opportunities of the past.

At least it considerably calmed his doubts.

Yet those doubts gained strength for a short while when the pastor of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, after several warnings by the authorities, was taken into custody and, if one could trust hearsay, sent to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Pastor Niemöller had been his spiritual guide, one might say his paternal friend.*

To be honest, many people, including some from the highest circles, had warned him to be more careful with his sermons.

Schuer was sorry that he himself had never warned him, though he had always known he should have.

And lately, thanks to her achievements, Baroness Thum was making herself independent, so much so that with the support of her highly placed patrons she was appointed full professor and he had to free her from some of her former duties at the institute.

And this, no matter how noncompetitive he was, Schuer could not forgive.

Even though lately the baroness had been behaving quite humbly, or at least she meant to, knowing that the means she had deployed against Schuer had not been above board. She told herself to be more moderate. She relied on the strength of their lifelong scientific complicity when she refused to withdraw the publication of the pamphlet, and she never considered taking her name off it; the booklet was supposed to be published within a few weeks with a print run of 600,000 copies, which would bring her considerable income.

She felt no small satisfaction; her pettiness reveled within her.

Schuer was considered not only a much more eminent scientist than she but also an exceptionally talented stylist; still, not one of his lines would ever reach as many readers as any one of the sentences in her little booklet. Nonetheless she tried reading the text once more with his eyes, while with Imola’s head she thought about herself.

They were both deeply disturbed by each other’s presence.

She even felt sorry a little for Schuer because she had been so cruel to him.

That was why she looked at the text again.

In their respective rooms, at a good distance from each other, they both felt a little ashamed for having let their emotions become visible; they did not want to see each other again.

She did not open the writing cabinet to take the pretty little godemiché out of its silk-lined box for even just a few seconds. Occasionally, infrequently, as a self-consolation, as one who kept this dark story a secret from herself, she would smell it quickly, all over, and then thrust it into her mouth. But she was helpless, precisely because of her highly placed patrons in the Education Office on Lützow Street, whom she needed in her quiet war against Schuer, just as they needed her scientific prestige and well-established name. Those patrons now supported her professorial appointment on moral grounds, while Schuer had long opposed it on moral as well as pedagogical grounds. In this too Schuer suffered a defeat. Never again could he exploit her as a fallen woman or unmarried mother, though without her patrons she’d have been vulnerable to his machinations. Thanks to his assistant’s connections in Frankfurt, Schuer had access to Himmler, who had received him several times, but this connection had not made the state apparatus’s enormous power available to him, nor had it allowed him to ignore it.

When a little later they stood together in the sunny living room, ready to go, they were aware that for the next few hours they would have to restrain their sentiments and emotions. And now that did not seem so difficult. They admired each other’s dress with an intimate joy that made it seem as if there had been no tension between them earlier.

Come, turn around, let me see.

My, this is really something.

Even though in fact they each had reservations about the other’s clothes.

The lines of this suit of yours are completely charming.

Every one of your shoes and handbags is, if I may say so, a real masterpiece.

They were going to have to walk for about ten minutes in their medium-heel shoes.

Given the cool edge of the breeze, they didn’t worry about working up a sweat, so they minded their steps and did not hurry. And exchanged their words circumspectly too.

When they left behind them the last houses on the reserved, elegant Hüttenweg, they were greeted by the mellow summer smell that spreads all across the Mark-Brandenburg Plain with its open sky, wide meadows, low and dense forests, and shallow waters overgrown with cane and sedge.

Countess Imola found, speaking frankly, that Baroness Karla’s toilette was ridiculous, though she had nothing serious against the outfit per se. But she wouldn’t have worn that kind of shoe or carried that sort of handbag, though she appreciated the workmanship and the exceptional quality of the leather. Karla’s high-buttoned dress was of white synthetic silk striped horizontally in light blue, with a round collar; over the dress and made of the same material was a cape, striped vertically with lighter and darker blue, that fastened over the chest with a longish narrow tongue fitted with only five buttons. A sophisticated optical illusion and the buttoning arrangement well emphasized Karla’s breasts, which she had first seen when she was a little girl and would have given a great deal to see again and touch with her fingers. The illusion came from letting the cape fall so that it not only concealed Karla’s too-wide hips but elongated her waist.

The Auenberg girls must have been very proud of their waistlines, which they had inherited from their mother, and they did everything to make their clothes follow this advantageous physical trait. As if in great secrecy, and despite everything, they were building their fragile fate on their dangerous maternal inheritance.

Imola appreciated the fact that this clever little trick with the buttons gave Baroness Karla a fashionable silhouette; a tailor’s clever work, she had to admit; nevertheless, she looked like a dried-out country schoolmarm in it. Only her handbag and the almost mundane shoes testified to her social standing; well, all right, so did her wonderfully fine silk stockings. The shoes and handbag were made of the relatively smooth, not so knobby skin hanging like dewlaps from the lower jaws of alligators; this is the animal’s most vulnerable spot if it takes up a fighting stance when attacked by its mates.

Germans have no sense of how to make an appearance, of how to shine, no doubt about it, she thought, with no small satisfaction.

As for Baroness Karla’s own silent opinion, it was that while her eyes could not get enough of the rich sight of Countess Imola’s toilette, she thought her Hungarian friend was once again somewhat overdressed — not by much, but still.

Hungarians seem to lack moderation or a sense of austerity, she said to herself contentedly, which in us northerners comes strongly and naturally, and so she doesn’t notice how embarrassingly conspicuous she is here, in an essentially rural environment.

Like a bird of paradise, like a peacock.

She was cross with Imola for her tendency to exaggerate, but also proud and enthusiastic, almost like an adolescent girl, because Imola showed with her behavior that she was allowing herself the kind of rebellion that Karla had never permitted herself, notwithstanding her unrestrained inner life and secret adventures. Following the examples of women moving in the highest social circles, Imola wore classically designed clothes and carried accessories made of the finest materials. Severe, comfortable, medium-brown goatskin shoes with fairly stable heels on her narrow feet, a somber, rather dull handbag of the same goatskin along with the finest kid gloves, filigreed at the wrist. These items established the basis of her appearance, giving it weight and seriousness. In truth she was beyond the point of being either under- or overdressed, and Baroness Thum, who lived far from the high life, was mistaken on this score. Imola used airy, light, pale pastel colors to make as graceful and playful an impression as possible, and at the same time she deflected attention from her physical attributes, her bodily irregularities, not with conventional sartorial ideas but with extravagant ones.

To represent one’s family and social class continuously, a person should not display anything that makes her appearance exceptional or peculiar.

Her way of dressing found meaning in the absence of characterization, as it were, and in persistent individuality.

It was all right that she lived at a different level, thought the baroness, rather crossly, but sometimes she ought to tone down her style a bit. But here again the baroness was mistaken. As a lover would be who in the throes of passion demands that the beloved be ever more flawless at every moment, more perfect than perfect.

What intemperance.

Countess Imola, in contrast to Baroness Karla, could not do without at least one expensive piece of jewelry; in summer she saw to it that there would never be more than one.

With magical lightness and no less extravagance, she had pinned on the severely cut English lapel of her peach silk suit a brooch decorated with a real pearl. The pearl was exceptionally large, of a color somewhere between white and gray and including — in certain lights even reflecting — all the hues of the rainbow; it was set on a severe-looking platinum rosette. It came from Le Maître’s Paris workshop. She had a matching platinum ring, also decorated with a similarly expensive pearl, which the gloves concealed, but anyway she did not consider the ring as jewelry.

The baroness could not work at her table in the dissecting room or in the laboratory with all sorts of jewelry on. But she used this argument only as an excuse. In reality, it was physical stinginess that kept her from wearing jewelry.

The Boîte Rouge was the only place where she readily revealed and displayed her splendid anonymity to strangers.

Nothing else, ever.

She was extremely ungenerous with herself.

When she spoke in German, Countess Auenberg thought in German, yet things that might be considered improper occurred to her in Hungarian.

I’d rather marry my dear Mihály quickly, she now thought to herself as she sized up Karla and excused herself. Whatever happens. In the depth of her soul, she feared she might dry up as this other woman had. If she does not act soon. Even if I go crazy because he so resembles those other men. And she laughed in her anticipated great happiness because, regardless of how much she feared Mihály’s brutality and however much she doubted herself, the promise of their future stormy physical encounters proved stronger in her.

An eager and unsuspecting Karla took over part of this feeling along with the laughter or, rather, she received a portion of it, not undeservedly, and laughed along with Imola.

Even though Imola was by this time laughing at the thought that she’d never let herself become such a scientific nun.

Ever since she had seen Karla in the lake, she has been following her involuntarily; because of her, she studied biology as a private student at the university in Prague. Now she will stop following her. She will be happy and she will bloom. She too had attended Professor Nussbaum’s anatomy lectures and his lab sessions about dissection, which were hard to take but necessary since she did not want to know less than Karla did. It’s been sheer madness what I’ve been ready to do because of her. Still, she could not decide to enroll as a regular student, take exams, and go from degree to degree as other students did. Before Prague, she had never attended public schools. She would have felt it profoundly improper to have to account for her knowledge to men, to complete strangers, or to have them put questions to her. What’s all this unbridled laughter, the baroness asked, while laughing herself, trying to navigate to a plane somewhere between goodwill and suspicion, as if she knew that in linking up with the younger woman’s thoughts she was in fact laughing at herself, finding her own fate unworthy and frivolous.

So many foolish things pop into one’s mind, it’s nothing, really, not worth talking about. I don’t want to bother you with it.

I see.

Goodness, I did not mean to offend you.

But this time you really did, said the baroness, both pleasure and pain sounding in her voice, for she had sensed that Imola’s laughter had been at her expense, and now she had to exploit this alibi to the full by acting offended.

But she could not have known that the younger woman was in the process of parting with her for good.

And at that moment they laughed again on each other’s account, skittishly and happily, like two immature schoolgirls.

They put their arms around each other’s waist as they walked. Their hip bones bumped a number of times before their steps found a harmonious rhythm. They took care with their arms not to rumple their clothes. Soon they reached Ihne Street and proceeded in the shade of not yet too tall or too ramified plane trees.

There was no time left for the baroness to show the countess the world-famous scientific compound’s professional or special buildings, the great lecture hall, the large dining hall, and the halls designed for social gatherings, but they passed by Harnack House, with its guest apartments maintained in a charming rustic style. Here, as if in passing, Baroness Karla remarked that Margarethe von Bellardi managed the institute with great expertise and elegance; she had been her classmate at Prague and for years has been her most trusted confidante even though at the university they hadn’t even noticed each other.

Should there be a chance for it, she would introduce her to Imola.

She said most trusted confidante in order to hurt Imola.

They reached the building, with its dignified and modest exterior; its narrow wings were articulated by tall windows.

To make things simple we’ll now simply march through the institute, though that means I won’t be able to show you my rooms or the laboratories.

We don’t want to be late.

You’re right, not for any reason.

Along with their words their movements became light and airy, almost breezy, as they hurried noisily through the revolving doors.

The doorman’s booth was wide open.

They met no one in the well-lit vestibule.

The back section of the building, more spacious than promised by the facade, seemed with its big windows to spill into the garden. Their laughter, their hasty words, and their strong steps echoed loudly in the empty corridors. Baroness Thum moved with ease; with the vivacity of her movements she was also trying to demonstrate how much she felt at home. In the capacious stairwell, permeated with the smell of formaldehyde, she stopped for a moment to indicate with a gloved hand that they’d be leaving the building through the rear exit, that her office was upstairs and her great collection downstairs.

About this great genetic collection, kept in wax-sealed glass vessels of sometimes enormous dimensions, inside strictly locked closets, she had meant to talk in great detail to the countess, even the evening before, when she’d just arrived in Berlin. So that when, on a calm afternoon of a day in the future, she moved the sliding doors and showed her the contents of the closets, the countess would be prepared. Part of the collection consisted of material for her special research: dissected eyeballs and preserved eyeball segments, always one eyeball and then various segments of its mate. Most of the items in the collection showed hereditary organic anomalies and abnormalities, classified according to different human races, and every display model was human-size. But she did not have a chance to make a detailed report because of Imola’s indifference and lack of interest, for which she was unprepared. Nothing interests her but her fiancé. And it just so happened that only days before Imola’s arrival, Karla had successfully completed a project containing seminal scientific discoveries that would put a significant tool in the hands of physicians involved in defining racial affinity. Karla was not interested in anything outside her own work, and she couldn’t share her incredible joy with the silly goose.

I have been probing the secrets of Creation, and she prattles about her trousseau.

In reaction to the insulting lack of interest, she quickly decided not to show Imola the collection, which colleagues from all over the globe came to admire.

Demonstrating abnormalities and anomalies was no easy task; organs, limbs, and other body parts, occasionally entire human heads or trunks and lower bodies, had to be dissected and displayed according to size in the different glass vessels, and in such a way that physicians arriving for extension courses in genetics would focus their attention not on the mutilations but on the subject of the scientific demonstration.

Now they were already out in the institute’s garden, richly planted with flowers; it was separated by a single, severely clipped hedgerow from the splendid rose garden attached to the director’s villa, where the roses were in their second bloom of the season.

Countess Auenberg thought it quite embarrassing to be using a rear entrance, no doubt to surprise the family with their arrival.

Indeed, an unsuspecting and relaxed Schuer was leaning against the railing of the upstairs terrace with an open book in his hand; he was explaining something to his whimpering son. And the lady of the house, with her garden gloves and clippers, was still gathering flowers for the festive table.

The institute’s doorman followed her with a pretty little basket, telling her something she seemed very interested in.

The two guests had arrived a few minutes sooner than expected.

And after they got everything nicely sorted out and were in the salon Baroness Erika introduced to the countess the twelve-year-old Siegfried, the ten-year-old Sieglinde, and the six-year-old Ortrud, they all hurried into the dining room to sort and then tastefully arrange the flowers in small vases and bowls; since the countess took a very active part in this, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein found an opportunity to take her boss aside and tell him about the person of her young lady friend. He had to know that he would be chatting not with any old Hungarian countess, there should be no misunderstanding or mistake of any kind in this matter. She was a guest of the state, received at the highest echelons, and within a few months she would be a queen.

Without further ado they sat down at the table.




No More Time


She was walking ahead of me and I followed her. As if she didn’t hear it. I felt disgust and hatred. And envy and admiration that she could do something like that. And I was the miserable wretch she could do it to.

For some reason, they closed the store a little early that day. Luckily I’d gone down before that to stand in front of the building. My heart was racing; I thought it would burst. I was preoccupied with all the time I had to wait. I couldn’t understand why I was so restless, so weak and childish because of a woman. Who doesn’t interest me very much. I was angry with myself. I felt as if I were doing something important the wrong way. Or doing something I shouldn’t be doing. First I followed her from across the boulevard, and when her boss disappeared in the lobby next door to give the steel box to the concierge, I went over to her side. She was just turning into Szófia Street when the bell of the Terézváros church began to peal. Like a secret signal that I did not understand. Maybe I couldn’t relax because of the blustery evening wind. She kept walking and I followed her. It didn’t seem likely that I could call after her, and even if I managed to calm down, where could we have gone in such weather. I did not understand what I was doing, but I could not avoid doing it. It was not completely dark yet, the sky was aflame, and gigantic clouds were swimming in it. It was no longer raining, but with each new squall I felt light spray on my face. The streetlamps’ yellow lights were swaying. The city, with all its wet flags, was deserted.

In this dark little street, she had to hear my footsteps. She was tapping in my brain with her fine little high heels, or maybe in my soul. I did not want to catch up with her, because I really didn’t have anything to say to her. I couldn’t figure out what I should say to her. Still, I was counting on her stopping suddenly, was hoping for it, yet could not imagine what we would do if she did. Since she’d started out and I’d followed her, she gave no sign of noticing me at all. It would be hard for me to say how I felt. Maybe I wasn’t feeling anything. Because I was more interested in what she was feeling, or what she was thinking about, or why was she doing it in this particular way. That’s what I wanted somehow to intuit from her, from her carriage, from her steps, from anything. And to know whether she heard my steps and was only pretending she didn’t. Because if it meant nothing to her that I was following her, then she must have forgotten me, she wasn’t running away from me, she wasn’t leading me anywhere but, having finished work, was simply hurrying someplace. And that would be the end of our story, I’d have to accept that. But at least I’d see whom she was going to meet. Because I knew she was going to meet somebody, I just did.

It was as though I simultaneously had two unrealizable hopes, equally strong. If she was going to meet someone, I could simply avoid her; just keep walking. But if she didn’t meet anyone, there’d be no more excuses; I knew that too. If we could not talk to each other, open our mouths and understand each other, then our relationship would remain a painful illusion, a disgrace, a defeat. And I wished for nothing more than such a defeat, accepting in advance that I would be the loser. Or rather, I’m not sure I could imagine such a great defeat. But if I had to open my mouth, I might have nothing to say to her. This was just too much; I can’t talk about it. And I wished nothing more than that I should have nothing to say to her. Then at least it would be over. In the meantime, it was most important that I could see her, follow her, adjust my pace to the patter of her high heels. I had never before seen her walking on the street from so close up, and this became more important than anything. Whatever happens later, this I will find out now. Or maybe I already have. Even though I couldn’t know in advance what I wanted to find out. But I knew I was curious about this monotonous sight that changed every second, though I had no idea why. I drank up the vision, blotted it up, and was not disappointed by a single moment of it.

Maybe her coat caused a slight disappointment. If not disappointment, a little confusion. She wasn’t wearing her own coat; it had to have been somebody else’s; I could see that it wasn’t hers. No stores sold such coats, it was too big, sand-colored, made of some light material and maybe a man’s coat. And this sand-colored blotch was leading me down dark Szófia Street. The coat not only bothered me, this ill-fitting coat that made it so I couldn’t see her, see who she was, but bothered the tenderness I felt for her. It was not her body I wanted to see, or maybe it was. The silence of her naked body, unhindered. When I’d seen her from a distance or in her white work coat, nothing disturbed my sense of her beauty. And nothing restrained my fancy either. As if only in the finest garments could I appropriately dress her beauty. But her coat reminded me of socialist reality, of the disagreeable and recurring thought that I was pursuing just an ordinary woman who worked in an espresso bar, and then this couldn’t be more than an awkward little adventure anyway. Which I didn’t need. And if I was already thinking this, it was almost as if I had already offended her. As if a wicked aunt were calling to me from the pages of a pulp novel: you can’t belong to each other anyway. I’ve always made allowances for women, but it was high time to admit to myself that I was more passionately interested in men, since what I’m really interested in is what I am like. Seeing her in her white work coat, there might have been room for a romantic imagination yearning for elegant richness, but seeing her in her awkward penury made that impossible. As though nothing was or could ever again be in its right place. Women were not the ones. I couldn’t find my own way, or anyone else’s, or anything at all. Perhaps this inability of mine lent weight and strength to her beauty, but I didn’t want to retreat from my illusions. Luckily for me, she did not stop and gave no sign that she heard my steps. She hurried on as if she had urgent business somewhere.

Her wonderful footsteps gave me a respite.

She was probably wearing a tight-fitting skirt under the ugly coat, for her steps were very short though very determined, the patter of her high heels almost aggressive. I wouldn’t have thought she had nice legs. I was seeing something of which I had to say that I’d never seen anything so beautiful, but I’m sure I did not elaborate on the sight, not with words. I knew that men paid special attention to legs. But this too was one of those things I didn’t understand about men. It was as if there was a direct relationship between their sexual potency and the sort of legs this or that woman had. While men talked about women’s legs, I looked incomprehensibly at the men or at their legs. I was engrossed in her straight posture, in the unbroken rhythm of her steps, in everything that was entrusted to her feet, rising in a pleasing arc to her ankles and to strong and shapely calves in silk stockings. Earlier, I hadn’t even thought that I would or ever could need a woman, because the crudely declared need for possession rather nauseated or scared me. I considered it absurd, ominous, arrogant, and crassly stupid when a man declared something like this out loud, or made eyes or gestures to make his intentions clear to the woman in question. In myself, I couldn’t arouse anything that even remotely resembled an urge like that. Earlier, the very assumption of something like this would have made me sink into the floor with shame just to think of it, let alone do such things. That I’d be interested in someone’s legs or might want someone because of her legs, ass, or breasts. And I especially did not understand about the ass; why the ass, what could men do with women’s asses.

So now that’s what I was thinking about. As if somebody inside me had said it straight out, loud and clear. Well, this woman certainly has great legs. I want this woman. And there was nothing to add, not that I wanted to, because the statement referred not to her soul but to how she walked, to everything that this impossible coat so cruelly concealed, to her ass. I wanted to look at her ass, to see her ass and her breasts and her belly.

It was all about my own soul, and I could not resist it.

Her steps kept pattering on. I heard these wishes uttered within me in my own voice, and not only was I not ashamed of them but an unknown quantity of unreasonable cheerfulness was bursting in my chest. Which made me exactly as irresponsible and haughty as I saw other men being in similar situations. Only a little while earlier, I had been eagerly sneaking after her; only a little while ago I had felt the heavy, anxious, nervous, and unstoppable hammering of my heart, and now this — this puffed-up, conceited, and unimpeded gaiety. I kept following her and my own voice made me feel free.

This is how we reached Ferenc Liszt Square.

She is leading, this woman is leading me, I thought, she was leading me somewhere. That was my definite impression. To tell the truth, though, I couldn’t really have believed this, because I had no intention of arriving anywhere, could not have said where I might arrive with her and what was making me so puffed up, but by then at least the doubt and dread had disappeared. As if I were saying, if it won’t be like this, well, then it will be some other way, shrugging my shoulders. Even if I’d known what was waiting for me, what kind of months or years, I still would have surrendered to this moment, because I had nothing to ward it off with. I haven’t regretted anything, I’d do the same today, I would surrender.

While we were crossing the square in front of the Academy of Music, she had to lean forward and force herself into the squalls.

She was holding on to her bag slung over her shoulder. She turned her head to the side to keep the wind from slamming ice-cold drizzle into her face.

I let the wind do what it wanted to, let it hit me in the face, let the water drip down my neck, so long as I could see her, not lose sight of her, not for a second. And then I turned my head away too, and for a while I followed her like that, though I was as good as blind and with drizzle spitting into my face. Inside the academy, a concert must have started; in the pale light of the lobby, behind the art nouveau swing doors, strolled two usherettes deep in conversation. I don’t know if she slowed down or I speeded up, but by the time we reached the corner of Király Street there were no more than ten paces between us. I did not dare go closer; I deliberately kept this distance.

Let her lead; let me follow.

Perhaps it was only for a few seconds, but I was gripped by an attractive irresponsibility, or perhaps I was completely filled with joy, or one feeling totally masked the other. Above Király Street the sky was completely dark, with only the streetlights swaying in the wind. A police car was approaching, its wheels whispering a soft slow melody on the wet asphalt. As if with its quiet purring it had banished all the other noises in the empty street, the unexpected clapping of the wind, the mysterious knocks, the low gurgling in the gutters on the unadorned neoclassical corner building. Even if it hadn’t been a car like that in which they took my father away and made him disappear, I’d still be afraid of them forever. My own fate no longer interested me, and my father’s fate had shrunk to being a mere episode in the overall story. She was moving along, walking close to the corner building while navigating between puddles and water dripping from holes in the gutters. The squalls could not easily penetrate this area, yet the roofs were clamoring. The police paid no attention to us, in their eyes we were only pedestrians; still, they watched and acknowledged us. Quarreling lovers. The car carried four somber outward-looking faces, busy ascertaining whether there was still an adequate level of fear in the dead city. I could have been a rapist-murderer; all they were interested in was the degree of fear. I could have been a mugger planning to rob the woman and waiting for the police to disappear. It was happening right before their eyes, yet they had no words or even eyes for it. No matter how much they checked things, the street was still there and they could not keep people from walking on it. It was the minimum they could permit, but it showed on their faces that this was too much for them, more than necessary; it overtaxed them.

There went the prey, who deliberately revealed her steps to me. And the city’s darkness was also not working for the police. I wouldn’t have minded walking all night in its labyrinths. If they had followed us, they’d have had nothing to uncover. It was like a blood clot momentarily stuck in the heart for an unexpected, fleeting instant; still, I felt light and it made me happy that I could follow a woman on the street right in front of the police. I could have easily said that I was enjoying my secret little liberty. As if it were the randomly appearing and disappearing police car that made me understand what I had taken earlier as regret and sadness on her face. I saw my own hesitancy, anxiety, and dread squirting up from under the police car’s wheels. My entire life until then had been nothing but withdrawal and hiding; I wouldn’t have thought there was free will — as indeed there was not. But now, with her steps, she simply suspended my fear. I didn’t care about her ugly coat either, because my hated cousin’s hand-me-downs no longer bothered me. Only a few more steps were left, which is to say no more than a few more seconds. And that was the end of this last little reverie, because then she turned into Nagymező Street and disappeared. As if she had been meaning to trick me. And life would indeed be nothing but bitterness and disappointment. I speeded up and took the last steps to the corner on a run. I could not let her do this to me after she had brought me so far. I wanted to see at least where she was going.

She was standing in front of the church as if she had meant to flee there in the first place. One wing of the heavy door was wide open.

She could see that I was virtually running after her. And I, at last, could see that she was waiting for me, nobody else, because in the middle of the broad sidewalk she turned around to face me. I couldn’t slow down, and I couldn’t have said how far I’d go in my daring now that she had gone this far. As a feeling, it was as if, unable to brake my momentum, I’d plow into her — but my courage abandoned me at just that point. I had a chance to live through one of my life’s most lucid and delicate moments. There was no room for deception or falsehood in it. It was a brief flash preceded and followed by thick fog. She stood there, stiff within her own obstinate decision. She would wait for and, with a single blow, bring the insane attacker low; that’s how I saw her, determined, wild, and aggressive. But the closer I came, the more nicely she smiled, as if welcoming the attack with the joy of brutality come true. Which meant that she was no less insane than I. Her smile was so refined, so soft, so unalterable, yet expanding and spreading so that her face almost swam away with it, but the obstinate decision with which she planted herself on the glistening sidewalk was not nice.

It was crude and uncouth, and my overhasty running wasn’t nice either, as if my limbs were flying away from me, leaving me unable to control or aim my movements in the right direction. The eagerness, this greedy fear that I might lose or miss out on something, was not aesthetically pleasing. And neither was my alarm that I might smash what I wanted to seize and hold on to. But it was nice that I wasn’t ashamed of all this, of my desire to possess. In what way would it be possible to possess an entire human being — in no way. There was nothing I could ruin. For at least a single moment to grab her ass with both hands. And that’s what she responded to with her smile because she wasn’t ashamed either. She said, I’m not playing hide and seek with you. She said, what do you want. She said, here I am. She did not say, possess me, but now I shall crush you, tear you apart, devour you, possess you. And that, after all, was a different kind of beauty, though a little funnier too, or cruder. Until then, she had always seemed rather fragile, transparent, anemic, and sad. I could not yet see clearly that she had physical characteristics in which the cruelty of her soul was engraved. In her there was room also for the ugly; on her the lovely also had its place; madness took up space in her, as did shameful cunning. Ultimately we both knew what we wanted from each other, and we even knew that we were unstoppable.

Yet I had been counting on something entirely different.

She had to be beautiful; that’s what I had counted on. Nothing should be left that wasn’t nice, harmonious, or aesthetically arranged. Although nothing had a real explanation, things did not happen that way. And then there was no explanation for the way things did happen either.

Drizzle shone on her hair and shoulders. The entire street glistened around us.

Here, at the corner of Nagymező and Király streets, the wind swept up everything, blew and scattered things everywhere; the streetlamp’s light was swinging on its cable above the pavement, the wet branches trembled nervously.

I asked her if she’d known I was following her.

She said she knew and shrugged her shoulders, as if she didn’t consider this interesting or significant enough to talk about.

Drizzle sat on her eyelashes too, and much more interesting than the meaning of the words was that we were speaking to each other. That some kinds of words were coming out of her mouth and I had answers for them — this was something completely new and completely incredible. And we were speaking loudly too; we had to, over the noise of the wind. But it wasn’t nice that I wound up so close to her. As if I were forcefully invading her, giving her no way out; at the next moment she’d have to back away from this exaggerated closeness. It was not appropriate to the situation. As if, after all, she might have wanted something other than I did.

I said that even though she’d known I was following her, she pretended not to notice me.

Because she had to hurry. Her whole boring life is nothing but one big hurry, oh God how boring. Even now, she has to go on running.

But how did she know it was me and not someone else, seeing as how she didn’t look back.

She knew I’d understand without an explanation, she answered, and from her smile I understood that this insane woman really knew everything in advance. I shouldn’t be angry with her, but she could not go into explanations. We wouldn’t have time for a regular conversation this time, anyway.

But I still don’t understand, I said. I really couldn’t decide whether to show up or not because she hadn’t really answered my question that morning.

She shrugged her shoulders again.

But I could see her ring, she said, I am a married woman, she said. She had seen clearly that several times I had looked at her ring. In her opinion, it was very obvious that she was marked as belonging to someone else, and she wasn’t kidding.

I had looked at her ring because I didn’t understand the situation.

I had to decide about everything else.

And I thought I was only imagining things, I moaned. I made myself imagine, fantasize things. What I was looking at was the question whether she was engaged or, I don’t know what I’d thought, maybe recently married, or whether she was wearing the ring on her right hand or on her left.

She can’t arrange a date like this in front of her boss, could she. They’re on deadly bad terms, she said emphatically. Which is bad enough as it is, no point making it worse with some stupidity.

One can see that, I said.

See from what, she asked suspiciously.

From the way you two go around avoiding and watching each other all the time and relax a little only when the other woman’s husband or fat little son comes into the store. Then they manage to be more polite, considerate.

Although our eyes were flitting around each other’s eyes, I was watching her mouth. And how she too didn’t know what to do with her hands. I didn’t know what to do with mine, and because of that I was standing so stiffly in front of her that my legs trembled.

The trembling did not let up; it kept on, gentle but steady.

She speaks nicely to everyone. She never wants to hurt anyone.

Nor I, I replied, in which there was a good dose of coquetry.

Not you either.

With these three words in the daring informal mode, everything changed again. Until then we had been politely using the formal address, now she changed the rules and we had to look at each other in a new light. As if we were looking at the three words receding, which calmed and slowed us down. It was impossible to decide whether she’d said this deliberately or the way she thought about me had just slipped out of her mouth. But I think she said it deliberately. She wanted to test me. And it was like pulling aside another curtain so we could see each other better.

Still, I asked her about her boss, what problems did she have with her, because I thought it was better to talk about someone else instead of ourselves. And I used the informal address also, straight off. What’s your problem with the boss. Only I didn’t know what to do about the trembling of my legs. I was afraid my knees would knock against her and then I couldn’t hide the insane, humiliating shaking. What would she do with a shaky-kneed idiot like me. It was as if suddenly, with this trembling, my entire terrible former life had caught up with me and flooded me. She shrugged her shoulders again, and to see this third shrug wasn’t nice anymore. I don’t know how else to put it, but it seemed to indicate a pettiness in her character; it wasn’t that I had embarrassed her, she was embarrassed for herself. She turned her head away a little as if she preferred to look into the distance, and that once again evoked for me her unfathomable sorrow. Or maybe she turned away so our faces would not be so close. And again I felt she didn’t do this because of me, not because of my breath, but because of her. She was gauging her closeness to me; it wasn’t my closeness to her that bothered her. Or she wasn’t trying to avoid my closeness, anyway, but wanted to give herself time; she wanted to gain time to decide what to do or what she might do. And in the meantime she didn’t do what she might have done of course, and I didn’t do it either.

We did not fall on each other or bite each other, as animals in heat would have done. My knees went on shaking uncontrollably.

By the way, you’re wrong about me and my boss, she said, staring into the street, spotted with lights; actually, they got along pretty well. Only she didn’t want to spend her whole life in such a miserable shop. She hates candy and sweets anyway. She wanted to take evening courses at the university, since she can’t study during the day. But she hadn’t gotten a recommendation from her workplace, thanks to her boss, so she can’t go to night school.

I can’t study anywhere.

She must have been thinking of something else as she spoke, or else didn’t really want to talk about this. And then, pretty absentmindedly, she asked what I was studying and she glanced at me. Her expression remained serious; perhaps she envied me for being able to study. Maybe she was truly interested. Just as it really interested me why she couldn’t. I didn’t dare move my feet or do something, anything, to stop the shaking, in case the movement might disturb her closeness to me. And then she might retreat. As if there were a territory I’d already conquered and now mustn’t give up any part of. But I couldn’t understand how the words were coming out of me or what I was doing, because suddenly I lied and said I was going to the School of Physical Education. I don’t know why I said that. And as if I had just then decided that, despite my own well-understood interest, I could not expose myself to her. Maybe because she was a married woman and took it all seriously. As if to say, this can’t last more than two days, maybe today and tomorrow, or maybe only this hour, but definitely a short period, which she could end anytime, or I could; nothing more than a passing fancy. Because it wasn’t easy to extricate oneself from a lie like that. I probably wanted with my lie to keep control of a situation I no longer controlled. I could not escape my situation, yet I managed to let the dread make itself heard in it. And when she glanced at me, she no longer made her eyes flitter around mine but looked at my forehead only, or my hair. And maybe that’s why she believed my lie. It was a little disappointing and surprising, that she was someone I could deceive. She was grasping the strap of her shoulder bag with both hands. As if only something very little separated her from stroking my stubbly face. I don’t know. It was as though I didn’t want what I wanted. And as if I’d said what I’d said, resorting to an impossible lie like that, only because my hair was cut short, like a crew cut. Or I simply didn’t know why I did it.

But that sentence again changed everything, turned things into a different direction, and it was irrevocable.

One always feels clearly these turning points in one’s life, and nothing can be done about them.

I quickly asked her what she wanted to study, just so she wouldn’t ask me more questions. But this was very strange, because the lie that had simply appeared in my mouth, independent of my will, now seemed to be erasing my embarrassment. As if I needed some ignoble advantage to collect strength for an attack of uncertain outcome, and the lie indeed gave me strength, and my legs were no longer shaking.

Philosophy.

I looked at her; this was not to be believed.

Philosophy, I asked incredulously. What, I asked, as if I hadn’t heard well.

As if I were hearing echoes of my own lie.

And I didn’t even know what philosophy was. What had philosophy to do with a beauty like this woman. Philosophy was something my uncle talked about with his colleagues. I had the distinct impression that this branch of science was a means by which old professors could use one another in some dark business or trap one another. They fuss around in this language to disguise their true intentions and so as not to frighten others away before it’s time. It had never occurred to me that philosophy could be anything but the thieves’ Latin of these old fogies. When they invoked philosophy too frequently, Nínó would get up without a word and leave the men to themselves, or she’d chat with the ladies.

But the woman didn’t even acknowledge my insulting shock, except now her anger opened up, her helplessness, and she pelted me with her bitterness.

If her life is being ruined, it’s thanks to that miserable Jewess.

She hit me with that word, which she may not have noticed, or perhaps she meant to hit me with it.

But she’d outsmart them. If she had wanted to enroll in the Academy of Commerce they’d have unconditionally supported her application. She should have taken them up on that offer. Dumb as she was, she refused it. And what was she jumping around for, she didn’t have a very good social background for the current regime. Downright terrible, undesirable. But if there was one thing that did not interest her, it was commerce, business. She’d leave that to the Jews. She laughed, and with her beautiful teeth laughing into the darkness, she cried out that they couldn’t defend their philosophy against her. With her mouth and teeth she was shining like a French chanteuse. And I should believe her, she’d prefer even the School of Physical Education to a business school.

She had played basketball regularly in high school, they had a pretty good team, and sometimes they still got together to play, and she was a good short-distance runner but had to stop that too.

As she talked, I tried to think how I could take back my insulting remarks. What can I say about philosophy when I know nothing about it; it seemed more urgent to distract her with something lighter. I could have asked her, but I didn’t, what distances she ran and what her best times were. I couldn’t have asked anything else about running; I knew almost as little about running as I did about philosophy. But I wasn’t afraid that my ignorance would give me away, all I could think was that the whole stupid conversation was going in the wrong direction. The longer we talked, the farther I drifted from where I wanted to be, and we were drifting farther away from each other. She was taking me into dangerous waters, or even thrusting me out of the main current. And I didn’t understand why she used the expression Jewess, which in Budapest parlance was definitely a pejorative.

It was pretty clear to me that good manners required something other than what my mind needed and my mind was busy with something other than what my body desired. All three strong sources flowed simultaneously, but each was taking me to a different place.

I should have rejected something in her, but it was impossible to do everything at once.

We could not refuse to have this conversation, and I can’t say I wasn’t interested in what she said or might have said. I was carried along by a current of curiosity, and with her unfortunate expression she carried me even further, but while she spoke, my mind kept weighing something else and it felt as if I missed, individually, every one of her words. My mind was assessing what would be better and more comfortable for my legs and hands. And if I didn’t know what to do with my limbs, then it was pointless for my mind to want this conversation, which could not be halted, if only out of politeness. The further she carried me along with her words, the more strongly I felt there was something I hadn’t done with my hands that would be more natural, actually more necessary, than all those superfluous, flawed, and insulting words. But neither politeness nor my mind allowed my hands to do anything — I just couldn’t touch someone who abuses Jews at the drop of a hat and whom I don’t even know. Perhaps she had made me talk to her so I could get to know her. Yet I didn’t want her to speak, so I interrupted her, spoke into her speaking. I had to extricate myself from the dangerous current of my lie, and I was deadly afraid that she would literally make me drift away in the current of her words, that I would miss or already had missed something important. I wanted to get back to the place where we’d started, where my legs and hands had been condemned to idleness and were busy either taking me toward her or trembling. In other words, I felt I must not lose time — not a place, not a conquered territory, but time; time was the possession I might lose. It was as if we had already enjoyed a brilliant golden age, and if she carried me further with her words it would be like accepting a paler, silver age. As if in the former it was possible to touch each other’s face with our hands but now it no longer was.

I asked what she would have done if it had been a stranger who followed her.

She saw it was me.

When did she see that, and how did she.

I saw on her face that she was reluctant to answer.

Perhaps she preferred to go on drifting with the words.

Her gaze was now circling in very different areas, around my eyes, gliding across my mouth, continually touching my forehead, where it lingered, as if it had found something there, and I liked that very much. Perhaps she wanted to continue talking so she could find what she was looking for and she wouldn’t have to touch my stubbled cheek, either gently or rudely. In fact, I was very curious to know what her touch would be like; I wanted her touch. We were standing very close; from below, she was looking up at a place she wasn’t reaching out to touch.

She’d caught sight of me, she said reluctantly, when they were closing up the store.

I didn’t notice that you did.

Because she does this more adroitly than I do, she doesn’t stare so obviously and irresponsibly, and still she sees more than I do.

But now she really must hurry.

Where are you hurrying to at this time of day.

If I wanted to I could wait for her. She motioned at the church, indicating that she would be going in to it. And then her husband was coming to collect her.

This was like two blows of a cudgel, that’s what my face must have shown.

She started to laugh, as if taking revenge for the earlier insult, though she seemed a bit ashamed. At the same time, I recovered from another daze, a deeper one that did not include her. And I fell into a helpless fury, which she had provoked yet was now only observing, coolly, innocently. Or was happy about. That was her revenge. I did not understand anything in the strictest meaning of the phrase: nothing. I did not understand how I’d gotten mixed up in this situation, and I didn’t know how I could get away from her quickly. What did she want or what did I want from her. Why am I still so careful not to turn my anger loose.

What had we talked about, what subjects, what had I spoiled, with what, or why did I even exist.

But then why did she say I should wait for her.

Right away I heard the stifled rebuke that had found its way into my voice, which sounded like the shout of a quarreling man; hard as I tried, I couldn’t do much about it and saw her face turning cold as ice.

No, she did not say I should wait for her, not at all. She asked me not to wait for her in front of the store.

While we spoke, we could hear intermittently the sound of the organ from within the church. And the wind kept on roaring.

Really, she didn’t have to tell me not to wait for her.

Why should she, if this is what she wanted.

Wanted or still wants, I asked, on the attack.

Wants, she replied innocently.

Her gentle impudence and the glitter of her huge eyes so enthralled me that I became even angrier with her — or with myself. But then how would I defend myself against her. I asked her why she hadn’t told me not to wait for her today but tomorrow, another time, the day after tomorrow or sometime when she didn’t have to go to church and her husband wasn’t coming to collect her.

If she works the afternoon shift, her husband always comes for her.

I had never seen him come for her.

Because they always meet here. This is something she didn’t care to let her boss know, whether her husband or someone else comes for her. Her older brother is a deacon in this church.

What this means, then, or what she means to say, is that this whole thing makes no sense or is completely hopeless.

Even if I did wait for her.

If that’s what she means, she would have told me not to wait but to get lost.

But that’s not what she said.

But then she could have told me to wait for her after the morning shift, because then she wouldn’t have to go to mass and her husband wouldn’t come to collect her, either.

It seemed I kept repeating the same tune. I have said this before, it’s boring.

What, am I here to amuse her.

That’s how I vented my anger, that’s what I kept on insisting, incredibly and ridiculously, even in my own eyes, as if looking for a tiny crack where I could hide, probably making myself more ridiculous; but in fact I kept wasting time with my questions so I could leave with my dignity more or less intact.

No, I shouldn’t be angry with her, things like this disgust her, it never occurred to her to say something like that — or ask for it. She might have said it, no doubt, but she’d never want to be entangled in dark little lies like this or entangle others in them. No, she loathes this type of secrecy with all her heart. I probably misunderstood her. She likes to talk openly about everything. She’d just told me why she hadn’t been able to talk about anything in the store. But she wouldn’t keep secrets from her husband, why should she. She didn’t understand why I didn’t understand.

Because it’s not understandable.

But what don’t I understand.

Or maybe I do understand but don’t want to. Or I’m afraid I might misunderstand her.

Now she must really go into the church because they are almost at the Elevation of the Host, but still, it would be better if I told her what I didn’t want to understand or why I didn’t.

I don’t want to offend you. Please, do go in, and I’ll leave.

I shouldn’t go away now.

Not now, I’ll go once you are inside.

Still, she asks me not to go.

Leave it to me, all right.

All right, then she won’t go in.

I don’t want to offend you with anything, even if you stay out here.

She really can’t imagine how I could offend her.

By leaving, for example. Or if I didn’t tell her what I was thinking about. That’s already two examples. Everyone can be offended.

My own words made it clear that this woman was playing a role and had assigned a role to me too — an unfamiliar but most intriguing role.

And I could see how defenseless she was, precisely against this sort of thing. But she didn’t want to be protected by lies and self-deceptions. She did not like it when something was kept secret from her; true, she herself had no secrets. And she did not like things turning out unexpectedly, though she was fairly flexible.

I told her it was just like that for me too.

That makes two of us.

I said this didn’t sound too good.

What didn’t sound good, what was I objecting to, and what do I want anyway.

I said it was very simple. Either I’d like to leave right away or I’d like to understand why I had come in the first place.

Wonderful, she said, laughing, and asked if I always busied myself with such quintessential questions. As to this particular one, we can answer it very simply. In all probability, I came here to talk to her.

I said, if she knew so well I wanted to talk to her and not someone else, and she didn’t mind, then why was she making my situation difficult. And frankly, I didn’t understand why she had to go to church and to confession. Or why she would need her husband for it.

She didn’t have to go to church or confession at all, and usually didn’t, since she lived in sin consciously and inveterately. But for a few weeks she had been studying rituals, and the concept of sin interested her from a theological-historical point of view. But I should know that she does not exist without her husband. Anyone who wants to talk to her, it’s like talking to her husband.

They tell each other everything, anyway. They grew up together. This has nothing to do with the Catholic Church, her brother, or confession.

Still, I can’t expect her to keep it a secret from herself that she wanted to talk to me.

Well, that’s all.

That simple.

But why would she think I’d like to talk to her husband, whom I don’t know. Or how on earth could I have known they’d grown up together.

No, she hadn’t thought about that, and she leaves it up to me whether I feel like waiting for him.

For God’s sake, what did she think the three of us would do together.

She hadn’t thought of anything special, and she certainly didn’t want to alarm me with debauched thoughts. But since I asked, she could repeat that she must have thought of something like this: I would wait for her while she was in church, and afterward she and her husband were planning to go to someone’s house, to a party, and if I felt like it I could join them. She definitely did think of this, more precisely, such a thought did occur to her. But I kept asking so many senseless questions that she hadn’t had a chance to mention it.

And what if I don’t feel like going to someone’s party right now, and even less like talking to her husband. Or what would she do if her husband didn’t feel like talking to me.

Nothing would happen, no problem, and at least we’ve talked about it.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What we’ve got, then, is only this nothing.

Furiously, she held her peace.

There is nothing, I shouted.

I’m talking nonsense.

I said, in that case I am very sorry that I’m so obtuse. Obviously, my talents do not reach this far.

But if I really wanted to leave, I should go ahead, of course. Ultimately, she didn’t want to make me do anything I didn’t want to do, and she couldn’t, anyway.

On the one hand she knows very well she could; if she couldn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here like a jerk. On the other hand I don’t want to go away so much because if I did, I wouldn’t have come in the first place.

Well, that’s really very witty, she answered, sharp and sarcastic. But she was afraid I had no more time for further witticisms.

I didn’t understand that; I said I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why this was witty.

While we were talking I paid no attention to what was happening around us, though I must have seen and heard more and sensed every smell and odor more keenly than before. Now suddenly everything changed. As if she had pushed me out of herself, making me feel like a drunkard. I understood neither the words nor the sentences. Only the fragrance that emanated from her enormous hair, full of glittering beads of drizzle, from her soft white skin under the collar, and from her bare neck — perhaps only that fragrance had not changed. Her posture had changed, the color and tone of her voice had changed, and her comportment had changed. It was as if with my sense of smell, stunned by the acridity of an exceptional perfume, I were trying to reach her true fragrance while becoming so deeply immersed in both fragrances that I couldn’t hope to separate them. It was improbable that we were still standing here in this storm, roaming over each other’s face, knowing that it was all hopeless. I should have jumped into the Danube from the Árpád Bridge. I planned to leave here as soon as possible, yet I couldn’t even give up the enjoyment of hopelessness. Or perhaps it was her fragrance that kept me; the gusty wind thrust it toward me and carried it away from me.

And she had a contradicting sentence for every one of my words; I could not allow that, but she wasn’t going to allow anything either.

She laughed again — my uncomprehending face must have looked funny. I sensed that a long time was going by, but there was another computation of time in which not even one of our shared moments could have passed and only the surface of everything could be touched, where everything remained hurried and volatile.

And, as if because of the words, we only snatched at issues in a desultory way, unable to talk them through to the end.

She motioned to me to look behind me.

A car was parked along the curb. I remembered having heard it stop there.

I looked at her and then at this odd, shiny automobile from another world, from before the war. I couldn’t decide what to do. I was furious, pouting about the way she might be forcing me to do something senseless. The person at the wheel did not move, seemed not even to notice us. His face could not be seen, he must have had a coat on, maybe a leather coat, and for a few moments he remained but an indifferent shadow. The windshield wipers kept swishing. And then he must have lost patience, having to wait so long. He leaned across the passenger seat and threw open the curbside door; his movement sizzled. People started coming out of the church, the organ sounded its loud farewell with great blows of air.

Don’t be angry, but I’m not coming, I said. I won’t. I said it as someone whose self-respect was important, but by saying it only once, I couldn’t make myself accept this declared intention.

When would she see me then, she asked, without the slightest change in her face. No annoyance, no sorrow. Raised eyebrows, engraved in her forehead. Perhaps her large eyes and pursed lips awaited an answer, but whatever my answer might be, no response would touch her being. A face made of large, white, motionless, and indifferent fields.

She looked so lovely that it hurt me to say what I was about to say, but I said it, I don’t know when we can see each other again.

And in that very instant her husband honked.

He barely touched the horn; it was nothing but another signal, but now the woman too seemed to lose patience. The various fields on her face twisted in anger, she pulled up her shoulders a little as if ready to attack. She shook herself, became ugly, and then yelled into my face to stop shitting around, what the hell was I shitting around for about a stupid little thing like this.

Now it was my turn; I burst out laughing. I said, all right, let’s not shit around. But it was easier to say that than to follow her and also satisfy every unexpected demand of the new situation.




The Lovely Angel of Revenge


Baron Schuer took his customary place at the large oval table as head of the family; Countess Auenberg sat opposite him, at the place to which the lady of the house had shown her. They were in the smaller dining room, which was used on weekdays. Its walls were covered in deep-green silk embossed in old gold; its white-lacquered neo-Baroque furniture was upholstered in the same silk; double doors and two large windows gave onto the terrace and because of the summer weather were left open.

One could see down the enfilade of rooms.

The two of them began to talk politely, rather coolly even, a bit offhandedly, as if barely able to control a mutual dislike. Even though from the very first word they felt such an urge to converse that they scarcely had the patience to await the other’s responses. As if they had spent too much time on the high, neutral plane of politeness. While beneath them, in the depths, beyond the formalities, they saw all sorts of other things — nimble fish, gently floating water plants — which in a little while they would dip down to obtain, without breaking off their mutual glances, rapidly filling with increasing joy.

For long minutes after the maids had left silently, having served the cold fruit soup topped with whipped cream in cavernous Rosenthal bowls, incredulity and shock reigned around the table on account of the two of them, shock underlying the restlessness and the continual babble of voices; the others, despite their formal discipline, felt the maddening whirlpool-like tug of a potential scandal.

That’s it, Schuer cried to himself, so pleased with his idea that he could have jumped for joy, as if arriving at an important station in his life. This did not necessarily have amorous significance, at least not directly. She will create the right conditions for me in Budapest, and once again he carefully scrutinized the young woman the better to see who it was whom he had to win over for his undertaking. Yet he couched his professional plans, which had arisen because of her, in terms of endearment. As if to say, all I need to do is touch her, and she will bloom.

Oh, why didn’t I think of this before.

He saw clearly that she was the being he should have waited to marry, no one else.

They did not acknowledge that in their great bewilderment about each other they were talking at cross-purposes while hearing and understanding the words of the others at the table, who, prompted by a similar bewilderment if not embarrassment, had been interrupting their duet and one another too. The two of them heard this duet they were creating — how could they not — but they didn’t understand the others, because they were no longer curious about them. This time he must not be too hasty, Schuer warned himself. Not every day does one meet someone who will be a queen tomorrow.

Nothing changed in the pleasantly cool dining room shaded by gigantic maple trees, or outside in the splendid rose garden, to warrant a mutual emotional excitement of such proportions.

Someone should have stopped talking, if only out of obligatory courtesy.

As if a thick, sonorous jet of water had bubbled up from the well of mutual admiration and adoration.

He had not waited for her, how could he have; he hadn’t known her, had had no idea she existed. Ridiculous, he said to himself. But now she would be useful, together they would establish the new institute, which he definitely needed, and this woman, a Hungarian queen, would be his patroness, which is quite impressive any way one looks at it, even though he knows these are empty words, a ludicrous self-consolation. The more likely object of his enthusiasm was the young woman’s beauty and elegance. He felt her as irresistible, had never met anyone like her.

Everyone noticed it, even the cautious maids busy with the soup. Amid much giggling and pretended secretiveness in the kitchen, they passed on the news to the cook and the scullery maid preparing the sauerbraten. This is a delicate operation in any circumstance; one must be quick so the meat doesn’t cool while being sliced.

The two of them had no sense of the impropriety they had put on public display. They both believed that in the circumstances they were well disciplined, and they admired themselves for their self-control.

Yet it was more like being on the brink of an earthquake.

Because they wanted more, wanted everything, they could not deny themselves to each other. How could they look into each other’s eyes without plunging into the whole scandalous story of their years spent without each other, and how could they not relate even more and more while readily absorbing the totality of images offered in the raw sight of the other’s solid, lithe physicality. The lady of the house, the three well-behaved children, the severely dressed Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein and the nurse, Miss Bartleby, a rather pale, heavily freckled, unattractive Englishwoman with frizzled red hair, who was in charge of the children even at mealtimes — everyone around the table saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears what the two of them were up to.

A brilliant and indifferent early afternoon in late August with the unmistakable hints of approaching autumn’s flavors and barbs.

This is what is happening to them. In the eyes of both there shone an alarming, wonderful feeling of being both surprised and privileged.

Countess Auenberg felt only one thing, that after three days of absence, she had reached home in Schuer’s sparkling eyes.

Although she couldn’t have said where she had come from or where they might now go together. Will this stranger sitting opposite her supplant her adored betrothed. She was so lost in Schuer’s glances, glittering with cold lights and cruelty — and she saw, how could she not, that he was dangerous, a man to be feared — that his incredible nose failed to disturb her, on the contrary. Yet it kept staring at her threateningly, in just the way she had complained about to Karla.

But it did not occur to her that her infidelity might be scandalous or that she was wavering in her love for her betrothed; she was suddenly busy with many objective details. Other considerations could not have entered her mind, on the contrary.

Because he was here, sitting opposite her.

Even if she were to see them together, she would mix up the two men’s faces and mainly their figures.

That made her happy — the sensitive, invulnerable mixing of the two, its enthralling realization. She spoke to him in rapid, whirling words. As if she were speaking to an idol. She spoke to him with her strong, courtly Viennese accent, herself incredulous about what she was experiencing and what she was now telling this idol so loudly, distracting her own attention from the impermissible attraction and its realization. This is not a human being; this is an idol. Not once did she turn to Baroness Thum, who also insisted on speaking only to Schuer, disregarding the lady of the house too, who, with loud arrhythmic comments, remained the loneliest person in the company. Well, the day before yesterday when — no, Schuer cannot possibly imagine — led by the charming Emmy Göhring, she laughed as she pronounced the name, she was absolutely charming, she laughed again, they paid a visit to Arno Breker’s atelier, here on Käuzchensteig if she wasn’t mistaken, wonderful, it’s probably not far from here, you probably know the place, isn’t it marvelous, you must go see it, he is a marvelously great artist, well, she became aware of an astonishing bust in one of the atelier’s abandoned nooks, on a pedestal such as one sees in ateliers, but she didn’t mention that, overwhelmed by the obscene and brutal sight of all those tight bundles of muscles, in the entire studio she had found fascinating and reassuring only this smooth naked male shoulder. At first glance she thought, she could not believe her eyes, that the artist had probably modeled the bust so lovingly on her fiancé. She could not describe it any other way but that it had been made with love, though she knew nothing of the creation or existence of this sculpture. Nor did she say, how could she, that she had not yet seen her fiancé’s naked shoulder, how could she. She worships her fiancé in his impeccably tailored suits, though she knows, she giggled to herself, that she should worship only Jesus Christ.

Still, she wasn’t curious about him naked, nor about his shoulder either; in fact she wasn’t curious about any part of him. There will be a time for that. Which she feared — what she would have to do then.

Schuer could not have known what the Hungarian countess was laughing about to herself as she talked to him with such abandon and why, at the same time, he shuddered at her sight, or why this shuddering made her more desirable. Even though he wanted nothing from her. I don’t want anything. She became in his eyes a little like a lovely angel of revenge. Only he could not understand why he thought this; on what or whom might this angelic being take revenge. On his terrible marriage, his entire infernal life until now.

Or if the artist had not modeled the bust on her fiancé—she had to get closer to it, something about it was suspicious, she, by the way, worships art and worships artists too, she continued with the forbidden word and in her immoderately loud and piercing, shrill little voice — then the artist must have modeled it on himself.

That is what she wanted to see, but the ladies kept following her everywhere.

She personally didn’t care if sometimes these modern artists with their modern works were shocking. She failed to notice the chilling effect these words provoked around the table. The moment she uttered them, all three women and even Schuer fell silent. Miss Bartleby, who until now had been trying in a subdued voice to restrain the children — and who, to the great amusement of the family, was considered a passionate devotee of the spirit of national socialism — could hardly contain herself. Unless asked, she was forbidden to take part in conversations around the table. Modern temples should be erected to house their shocking works. This remark caused a cacophony even louder than the previous one; everybody was trying to drown out the countess’s impossible sentences. And she did not say aloud how the artist with his entire physical presence had reminded her of Mihály, even though she could see that Breker had a terribly weak character, that he was a terrible sycophant. At this moment, it seemed to her unbearably impossible that her listeners knew nothing of Mihály. Perhaps she should talk about Mihály. But then it turned out, she continued easily and in the same breath, that the statue depicted neither the sculptor nor Mihály but the wonderful architect Albert Speer, whom she had not had the good fortune to meet, but she was sure they must know well that he was the Führer’s favorite architect; she said it like that, her voice full of tenderness as she pronounced the word Führer. With which she quickly rectified some of her earlier rudeness, as her listeners interpreted it. Even though the tenderness was directed at the model of the bust rather than at Hitler, whom she quietly abhorred. Following Count Svoy’s advice, in this instance it would have been incorrect to say Hitler. She had to accept that this was the way Germans expressed their natural affection for and unconditional trust in the man she found repulsive in every sense of the word. And demonstrating to the Germans that she was independent was not the only important thing to do, in this she agreed completely with Count Svoy, since over the centuries the Auenbergs had become great Hungarians; she also wanted to exploit for the benefit of Hungarians the fact that given her bloodline and her name she belonged to the Germans.

Which Schuer, involved in this subject, had instinctively sensed in her face and figure when he first saw her approach on the garden path alongside Baroness Thum. With some satisfaction he acknowledged that she had an exemplary Nordic physique. Even Eichstedt, that skeptical scientist, would be happy to see such pigment-poor skin and hair, so supple and slender a figure, on which there was nothing superfluous, the long face with its slim nose, with its exceptionally high base and unusually close-sitting nostrils; with their sensitivity, these features moved him to the core. He will start an affair with her, a secret affair. He lingered long on her unpainted lips and then sought out her barely protruding cheekbones to observe how she spoke, chewed, and swallowed, in a way to possess, from an anatomical viewpoint, the young woman’s bite.

But she was sorry that Eva Braun was not present, her lips said.* Another topic her listeners would not talk about, and they were appropriately taken aback by her mention of the name. She had heard so many good things about her, she must be a charming personality, they probably knew her. They fidgeted, what is this foolish little Hungarian countess going on about, and began to speak over and above her scandalous utterances, so as not to hear them. Speer’s charming wife, Margret, she was there, however, in the dazzling array of ladies, Magda Goebbels and the others, all of them. Any man would be happy in the company of so many dazzling women, but she had the definite impression that they had left this great artist cold. Artists, after all, are busy with their art, and for a great artist we forgive everything, do we not. And with that remark, and an amiable laugh, she glanced around at her table companions, all of whom were preoccupied with themselves and, except for Siegfried, talking about themselves. Countess Imola received no answer, but this did not seem to bother her. Margret Speer is a dazzling woman, she continued, instructively, as if going more deeply into the subject might elicit curiosity. Her modesty is so winning, and the two of them quickly established a friendly relationship, a few words sufficed and then they understood each other, they would visit each other. Margret would come to them in Fánt and she would very happily visit the Speers in Berchtesgaden. Her shyness and objectivity were touching. Downright touching, she said, with an embarrassed little laugh underlining this impression of Margret, who said, yes, she also could not fail to notice the resemblance between the physiognomies of the two men.

It is probably no accident that the two of them are such good friends.

So much openness and chatter charmed everyone at the table, as if they now forgot about her earlier scandalous statements.

Men are truly enviable for the profound friendships they develop among themselves. Men are peculiar, very peculiar. Women are not prepared for things like that, for such great, heroic friendships. Their pure feeling for one another is what makes men psychologically so strong, in her view. And they need their strength too, because somebody has to protect the women. Still, everybody was surprised to see that somebody would have such a likeness, which was indeed beyond all human imagination. Perhaps we should read the Bible a little more carefully. Or take it more seriously. Because if we are all created in God’s image and He wants it that way, then there can’t be too much difference among us. And how in the world could there be so many likenesses in one big pile, she thought in Hungarian, which seemed disdainful enough for her not to say aloud. However, the true focus of her disdain was Bolshevik and Nazi ideas of equality, neither of which was to her liking; they both seemed to her to be terrible populisms, inundating many societies with their vulgarity. And Schuer surely knew this too; he must have noticed that in bodily shapes there are other similarities around the world. Perhaps everyone recognizes this, but not everyone is fortunate enough to live in proximity to his likenesses. Schuer, with such splendid achievements in his research on twins, as the baroness had told her with great enthusiasm, must have an explanation for this phenomenon. She regaled him with the story of her official visit only to mention the shocking phenomenon for which she could find no scientific explanation. She could call this nothing but a miracle, a miracle. Surely there was a scientific explanation, of which she, because of her feminine ignorance, was not aware, even though she had taken biology courses in Prague.

She wanted to let the man of science know this fact too.

She’s always had a special interest in genetics, and she mentions this now only because when she mentioned it this morning she had the impression the professor thought she’d done so only out of politeness. Which offended her a little. How is it possible that there are so many multiple resemblances and simultaneities among different lines of heredity, would Schuer be kind enough to allow her to pose this question directly to him. But she would not say aloud that when, as part of the crowd streaming out of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, Schuer stopped in front of her, she glanced at the four of them linked in their physical reality.

She glanced at Mihály’s lookalike, who was the likeness of these two who in turn were each other’s likeness.

I’m losing my mind, she thought in Hungarian, what a dizzy person I am, I see him in every man, she said to herself, though she could not have said who she was seeing in whom among the many likenesses.

She knew Mihály best of all, of course, which is why she thinks they all resemble him, but perhaps it’s the other way around, that he resembles them. And the attraction of this thought was so strong she could not banish it.

Another reason she did not say this out loud was that at the table, very near a full glass of water, she was whirling within her own thought and in dread of what she felt about it. If four such insane likenesses may occur in creation, if Albert Speer can resemble Arno Breker so much that it seems as if Breker had modeled himself on the architect, who happens to be his friend, and these two so eerily resemble Schuer — this is how her insane calculation went — whose shape is eerily like Mihály Horthy’s, then there must be countless others like them who keep exchanging their personalities and profiles, in which case we are talking about the possibility not that one of these men will by chance become her husband, with his own or someone else’s personality, but that any one of the others could be her husband.

What frightened her most was that she accepted this thought from herself without protest and broke down every barrier in her thinking. Even though she had been raised to fear and dread black magic, reject esotericism, and disdain superstition. There were secret passages, then, among individual lives. Which she has now uncovered, found the trail of, but should not tell anyone about lest they think she’s gone mad.

Frightened and suspicious, she asked herself whether these unhindered secret passages existed only among men.

Whose powerful probability she could not but feel in the muscles of her thighs; she should have spread them a little more, which she did, but in her fright she closed them again, modestly. She had only to look at this variant sitting across the table from her to feel that she was insanely attracted not to their personalities but to their sheer physical forms. These men have no personalities. In which case, she has gone mad. Her mother must have left her and her sisters for some reason like this. The big trickster probably strongly resembled their father; more correctly, their father was only a doppelganger of the trickster and their mother had to leave the copy for the original, and so she made short shrift of exchanging one for the other.

And why shouldn’t she have done it; it was logical that she did.

She’d never experienced this among women, women are very different from one another and like to be different; they make a point of it. In contrast to women, men are interchangeable. You may choose any one of them, this other voice whispered, you have to pick one; for them it’s all the same whom they impregnate. In her feet, growing tense in her comfortable shoes, and in the roots of her hair she felt the excitement of the thought; she could not let go of it. She was pursued by the thought that she must choose not the copy, obviously, but the original; the thought made her brain ache, yes, not the forgery but the original. There’s no denying that she also felt this torturing thought in her breasts, becoming sensitive where the silk blouse touched them, and in the depths of her womb. She continued to chat rapidly and with inspiration about the many-faceted indecency that this truly great artist allowed himself to commit against the wife of the famous architect, let’s admit it, very boldly. If he were not an artist, one could not forgive him such immoderation.

He had told the visiting ladies about the emotional admiration and devotion he had felt for Margret’s husband from the first moment of their first encounter, and with this admission he no doubt embarrassed them all — the ass kisser, she thought in Hungarian, every artist is a born ass kisser — but Margret’s husband was also the man whom he could thank for his wonderful commissions, she added aloud in German, laughing.

Still laughing, she asked Baron Schuer, deep in his own monologue, whether he had the good fortune to be familiar with the amazing story of the two great artists’ encounter.

She could easily call it a meeting of giants.

Her overheated, shrill little voice sweetly cut through the other voices.

Frankly, she was happy because she was no longer thinking about the oddity that she would have to leave the proximity of this man and return to the Auenbergs’ city palace in Tárnok Street in Buda.

The sun-drenched riparian city sank back into its dim and chaotic past.

The umbilical cord snapped.

Although she received no answer, she probably did not expect one, just as she had not responded to every aspect of the hubbub Schuer had made when he volunteered, unasked, those details about his youthful experiences in the Thuringian campaign.

For the time being they could both be satisfied with what they had found in each other’s eyes and quickly made their own.

She bewitched Schuer with her shrill little voice, and the scientist’s warm, lecture-trained deep bass had a similarly profound effect on her. Because, you know, Countess, it so happened, and with your permission I’ll tell you this one last story, before moving out of the area we should have stopped in Friedrichroda to put things in order there too. The two of them made each other’s body resonate like a sound box; with vibrations coursing through each other’s corporeal matter, neither of them had to pay attention to what was actually being said. They could look at each other’s hands, lips, neck, or forehead, whatever their clothes left exposed to the eye. While the three children and the three other women, their pupils dilated, marveled to see them being gradually and improbably transformed. Spooning their soup with painful precision, the hostess and the two other women tried to engage in conversation on so-called neutral topics. They ostentatiously pretended to be sharing lighthearted banter and paid no heed to its content, hoping that the other two would awaken from their scandalous shamelessness and return to earth.

The two continued to converse politely, spoons in hand, hoping to distract everyone’s attention including their own from all that was happening publicly between them.

People in Schuer’s house never sat down to lunch before two o’clock, and they always ate very simply, never to excess. Which was as much part of the strictly followed family tradition as was the obligatory tastelessness of the food. Occasionally cooks would quit the job out of conviction, when they reached the point where they could not endure banishing all taste and character from the food. No surprise that in this house the preparation of sauerbraten was a hotly debated issue. At the Schuers, the cooks had to be sure that the food was never composed of ill-smelling or odorous raw ingredients, for the smell of raw meat revolted Schuer, and though he never went near the pantry or kitchen, the very thought of being under the same roof with uncooked meat also revolted him. Yet a good sauerbraten must, before being cooked, marinate in its vinegary, spicy sauce for at least ten days or even three weeks.

They all found it unbearable to sit there as if nailed to the stiff, high-backed, barely upholstered chairs along with other people with whom they had nothing in common. Baroness Karla did not understand what might possibly have tied her only a few hours earlier to this shocking female, who with perfidious naïveté was concealing her intelligence and about whom, despite her unpleasantly shrill, hysterical little voice, there had never been anything little-girlish even in her girlish years. Still, she couldn’t get enough of the younger woman’s premature beauty. Suddenly she felt compelled to accuse Imola not only of being ignorant of degenerate art — the reason for her idolizing these particular modern works — but also of having lost her innocence.

Though she’s engaged, she’s not ashamed to behave like this with the first man she meets.

Baroness Erika disdained but also felt a little sorry for the showy young lady.

She’s crazy, she said to herself, excusing her guest, yet it was in these painful moments that her mind clearly formulated the haunting yet always repellent realization that the father of her children was not a human being; she’d always known he was an animal. Who obviously would have preferred to get up from the table in his home, grasp the hand of the ever-twittering crazy woman, and with no consideration run off with her, leaving behind his beautiful, happy family life.

They didn’t know what to do with their destructive emotions; they couldn’t shed their self-discipline so suddenly.

Though Baroness Erika nervously repeated to herself several times the helpful bourgeois commonplaces reserved for just such occurrences — I’m dreaming, this cannot be true, I must be dreaming — that is to say, though she tried to diffuse her anger by saying one should not acknowledge painful reality, she could rise above it by talking over it, and clichés often help one navigate seemingly hopeless situations, she herself was behaving compulsively. In a loud voice, she combatively matched every sentence spoken by someone else with one of her own, saying something about the soup they had been served, that the Schuers cannot bear cinnamon or clove in fruit soup, which in the first years struck her as very strange, it’s not always easy for a young wife to cope with the odd eating habits or peculiar demands of a husband’s family; something about the rose garden where blooms continued so abundantly until November, about pervasive smells emanating from the institute, from the entire research area, from her husband’s clothes, from the clothes of their guests, frankly, she can’t stand the smells; something about the children’s progress — she uttered proper and improper bits and shards of sentences with no apparent logical relation to one another, but with which she stepped over the boundary between inner monologue and public conversation; in fact, she didn’t know what she was saying.

She asked if the others were aware of the smells, because she was, even as she spoke.

But the others paid no attention to her. What she was feeling now, what was guiding her, was a terrible dream she was having about her husband. She could not have imagined he would be so starved for this common kind of love or that he could tenderly love anyone. She had no tender feelings for him. They respected each other and had no reason to be dissatisfied with that. And yet she now had to witness his meltdown, his disgusting hankering for this hysterical Hungarian woman, virtually devouring her with his eyes. Baroness Erika was convinced that neither of them needed intemperance like this breaching their obligatory mutual respect. Life was ruled by a strict agenda, and she had never thought there was a nobler or morally more satisfying task than to carry out that agenda, a task that required a complete human being.

Saturday nights were the only times when she was assailed by a physically somewhat burdensome and potentially sordid anxiety: about moments when, accompanied by a long moan, her husband reached the end of his all-too-short pleasure. The baroness would have wanted more. Which she would never have dared to wish. Instead she tolerated what there was, if that was how it had to be, and offered no initiatives. She was careful not to fidget afterward with the inexplicably deep currents of her wildness, not to awaken the man who, having wiped his member, wet with sperm and vaginal secretions, on the edge of his silk-poplin nightshirt, dropped into a deep sleep as if on schedule. The nightshirts had to be hidden in different places so the maid would not find them, and every week she would sneak them into a batch of clothes to be soaked so the washerwoman would not notice them either. After his aggressively large and satisfied body relaxed in sleep, he often and for long periods continued happily to pass wind, of which he was wholly unaware. Or, if he was startled awake by it, for the sake of them both he pretended not to notice. Twice it happened to the baroness that just as she lay there helplessly on her back, disgusted and rigid in the fetor emanating from under the cover and with her very wet thighs trembling, perhaps because of the strength of the aversion she felt for the man, rumbling waves of her own gratification swept across her. Her body made itself independent. It was as though her insides sensed a tectonic movement and then her entire disciplined and pampered state of mind dissipated like the crest of a gigantic wave into individual drops.

Without her being able to do anything about it.

She could not even scream, yell, or bellow exultantly.

When her consciousness returned, she felt filthy again.

She could barely wait for Monday, when she could change her nightclothes and her husband’s stained and sperm-smelling nightshirt. The washerwoman did not understand why she had to starch the professor’s nightshirts more heavily than his shirts. So he wouldn’t wipe it on them, let it hurt if he does things like that. The baron did not dare say anything about the stiffened nightshirts, because then he might have to specify what he did with them. The baroness would not have liked to acknowledge a human organ and its attendant physiological phenomena of which, even after the births of three children, she knew hardly anything. Later, though, she always hoped that maybe it would happen to her again, and so she did not mind that the man dropped off into satisfied sleep, always at the same moment and always in the same way.

While she listened, mildly disgusted though not completely denying her moderate interest either, to the bursting bubbles of his gases and to his snoring, all she had to do was touch herself, just barely, the temptation was great for it to happen again, but she did not do it, she resisted, no.

She thought it best not to have it happen, for she was ashamed of pleasure and ashamed of her readiness for it.

Occasionally, Otmar wanted it several times.

She could not reject him on every occasion.

That was another reason it seemed more correct for her to remain calm and not to tremble.

Whenever Otmar awakened himself by farting too loudly because of his efforts, in a developing dream, to stop his falling body at the edge of a precipice, he would grab wildly at his wife to stop her trembling, pry her thighs apart, and, bent on satisfying her, brutally penetrate her. Although he did not much feel like it, he did it because he was aroused by his wife’s heavy body trembling vulnerably under the covers, and he would keep pushing and thrusting like an obstinate willful child who wants everything and at once, because he lived in the belief that the more expediently he pushed and the deeper and more brutally he penetrated, the greater his wife’s pleasure would be.

During such moments there was no room for formal tenderness or obligatory attentiveness, which otherwise functioned flawlessly between the two of them.

Schuer believed that the male had to struggle with the tempting resistance of the female for the sake of propagation, and her eternal frustration from not being satisfied was temptation itself.

That was the brick wall he had to break through.

And when that happened, Baroness Erika’s knees and thighs would go on trembling mildly into Sunday morning.

Which ruined her entire day.

She never talked to her husband about her Sunday migraines; she never connected the aches in her ovaries and her irregular menstruation with these terrible nocturnal scenes, and that is why she could not mention them.

But even if she’d known what she might naturally discuss with her husband she still wouldn’t have done it.

She didn’t want to spoil their lovely family life with such matters.

Now, however, she was witnessing a nightmare from which she had to wake herself immediately. It won’t last much longer, she told herself, she will concentrate on the children until it passes, she said to herself. She wants to wake up so she won’t scream because of the pain.

What are you doing to me.

She couldn’t imagine herself capable of suffering so much mental anguish; her heart was nearly breaking, yet this slightly alleviated her painful Sunday headache.

What have you done to me, and what more are you going to do to me.

The children behaved best, though they were exhausted by the adults’ peculiar behavior; Miss Bartleby found herself very busy with them. Mainly, she had to restrain the two little girls. Ortrud, sitting on plumped-up pillows, the smallest of the three children, cried out or made gurgling sounds when she sensed tension among the grown-ups, and this elicited quieting hisses and lengthy admonitions from Miss Bartleby. Children were forbidden to speak at the table. And Sieglinde began to swing her legs like a bell’s clapper under the table. Which in the Schuer household was also strictly forbidden. Both Miss Bartleby and the nanny were told not to put up with it even for a moment. They were given permission to hit the children’s bare feet with a stick. They often voiced their view that a little child should never be unsupervised and should never become irresponsibly absorbed in himself, whether in company or alone. These views referred to something the children did not understand.

We do not cut boiled potatoes with a knife on our plate; we break them up with our fork.

This, however, the children knew.

We do not spread jam on black bread, only on white. They did not understand that, but they had to accept it.

In fact, the adults assumed that the uncontrolled monotonous swinging of legs would lead the children into bad habits. Too strong and uniform a pleasure, for too long a time, would travel from the muscles of their little legs to the base of the thighs, and then the child would be doing it all the time. Miss Bartleby had to check for reddening of the girls’ little vaginas, because that would be the telltale sign. Or the boy’s little penis might grow erect as the result of the seemingly innocent foot dangling, which applied continuous steady pressure to his two little testicles. But the Englishwoman was now so busy with the scandalous sight before her and with her own politically motivated agitation that she did not notice what was happening under the table, what was brewing among the children.

While the adults, individually and together, kept on saying what they had to say, interrupting one another, knocking down another’s words as soon as they were uttered. Baroness Thum was the loudest; the children feared her the most. She was now profoundly ashamed of Countess Auenberg’s provocative behavior, and she was ready to burst with her own multilayered jealousy. But they were all talking past one another, above one another’s words, increasing the cacophony, even though they knew they should listen to the end of what anyone else was saying, which, in fact, they heard very well. Baroness Thum had to calm herself down. And Siegfried turned more and more pale with his concentrated attention; he was the only one who did not open his beautifully shaped mouth.

He was an exceptionally anemic, pale little boy who frequently fainted, which made his father even more dissatisfied with him.

He was too pretty for a boy; adults looked at him with a certain aversion or uncertainty. He was actually waiting for his little sister to kick him under the table, deliberately or by accident, which would release their accumulated pent-up desire to become unruly. He longed for a little pain, a small clandestine punishment that would allow him to let loose with the aggression he had kept in check.

Whenever he passed out, they threw cold water on him, slapped him in the face, put him in the bathtub all dressed and turned the cold shower on him. For days after the slaps his father coldly gave him, his jaw would feel dislocated and he would find speaking difficult. In vain he promised never to faint again. In his heart he did not blame his father for the strict preventive measures he took, because he knew, oddly, that his father knew what a devastating fate awaited him, his son, even if everything were done for him or against him.

He admired his father and regularly spied on him when he went to urinate.

He looked up to his wonderful father as to someone who had once managed to avoid such a fate, with the aid of great self-discipline.

As if the two of them knew everything about each other.

His father had a marvelous fate; everyone respected and admired him. And he secretly wanted to acquire his father’s habits to avoid the impending danger. Although he did not think he could possibly follow in the footsteps of such a wonderful man. He worshipped his powerful father so much that when his unsuspecting father left the toilet, he would sneak in, lock the door, and, bending over the bowl, inhale the smell of the urine; he was ecstatic, the smell of his excrement, oh, the odor of every little remnant and excretion of his; he was put out if he could not indulge himself in anything of his father’s. And to sniff his father’s soiled shirts and underpants in the hamper, because there too he fancied he could smell his urine.

He had no way of knowing how tactful and intimately considerate his father was toward his mother, an exemplary mother and wife. She did not quite like the Saturday-night interludes, and therefore in the second year of their marriage, after she was finished with the confinement following Siegfried’s birth, Schuer decided he’d do it for her only once a week, not to burden her too much.

One cannot say it wasn’t difficult for him, but in truth he never did it the way he really wanted to, so it was no great sacrifice.

And thus, in the late afternoon or evening of almost every Wednesday, while staring at the smooth white wall, his lips parted and eyes half-closed to evoke the carefully selected and by now well-worn memories of the wartime barracks — in which not copulating men and women but their limbs and sexual organs played leading roles, images far removed from what he would have realistically desired from his wife but allowing him to enjoy a second weekly occasion, in Luther’s name, so that he would not be neurotic and irritable with his wife or co-workers — he quickly satisfied himself.

They could not have known that when the little boy stumbled out of the toilet, he fainted because of his enormous love for his father.

If she kicks me again I’ll pinch her mercilessly.

A dangerous emotion was urging the little boy against Sieglinde, who could not have known what dangerous thoughts were occurring to her powerful father because of that woman. But perhaps she did sense something dangerous about her, and sense that her father’s thoughts were for his family. Not to mention that the young woman’s fragrance, the unusual colors and lines of her clothes, inclined her to a special predisposition toward a wide, elegant great world of whose existence she was otherwise unaware.

They could not have known that the way of the world was changing around them; the reckoning of time was about to be jolted, and they would be jolted too, even if they had known of the impending change ahead of time.

In fact, the powerful and wonderful father apparently did nothing but, as it were, display his knowledge to the high-ranking foreign lady and elaborate on his scientific plans. He himself could not have said whether with his oft-repeated words he was trying to conceal the emotional turmoil taxing his entire body and soul, or, the other way around, he was releasing all his emotions so as to court the elegant woman vehemently, to lure her into his scientific plans so that later on he could make use of her influence. Suddenly he did not understand how, in the midst of explaining his scientific concepts, his judgment and thinking could slip so out of control. When and how had he strayed into such a delicate biographical subject, what could have deflected him, to speak of something he should not mention. He had not spoken of it with anyone for twenty years; and when he was supposed to report on the events he had witnessed to the freshly appointed district attorney of the republic, he had lied brazenly, not out of necessity, but with his head held high because that was what comradeship demanded.

As if he were standing naked before the young woman with all his moral burdens. He wanted something important from her, though he could not tell what might be more valuable than his work and good name. He slid back twenty years because of the young woman, because of her he became lost in his own biography, and despite his power and reputation and scientific knowledge he could not have told at this moment who he would become, what person, who might start his life anew.

How, in what system or order, does one formulate a sentence in oneself; he did not know.

Who does she see in him, this young woman who should have nothing but contempt for him, if she knew who he was.

One speaks first, and only then realizes what one wanted to say.

This, however, happens in an instant, like slipping or tripping.

I’d be unworthy of such a woman, he thought, and looked at her innocent delicate limbs, even though he believed he feared her.

But then he can’t know who it was who’d been talking from his body and through his mouth, or who the person was who, in advance, saw through his plans that could not be put into words.

He did not say aloud that there wasn’t a word of truth in anything he’d said though there were many true things in it; the temptation to say this was great, but this is something one can only desire and cannot come near doing.

Please, do not be so gullible about me, he wanted to warn her, to protect her from himself.

Which made him see her more clearly, because, after all, he had deprived himself of her possible effect on him. Your respect feels good, even though I know you wish to flatter me with it; still, I accept it because I melted, I have been melting in your presence. But please, do not forget for a moment what a laughable character I am, even in my own eyes. I am not a trickster, you don’t have to worry about that, I am a clever scientific official, which is no mean thing, but without significant scientific achievements, though I’ve yearned for them all my life. He became very sentimental about himself. Perhaps I shall achieve something significant yet. This woman should be a queen, who would keep her from it, it must happen.

She shouldn’t run off with a nobody like me.

After a while, he managed to regain some of his mental composure and, to retain it, continued to talk uninterruptedly and with great aplomb. He mentioned only subjects he had talked about a hundred times before; at most he had merely to adjust the intonations. Perhaps he played a bit more strongly on the emotional strings. Which caused his disagreeable memory to work harder. Of course the prisoners whom the volunteers had to march to Friedrichroda that foggy spring morning had not been shot while trying to escape, as the official report had said. Which ones among you have small children, step forward, you miserable commies. Good Lord, someone thought with alarm, was that the sentence. Run, damned communists, they yelled, and when those prisoners believed they could disappear in the fog, among the trees, that they were free, could go home to their small children, then it happened.

Which ones among you have a wife at home, damned communists, step forward. Actually, he was glad this is how he remembered it and forgot nothing. Who among you have widowed communist mothers, you damned commies.

Who is an orphan, they yelled at the last one, you damned communist.

By the time they reached Friedrichroda, not one of the twenty-seven was left.

But what am I saying, he interrupted himself in a practiced conversational tone, stopping himself from uttering another word on this topic and returning quickly to a favorite subject of his, which, although it did not put his life in an adventurous or colorful light, made him feel safer morally.

These realizations, then, provide medical science with means, he was explaining, and you should never lose sight of this, Countess, means by which we can control and steer the biological fate of our people. We are no longer at the mercy of chance, as are less fortunate nations, and I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to say, because it must be obvious that I am thinking of Hungary.

Anthropologically, the most interesting part of the story was that the second group of these communist beasts ran off into the depth of the forest with the same inner conviction as the first group had — run, damn commies — even though in the fog everybody had heard the dull reports of bullets whizzing among the trees just minutes earlier.

There could have been no one who did not know what that meant.

Run, damn communists, run.

Think about it, Countess, if one has a chance to do something good and noble for the sake of one’s grandchildren or one’s entire nation, will a man with the right sensibilities pass up such an opportunity, no matter what the price.

It seems that one’s instinct to escape proves to be stronger than one’s reason, he said to himself at the same time, the animal in one has the advantage, and the human in a person comes afterward, ready to weigh things.

He did not answer his own rhetorical question because he did not wish to carry his pathetic tone too far.

Individually what we are doing here are scientific odd jobs, nothing else. But the work we do together on the national scale is indeed something big.

His fellow soldiers enjoyed it, he was thinking, and they couldn’t have been less educated or cultured than I, because this wasn’t a question of culture. To share their enjoyment after their first shots, that was wonderful. We live together or we die together. And the damn communists can always be destroyed, down to the last one, and that’s what makes the manhunt enjoyable. Which is not without etiological interest. Why does one enjoy something done in a group that one does not enjoy doing alone precisely because the group forbids it.

Who disconnects the inhibitions.

Or perhaps it should be asked the other way around. Why should he condemn it if he enjoys it so much.

Countess, perhaps you won’t be distressed by this, because no matter how highfalutin it may sound, we must say it aloud, he said aloud. Together we have lifted ourselves out of the lamentable march of world history. With the racial laws in place, the grand work is ready. About this neither American nor Norwegian, not even French researchers have major doubts. They envy not our achievements, they too have come close to such achievements, but our situation and our laws.

They were brigands, communist beasts, he said to himself, as if with his own emotions he were defending himself against his own aggressiveness.

We consider the nation as a single spiritual and biological unit, and therefore have seen that it was beneficial to reverse the order of things in medicine as well, he continued, sounding most self-assured. He had so much practice in public speaking that it was easy for him to let his attention run on parallel tracks or to divide his thinking. Schuer was appreciated at the university because he never said anything surprising; he did not do his thinking publicly. He knew well that people liked to hear only the kind of speeches they have heard before. And because he did not like to be bored, he busied himself with different subjects while composing his speeches.

We consider our primary task to be not the curing of the individual but genetic prevention, he explained, the treatment of the nation’s body, which means filtering out and annihilating the sick or flawed inherited stock, because we are working for the benefit of a healthy and racially pure genetic stock. It is for this purpose that we have established our network of race-nurturing physicians. One can only regret that the Hungarians cannot come along with us in this great work. For the first time, we have raised the latest racial-biological findings to the level of state interest, and you will believe me, Countess, when I say that this is an unshakable edifice.

We have in our hands a key with which we can daily open nature’s jealously guarded strongboxes.

Genetics has penetrated closed areas that only the gods could view, until now.

And there are only organizational obstacles to sharing this knowledge of ours with the Hungarians. From a racial standpoint I personally see no problem at all. We are familiar with the biological laws of our people’s life and therefore it is no secret with which races we see it advantageous to renew the inherited stock of our own.

At this moment, Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein fell silent, alarmed, because not even her amplified inner monologue could stop her from realizing where her boss was headed.

She thought every claim that they had reliable knowledge about anything was ridiculous.

But just this once she managed not to get involved in the discussion.

For a few moments she ruminated over the question whether Schuer’s new ideas might thwart her Roman plans.

Health and illness, talent and madness, the rise and disappearance of entire families, nations, and peoples occur not only under environmental influences, explained Schuer to the countess, as inveterate individualists or Bolsheviks would like us to believe, but also under the influence of internal hereditary laws or, if you wish, Countess, of closed hereditary chains. One might say they are the results of independently inherited narratives. Which means, put simply, that we is a more important unit of nature than I, and any nation unwilling today to accept this hard rule will not be here tomorrow. Hereditary stock determines in advance the mode of the mutual effect occurring between a living organism and its environment. And this, Countess, no one can change throughout an entire lifetime. That is how you should look at it. In the best case, one would consider this peculiarity one’s personality. Or, because of one’s upbringing, for example, one might consider oneself a woman even though half of one’s inherited stock is a man’s.

Involuntarily they glanced at Siegfried.

The countess appeared to follow the man’s eyes, which absentmindedly looked at but probably did not see his only son. The boy remained an uncertain outline, a blurry blond spot with a concomitant, constant bitter feeling. No matter what he did, this boy would not realize the hopes he had for him. For a short while they both looked at him, looked at him with indulgence, as if he were their shared child, and there was something moving and reassuring in this for both of them. But the little boy did not notice their glances, because with angelically closed eyes he was waiting for his kid sister’s kick.

If not now, then in the next second it would come; he wanted to force the kick out of his little sister, he wanted it.

Or the other way around: the other half of one’s inherited stock may belong to a woman, but because of one’s upbringing one will consider oneself a man. Nevertheless, one is not a hermaphroditic mechanism — I say this to allay your fears, Countess — though every human being is close to being one.

If I’m not embarrassing you with this frivolous claim, I must say that one has a bisexual potential.

Racial purity is not a purpose in itself, let there be no misunderstanding between us about that, it is not an obsession but rather the biological prerequisite of the survival of the races.

He did not want to mention his proposal just yet; perhaps after he had finished his business with Karla, when the guests were leaving.

But he was on guard, observing the effect of his words, and he sensed boring into his side the destructive power, seething with jealousy and professional objections, of Baroness Thum’s tense silence. He was grateful to her for not expressing her hostility out loud, for not spewing out her venom. The reason he continued to speak so professorially, nicely cutting off and eliminating any possible questions and doubts, or veering off in different directions, was to keep the countess, who was very receptive to his ideas, from developing any misgivings about their future cooperation.

However, this game of playing it safe had little to do with professional reality.

To make the available data useful for purposes of national health and to use it to establish, at least retroactively, a new system of racial screening backed by the law, they needed as large a collection of data as it was possible to gather. We would need God’s data, he sometimes thought, annoyed at his own unpardonable way of thinking. And he had his doubts, because they had been operating a huge, expensive system on the strength of presuppositions — neither during their research nor retroactively could they justify the system on their meager available data — and since he believed their method of data gathering was inadequate, he had to consider the existing data irrelevant too.

We are confirmed materialists, this is what he thought, who try to grasp creation’s data in some material form. That is to say, his concern was that they conceived of human attributes as mere matter or as material manifestations.

This is nonsense; among sane people, this should be nothing but an object of ridicule.

The most important, strictly confidential sources of the palpable data were handled by Assistant Professor Mengele. Everything they regarded as so-called mixed or Jewish material. From Rome, however, they received data with which they could confirm African and south European sources of their comparisons, while from their colleagues in Oslo and Stockholm, where they had no independent institutions, they obtained data relating to Nordic peoples who had remained racially relatively pure. In his desperate hours, he saw clearly that not even another ten institutions and another ten generations would be enough to gather the necessary amount of data with which to confirm or reject a presupposition of any kind.

Budapest should long ago have been the center of research on Slavic and Balkan interbreeding. But he did not dare entrust his otherwise ready and willing Hungarian colleagues with the most confidential data, the research relating to the penis, vagina, and sperm stock.

Under the patronage of this woman, however, it might be possible to establish a German institute in Budapest paid for with Hungarian money, where he could quietly exile the baroness, and then he would not have to maintain an ongoing work relationship with Professor Orsós either.

But at the moment he feared not only the baroness’s professional judgment — her silence was hovering in the air — but also his wife’s rancor. He was guided by no inner conviction of any kind when he tried to do everything the way his wife wished.

Heredity and environment, these ancient movers of evolution and progress, he was saying, beaming with obligatory professional enthusiasm, are clearly separable. We must separate them.

There was no stopping now. He could no longer anticipate or comply with his wife’s wishes, which he did not understand himself.

I must stick with this pathetic little tone, this overly professorial little tone, he told himself, and he commanded himself to be patient.

It can be done nowhere but in the people’s state of Germany. The inherited stock and the conditions of a healthy environment must be guaranteed by nothing but the people’s state, which therefore must place the individual too under strict scientific supervision.

He burst into laughter. Except for Baroness Thum, nobody understood his expansive good mood, swollen with brutality and violence.

Yet Baroness Thum was busy with something else at the moment; taking advantage of the opportunity, she took a quick good look at Schuer’s teeth. She did not want to miss the chance. From this angle, she saw hardly any fillings. Although with such a brief glance she couldn’t catch every irregularity.

Of course, by now she’d had time to conclude that all three of Schuer’s offspring were idiots.

And anybody could see that the boy would be a pederast.

Maybe she should try to have a more thorough look at the roof of his mouth.

Today, the future of peoples can no longer be settled with conventional weapons, Countess, and if in the future, as part of your high office, you will be dealing with questions like this, you must keep this always in mind, that everything will be decided by the level and quality of the knowledge of genetics.

The maids had taken away the soup bowls and with great show and ceremony carried in, through the rooms, two large gravy bowls and on two great platters the elegantly sliced sauerbraten, garnished with steamed cabbage and gigantic potato dumplings, which at the Schuers was prepared according to the recipe of the famous clergyman’s daughter, with all the attention and love due to national foods. They had to keep it a secret from the master of the house that first the uncooked meat had been marinated for a week in a broth made with water, red wine, thinly sliced onion rings, and vinegar, spiced with bay leaves, pepper, and clove, and poured in the stone dish so as just to cover the meat. Several times a day, with ritual seriousness, they had turned the beef over in its bath.

Schuer laughed happily because to this day he could not help being happy about the circumstances he had just described. He could not get used to the wonderful thought that he’d a part in it; he was proud of it. He lived in a state that had adopted the findings of his science.

Think about it, Countess, he cried with rapturous boyish enthusiasm. The Führer is the first statesman in the history of the world who not only acknowledges and understands the achievements of research in racial purity and genetics, but has raised them to be the guiding principle in the administration of justice. For him, nothing is more important than a healthy nation.

Countess, please, perhaps a bit more gravy.

Which was a warning to the maids not to stand around staring but to make another round with the gravy bowls, and mainly a signal for her husband that it was high time to find another topic for table talk.

Oh, yes, Baroness, yes, please, you’re very kind.

Karla, dear, wouldn’t you like a bit more of this tasty sauce. Pass this to the baroness, will you. Our cook makes this exceptionally well. We’ll let the ladies have the recipe, unless of course you are already familiar with it.

Would love to have it, who could refuse such a generous offer.

Isn’t this the natural way, Countess. I can’t bear secret recipes.

Why should a recipe be kept secret.

Baroness Thum, however, rudely motioned to the maid that she could go, should not even come close with the disgustingly thick gravy.

And, as if happy about the unexpected silence and attention that she managed to provoke with her impoliteness, she turned toward Countess Imola and said loudly that she had known old Milton Bradley, he was a great mind, a great scientist, and a fascinating man.*

Schuer quickly and very expertly expressed astonishment.

Karla, you don’t say, I really had no idea you knew him.

They played this irksome little game all the time; to test the other, to see whether he or she could see the other’s closely held cards and, if possible, find a way to deceive each other. They could gauge the status of their altercation by the irritation shown on the other’s face. The goal was to drown the rival in a sea of contradictory information. This time, however, Schuer pretended to be surprised so he could come to his wife’s aid and shunt the table talk onto a different track, the conversation that he himself had initiated and steered so incautiously in its present direction. His wife did not appreciate scientific discussions at her table. With her good bourgeois attitude, she disdained miserable scientists anyway, had nothing but contempt for all of them, no matter how famous. They could impress her, at most, with their wealth. They always began talking innocently enough, but within a few minutes they would either speechify heatedly or arrive at details she did not consider it proper to hear.

Especially at the table, least of all at the table.

But, dear Otmar, I even told you about their summer home in Wyoming built right next to a loud rushing mountain creek.

How could you be so forgetful, Otmar.

But more important than anything else, he was among the first ones, perhaps the very first, to pay attention to the characteristics of pigmentation, those finely shaded differences. Indeed, in the process of definition one can grade the differences infinitely, and this is what enables us to describe racial peculiarities. If we are initiating the countess into our little professional secrets, I think we shouldn’t keep these details from her. The primary differences show up in the color of hair or skin or even eyes, and in a measurable way, provided one has determined the appropriate means and method of measuring. He could not have known it, old Milton. He did not find it. But I do know, because I have found it. He worked with, as it were, sensory methods.

He simply described what he saw on the skin. He had moving words for it.

If you study these details, Karla, I can say that you actually catch creation at its constitutional, or immanent, work. That’s what he said to me, verbatim. Now, please, you may imagine I was very interested in this, in catching creation doing its constitutional work. I’d say nothing could interest me more. This is how old Milton gave a religious or esoteric dimension to the issue, so we wouldn’t stand helpless in the face of creation. I was fascinated by him, by his America, by his world. Because of their Negroes, Americans can’t avoid posing these questions. You can see it for yourself, Karla. All human beings are put together of the same materials, but each one differently because of his or her particular line of heredity. We have to admit that the entire completed work cries out for an esoteric interpretation. The countess should also know that Bradley was of course interested primarily in bastards.

He examined things by looking at them from the wrong side, as it were. He’d notice a crude difference between two things for which he had no explanation. Well, he would say, let’s see what happens when these other different elements are intermixed.

And now she chuckled just as her boss had done earlier — a sign that, again, only she and her boss understood around the table.

Bradley could not have — please forgive me, Otmar, for arguing with you — but he could not have provided a definitive explanation and neither can we, she continued, wiping tears away. A person can have at best a definable idea. That’s the extent of one’s science.

Finding a trail in the jungle and following it.

Today the baroness discourses about philosophical questions of science in a very sentimental frame of mind.

Oh, not at all, answered Karla pensively; her response caused such a deep silence around the table that the gentle rustling of the maple trees could be heard.

Despite Bradley’s paternal advice, I decided I had better start out on a trail I’d found myself, not found by others, she continued quietly a moment later.

Karla, that’s a very heroic statement coming from you, Schuer exclaimed; now he wanted to end the scientific discussion yet was happy they were showing the countess their spiritual teases and professional tussles.

You’re making fun of me, Otmar.

On the contrary, I admire your insight.

An eye, as you know, has a definite cross section. It can be sliced in two; one can make up to fifty sections. That’s all. I’ve gone further than others in distinguishing among the parts, en tous cas. Nothing has interested me except these sections, she continued dryly; she was enjoying her scientific superiority.

I had no other ideas, but at least I had this one.

She was happy at least to have come between the other two, however briefly.

The sections gave more differential answers than old Milton’s exemplary literary descriptions.

But I don’t necessarily deserve credit, she cried.

Credit and scientific achievement do not necessarily go hand in hand anyway, Karla, Schuer remarked, if only for the sake of balance.

That’s correct, the baroness replied contentedly.

Schuer let her have this set of the match because he knew what still lay in wait for her.

Then there was another quiet spell, with all of them silent as people are when they turn inward for brief reflection. Baroness Karla had managed to wedge herself between them, which not only made their feeling of belonging together painful, but also called their attention to what they had done, and made them realize that because of Karla they would never again be this close, so innocently and unconsciously.

And who knows what else might have happened to them in this seemingly calm moment if it were not for the cry of pain.

Sieglinde shouted out a surprisingly short cry, like a strong groan of mental anguish, and everyone looked at her in surprise. As if they were acknowledging her personal existence for the first time, as she sat there in her dark-blue puff-sleeved little dress trimmed with rickrack.

She kicked me, cried the little boy, beside himself, by way of explanation.

Because he pinched me, the little girl said, and her cheeks flooded with tears, tears of moral outrage, he’s so mean, so mean, always mean like this.

But her self-discipline was functioning very well indeed; she spared them the sounds of crying.

Which made the little boy lose his inhibitions, and he began shouting desperately, she was the mean one, how could she be so mean, she should be ashamed because it was just the other way around, she was the mean, evil one.

Then the third one started to cry, as if some unprecedented unfairness had befallen her too.

The commotion might have lasted only as long as it took the children’s mother and Miss Bartleby to rise threateningly from their seats. The two older children, knowing their obligations, stood up, resigned and very pale, and the little one slid off her elevating pillows. The guests could not imagine that this sort of thing was happening at the table for the first time. But before his mother had grabbed him by the collar, the little boy was looking at what he’d left on his plate with some alarm.

As if he were expecting punishment for that too.

Except the guests realized not that he was looking at his plate but that he was about to collapse right in front of their eyes. Before they could rush to his aid, his pretty head knocked against the table and, with a groping hand sweeping off napkins and utensils, he crashed between the shoved-aside chairs.

This prompted the two hesitating guests to rise too, and only Schuer remained seated for another few moments. Although in cases like this his upbringing required only that he remain calm, he also issued a contrary command.

Follow the ladies’ example, and if they are not sitting, you stand too.

The same scene again, said the baroness dryly. You will excuse me if I leave you briefly — Countess, Baroness.

Now Schuer stood too, but he did not lose his equanimity.

Oh, I’m so sorry, cried the countess with feeling, I am really very sorry.

Even though obviously no one needed to hear her sentiments.

Suddenly she seemed to sense the silence in the house.

With practiced movements Miss Bartleby and one of the maids picked up the helpless body and, while the other maid hurried ahead, carried it out — with no special caution.

Please, don’t let this upset you, said the man as gracefully as he could, let’s finish our meal, and with his spread arms he asked them to take their seats again. He gave no explanation for the strange event. Not a word.

Not a single sign of worry.

Which both ladies found strange.

Baroness Thum sat down quickly and politely, almost defeated. She smiled a little absentmindedly to herself, and raised her fork and knife. Countess Imola stood for an additional moment, as if bewitched, her gaze following the three women carrying the little boy through the enfilade of rooms, the little girls’ shoulders, in their rickrack-decorated puffy-sleeved little blouses, shaking with suppressed weeping. Echoes of her childhood, alive with loneliness, came crashing down on her. A childhood filled with sameness, uniformity; the way the two little girls’ shoulders in their identical little blouses trembled identically; it was as if Imola had also reached the end of uniformity’s magic.

Which was not a feeling, not a decision, not a thought; it was something that simply happened.

She did not dare look at Schuer again, or say anything. Would not have dared ask him what had happened to his son, which for him seemed usual and routine. She couldn’t have said where their conversation had left off. She was deeply ashamed of having dared to compare this terrible father to Mihály Horthy for even a moment.

How could I have done that.

How lucky it was for her and her sisters that, when their mother had left them, fate saw to it that they had their kindly father, however defeated, with whom they could weep together.

Shortly the maids returned.

The countess found their zeal repulsive — and revealing too — the way the dining room with its very bourgeois furnishings exuded gloom, the way the maids carried away the superfluous settings, indicating their vast experience in removing traces of scandalous scenes. Quickly and tactfully. This practiced, easy behavior especially irritated her.

What have I done, she was screaming to herself, what have I done. She had no idea what she could have wanted earlier from this strange man, and in what science she had wanted to stick her nose.

She had enough social experience to know that accidents like these are usually followed by other accidents, and three days later everyone will have forgotten this one. She might have become unfaithful because of a man who is ready to cheat on his wife, no, not just that, who tortures his children, whom he cannot restrain.

As if she were trying to calm down by claiming that a man like that was worth nothing and she didn’t even want him.

No one broke the silence.

Rather, the adults dutifully continued their meal, eating everything that remained on their plates in a very proper way. They smiled politely and preventively, clattering improperly with their knives and forks on the fine porcelain. They also had to listen to the noise of the others’ chewing and swallowing. Even as a little girl Countess Imola had found this maddening, she couldn’t understand how her kindly, tender father could chew so loudly. This was the only reason for them to speak, so they should not have to hear one another from such an intimate proximity.

One cannot chew and swallow so politely that one’s jaw, teeth, and tongue won’t make champing and smacking sounds.

Maddening.

Yet in light of the receding minor family tension, it would have been considered just as inconsiderate to leave food on one’s plate. And cutlery cannot be used on porcelain without making a noise; no such fine porcelain exists.

And there are no perfect manners either.

They finished their meal quickly enough, though, and the maids took away their plates. Countess Auenberg could hear herself making her report to her woman friends of this visit. Charming people, but I have never sat on such an uncomfortable chair.

At the Schuers, the serving tray was not carried around a second time. Everyone ate as much as he or she had taken or asked to be served the first time around. In the painful silence they did not have to wait long for the dessert, which slightly surprised, in fact irritated, the countess, accustomed to the French habit of pacing the courses. Done this way, the meal was not a repast but merely a hurried intake of nourishment. Luckily, dessert consisted of small portions of an excellent soufflé glacé au café, each portion ornamented with a single roasted coffee bean. Without being noticed, Countess Auenberg pushed aside the tiny coffee bean with its oily shine in the shell-shaped saucer; Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein and Otmar Baron von der Schuer, however, dutifully took theirs into their mouths and loudly crunched them between their teeth.

Schuer was first to speak once they had ended the long-lasting crunching in the frozen silence of the house, and once all three of them, ceremoniously and relieved, had touched their large damask napkins to their lips.

With her permission he would accompany the countess to the living room, he said in English, probably by accident. He and the baroness had originally planned to withdraw for a brief conference and he didn’t want to alter their plan, but he was certain he could count on the countess’s understanding and patience.

The countess, wearied by some strange distraction that might also be called coolness, neither answered nor looked at him.

He sincerely hoped, Schuer continued, growing hesitant in the absence of a polite response or look from her, that the company of his wife would more than compensate the countess for their brief withdrawal.

But the countess seemed unapproachable.

Eventually they’d have coffee together, Schuer added, almost as if against his will. This remark managed to startle the countess and remind her of her obligations; she complied immediately.

They left the dining room amid profuse polite murmurings.

Von der Schuer lingered to issue some instructions to one of the maids, and then for some time, happily, Countess Auenberg remained alone in the smaller salon.

The moment the door of the study closed behind them, Schuer and Baroness Karla ceased using each other’s first name.

This was not a conscious decision, the switch happened instinctively. From familiarity they stepped back into the scientific hierarchy, which had nothing to do with their common birth prerogatives.

I see that the Herr Professor intends to establish an institute in Budapest.

I intend to appoint the Frau Professor to head it. And that means, beyond all the joy involved, that the institute should be organized there.

They were standing awkwardly, halfway between the door and the desk.

At first Schuer wanted to take his place behind his desk, with its four decorative lion’s feet. Then he decided otherwise, choosing a friendlier solution, and he pointed at the comfortable armchairs in front of the glass-covered bookcases.

Strangely, neither of them reached the point of sitting down.

Nor could they step free of the gravitational pull of each other’s proximity.

At this point, it was also clear to Schuer that, given the baroness’s embarrassing surprise, he should not stop now; he must strike while the iron was hot; the baroness’s face visibly paled and then darkened with a rush of blood.

Merely a fresh idea, he continued lightly and instructively, as if he’d never thought of keeping secret — and couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to — the very personal emotions that had nourished his idea. You won’t get the Rome institute, not while I’m alive, but you can help me get close to this young woman in Budapest. We both know, Frau Professor, that after a five-year hiatus it’s high time for us to open a new institute. We can delay no longer. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to the Frau Professor about now. I have two further subjects, both of them very urgent. One of them is personal, he said severely and dryly. It has to do with Hans’s misdeeds.

In his self-consciousness he took care not to pause between words. The other has to do with the long-drawn-out question of ownership of the Wolkenstein house.

I would like to settle these matters.

Although he managed to finish what he wanted to say, the baroness barely acknowledged the second half of the sentence and was already weeping so threateningly and loudly that Baroness Erika, entering the adjacent small salon, and Countess Auenberg, hurrying toward her to inquire about the little boy, both heard it.

What Hans, what misdeeds, what have you got up your sleeve.

Look, I’m responsible for this situation, exceedingly embarrassing for both of us, Schuer continued, rather loudly. Actually, I received the documents about Hans last week, but I simply had no time to look at them until this morning.

What house, what long-drawn-out question, what ownership would you like to settle, with whom, with whom, the baroness kept crying out, very rudely and harshly, and although her features hardened, her self-discipline kept them from becoming distorted.

The timbre of her voice did not slide upward as it would have in simple anger, but because of excess blood became dark and ominous, deeper, taking on a masculine tone.

The voices in the study could be heard in the small salon but not clearly, and the two women, chatting animatedly, strained to listen.

They were talking about childhood fainting spells, of the deep concern with which both parents had been following Siegfried’s development.

Disgrace, the insulted baroness shouted again, which the women in the salon heard loud and clear, and though they had wanted to speak over her loud words, they fell silent, as if compelled by a magic wand.

Please, Frau Professor, why don’t you sit down, please, let us talk sensibly about your son, the man continued, unemotionally, as one who knew neither fear nor mercy.

Of course, I understand you are upset.

Please, leave it to me whom I talk to, when, and about what subjects.

Schuer could easily let this last sentence go by, since Karla Baroness von Thum zu Wolkenstein did not turn on her heel, did not move from her spot.

This morning, however, I finally looked through the dossier, he said, and he pointed to his desk, where a hefty sheaf of papers did indeed lie. Believe me that I offer you my friendly services with the best of intentions.

What are we talking about, what do you wish, please say clearly what you mean.

I must inform you about details of your little son’s examination, details you obviously are not familiar with, but as to their consequences neither of us can have any doubts.

The baroness, greatly agitated, wanted only to ask what kind of examination, what are you hinting at, what results and what consequences, damn it, and what has any of this to do with the estate in Wiesenbad; but she suddenly lost her voice or breath.

Might Schuer be referring to sterilization.

But she could not ask this question, because the awful suspicion gripped her that these swine might have not only ordered the procedure but also carried it out.

That is why Schuer keeps excusing his procrastination.

A strange moan left her throat.

Nevertheless Schuer answered her unasked question.

I’m afraid, Frau Professor, that the situation is even more serious than that.




A Startling Gratification


But we do have some kind of suppressed secret animal sense of which we are quite ashamed. It doesn’t say this is good or this is bad or ugly, because it has no conceptual language. It follows its sense of smell even though it has no nose. I simply wouldn’t have liked it if they’d taken the woman’s fragrance away from me; more precisely, I wouldn’t have liked it if it had been taken away from me too soon. If she’d left. If her husband or anyone else had taken her away in a closed car before I could taste this perfume to my heart’s content and roll it around under my tongue.

Although this sense has no eyes either, it can see things I cannot see. After all, it was not her fragrance — put more correctly it was not only or merely her fragrance that I clung to, but everything the naked eye could see floating around and about her, what emanated from her or what she was waiting and longing for that she hadn’t had before. This something, which could have been her natural endowment, her need, her being, or her soul, had nothing to do with her beauty. I said, all right, let’s not shit around anymore, and it felt pleasant to be suddenly and for no reason so lighthearted and indulgent, but in fact I only said yes to this ungraspable, unfathomable something, invisible to the naked eye; in no circumstance could I have said no to it. My animal being, perhaps my soul, wanted to arrest, accept, and possess her soul or simply to stay in the company of her animal-like being.

If she had said she’d now turn into a cat because she had to climb to the top of the church tower and I should turn into a cat too and follow her, I’d probably have said no. But at the same time I’d have thought to myself, all right, let’s.

I hadn’t been following her because I hoped that being around her would make everything take a turn for the better.

I followed her despite the possibility that my new situation might become unbearable at some point. Despite that, no matter what, I followed her. Later I might knock my head against a wall for my reckless decision, but I had to endure the pain. And I did, against all common sense, despite my upbringing, my sense of beauty, propriety, good taste, and proportion, despite everything that one carries in oneself as rules of behavior, despite the gold reserves of a good upbringing, despite everything one imagines about oneself.

Whatever happens, let things be. Everything, I said to myself, will take a turn for the better in a moment. Or next week.

My misery continued when I crawled into the backseat of their car. What gives me the right to crawl into a strange man’s car. We had not been introduced. And sure enough, I knocked my head on the door frame and my shin on the back of the front seat. I said hello, but he kept looking out in the darkness and did not return my greeting. Did he think that to all appearances I was crawling into a stranger’s car to seduce his wife. As a motive it wasn’t too convincing, as a procedure not very distinguished or imaginative, not to mention that it was true only as an illusion. I didn’t want to seduce anyone; I had never seduced anyone. I cried out, moaned, and huffed with pain and laughed, wanting to indicate politely that I knew how laughable I was, how ridiculously I was behaving.

I’m clambering after a woman who doesn’t even know my name, yet I had already lied to her. Again I tried to say hello to this strange man but again he pretended not to hear me. I deeply despised myself, with all the contempt I could muster, for being so indulgent. And it was for this reason, while I was crawling in, fumbling and blundering and knocking around, that I took a good hard look at this man in the darkness, the way one animal looks at another. Who is the person who, like me, has been so weakened by this woman. The rival was a handsome, large, well-developed, razor-thin dark specimen. Despite his raw beauty, there was something frightening about him. It’s also possible that at that very first moment I discovered a trait in him, or became frightened by a feature, that he didn’t even possess.

After all, I was not in control of myself at that point and I accepted the situation, against all reason, because of the woman. How else could the man look back at me if not with an awareness of rivalry. As if, with our rising animal repugnance, we were already searching for a hold on each other, figuring which of us was the readier for the struggle, was stronger and more flexible. Everything could be decided by the first glance. And decided it was. In this case, the body was more important, his body, mine, his strength, his adroitness, nothing else. He was nimbler than I, more cunning, tougher, more open and more direct, better prepared for repeated clashes. But not stronger in the psychological sense of the word. It was animal instinct that made me see that I would have to clash with a body that was hardly more than skin and bones, tense and taut with sinews and exasperation.

About which my civilized self, of course, kept quiet.

The feeling was physical, a shared physical feeling, mutual, since he looked back at me in the same way; he recognized me; he sized me up. I knew more about men than he did. And I’d also spent my early years in a boarding school; the bases of my experiences had been the struggle for food and, even more grimly, for the attention of the women taking care of us.

But it was impossible to determine which of us was more provocative. His lack of knowledge, or the insincerity of his knowledge, made him vulnerable. His physical attributes made him seem ready to attack, yet in our situation I was the attacker. On the surface his behavior was not hostile, of course, though at first I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t return my hello. But he had hastened to help me, tipping the front seat forward; go ahead and crawl in if that’s what his wife wants. He was sorry about my head bumping the door. And then, following my moans, he chided himself for letting me hurt my shin too. His countenance made it instantly clear why he wore that suspiciously threatening leather coat. He wanted to appear larger, stronger, and more severe than he was. Such leather coats were not sold in regular stores. Men in the secret service wore leather coats — not the lousy little secret agents, of course, but the bosses. And high-ranking cops. One had to be a privileged character to get one’s hands on stuff like that. Party bosses in the villages, nachalniks as they called themselves, also wore leather coats. At least twice a week they’d have themselves driven out in their huge black cars to the territory, as they disdainfully and arrogantly called the countryside, and when they emerged from their cars with a great hullabaloo they wanted to look like bailiffs of the old landowners, now hounded out, or like Bolshevik commissars in movies from faraway Soviet Russia. This man was more than ten years older than I, around thirty, but in his scrawny features he preserved the look of a vulnerable adolescent who always invites attacks, always smells enemies everywhere, and always wants to quash resistance.

I pretended to approach him in a friendly way, as if hoping to bridge the embarrassing situation with affable behavior. No one with decent bourgeois manners finds it hard to put on an amiable face no matter how embarrassing the situation or how rotten the mood. Which is not dissembling but a basic navigational rule guided by common sense. Once I was out of my apartment, I thought I ought never to be a burden to anyone, either with the miseries of physical existence or with encumbrances of the soul. I no longer look at myself in the mirror or arrange my clothes; I am decisive and satisfied with myself. So despite the awkward situation and the repeated rejections, I was happy to extend my hand for the obligatory how-do-you-do. To which he again responded only with a cool look. He did not want it, did not desire it, or simply would not waste time on it.

Obviously he hadn’t been brought up as I had. He seemed to be not from the country but from the outskirts of the city. In fact, this contributed to our clash, though he probably didn’t notice it, given the nature of the thing. He couldn’t have known what I saw as missing in his conduct. At most, he might have sensed that I did not acknowledge his signals of rejection, while I had to pretend even to myself that nothing was amiss and I didn’t take the rejection too seriously either, given that bourgeois etiquette rules were not applicable. Not only because officially they were no longer considered valid, but also because I myself liked to disregard them when in certain local situations I sometimes found them still being followed. But I thought his eyes were beautiful, deep and penetrating; he seemed to protect himself with their coldness.

In any case he too had no choice; he had to pretend everything was just as it should be.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world that without any prior notice his wife simply brought along her latest discovery, her heart’s chosen one, who knows who else.

To give this impossibility some plausible form, theoretically he should have gotten out of the car to give his wife a chance to introduce me.

Without this formality I couldn’t feel right. After all, one can’t stay together in such close quarters when one hasn’t been introduced.

I could not resolve this embarrassment; I didn’t have the means.

Not only had he failed to return the most public form of cordiality, my hello, but he did not return my prolonged smile either. Granted, my smile was simply dictated by rules of etiquette and in that sense was empty, what else could I have done. Yet it can’t be said that he rejected either the conventions or me personally with his look; it was his inner self, agitated by repressed anger and constant discontent, that strained against me. We had not even closed the car door and he was already snapping, crackling, fluttering. That’s how he demonstrated his anger with his wife, as if he enjoyed being boorishly irritated, enjoyed violating every rule of good manners. He believed he had the right to find his own vulgarity charming. He could afford to behave like this with a complete stranger, said his face. He was in the driver’s seat, literally and in every other way. Or perhaps he let himself behave like this so I could witness his strength and authority, so I’d have no illusions regarding his wife. There was something unpleasantly puffed-up, swaggering, peacockish in his behavior. In his anger he let his voice rise, as if he were not sitting in a small closed space and the presence of a stranger did not bother him. I was deeply ashamed for the woman and for me too, that she belonged to such a handsome monster and insisted on staying with such a peacock.

And not surprisingly, everything crashed into pieces within seconds.

His voice was deep, stentorian, filled with threatening reserves. He was complaining about some booze, which they were supposed to have brought along for the party, but which his wife had forgotten. He should have known. They had arranged that she would bring it from the store, but she’d never ever kept a promise to do what they had agreed she’d do. And then, changing his tone, he proceeded with ominous, fussy, and cold precision to re-create the dialogue they’d had that morning, what he had said and what she had answered. And he kept interrupting himself, yelling, that’s how it was, wasn’t it, roaring into the dimness of the car. He received no reply. But he went on and on, expansively and with uncontrolled gusto, as if these uninteresting and unimportant details, his tiniest actions, his every word, had enormous importance. He probably knew no limit in this display of self-complacency; or rather, he seemed to believe that merely remembering all these details justified him and proved his incontestable claims. As if he needed every little proof because other people were always questioning his credibility, as if he had to prove himself before the world against ever-recurring hidden accusations. His wife was probably the greatest monster, suspecting his every word. Or could not retain a simple thing in that birdbrain of hers, he bellowed in the dimness, and she should try at least to find an acceptable explanation for her thoughtlessness.

Why can’t a woman ever listen to another person, ever.

Women are simply not yet human.

The woman replied to this with practiced and highly focused patience, that she didn’t know what women did or didn’t do and frankly hadn’t been thinking about the question of how far women had come in their progression toward full humanity because she’d been paying attention to important things.

I see.

This scene, for example, is not important enough to pay attention to.

And with that, something ended.

This is how she was paying no attention to her husband’s misery.

The wipers were grating and creaking on the windshield in front of us. One car door remained open, the wind was snapping outside, cutting, sending waves of spray inside. We were like a ship run aground and tilted on one side in the midst of the raging elements. I did get some air from the blowing wind, but it seemed as if air had been siphoned out from between the two of them. There was a mute, baleful, and deadly silence. From the backseat I could not see their faces, only two necks stiffened in stubbornness. I had no idea what I could do to help the situation. The car was an old sports car, a coupe, whose narrow backseat usually served as luggage space.

Probably the best thing in a situation like this was to acknowledge being unable to do anything and leave it at that. The two of them went on staring ahead of them; not even by chance would they look at each other.

Their shared life has ended; they have torn it apart, it tore apart. But then they couldn’t go anywhere together. I had no way of knowing that they did this kind of thing several times a day. There’s nothing left, let it end. And their reciprocal anger was thrusting me into mortal danger; there was no exit through which I could leave. They were aflame, their flesh smoldering in the heat of their breakup. In a moment I had learned more about them than was permitted by any rule of etiquette. Although they brought different edges, different moods, to their mutual decision, they each reserved their individual sensual strength for the other — and for no one else.

According to his original impulse the man would be silent for only a moment, only a brief pause, after his rhetorical question. Yet he wasn’t surprised by the woman’s cruel remark — on the contrary, he seemed to consider any further words useless, superfluous, and he let the rest of what he had to say drown in him — for he had anticipated her insolent indifference. His entire being slackened, although startled; in the end he was gratified by the woman’s disregard.

I retreated to the dark corner of the backseat.

I was close to the man’s boyish, thin neck, but he was closer to me not just in the physical sense. Dense, thick, shiny black hair covered the nape of his delicately slim neck. A startling gratification radiated from it. Not only did his leather coat have a strong smell but the deep odor of black-haired men emanated from his entire body. I envied and felt sorry for him; I hated the woman for having done this to him. I did not understand anything about what they wanted from each other or what might happen to me. I had no door through which I could leave quietly, taking my empathy for the man with me; I was wedged in by my attraction to the woman. I’d have been happy to get out, more for their sake than for mine. If nothing else, I grasped that the man had received proof of one of his ill-omened suspicions, and this made him happy. He was losing something else, but this palpable proof was more important to him — the truth, complete and undisguised truth, which he now had to face.

Not happiness but truth was more important for him. True, the woman was stronger and more powerful, but truth was at his side, he was right, and therefore he would not yield. They could both perish now; the complete truth was already in his hands for all eternity.

And what only moments earlier had begun as empty haughtiness, bullying, or showing off was now, in the long silence, being transformed. They weren’t thinking of me as a person before whom they had to display or conceal anything. I actually think they completely forgot that I was sitting behind them in the dark. There was something unfamiliar and unusual in this, nothing like this had ever happened to me before. And the man had no fury left in him; still sizzling, they both quickly retrieved their emotions. Huddled on the backseat, I could not help thinking that this had happened because of me. Now they were left to themselves in the darkness, continuing their inner altercation within themselves. The original subject of the argument had become unimportant or, as happens on such occasions, every movement, or the other person’s motionlessness and unbearable silence, became the subject of further inner debate. They forgot not only me but also the wind that kept slapping them with bursts of spray through the open door.

The thought that the woman had done this to me made me angry. She must have known what would happen. And why should I put up with this, not to mention that I couldn’t tell what else might happen between the two of them. Which of them would be the lucky one to squeeze a word out of the other; who was the winner; who’d be more nimble in finding a hiding place for the emotions accumulating in the silence.

The street shone black in the dim light. Gently, wearily, yellowish light penetrated the car’s drizzle-speckled windows. Someone closed the church gate from the inside; it clanged and I could hear the key turning in the lock. From my place I could somehow make out the woman’s profile; she shuddered at the gate’s clanging and followed the sound with her eyes; she was saying good-bye to her brother, to her missed opportunity, to theology. That was the day’s portion of philosophy. She would not look at the man for anything, not to mention her ignoring me completely. I could be as angry as I wished about their insolence. For their not waiting until I was gone to have their domestic spat. But how in the world could I leave. I continued my own idiotic inner debate. I wanted to hurt the woman; to myself, I accused her of using me to make her husband jealous. It would have been good to say this aloud. She probably had much to confess. Mainly her disgusting double-dealing and hypocrisy; she was behaving like a sly gentlewoman, like a well-educated young lady. She begrudges me ten minutes, her husband is not enough for her, but she has time to go to church, spend time on theology, even though the slut is living in sin, to use her own words; now, who the hell could understand that. Why did I have to run into such a stupid woman like this again. Of course, this sort of inner conversation leaves one even lonelier, entangling one more deeply in the seaweed of emotions. It was also strange that I had more physical feelings for the unknown man’s neck than for the woman, for this whore, and yet I still measured everything by the way she might respond to what was happening.

The shining edge of her face showed no response to anything, not to doubts and not to accusations. Her immobile eyelashes, strong nostrils, full lips, and soft chin were like a moonlit mountain range that the outside world could barely touch; and her response remained a sustained indifferent muteness.

Anyway, each time I looked at her it was as if seeing her for the first time. She had many faces. I had to get used to being able to see only one of her faces at a time, and that was not even close to a physical feeling. Not even an attraction, because I had no way of knowing which of her many unknown faces would be waiting for me. Attraction, theoretically, must be based on some sort of certainty. The woman I was seeing here, in the car, was not the woman I had seen behind the steam of the coffee machine in the shop, or the one I’d wrangled with a short while ago on the street. I don’t know how she did it. I was preoccupied with berating her to myself and studying her from close up; and her beauty still made my chest expand, though I had not the vaguest idea what I could possibly learn from such beauty, and even less of an idea why I was so defenseless against it. What kind of nonsense is this, what stupidity. My situation looked hopeless; I couldn’t imagine how I’d get out of it.

Now I could look at her, irresponsibly and carelessly, and smell her to my heart’s content, something I had deeply desired, but I felt I was being locked into this insurmountable, laughable desire of mine. Something you’d want to break out of, but your gratification lies in your inability to break out. Thus, my body truly understood the man, who could not abide this woman, and that is why, against his own decision, he had to abandon his motionlessness. He did not capitulate completely, but he began rummaging in his pocket — a movement that hinted at weakness, vulnerability, and inconsistency. I was no less vulnerable, and I had no reason for it; she completely paralyzed me with her arbitrariness. He put something in the woman’s lap, an object or some secret gift I could not see.

Have you gone crazy, you’ve gone completely mad, the woman cried.

I think so too, responded the man.

Then he had to reach across the woman’s knees to find something in the glove compartment. He probably wanted to light up but found not one lousy cigarette there, and to do something anyway so as not to humiliate himself more, he angrily stopped the windshield wipers.

Well, maybe we should get going then, Simon, said the woman, and she made the mysterious object disappear into her pocket.

The man was frankly admitting his weakness, to which the woman probably always responded with a new cruelty.

What do you mean, maybe we should get going, what is that supposed to mean, tell me.

That we should go instead of keep sitting here.

If you’d be kind enough to close the door, Klára, we could really get going.

You don’t have to tell me twice, Simon.

And since they were still calling each other by their first name, this was obviously a kind of revenge. As if they were saying that no matter what happens, we must not lose patience, and we won’t. Even though they had lost it ages ago; besides, they were the ones who were trying each other’s patience. This must have been a well-practiced game. One of them pretended to have inexhaustible patience, and the sustained deceit made the other one lose patience completely. To make matters worse, the man did not find a cigarette, but the woman nicely vented her anger by slamming the car door shut very hard. Yet nothing happened. The man did not start the car.

Impassive and motionless, they both kept looking straight ahead. Now the woman should have made up some of her losses, or given up, but neither of them could give up anything.

And if I may ask, Klára, he asked very quietly and stopped.

And then at the top of his voice he yelled into the dark, where, you cheerless cunt, would you care to go. I am at your service, awaiting your command. You know your wish is my command.

In response the woman quickly turned around and gave me a quick glance; she obviously hadn’t forgotten me and in this impossible situation wanted to be sure I was still there. I had never heard nor could I imagine a man saying such a thing to a woman. And I’d never come across things like this even in movies or novels. Actually, the woman was not preoccupied with me, though with her glance she betrayed her regret that I had to witness this scene with no chance to escape, and shamelessly she continued her campaign of gentleness.

I sincerely hope, she said very quietly, that you are not being so charming and amiable because I have offended you in some way.

On the contrary, replied the man, no less quietly, I am always happy whenever I can reciprocate your attentiveness with something.

You must have acquired your manners in the Battle of Voronezh.*

I’d have readily acquired them at the Sorbonne if I’d known I’d be in the company of such illustrious types.

I enjoy the company of a tippler.

But I can’t abide your social class.

You don’t mean that seriously, do you now.

They looked into each other’s eyes and I can’t say they didn’t enjoy it a bit. Two obstinate foreheads, two fighting profiles, two magnificent manes of hair, two individual self-hatreds; even I enjoyed seeing their wildness.

Then would you mind telling me, my darling, what happened, what’s wrong, my one and only love, what’s wrong, what’s wrong, repeated the woman with increasing rudeness, ever more harshly and loudly, as if she had truly had enough, as if she’d go mad if she couldn’t redeem herself with hysteria.

Yet she quickly managed to reverse her ominous tone. I really didn’t mean to make fun of you, she then said very quietly. I’d like you to calm down a little. That’s all I want.

You haven’t answered my question.

I did close the door properly, though, didn’t I.

Most laudable.

I am one hell of a girl.

And you really think that everything’s all right now, don’t you.

I don’t know what else I could do to further our progress, the woman replied with a raw grin.

That I’ll forget it, that’s what you hope — that I’ll forget and forgive everything.

You’ve nothing to forget, my darling, my one and only, and you’ve nothing to forgive.

They looked at each other for a long time, as if they were playing on some peculiar instrument: two human heads bewitched by each other, two proud human heads. What emanated and radiated from the posture of their heads was that no matter what they might do for or against each other, they’d never run out of artistic ideas. Now it was the man’s turn to give in first, because her raw grin seemed to have stuck to him, no matter how hard he tried to defend himself against it by struggling for quite a time to put on a serious expression. Laughter probably helped the man accept his new defeat. Like two mischievous children at the successful completion of a prank, they burst simultaneously into brief, quiet laughter. Laughing must have helped the man through this latest defeat. It was painful to hear the two merry voices together. It was as though they were saying, we did this really well, but our shared success means that striving for happiness is more important than truth or justice. And then it was the man again who lost, with his search for truth, and the woman who won, with her search for happiness. Their attraction was much too strong; I could not resist it. I felt the man’s defeat in my cock stuck in my underpants, shriveled with fear yet moist with desire. And the woman gently leaned toward the man and was about to kiss him on the mouth, right in front of my nose. I had no idea what to do on that very hard backseat designed for luggage.

She barely touched him and quickly recoiled, alarmed; I could see the genuine shock on her face.

You’ve had a drink, she cried out desperately, like a child, which meant the man had broken his promise again.

I had one vodka, true. I couldn’t help it.

I can feel that you had more than one.

Even to please you, I can’t admit to more than one.

In that case, please be kind enough to take me home.

And I should go by myself.

By yourself or with anybody. Wherever you want to, however you want to.

After the latest squabble, their silence turned hopelessly dark and ominous. A moment ago, despite all my humiliation and resistance, they had captured my curiosity, but this skirmish unsettled me. For what they were doing to each other now needed no witnesses; my observing them was no longer explainable or endurable. This did not occur to me as a moral question; it simply hit me in my stomach, in my guts. One never knows what sort of life to wish for, because one would have to wish for several different kinds at once, to weigh the possibilities, but surely one wouldn’t wish for this kind. I worried that in my fright I’d have to fart.

I felt the moment had come; I couldn’t keep the results of my prolonged anxiety in check.

I began to speak, quietly and cautiously, calling the woman by her first name for the first time, and to emphasize what I was about to say I leaned closer to her and with both hands grasped the back of her seat near her shoulders. I took great care not to let my fingers touch her coat.

The man eyed me hostilely in the rearview mirror.

I think my presence is really unnecessary, I said, and told her that with her permission I’d like to get out.

As if she had waited for my voice, she turned around — but not just with her head, with her entire torso — and her shoulder pressed my fingers into the upholstery. And I was just going to turn to the man to take my leave. If the situation turned out like this, there was no reason to reverse it or pretend it wasn’t the way it was. But with her shoulders and her back, the woman bound me to herself, I became bound to her, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to free myself from her. This was nothing more or less than what happens when one fits the right plug in the right outlet and the current flows and the bulb lights up. She had to feel how excited and tense my body was. Through her coat, I sensed there was no reason to be nervous, because her calm or security would not be upset even by momentary despair. And for the next decade I would light up, would emit light, only for her. That’s it, the matter was taken care of. An enormous keel of confidence, tranquillity, and security steadied her, and other kinds of emotion or feeling could only scratch its surface, they could not disturb it.

The darkness we sat in glimmered, because light from the streetlamp outside was diffused by slowly accumulating drops of a fine rain that rolled quickly downward on the windows; the dark depths of the car were pervaded by the smell of stale tobacco, wet hair, coats, animal hide, and perfume, and now I could detect the reek of booze.

The man’s black hair emanated its fragrance differently from that of the woman’s blond mane.

For me, at that moment, everything had an elemental force, a perspective, height, depth, light, shadow, and of course an impalpable dark side. Be it a sight or a feeling, elemental forces were pitted against one another and, so that they would not be noticed in their naked forms, the words said one thing and the gestures said something else. Otherwise, they’d have knocked me out or carried me away completely. Although everything was interlaced with helplessness — the dominant feelings of the times, saturating and pervading everything, were total hopelessness, fear, disappointment, regret, exasperation, apathy, and tension — this state of affairs inevitably clashed with the confidence that comes from being alive; one’s own breathing offered assurance and hope for the next few moments and also, and above all, energy to endure many things or at least to throw a bridge over them. Even while making that remark about intending to leave, I knew I could never extricate myself from this affair. But I’d known that before, known it well in advance. She could see me better now, and I was afraid that her husband could too, though I hadn’t the vaguest idea with what and how I had revealed my shock. At any rate, the light of the streetlamp fell on my face and left theirs in the dark, but there were two unmistakable flashes in the woman’s eyes with which she meant to reassure me. As if with one flash she was saying, the problem is pretty big but this time I can handle him, and with the other, referring to my hysterical fear, she was peremptorily blocking my desire to escape: stay, help me.

Yet this was not what she said aloud, or rather, she arranged her words according to the rules of propriety.

She said, go ahead, go, she saw no problem, and while I hadn’t recovered because I was still trying to understand how I could be of help to her, she reached over for the door handle, the door was already open a little, ready to step out and fold down the front seat and let me out.

I still wonder what would have happened if the scene had ended there.

If it had, I’d probably never have gone back to the store and my life would have turned out very differently. My hysterical fear would have overcome me and I’d have met something entirely different. I would surely have met somebody on Margit Island who would not have been a woman. But I’ve no way of knowing that. Maybe I’d have found the wonderful giant again, whom I could never forget anyway. But the scene could not end that way: the man started the car — it all happened so fast — and in an instant the old motor moaned and bellowed, all revved up, and Klára managed to yank the door shut.

Puddles spurted under us, the wet roadway sizzled, on the empty road we barreled into the darkness at an insane speed.

And from then on none of us spoke.

Well, there’s nothing I can do about it; if he wants to drive while he’s drunk, let him. I threw myself back on the stiff leather seat meant for luggage and did not give a damn. Wheels screeching, we turned sharply from Nagymező Street into Andrássy Street. Maybe this man is not only drunk but also crazy; in a little while, I caught myself enjoying his craziness. I caught myself not only holding on but also letting my fingers go exploring, patting, and stroking, and these movements were involuntary and revealing. As if I were taking possession of something that belonged to them. I wanted some hide, some skin, while thinking again about the giant. I am touching and feeling this finely made black leather seat, stroking the decorative, richly grained, brown stripes of nacreous luster that, at the height of the backrests, tauten the vertically cushioned, ribbed, gray upholstery. As if I were discovering only now that in the interior of this old rattletrap everything was flawless, comfortable, and luxurious. This flawlessness went well with the woman but not with the man. I enjoyed the speed, their obstinate necks, their craziness, my own madness, I enjoyed the streetlights flitting by so regularly, I enjoyed having no idea what would happen to me or what I could do with my unstoppable thoughts. I enjoyed the little freedom I had gained from them, enjoyed having left my usual life so far behind that all questions seemed to reach me from a great distance. I gave myself over to the mad rush — from today’s perspective it probably wasn’t all that fast — which seemed to squeeze my soul.

He must have seen from far off that in front of the Savoy Café, around an open assault vehicle, policemen were cooling their heels and smoking; still, he didn’t slow down. The Savoy was empty that evening, as was the Abbázia across the street. White tables had been set for guests in the empty light. In fact, the entire dark city, paralyzed by the emergency situation, was empty, though filled with news and rumors; everyone preferred to stay quietly at home. Jostling and rattling, driving parallel to the streetcar tracks at full speed, we crossed the boulevard, decorated with drenched flags. For some reason, the police decided not to pursue us. I didn’t dare look back because I couldn’t imagine what would happen if they decided to chase us. It was a good, warm feeling, dictated by a groundless sense of confidence that even the possibility of a chase would not faze me; let them come after us. But they didn’t. In a few moments the car pleasantly warmed up and the rain-beaten windows became a little hazy. It occurred to me that the police might have thought Simon was one of them because of his leather coat, or that he behaved so fearlessly because he was a police officer. Regular cops did not wear such fine leather coats. The wet bare branches of the plane trees hovered above us in the gusting wind and rushed above us on Andrássy Street, a straight, wide boulevard with two tree-lined promenades that divide the broad roadway into three double-lane strips.

Not a vehicle, not a pedestrian anywhere.

The glimmering cobblestones on the tree-lined street rushed darkly under us. Just before the Körönd rotary I involuntarily yelled, watch out, dog, because a rather large black animal, attracted by the approaching car, was loping toward us from the outer sidewalk. Its surprised master, yelling and gesticulating, was running uselessly after it. The dog galloped at a right angle from him and then was off the sidewalk, across the road, back on the promenade, as if it were planning to hurl himself at us from the flower beds. For some reason it thought better of this, and, with muscles tense and mug thrust forward, it merely barked at the car from among the trees.

But it was not the same dog.

And it did not slow us down. Simon wasn’t driving as if, defying danger or at least taking it into account, he felt free. I’d say, rather, that he was ready for any collision, at whatever cost, and the explanation for his resolve was not to be found in either freedom or servitude. He grasped the wheel tightly, his arm stiffly spread. Nothing had an explanation, really. I certainly had no explanation for why I felt good at last in this anarchy or chaos opening up for me. I was a little embarrassed about my shouting. As if I still had something to lose.

But I preferred that nothing should be the way I’d have wanted it; let everything be the way it happens to be.

Klára’s body did not respond.

True, nobody asked her anything; events as well as the persons participating in them became independent. Ultimately, I gave myself over to the feeling Simon had claimed to himself: I surrendered myself to the mad chase, which covered over all my confused or nice feelings or any other kind of feeling, and which did not even let me know what we were chasing.

Originally, to all indications, he’d planned to drive to Hősök Square, at the end of Andrássy Street.

We’d barely left the infuriated dog behind us when from the Körönd we could see that we might not easily get through what was waiting for us. From afar, it seemed like an inexplicable apparition: somewhere, near or in line with Bajza Street, between the sidewalks lined with gigantic trees, two dark masses were blocking our way; between them lay only a narrow, brilliantly illuminated passage. At first glance, I couldn’t figure out what it was. We could see only a glowing mass of light between two dark masses.

Simon probably saw this first and figured it out before I did. We had already sped through the huge intersection at Körönd. He must have made his decision in a split second; without slackening his stiffened arms, and leaning into the movement with his entire upper body, he yanked the steering wheel to the right and then, amid terrific jolts, creaks, and thuds, gave another yank to the left, which luckily missed running us up onto the promenade and into the trees or flower beds; he managed to find the roadway between the promenade and sidewalk, where he sped through without slowing down at all.

I won’t deny it, I admired him.

And the explanation for the apparition was very simple. To block that part of the road, the police had put two of their assault cars facing each other and turned floodlights on both of them.

It wasn’t easy to understand why they’d done this. Perhaps something else had happened in the city which we hadn’t yet heard about, not just the terrible accident that morning at the site of the official celebration. But none of us asked or said anything. They wanted either to arrest some people or to keep the entire city under control. One left so many things unsaid and stopped doing things at the slightest hint of danger; we kept quiet because we always expected the worst. In the dark, under the trees, the leather-coated fellows stood in groups. They had not erected such a conspicuous roadblock for at least four years. It was also peculiar that they had chosen this street on which to block this quarter of the city. At the corner, behind a heavy wrought-iron fence, stood the Soviet embassy, now darkened; if one strolled farther down these tree-lined streets one could see that all the way to the Epres Gardens every building belonged to the Russians; the area had become a little Moscow. It was not likely that we could get through the cordon even on a secondary road. But Simon was not slowing down; he turned into Bajza Street at a sharp angle, brushing against the curb and honking his horn twice.

The real game was just about to begin, or maybe it wasn’t a game.

Perhaps he wanted to prove something to the woman. Or prove his superiority to me. He was screaming. It would be incorrect to say he was screaming at the top of his lungs, rather I should say he was screaming from the depths of his chest. As if singing a lonely song of self-justification. Now he increased the speed, now just as suddenly reduced it; the car was rocking back and forth. For long spells he’d let go of the wheel or, thrusting his arms against it, would yank it this way and that, making the car dance between the two sidewalks. It was hard to tell what the old jalopy could endure; maybe it was an old Adler. All the while, he honked the horn rhythmically. I couldn’t be sure whether with this weird running amok he was testing his wife, putting on a show for me, or taking his revenge on the cops we’d left standing and befuddled, for having kept him in a constant fear of threats; he was simply thumbing his nose at them.

In those years, one didn’t do things like that.

There were enough other dangers.

Klára cautiously held on to the seat, but her posture revealed no fear or any sign that she had an opinion about what was happening. She retreated, became neutral and did so inconspicuously, which in itself was a weighty opinion. One did not provoke fate if one could help it. With triumphantly sung battle cries and much honking of the horn we drove across Queen Vilma Road, now called Gorky Avenue, and then across Damjanich Street. I thought Simon had indeed gone mad. Might deliberately run into a building. He drove up on the sidewalk. With a terrible racket, we swept away a few garbage cans put out for the morning collection.

Nobody could be sure that some unsuspecting person might not step out on the sidewalk.

I was counting on Klára to figure out a way to restrain him.

But during those few seconds we drove along the sidewalk in Nefelejcs Street, I chose to close my eyes. I had no other way to protect myself against such an enormous attack of senselessness. Perhaps it would have been more dangerous to do something than do nothing. At the corner of Dembinszky Street, we literally fell off the high curb. At least he left off with his screaming, as if he’d bitten his tongue. Then, as if doing the most natural thing in the world, he drove perpendicularly across the street and deliberately braked so sharply that we tumbled forward.

Voilà, c’est tout, he said, here we are, and slapped the wheel with both hands, making the horn screech again.

This is when Klára looked at him again, with yet another profile.

I’ll just change, she said dryly, give me ten minutes.

Five, said the man.

Eight, she said, and before getting out she threw a glance my way.

She wanted to be sure that I’d survived the shock.

For that instant, I could cling to her attention, but this brief encouragement proved inadequate to help me endure the following minutes. She released the car door carefully, it barely clicked shut; with hurrying steps she walked through an open, dark, gaping gate. Leaning across the seat and pushing out the door a little, the man yelled after her to bring some cigarettes. The door clicked closed again, there was silence at last; again an impossible moment. Outside the wind was raging, slamming into the tin gutters. We were out of life-threatening danger. In the rearview mirror he looked at me hostilely, as if he were still preparing something against me or against the world; I looked back at him. It was an unfamiliar look; I couldn’t tell what he might be up to. But I ran out of the reserve of Klára’s encouraging glance. Now I couldn’t have given a good reason for leaving.

It was getting late, but that wouldn’t do for an excuse.

I said, I’d like to stretch a little, but now I wasn’t thinking of anything else except getting away. I wasn’t going to wait for Klára to come back.

Of course, it also occurred to me that I should cut across dark Aréna Road. I seemed to feel in my limbs the elation of getting away, the liberating steps.

As if freedom were truly waiting for me on the other side under the storm-tossed trees.

I still called it Aréna Road, its old name, because there stood the house, facing City Park, where I was born, and which my grandfather had built. And behind the Műcsarnok art gallery, among the large plane trees, the underground public urinal yawned invitingly with its pale light; this was where men thirsty for one another always waited in droves.

He asked me if I had any cigarettes; he said he’d get out and stretch a little too, but he’d gotten very wet before, which made me glad. At least we clarified the distance between us. I said I was sorry but I did not smoke, which was not completely true, and we both got out of the car. For me it was harder because I had to climb around the front seat, tipped forward. And to lessen my humiliation, I said if my memory did not fail me, there was a bar nearby. While waiting for Klára, I’d be happy to buy him some cigarettes there. He burst out laughing as if to brag about his embarrassment. He said that would be very considerate of me, but he could hold out for another few minutes. But I was right about the bar, he said, there, and he motioned toward the farther stretch of the street.

They have pretty lousy cigarettes.

His leather coat was short, I could see now under the streetlamp, its leather rather worn, its surface scaly with time. Private chauffeurs and farm managers had worn coats like that before the war.

The bar was indeed there on the bleak and shabby part of the street. Who knows how long the shadows of men had been standing there with their beers and spritzers in front of its illuminated window. This bar was one of the most mysterious places of my childhood. Regardless of what kind of family one comes from, in the city where one grows up there are always some forbidden places. This was not a hostile world; if the drunks weren’t on a rampage it was a rather peaceful place, yet I knew I should not step inside it. Not because somebody had forbidden it; life simply presented no situation that would have required it. Lately, this was the starting point and terminus of the number 5 bus line. The bar was always dim with smoke; it buzzed like a beehive; there were always so many men that some of them had to stay on the sidewalk, even in winter. They put a bench outside, along the wall of the building. The streetcar on István Road was also discontinued. The bench was painted blue, like the buses, because it was meant for resting drivers and conductors, but most of the time this is where the drunks lay about.

From the dark City Park, the spring breeze with the fragrance of wet trees pounced on us freely.

Then something perplexing happened again, something I hadn’t counted on.




Hans von Wolkenstein


He was but a tiny spot in the landscape, the boy about whom they had spoken in Baron Schuer’s study. The one with blond hair streaked so noticeably with strands of dark brown.

An ant, a hard-shelled little bug, no more than a naked worm that anyone might absently crush underfoot.

A little boy with brilliant blue eyes and close-cropped hair, slightly sluggish movements and a slouchy walk, who had no extreme thoughts or unpleasant feelings about himself. He was not grinning now, but he wasn’t bothered by premonitions. Nothing indicated to him that something might be out of the ordinary in the universe or that any danger was lurking.

Although the other boys could not help worrying about the regular racial-biological measurements, he wasn’t even fazed when one of their mates jumped off the Ochsensprung at dawn and died instantly. He often irritated his counselors with his constant grins. Which the others enjoyed no end: that he had the courage to grin and, when the counselors cautioned him that now you really have nothing to grin about, my boy, that he responded by grinning even more foolishly. Perhaps he found their displeasure comical, perhaps he was glad to receive more than the usual share of attention, for which he was willing to do much, because he liked to playact and clown around. The others thought him daring. They admired and feared him. They wouldn’t have dared behave as he did or approve of behavior like his.

The counselors assumed that since the other boys laughed at him, the community’s severe judgment would affect him.

But that was not the case; on the contrary, the boys laughed in sheer enjoyment. Involuntarily and communally, the boys were also laughing at something they shouldn’t have laughed at. Progressing carefully, step by careful step, Hans led them to unruliness; he was unruly on their behalf, which gave him enormous pleasure, always to go further than the others would ever dare and thus to lead them to sedition. The counselors failed to notice that the laughter was a shared and organized display of insubordination, a veritable rebellion. Or rather, they noticed it only when it was too late. They should have recorded every occurrence in all its aspects and manifested forms.

From a genetic viewpoint, they regarded a proclivity to rebellion as an important telltale sign.

The baroness also thought it outrageous that a person should be grinning all the time, unable to look at anyone without grinning.

Hans, you are behaving preposterously, my boy, your behavior is simply impossible, that is how she chided him.

But her son listened to her less than to anyone else.

Every year several boys tried to throw away their lives; only the childish methods or the results differed. But Hans took nothing seriously — the baroness had reason to worry about him, for it didn’t matter what she told him; he did not care about her motherly pain and sorrow, did not listen to her chiding or warning; she might as well have talked to the wall.

He’d follow her with his wide-open, slightly wondering, incredulous eyes as if out of curiosity, so as to fix in his conscious mind her every gesture; emotionally he remained far removed from everything. In this the baroness recognized herself in him, and when that happened she fell silent, contented. Even though it was the boy’s father who looked back at her with those rebellious, challenging eyes. It was as if, relinquishing their ritual sentimentality, the three of them had suddenly become closer. And none of them could deny their shameless intimacy.

This was Hans’s fourth year in the boarding school. Had they not opened this school, his mother would have had a problem finding a place for him. Several times during those years, he had lived through a peculiar hour or day, such as today, but unlike the other boys he found nothing to object to in the leap to death, not even the first time. At most its finality surprised him rather benignly. Those boys had saved their integrity, which everyone else loses several times an hour until they’ve used up their last reserves. He appreciated the suicide boys’ perspicacity, their consistency. In the depths of his soul he approved of them, considered them superior to those, including himself, who were willing to endure their lives simply to stay alive. He put a good face on his life, since he didn’t want to make his own or anyone else’s life more difficult by whining or complaining; he became fate’s disgraced conspirator, and with his entire physical being he suffered from existence.

He constantly felt that the raw materials of his body, his organs and limbs, had been put into the wrong skin, and the soul that was added was inappropriate to such a skin or such flesh. He profoundly disdained those who spent their lives eagerly fulfilling their filial duties and paying naïve respect to their parents. No matter what. Anyone can deceive people like that and make them do anything. In his eyes, those boys were laughable creatures. Still, in his disdain he failed to overcome his deeply rooted religious presentiment that perhaps the devil had tempted the boys when they threw themselves into the depths.

And now another school year was over. During the short summer vacation he had to stay here, could not go to Berlin. And, because of her work, the baroness could not come to Annaberg.

While roaming about alone during these three weeks in the enormous Erzgebirge landscape, he thought a lot about these matters. But even in retrospect it did not occur to him to be horrified, as others were, by the suicides. At most he found it ridiculous that some of the boys miscalculated the direction of their jumps or changed their minds at the last minute and were caught on the first rock and were injured but did not die. Or those whose plans were faulty to begin with. They were ready to throw themselves onto the tracks of the narrow-gauge railway, the idiots, when they knew the train had to slow down before the viaduct and would only cut off an arm or a leg.

Occasionally the feverish desire to free-fall seemed to spread like an epidemic among the boys. It was safest to jump off the viaduct. As if every school year demanded a living sacrifice to frighten the rest of them and make them forget their own attraction to it. As if the suicides were offering up their mangled bodies to their mates. And to have one successful attempt, several boys had to try it; there were always more of them prepared to do so. Whether as dead or as wounded, the boys who made the attempt were never seen again. There were no funeral services or memorials; the counselors conducted no investigations that might have revealed who had assisted the suicides in their preparations.

Alone and unnoticed, it would have been hard to do anything. Obviously everyone had accomplices, and this kind of friendship was no less a threat to society than a collective rebellion. Baron Schuer himself viewed this infectious inclination with some anxiety, but after consultation with pedagogical and psychological workers from sister institutions he concluded that, statistically speaking, the phenomenon was not extraordinary or worrisome. It was necessary to take certain risks in an experiment of such scope.

They did not reprimand the survivors in terms of religious morality either; instead, things continued as if nothing had happened. For the living survivors who had helped other boys to kill themselves, this lack of reprimand, especially the lack of religious reproof, marked a kind of limit on their own impunity.

A certain stillness, an unnamed shame, filled the empty spaces. Among the boys who missed their self-destructive mates, anyway. Being silent made forgetting harder. One of the priests at St. Anne’s should have commemorated the unusual events — at least from the pulpit in Annaberg, when on Sunday morning the counselors accompanied the boys who showed up for early services. Every Sunday, those counselors turned the simple act of preparing to go to church into an elaborate procedure, using it to see who were the believers, who the dissemblers, who might go just for the fun of it and then during the service end up scandalizing the town with their giggling. Hans showed up for services, but not because in his faith he wanted to follow his mother’s example. Yet the priests, whose relationship with the demonstrably pagan counselors was obviously strained, never mentioned the events in any sermon. It was impossible that they did not know of them, but one couldn’t tell this by looking at them. Hans had the impression that the communal silence resembled the behavior of a free valence in a world of chemical compounds, forever dangling in the empty universe in hope of combining with something.

After all, the the ones who had perished were flawed specimens — this must not be forgotten for even a moment. A pagan thought, and Hans did not understand how the priests could approve it.

He imagined that their departed mates had the free arms of the living boys in their grip.

And when it happened again, the physics teacher, Gruber, would take them the next day to the viaduct to explain again the laws of free fall, sometimes several times over. He did this each time a suicide occurred, using the very same expressions on each occasion, yet the boys never tired of his lectures. Whether the act had been successful or not, the poor fool had come to grief forever, Gruber explained as if for the first time. One group of boys was made to stay at the bottom of the viaduct while another group, led by the good-looking young teacher, clambered up to the railway embankment among the pine trees, and from there to the viaduct’s central pier; after they had performed the experiment the groups changed places. The teacher’s opinion was that the boys could understand the dazzling regularity of uniformly accelerating motion and the strictly physical character of human life only if they measured and experienced them from both perspectives. All they needed for the experiment was an authenticated means of measurement, an authenticated lead weight, and two authenticated stopwatches. The measure of uniformly accelerating motion differs only slightly at every geographical location; up to this point, it is easy to understand the premise. At the select location where we live, for example, the contiguous crust of gneiss strongly but uniformly modifies the motion. It is a general rule that the speed of a given body, while falling, changes equally in equal intervals. According to Gruber’s authenticated measurements, in the Wiesenbad gorge the speed was 980,839 centimeters per second. If, therefore, at the dropping of the accurate lead weight, the speed is zero, then in the second second of the fall it will be 980,839 centimeters per second, in the next second 2 x 980,839 centimeters per second, and so on; after t seconds it is t x 980,839 centimeters per second. From here on, only a few could follow the good-looking young teacher’s explanation, according to which, in plain words, speed is proportionate to time and it is therefore easy to figure what sort of resistance the body, falling at the given speed in the given time, will encounter when hitting the ground.

The boys, who did not understand the logic of the calculation and would have liked not to think about the smashed body, about the boy whom they may have loved or sometimes hated, but who still hoped they’d do the measurements rights, at least mechanically right, usually watched the good-looking teacher rummaging with both hands in the pockets of his smock while moving his buttocks in odd ways. Walking back and forth in front of them, what was he looking for and what was he finding. Sometimes he became so involved in the explanation of the physical world that he stopped involuntarily, lifted something from his pocket, and looked at it a long time with innocent eyes, though he probably could not have said why he had taken it out and what it was he was seeing. He had in his pockets pieces of chalk, a pencil sharpener, an eraser, a ball of carefully rolled-up string, and a pendulum; the latter two went together. One could fit the waxed red loop of the string into the hook on the pendulum. Hans, for some inexplicable reason, particularly envied the teacher this clever little instrument. Or, in his absentmindedness, the teacher would reach into the depth of his pocket and at the same time stick his butt out and reach between his legs to scratch. The boys knew perfectly well what he was scratching, and they said he was scratching his balls. They happened to know he suffered from some skin ailment that might have been caused by venereal disease. Occasionally, he’d lift the wings of his smock and, reaching into his pants pocket, rearrange his testicles in a more comfortable position.

He would halt his explanation while his symmetrical face with its handsome little mustache took on a dreamy look.

The crushed bodies were taken not to Chemnitz, nearby, and not even to Dresden, but to distant Leipzig, directly to the university clinic where, after thorough autopsies, the families could receive them in sealed coffins. On this brand-new day, fallen on them from the bright blue sky, their hands messy with fine woodland dirt, the boys were standing in the botanical garden.

One of them, named Kienast, happened to know that the researchers in Leipzig and Berlin were especially interested in the brains of the suicides.

You’re making this up, Kienast, said one of the older boys hesitantly. I’d say you’re talking nonsense.

And they know how to make clean work of it too, continued Kienast, as if he had not heard the older boy. If there’s anything left of the head, they saw around the dome of the cranium and take it off, like the lid of a pot.

They don’t do that differently with others, so what’s so special about it, if you wouldn’t mind telling us.

Listen, I know exactly how they get to the valuable brain.

That’s not what I doubt.

And they have to get to it.

Come on, my little friend, they can’t suck it out with a straw through the ears or the nose.

But I know how, the bookish Kienast kept repeating stubbornly and was hurt when the other boys laughed at him again.

He was from Leipzig and his father was indeed a prosector, employed not by the university clinic but by the municipality. More precisely, he made very ingenious dissecting instruments, and Kienast claimed that this was a family tradition, because the whole family was made up of inventors. He often picked his nose, and the others said that he seemed to have invented nostril mucus. The older boy, known to be Hans von Wolkenstein’s best friend, had great prestige. In the boarding school, the boys conversed in exceedingly polite and bookish tones, but there was much cruelty; in fact, they concealed their brutality and cruel behavior behind politeness and dry argumentation. They would not burden one another with openness. At times they wove their sentences so circuitously and archaically it was as if they wished to hide their longings and desires from one another. Even in their loud skepticism, they never went too far. Now they were laughing mainly because of the tension suddenly provoked by the extraordinary event. The way adolescent boys laugh to stimulate one another to continued laughter. Some of them were gliding between higher and lower registers; others simply neighed. It was hard to imagine that someone who only yesterday had knelt right here to fish mole crickets carefully out of fresh horse dung and throw them into a bucket of water was now lying on a marble table, having become the object of scientific research.

What makes the brain so precious is that you can make vertical or horizontal cross-sections of it. I wish to note that it’s your privilege not to believe this, insisted the one called Kienast, shouting over the laughs.

There was no malice in the boys’ assault of laughter; they treated Kienast’s foolishness, and even his obvious character weaknesses, with indulgent love. He was a shitty little character, but they liked him, and for quite some time he had been under their protection. Whenever he was gripped by an epileptic fit, they literally formed a wall around him, cleverly diverting the counselors’ attention from him. They could not bear letting his secret be discovered; he became the pledge, as it were, of their secret resistance.

They preferred to overlook his shitty little quirks.

Kienast was small, fragile, incredibly mean and aggressive. It had become clear that even epileptics were not removed from the boarding school, because the researchers were just as curious about their behavior patterns as they were about every other deviation, though by law epileptics had to be sterilized. This was no laughing matter, and that is how he had become the silent object of their resistance. He probably tried to balance his threatened state with zeal, while the others did the same with their manliness.

It hurt his pride that his physical misery, whose origin was unknown to him, made him dependent on his mates.

And then they progress cell by cell; in retrospect, they can find out the guy’s personal secrets.

He had a complete story, told with quiet shuddering, about how different people had committed suicide.

It was strictly forbidden to go near the railway that crossed the pine forest unless a counselor went with them, or to the enormous viaduct bridging the Wiesenbad valley or, higher up, the Ochsensprung, a rocky ledge barely protruding from the oaks that clung to a steep slope above the waterfall, from where, according to legend, because of a shepherd’s pact with the devil, the Wolkenstein estate’s entire herd of oxen had sought refuge in the depths.

On paper, the counselors had to note every infringement. However, they mainly obeyed the school regulations by noting down when someone, or more than one, had violated one. Their aim was to gain a realistic picture of the various rebellious tendencies thriving among the boys and of their secret movements. On several occasions, when it was Gruber’s turn to wait for the small group of boys in front of St. Anne’s, he would take them not directly back to the boarding school but first to the municipal baths in Hauer Street, into the steam section and afterward to the beer hall on Johannis Street frequented mainly by miners dressed in their Sunday best; the boys ate there, and the older ones also received big glasses of beer.

Gruber paid; he paid for everything.

And he said that they no longer had any secrets from one another.

Which Hans von Wolkenstein, no matter how hard he thought about it, could not understand. Indeed, theoretically nothing could happen to or among the boys that the counselors would not have known about or would not have recorded in their report notebooks. But he did not understand what kind of secret Gruber could observe on Sundays in a steam bath filled with loud men. Hans was sure that Gruber observed a physical phenomenon that, theoretically, they could observe too.

And that Gruber would bring this observation of his into some relationship with the boys’ religiousness or faith. He did not dare ask anyone what Gruber had in mind. The body of anyone jumping from the Ochsensprung would first be smashed on the waterfall’s enormous ledges, but the water would carry the body farther, pushing and hurling it down to the next rocky ledge.

The data gathered from the counselors had to be put into the pedantically documented system of parallel scientific examinations; all data had to find their proper places; there could be no information that, in relation to the expected research results, was not important or interesting. The pupils themselves readily accepted this principle; they knew better than anyone the generally accepted genetic norms and rules. They knew that none of them had a flawless Nordic origin, least of all Kienast. After all, this was the reason they had been brought together here, this is why they’d been picked. Gruber’s origin was different, however; he proudly told them that all his measurements were pure Nordic. Which they watched with great interest and suspicion. Being near him, they felt their own sense of inferiority strongly. The number of peculiarities about him was too many as it was.

They distrusted him, if only because he still lived with his mother, who served them delicious streusel cake when she hosted them.

They had to be here for the experiments; they could conclude that from Gruber’s remarks, but they never talked about this with anyone, never about anything like this.

But why were they, and not their siblings, who were also thoroughly examined in outside clinics, at the school. They asked each other about their origins and defects; it would have made no sense to keep them secret. There were no Jews among them. At least they had no knowledge of any. Secretly they had to know everything, so they could have a better picture of their own situation. Or what about their parents, who had turned them over and exposed them to this continual examination when they themselves were the cause of their children’s dubious status. There is a kind of sexual or amorous heedlessness in the world that cannot be corrected. Kienast’s mother was Mexican, Christian but not Aryan. Something one could not see with the naked eye in her son, but the family was aware of it; they knew it would show up in her son or grandson, and the latent biological conformity filled them with a peculiar dread. If only because of Kienast’s truly spectacular epileptic fits. However, Kienast found it hard to imagine what would have happened if he’d been born not to a mestizo woman but to an Aryan one, whether it would have been better for him. Shackled by a certain physical hypochondria, the boys observed themselves and one another as if expecting some secret ailment to appear at any moment, or some racial impurity whose carrier they had become because of their parents’ mating.

He loved his mother; how could he not, even though it would have been better to hate her since he could not forgive her his birth.

And that she had let these people take him from her.

Or if at least she had chosen another mestizo for her partner and not his father, or stayed in Veracruz so her son would not have been born here, as an epileptic.

And now he had to be ashamed of his mere existence.

And why do their parents pretend that this is a high-class boarding school for boys, as if they knew nothing else about the place.

About what is happening here.

And as if they, the boys, had only to discharge their filial duties. To satisfy their parents by doing well in their studies in all circumstances and by demonstrating exemplary behavior. Everyone knows that parents want to give their children the best of everything.

Children have to be grateful to their parents all their lives.

However, despite its well-kept appearance and exceptional status, there was something ominous and grave about this boarding school.

Hans was glad that at least his father had finally disappeared from his life; at least he wouldn’t be around putting on airs. Sometimes he felt that in this harmlessly desolate landscape and in the rustically styled, bare-walled building there was too much yellow-brown, as if the earth itself had made the building’s substance so heavy; he was disgusted by all the gneiss surfaces glittering with mica. And the surroundings, or his family history, depressed him because here everything was damp, skin-colored, smelling of cold stone. Sometimes his conscience would be gloomy for weeks. He did not understand why he had to be born here or why he was born at all. The rocks, the retaining walls, the northern and western sides of the building wept all day long. At other times, under the influence of other glances, mainly from the eyes of strangers, this was a wonderful, idyllic landscape far from human settlements, a cozy human nest, an old hunting lodge in the primeval forest where everything was well cared for and lived in sensible harmony with nature and with its own nature.

He would marry a blond, blue-eyed, pure Nordic woman and thus he might correct to some extent what his mother had ruined with her careless step.

The others could not have known his family history. It was not clear where he had learned the story himself. The enormous soul-lifting mountain valley, as strangers enthusiastically called it, seemed to hover in a haze even in daytime; it was their family estate. He rarely managed to learn anything about his own history from his mother, but their old servants didn’t give a damn about the laws of inheritance and told him all sorts of things. The haze never left the valley. Outlines dissolved or disappeared completely in the morning or evening fog. One could not tell whether one was seeing mountain peaks or clouds above Frauenholz. At such times everything dripped, as if the plants or objects were weeping. Drops dripped from the leaves, remained poised on the tips of pine needles.

Slowly, quietly, the gutters began to go pit-a-pat and then, as if it were raining, the increasing drops trickled from the wide, high-built roofs and gurgled ever louder.

Scientifically based, vitamin-rich foods awaited the boys; smooth, unadorned raw furniture made of fine German oak and beech, all the furnishings and objects arranged with thrifty good taste; accommodating and friendly service personnel, and a warm pedagogical, educational staff radiating tranquillity, almost a friendly spirit. Teachers of special subjects were brought from Annaberg every morning on a special bus. The boys could choose from various private lessons or play different sports under these teachers’ supervision. They climbed rocks, boxed and wrestled, while others studied musical instruments or various living languages. Or simply sat at the brownish-red kidskin-covered tables in the ground-floor library. On the pretext of checking data for their papers, they sat under the light of the green-shaded lamps and secretly searched in handbooks and encyclopedias for the symptoms of genetic diseases from which they might be suffering.

For some unfathomable reason, up here in the mountains botany became the most widespread passion among the boys. Spores, pistils, pollination, cross-fertilization; the rarely used terms themselves made a strong impression on them, along with dissemination, grafting, rooting, cutting and grafting of buds, the hotbed in the educational orchards, the sowing, dibbling, planting and transplanting in the cold bed, the phrase cold bed itself, the tree nursery, the winter and spring cuttings, the care of the saplings’ nursery, preparation of flower beds, planting on ridges and on hillsides. All these activities were attractive, extremely simple, and time-consuming, sometimes demanding protracted physical effort, at other times deep absorption and concentration. The activities deepened the boys’ patience and confidence regarding nature’s great processes, somehow supplanting religion, because it was from these activities that they had to project their vision not only to the following week but also to the following year or even to the lives of succeeding generations.

Even if they were dealing with annuals.

After a while they became so well versed in the life conditions of plants that at the mere sight of a given sample of a species they could review its entire growth season or even its entire life cycle.

These moments were rewarding because of the weight of their knowledge. Still, their most permanent feeling was one of anxiety and ominous premonition. It sat at the base of their soul like a keel. As if hiding from their own probing looks, they were trying to discover how to satisfy the racial requirements that the accidents of their birth had kept them from fulfilling. And lo, they had barely returned from vacation — not all of them yet, adrift — and already one of them had put an end to it all.

Schultze, one of their teachers, a world-famous expert on racial-biological measurements and measurement techniques, a very proper older gentleman with fuzzy silver-gray hair and cheeks made rosy by burst capillaries, had also come back to the school. A not easily approachable but very musical man, he mainly hummed and whistled to himself. Every month he spent a week, sometimes two, in his separate little room in the attic loft, full of instruments and implements that could be seen nowhere else.

He ordered boys by name up to his office and he himself came downstairs only at mealtimes.

Sometimes his word would tip the final judgment about a boy, but nobody, absolutely nobody, talked about this, not with the other boys and not with any outsider.

They had to go up to him at impossible times.

That is what the instructions were: they had to go to him whenever he called and no matter what activity they were engaged in at the time. There was nothing in the attic but two offices, convalescence rooms, storage rooms, and spaces for various discarded objects, kept in meticulous order behind locked doors and accessible only to the housekeeper.

And to the unusual silence, which surprised everyone and immediately held them captive.

Up here, one could hear, at most, voices or echoes of shouts from the other side of the brook, from the great meadow, or from the sports fields, squeezed in between high retaining walls and glistening with snail trails. Or Schultze’s singing behind closed doors; he often talked to himself in recitative, as if he were performing in an unknown large-cast opera.

The boys would listen to the creaks of the floor or crossbeams while waiting in front of Schultze’s office.

During the examination, Schultze kept his eye on the limb he’d chosen and his ice-cold instruments; nothing else interested him. Occasionally he’d jot something down but hardly ever said anything, preferring to point, indicating that a boy should turn this way or stand over there. Never looked anyone straight in the eye, probably wasn’t curious about the boys. The instruments clinked and clanged. If he especially liked something or was dissatisfied with a result, he would click his tongue.

Let us now look at this marvelous distance, O Tibiale, wherefore hast thou receded so from Stylion.

These were not Greek gods but measuring points on the human body.

Or he would sing something like, O Symphyse, tremble not while from on high Omphalion keeps an eye on thee. These musical mutterings meant that the knee joint on a standing person with arms at his side was farther than usual from the wrist joint, or that the skin over the pubic bone should not tremble nervously, since he was doing nothing to it except, with his instrument designed for this sort of measurement, marking its distance from the navel. Not everyone feared him. The instruments were always cold, so even the bravest boys dreaded that first touch. In ordinary Latin dictionaries, the boys did not find the names Schultze used. They also worried that Schultze might touch their naked limbs and other exposed parts. Two life-size drawings of the human skeleton hung on the wall, with the measuring points of the body marked with numbers. One drawing, of the body in profile, had twenty-seven points; the other, a frontal view, showed twenty-eight points, all according to Braus. This mysterious name was written above both drawings in beautiful Gothic letters, but Braus could not be found in any of the encyclopedias.

Schultze looked at the boys’ eyes while he took out the large leather case in which he kept instruments for assessing eye color. But the leather case so alarmed most of them — the imminent danger making their eyes ache in their sockets — that they quickly closed their eyes or buried their faces in their hands.

In four black-velvet-lined cannonlike cases, glass eyes looked up at the ceiling. They were arranged in five rows, eight to a row, in trays that one could lift out of the cabinet. This meant that there were 160 differently colored and differently patterned glass eyeballs; under each eyeball, on a tiny copper plate sunk into the black velvet, the eye color’s number and letter designation was indicated. Schultze unpacked all this, bringing out all the velvet-framed cases and laying them side by side, the better to see his entire holding. At the bottom of the cabinet, on the last removable tray, there lay on the velvet bed a frightening instrument made of silver and resembling candy tongs, and a strong-smelling, hair-thin sandalwood fan.

Schultze made his first determination with the help of the fan. Individual segments of the fan could be cleverly separated from the others and, along with small enamel panels that showed hand-painted images of the many different eyes, be held up to a living eye in order to identify its color correctly. Although he worked with a steady hand, in his professional excitement Schultze sometimes touched a real eyeball with these small panels lifted to the boys’ temples.

Which of course was enough to make the boys wince.

But Schultze would go on singing, don’t be so sensitive, you little fool.

After this crude definition, he would reach for his ominous silver tongs, with which he could not only lift a valuable glass eyeball adroitly from its velvet bed but hold it with total confidence right next to a real eye. Throughout this activity, he shone strong lights into the boys’ eyes from the front and sides. And he preceded everything by dripping something into their eyes to keep them from blinking. If they resisted or blinked involuntarily, Schultze sang out that intrigue and scheming would not destroy the divine design, the gods cannot be tripped up, and the boys would get more drops in their eyes.

For hours after the examination, the boys would wander about with numb eyelids and enlarged pupils or just sit motionless on a bench, heads buried in their hands.

The light hurt.

Or Schultze would sing, hark, hark, I need but a single secundum, lend me thy patience, Prince, I am on the trail.

For the capital offense, the villain will pay forthwith.

Sometimes the boys would keep rubbing their eyes to gain time.

Don’t pick at it, don’t rub it, unless you want me to take it out with my tongs, my boy. What the devil, so it’s tearing, sang Schultze, and then they had to open their eyes obediently to receive the initial drop or the stabilizing drop or the drop against tearing.

It was very quiet on this floor for another reason: right underneath, on the third floor, were the dormitories, two large and three smaller sleeping halls that during the day were off limits to everyone. All their windows had to be kept open regardless of the season. Even in the vaporous winter cold the halls were barely heated but, because of the high humidity, sometimes in the summer months they tried to moderate the temperature in the rather musty dormitories.

On the second floor were classrooms and the so-called great hall with its two enormous stone fireplaces, thick chimneys, and a chandelier made of painted wood. One could still see, on the gilded rims of the small colorful plates at the base of the electric candles, remnants of guttering wax candles of former days. This large space with its coffered ceiling, painted with great artistry, had once been called the knights’ hall because of two full sets of knight’s armor standing at either side of the entrance. Everything here seemed to have been left where the Thum zu Wolkensteins, who had used them for centuries, abandoned them in somewhat poetic disarray, at which point the baroness turned over the building and the part of the estate that went with it for the protracted use of the institute.

She did it mainly for political and scientific considerations.

True, she received a rather high annual rent from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, but from the point of view of her career, it was more important that she have a safe place for her son. The part of the estate that officially belonged with the building included the broad valley with its fields in flower from spring to autumn; the watercourse, which at certain sections had been regulated; the loud waterfall and the woodlands of the gorges; and the pine and oak forests all the way up to the ridge from the Ochsensprung to Frauenholz, where only clouds roamed. Over the ridge, the baroness’s ancient estate continued in other forests, pastures, and fields, but in the land registry, this entire section was entered under an independent lot number. Baron Schuer now wanted to obtain ownership of the building for his institute, even if it had to be without the rights to the part of the estate that went along with it.

But he did not talk about this at his first move.

He was afraid that if he failed to take advantage of his situation with proper force and speed, Himmler’s ruthless protégé Wolfram Sievers would beat him to it — he might already have done so — and obtain the house for his own institute for research into Germany’s ancestral heritage, his own efforts on behalf of racial purification.* Several years of Schuer’s preparatory work would come to nothing; his was a scientific plan whose execution required at least another decade of research, if not two. He wanted also to somehow call the Führer’s attention to the fact that it was not propitious to have everything doubled in the Reich, and not only because of its costliness.

After all, two scientific truths could not exist side by side.

In this game of higher stakes, he was forced to enter a great trial of strength, which also promised to be a showdown with the powerful Himmler. Who, at least on the face of it, respected his scientific prestige and achievements. Baron Schuer knew from his own assistant, Mengele, that Sievers had had his eyes on the Wolkenstein house for a good many years and had spoken several times with the baroness about purchasing it. Schuer was no more convinced of Mengele’s loyalty than he was of his scientific abilities, but he needed Mengele now. He was afraid that Sievers would take over the house and simply throw out the research material so diligently collected from the children, who had grown used to continued investigation. The baroness herself was also a source of concern: not only did she want to head the institute in Rome in return for the house, but she also meant to raise the rent on it. For his progeny purification institute Sievers looked for houses that were far from any kind of human settlement. He was a long way from having established his network, but dark folk imagination had already given a name to these institutes. Lebensborn: the word itself contributed to the institute’s dubious reputation. A place where life is created. And the baroness intended to raise the rent by the very amount that, with the budget at his disposal, Baron Schuer could not afford to pay.

Which clearly showed that the baroness realized her advantageous business position and wanted to extort as much as she could from him.

Which Mengele must also know, since nothing happened without Himmler’s and Sievers’s approval.

He had turned a haunted, musty hunting lodge into a well-functioning institute with the highest standards of hygiene, and now these people were trying to push him out and settle into a well-established place.

Mindful of the many valuable objects, some of them dating back to the Middle Ages, the old family pictures, the somewhat worn furniture that had reached a critical age, the many fragile historical fripperies, the so-called ornamental pieces, and the heavy hand-woven silk Venetian tapestry, students were not allowed in the knights’ hall except on Christmas Eve. Christmas celebrations were held in the large dining hall on the main floor, which had two stoves built of ancient tiles and walls decorated with trophies. At the completion of the festive meal, music-loving pupils were allowed to enter the knights’ hall and listen to a few recordings of classical music.

Schultze came from Leipzig too. When one boy left his office, a good half hour, sometimes even forty minutes would go by before he would order up the next one. Nobody knew what he did in the interim — how he evaluated the results, and whether the results had anything to do with whom he called for next.

Whether he had a list.

Hans, together with Hendrik Franke, the oldest of the boys, somewhat overage, whom everybody admired for his calm, deliberate manners and who, right now, was arguing with Kienast in the botanical garden, had managed to sneak into Schultze’s office several times. They wanted answers to their worrisome questions; they searched the place thoroughly, took some documents, even destroyed them, but found no list. Schultze always arrived with a large bag; he must have kept his important papers in it.

Which meant they had to get to the bag; and they were determined to do just that. It wasn’t impossible, since Schultze often sat in the second-floor hall and listened to music. He would sing to himself endlessly, even when entering his latest results into his carefully prepared tables, comparing them to earlier results about the same person and to other persons’ results at different times and different places. With a practiced eye, he would check or modify the hypotheses emerging from his research. He would draw up charts of the rhythm of bodily development; he’d compare them but had only a passing interest in them.

No definitive conclusion now was allowed to influence his pending conclusions later.

Well then, let it be him, he sang and ruminated, let it be this one or that one, as he went on with his seemingly mechanical work — based on his familiarity with the physical attributes of boys and on strictly physical measurements — work that in essence, however, proved to be intuitive. The boys could not even begin to deduce what guided Schultze’s decisions or what consequences his maniacal series of measurements might have for them. Because not everybody had a turn on each occasion, and — perhaps because of Schultze’s scientific whims — several boys were left out of the measuring sessions for quite some time. There were his favorites, boys he may have enjoyed measuring, and there were others to whom he paid no attention at all. Or on whom he did the work perfunctorily. Sometimes the boys in the latter group became very anxious that they meant nothing to Schultze anymore. This feeling was unendurable in the long term; it was very like jealousy. While the other boys were watching, enviously or disdainfully. They could not fathom the reason for their exclusion. Why was Schultze not interested in their measurements. In what way did they differ from the others; was it something the naked eye could not see or was it covered by their clothing.

And this watchfulness, intensified by base emotions, made the atmosphere among them ominous and depressive; they could not forgive one another for it.

If there is equality, then let there be equality.

And from a higher viewpoint on the persons or limbs or other body parts chosen to be measured, there were still issues that could be neither followed nor understood. The more and more detailed the data, the more clearly Schultze saw that strength, or energy, or the principle of love or that of equality did not function in organic nature, and that, with regards to judging single individuals, uniformly applied and authenticated units of measurement had been misleading him. Only the exceptional exists; the individual has its laws, very intimate and from the outside impenetrable laws; but the individual is not linked to the group through its exceptional characteristics.

Strength, energy, love, and equality are ultimately kinds of political fiction based on a statistical fiction about the average, and they have nothing to do with physics or biology.

As if he were saying to himself that these sciences must first be cleansed of political fictions, or that he must first occupy himself with metaphysical questions, and only then could he do something with the results of the mechanical measurements.

Maybe not even then.

In the evenings, Schultze sat singing to himself in one of the comfortable armchairs in the great hall. He remained alone with his thoughts even as, around him, other teachers were reading or talking among themselves. He agonized about the desirable metaphysical foundation for the so-called final questions. He did not even notice when a record ended and kept spinning on the turntable, empty and crepitating under the needle. He also managed to talk himself out of looking for connections, relationships, or parallels in his intuitively collected mass of data.

He whistled classical melodies, always repeating them, the same way and always the same ones, maniacally.

At the same time, he drank quite a bit of red wine.

Every time he finished his work, he had to wait for Geipel, another teacher, from Berlin, a renowned expert on the genetic determinations of the palm and fingers, who did not always come alone but in the company of several guests, all of them scientists. Geipel was the scientific supervisor of the examinations, and because of his humorous ways, the boys had very quickly, not as with Schultze, come to like him.

They could more easily understand the rhythm and sense of this embarrassing, oppressive activity called supervision than the meaning of Schultze’s perpetual examinations. The supervisions were carried out at least three times a year. That is when they found out who among them were considered very interesting or problematical — which, theoretically, they should have known earlier, since they involuntarily followed the measuring technique’s secret instructions and made them their own with their own eyes, except that they could never decide why and from what viewpoint this or that fact would be decisive or interesting. Once Schultze had measured something, they observed that thing on themselves and on one another, so together they probably reached a more profound level of observation than Schultze ever did with his exact measurements. They knew everyone’s measurements in any part of his body, what any of them preferred to keep quiet about and, to avoid comparisons, what they wanted to keep a secret and from whom.

Vigilantly they watched one another’s features, limbs, and colors, the changes in their attributes and physical inclinations.

The fruit of this vigilance ripened during the times of supervision.

Schultze’s monkish strictness repelled and disgusted them.

Didn’t I tell you, I also saw it, see, I knew it in advance.

However, they enjoyed the subtle knowledge they gained by studying individual cases.

Involuntarily they became attuned to the scientific presuppositions Schultze studied so diligently, but since they did not need to strive for a scientific outcome, they were free to associate their observations with feelings and emotions. This was not without danger, because they could not ascertain the consequences of their individuality, of their exceptional or problematic qualities, though that might be the fount of their knowledge. That everything had grave, even dire consequences — of that they had no doubt. Nor could they discover whether there were prescribed units of measurement by which to gauge their being problematical. Hendrik and Hans found no papers relating to this question when on two consecutive nights they broke into Schultze’s office. Sometimes it seemed that the committee found the exceptional to be the norm; at other times the norm seemed to mean average or desirable, which again should have been designated by a number or series of numbers, which the boys could not find anywhere.

They also understood that a questionable number was nonetheless a number, its symbol x, just as in the periodic table there are empty spaces. But the empty spaces become visible with the filled places; thus it was not unreasonable to look for the latter. Boys considered problematical were not only exposed to merciless repetitions of previously assessed measurements but, in the silent presence of committee members, also subjected to measurements other boys were not. In any case, the boys had to strip naked for the measurements when Schultze measured the distance between chin, Gnathion, and the tip of the sternum, Suprasternale, and again for the supervisions.

If anyone thought of not stripping voluntarily, Schultze would demand it, on every occasion.

Kienast was considered a difficult case.

Let’s take off those shitty little drawers, Schultze sang, come on, get rid of those stinking socks.

The boys in the boarding school changed underwear once a week, and Schultze was particularly sensitive to the inevitable bodily emissions. He could barely forgive the boys when their bodily data were linked to organ functions. Another reason that made it hard to judge one’s own situation by the measurements of others was that not everyone liked to report on what happened to them in Schultze’s office, what irregularity was discovered or which body part was the focus of interest during a certain visit. Many of them tried to make their reports innocuous, which stood to reason, while others exaggerated theirs shamelessly. Even though no one knew what would result from either of these distortions, and it was impossible to gauge which was the better self-defense in the secret war against being scientific.

To keep quiet about the embarrassing experience of being measured, or to brag, exaggerate, and outdo the others.

They were all bastards, that was the truth.

The adults would never have said this aloud about them, and the boys were even less likely to mention it among themselves. They could not help thinking about it, because not only science but also the law declared them bastards. Nevertheless, the education these misbegotten children were given was in accordance with the most progressive, modern pedagogical theories. Most of the boys considered this an illusion intended to deceive them — a correct assumption — but they could not ignore the scientific level or quality of their education.

Fifty-nine boys, the number hardly changed over the years because the suicides were always replaced with others. They studied in small groups, and these groups were divided roughly by age. Mainly they studied classical sciences, mathematics, physics, botany, chemistry, but also ancient languages, Latin and Greek, literature and history, especially ancient history, and subjects such as archaeology and ethnology that were not usually in the curriculum of midrange schools. Their physical achievements and mental capacities were monitored, and they were given the results of this monitoring because they were asked to do achievement-increasing exercises for the proper assessment of which it was required that they strengthen the spirit of competition among them. Their mental capacity and their intelligence were tested, and copious notes were taken of their behavior in many different circumstances.

The boys could not imagine their instructors without their notebooks. They had to feel privileged to be living and studying in such an environment, and they knew that the highest levels of German science would use the data resulting from this. But they were repeatedly told that they were the same kind of person, birds of a feather, all in the same boat, tied by a bond that could never be broken. Whatever might happen, they could not — and they knew this — not even at the cost of their lives could they leave before high-school graduation. This was so far in the future for them that they couldn’t imagine a world with different conditions.

They could not decide what they should be like, since they were already the way they were.

Or how they should behave, so that despite their unfortunate birth, they might seem to be what in all probability they never had been and never could be. Yet in this way, given who they were, it filled them with satisfaction to think they performed a great service to German science. If Schultze were to succeed one day in defining the norms of racial desirability, based on the boys’ data, their stunted racial development would become their merit.

These mainly intellectual broodings touched Hans less than they did the other boys, and they touched Hendrik only for practical reasons. About as much as did the others’ silently endured pain and self-doubts. Tension and anxiety about a lack or an injury that none of them could avoid. But regardless of the effect of these thoughts on them, Hans and Hendrik, for different reasons and in different ways, were able to keep a distance from them, and even physical intimacy could not have brought them closer than this shared ability.

To their great good luck, they also managed to keep the strong physical signs of this feeling at a certain distance. They could not afford to wind up in a situation where they’d have to explain things to their friends or be suspected darkly by their instructors.

The instructors paid special attention to such matters; moreover, they gave the boys the opportunity to observe for themselves the purity of their own inclinations or the nature of their own deviations.

The two boys were especially sensitive to the exceptional atmospheric pressure of the locale, and also to the scientific aims of the place as they understood them, though neither of them had ever shown any touchiness; their reputation was firmly based. Hans always behaved as if he stood above everything that had happened or might happen to him; he was looked upon as privileged in the school, where being privileged was usually considered as being at odds with the communal spirit and the boys were contemptuous of it. The service personnel were forbidden to establish personal relationships with the boys. Any kind of bias or self-consciousness might threaten the accuracy of observation. Yet the men and women on the staff, who came from nearby villages and the little medieval town nearby, could not treat Hans as anyone but the lord and master of the place. Bastard or not, they did not much care.

They tried to please him in small things — even when unnoticed, as it were — and he shared these friendly benefits and advantages fairly with Hendrik. The imperceptibility of these activities was what convinced the others that Hans had real historical prerogatives, which was a good reason they should listen to him. The scientific supervisors of the institute erred, however, in thinking they controlled every aspect of their observations. What is more, not only the kitchen personnel, the stokers and scullery maids, but the teachers and of course the boys all knew that Hans’s mother owned the two ancestral homes, the enormous forests between Thum and Wolkenstein, the lumberyards, and even the small forest train that, with much whistling, ran across the Wiesenbad viaduct every afternoon, and that she was also connected at the highest level to the scientific research being conducted here.

It was naturally humiliating to think they were objects of a scientific experiment, yet all of them went to sleep and awakened with this unpleasant thought.

Knowing they were here at the express wishes of their parents should have made the boys consider the matter settled. Yet it gave them no rest. When they went home for three weeks each summer, they dared not ask if their parents had any knowledge of the experiments or what sort of papers they had signed regarding their sons’ placement in the school and their being subject to hygienic observation. That was the key phrase. The boys searched and several of them found such papers among their parents’ documents; indeed, the parents had signed binding notes that referred to the appropriate law and clearly spelled things out.

This summer, Hans was not allowed to go home because the consulting committee members thought an extreme session of observation was necessary in his case. They inflicted this punishment on him because of the break-in. They exposed the boys in an embarrassingly elaborate way, for the process of exposure itself became the object of the observation. The baroness, helpless against a scientifically defended order, was in fact relieved to hear of it. Then she wouldn’t have to waste three summer weeks in hopeless family time. She preferred not to acknowledge what sort of danger awaited her son during the extreme observation. She was also afraid of him; the boy’s sheer physical existence filled her with aversion.

When occasionally, after awakening, she thought about it, she felt she’d be much happier without him, though she could not have known much about her possible happiness. Frankly, she’d spent the months of her unwanted pregnancy in anger and desperation about her new, unknown condition. Her misshapen body, the nausea and vomiting, made her restless. She could not deny that she felt nothing but hatred about her pregnancy. As if she’d been cheated out of her own body and punished too, since she couldn’t talk about it to anyone.

Perhaps that is why Hans arrived in this world way ahead of time. Which filled the baroness with a sense of total disaster. There were two interdependent beings in the world, but knowledge of their mutuality caused her not one iota of joy. Within a few days, she went dry. She probably shouldn’t have had those thoughts. To pull the little kerchief over his head, or the light blue coverlet. Another reason why the baby had to be given to a wet nurse as soon as possible. Yet he starved on the stranger’s milk, turned blue crying each time he was fed, and screamed through entire nights, even when they fed him at regular intervals with both milk and the best food.

Karla was weak; one morning, before going to the Auenberg estate, the baby unexpectedly fell silent after protracted screaming. It would have been good if he’d stopped breathing. Karla had the impression that the baby accepted his death. As if, together with her, he was waiting for his breathing to cease. She stood by the crib, silent and motionless, and wished along with him that he’d perish. Perish. But he did not. Even though she wished it, oh, how she had wished it.

Nobody could talk to her about unconditional motherly love without making her laugh, even out loud.

She knew precisely the enduring feeling with which the mother hates her son and does everything to kill in him at least the element alien to her because of his sex.

Or else he should perish.

But she did not go beyond thinking those thoughts, since she would have considered it beneath her to lose her dignity, notwithstanding her hatred for him.

After a few summer days had passed, once the others started coming back, Hans no longer expected that the baroness would come for him and at least take him to their house in Annaberg. He probably was waiting not for his mother but for the house, or for the taste and sweet fragrance of the warm walnut-filled pastry she once had bought for him at the weekly fair in Annaberg. He could not forget the lightness of this pastry and the creamy texture of the filling.

Nor forget that there was something in the world that his mother had once actually bought for him.

When left alone, this was the feeling with which he viewed his body.

As some kind of a test, he caught his penis and testicles between his thighs and showed himself like that to the others in the shower. They liked it, and laughed; Hendrik especially liked the idea that Hans might have a pussy, but only Kienast imitated him.

Hans could be content that things were going well among the other boys without him. He consoled himself with all sorts of things. He found acting like this somewhat childish, but it was unavoidable and he needed hiding places for it. He also could keep in contact with them even during months of silence, and he did not have to relinquish his leadership. He was allegedly ostracized, which, along with the denial of summer vacation, was considered the most severe punishment, but it was made even more severe by an attempt to cast suspicion on Hendrik and to separate the two of them. That is why he put on the little monkey act with his pussy in the shower. Hendrik had not been punished, because they wanted to create the impression that he was the one who had betrayed their conspiracy. In the shower Hendrik well understood that Hans did not believe this.

That is why he did not laugh along with the others and his eyes glittered with joy.

There was no precedent for imposing a permanent ostracism on a boy or for expelling him. So theoretically they could do anything they wanted to, which Hans and Hendrik comprehended and, within certain limits, exploited. They even succeeded in exchanging letters that, after repeated readings, they both burned. Had they not enjoyed their heroism, they couldn’t have done it. Even so, it was hard to watch the pages of those letters shrivel and turn to ashes in the flames, pages on which Hendrik called Hans my dear friend and Hans called Hendrik his dearest brother. But they couldn’t have known that their instructors had information about most of these secret activities and the letters had not been undocumented. While the others were away and the service staff was busy with the major annual cleaning, painting, and whitewashing, Hans could get along without speaking to anyone. It was actually interesting to live without talking. Along with his friends subjected to similar punishment, he was mainly unsupervised for those summer weeks. Recalcitrant staff members gravely violated the strict rules and regulations so that others could observe and then write about the boys’ activities. And thus, at a given moment, all Schuer had to do was go to his desk and, while Baroness Thum zu Wolkenstein was still struggling with her first surprise, take out a paper listing the illegal activities that Hans von Wolkenstein had engaged in, in the company of another pupil named Hendrik Franke, the rules and regulations he had violated, and to what sort of sensual excesses he had yielded. How many times they had broken into Schultze’s office together, the papers they had taken from it and then destroyed, the content of the letters they had exchanged, and what sort of complicated relationship they had entangled themselves in with two trusted members of the service staff.

Which put his mother in a very difficult situation; the baroness struggled with tears of anger. At the very same time, this disobedient child was crouching at the foot of the central pier of the viaduct arching seventy meters over the valley, with the rumbling noise of the waterfall rushing down from the craggy ledge of the mountain slope opposite, while his friends in the botanical garden discussed the situation in their own argot.

He was crouching on a yellow-brown rock, where the whimsically cascading, gurgling, and splashing water sometimes flowed over his feet. He was wearing his institutional uniform, a sailcloth shirt sewn in a military fashion with brown corduroy knee pants. On the banks of the stream he had taken off his high-quarter buttoned shoes and corkscrew-patterned socks and hidden them in the high sedge. Because the instructors often played tricks on the boys by taking away their scattered shoes or clothes.

His bare soles clung firmly to the rough-surfaced rock, but making the slightest move caused it to wobble under him.

He did not want to lose his balance.

In this early afternoon hour, when above the high ridge of the Frauenholz gorge the last rays of the sun were disappearing, taking their warmth with them, the end-of-summer air in the valley acquired a sharp edge.

The smell of resin and wild marjoram was everywhere.

He leaned as far forward as the wobbly rock allowed, raised a stick over the clear water, concentrating on something in it, below its turbulent wild rushing. A strange, never-seen-before creature among the stones. Perhaps the corpse or torn-off limb of a creature; just then a new current shoved it under another stone. He would not leave it there; in a little while he’d pluck it out from under the stone and trusting to the current would ceremoniously put it back. He could just barely reach it with his stick. Just enough to turn it over. Whether it was a living creature or a dead one, he wanted to see its belly. The rock wobbled a little, the water splashed, and it wouldn’t be pleasant to fall in. A pale piece of flesh that had lost its color in the water. A shred of flesh from the body of one of the suicide boys ripped on the rocks as he was hurtling down. Or a drowned slug, or torn-off crabmeat. At this spot the current was so powerful that it washed away any telltale blood, and bits of clothes were thrown out on the grass or stones.

He had not yet decided whether to consider his find an independent being, a dead body, or some kind of waterlogged piece of meat or flesh that couldn’t be dislodged from the stones, when from on high, a little above the waterfall, from the rim of the gorge hidden by the oaks, he heard the familiar rattle of rolling stones.

Someone was coming down off the Ochsensprung. And in the next moment he could make out that it was a female. The color of her skin and something red gave her away. Or multiples of red. A brief flash among the foliage as she continued lowering herself carefully, accompanied by the happy noise of the stones.

Whoever undertook the neck-breaking stunt of coming down the dangerous and twisting trail — used mainly by deer — had to watch their step. And look out for what to hold on to next, assess which root, branch, or sapling would give support or hold one up for a split second while shifting weight for the next step.

A simple slip might mean serious injury.

Hans straightened up a little. To see the figure better, though he knew he should flee. He did not want simply to throw away his stick. To run, to flee as inconspicuously as possible, careful not to step on wobbly rocks so as not to fall into the frothing, ice-cold water. He cast a last look at the strange phenomenon he’d neither fished out nor managed to identify. With a few well-directed jumps he was off and away, looking back at the dark mountainside where the rustling in the bushes grew louder, which was encouraging. He clambered up the steep riverbank and felt a childlike joy at having escaped, then waded into the high grass, which benevolently swallowed him and covered him up. He went on listening, and panting, while he retrieved his buttoned shoes and thick knee socks. They had become damp with dew, and within moments he too felt damp as he lay in the grass. The approaching girl’s arms and legs and the red flashing of her skirt disappeared behind a group of rocks. On that stretch, the serpentine path lessened the steepness of the slope. When she clears it, the landscape will come upon her as if she were at a comfortable lookout point. Before that happened, he had time to stuff the socks into the shoes and, bending low, start off. Back to the protection of the railway viaduct’s enormous central pier.

He had to step on stones. Barefoot, he quickly picked his way over the yellowish, body-colored stones.

Every step made some noise and was painful.

His plan was to use the cover of the pier to back into the woods. From there he could stroll along the riverbank without any danger of being discovered, over the rather prickly ground covered with pine needles under the hundred-year-old trees, so that at a more distant spot he could put on his socks and shoes.

He looked back once more to see who this person was, what she might want. He did not know what he feared discovering or what kept him there despite his fear.

She was a girl somewhat older than he; at the sight of her Hans grew a little uncertain. Her dark hair was in braids with bows at the end made of the same red material as her skirt. She was carrying a small basket, as if she were collecting berries or mushrooms.

For that, she was too late in the valley.

Where the serpentine section of the trail ended, the most dangerous stretch began.

The trail continued downward, deepened by water-worn gullies and blocked with fallen stones. She could not help sliding, or grasping at shrubs, tendrils, roots, or dried-out stalks that would not break or be pulled off when she tugged at them; she was becoming flustered. The red-bowed braids now fell forward, now snapped back, her breasts quivered under her blouse, her little basket slipped up to her shoulder and almost slid off her wrist; everything was crackling and snapping. Which the valley and the viaduct echoed many times over. She was rushing headlong down the trail; her skirt kept flying up. Hans saw her long brown thighs and pink panties, and then the same series of pictures again.

He was afraid she might have to cover this steepest stretch of the trail sliding on her bare bottom.

Such a stupid girl.

Who doesn’t know how to dig in with her heels and the outer edge of her shoes.

How can a girl be so dumb.

She was not in the least scared; the speed and danger made her rather determined.

Hans was whimpering and cheering her on. He clung to the base of the pier, craning his neck to see her better. As if for the first time in his life he was seeing a feminine being, fully exposed and with nothing held back, struggle with circumstances and the gravity of her body.

She thrilled him, though he could not imagine what she was doing here.

He would catch her.

If they sent someone with an urgent message from Annaberg, that person would come on a bicycle. When relatives came on foot from Wiesa or Wiesenbad to look for some staff member, they came from the opposite direction, from the Bismarck tower.

He will surprise her.

This is just crazy, that someone should be such a clumsy bungler.

But she reached the bottom without mishap, slamming against an uprooted tree. She grasped it, supported herself on it, and rested a little, panting and looking at the stream, which she still had to cross, and adjusted her skirt and blouse. Also her breasts, with a single movement under her blouse, which stunned Hans for a moment as he clung more tightly to the warmth of the pier.

He was incredulous; this could not be happening.

It was obvious that she’d have to take off her shoes to get across the shallows, which was not without dangers. For a second Hans imagined that in fact she was coming to see him. That she wanted to visit him in great secrecy. But this made no sense.

As if she had been exchanged for someone else during the lapsed time, she had changed completely. The change, for which Hans was unprepared, aroused unpleasant feelings. How could he have known that such a change was possible in the world. What he saw was that Ingke Einbock had grown taller and heavier. She had grown out of her little girlhood, while Hans, despite his summer adventure, remained a little boy, which made him ashamed. The girl had the upper hand now; that was his definite impression.

Which tortures every boy.

Not wanting to feel what he was feeling.

Not to think of what he perpetually thought about.

She had always seemed above him somehow, and this had bound them together as their deepest shared secret.

He watched eagerly to see what she was doing and how.

Perhaps readying himself to help her if the need arose. If she slipped on the stones, which was a definite possibility. Tripping and plopping into the water with her stupid panties; and if she did, she’d never be able to get up again. Dumb Ingke Einbock, but why did she come here. This sort of thing had happened to him when they tested their adroitness and played with this danger. There was an obvious basic rule for crossing the shallows that it was inadvisable to ignore. The current there was very strong, and slippery colorless algae covered the underwater stones. The cold of the clear, rushing water penetrated him to the bone. It felt as if a blade wanted to slice off his feet. Anyone who dared to put two feet down on an algae-covered stone was a lost cause.

His breath might stop, but he was already in the water and his limbs were bruised on the stones. Without anything to hold on to he might slip, because underwater everything was slipping along with him. As if the mouth of hell had sucked him in and he was about to slide down its gullet. Somebody, someone standing on a dry rock, would reach out and help him, that too had happened, or the current quickly pulled him away. He would still feel how pleasantly warm it was to live inside his flesh, but the cold of the water was already hurting. And to prevent the end, he would have to stay on a dry rock with at least one foot, and cling to it.

But if he had already fallen in, there was no other way to escape except to give in to the insane current, to entrust his helpless body to the elemental force of the water.

Which nobody really likes to do.

He had to be careful not to wind up in the whirlpools at the waterfall or knock against the treacherous boulders. But the force of the current made this almost impossible to avoid. The frigid water had already numbed him, deprived him of his senses. He could not swim more than a few strokes. And it didn’t make any sense to try. At best, he could steer himself, have some control over his direction, to keep the whirlpools from taking him under the waterfall, because whoever was caught there would not be disgorged without serious injuries. And when past this danger, where an increased volume of water widened and deepened the streambed, it was possible to wriggle his way to shore. He could check the blue spots and bruises on his body; hours later, his teeth were still chattering, his body still trembling and shivering.

And the other boys were laughing inside their warm bodies.

And there was no point in answering them, because no sound would come from his mouth and his teeth were chattering.

Ingke was obviously familiar with the rules; she adroitly avoided the underwater boulders. Only when she reached the middle of the stream did one of them wobble under her. This was the moment when Kienast was summoned from the tree nursery, they were about to put the tools away, he should leave everything and report to Schultze’s office.

Kienast was under the boys’ protection, but no power could cross Schultze’s wishes.

There was but a short hour until dinnertime.

And Ingke Einbock had come from Annaberg to see him; she did want to visit him.

She laughed but did not answer questions.

She took a small letter out of her blouse — a calling card in an envelope. And as Hans opened the envelope, which had not been glued shut, he right away recognized his father’s handwriting. His father did not write as Germans did.

The important thing, Ingke Einbock said, is to keep your mouth shut.

We’ll tear it into tiny pieces.

There were altogether three sentences on the card. A peculiar dread seized Hans whenever he had to read his father’s letters written in Hungarian. And when he wrote in German, it was barely understandable because he made so many grammatical mistakes. Hans knew Hungarian, but since he had first learned to read and write in the Slovak school in Fánt, the visual image of Hungarian words remained alien to him. And how glad he had been to have managed to forget his father for good, along with dread of his language.

He should prepare: his father was going to take him away from here.

As soon as he read this first sentence, he was filled with completely unprecedented gratitude and joy — that his father loved him after all, would take him to himself — and at the same time he was also filled with an unspeakable, crushing pain. Because then he’d have to leave Hendrik forever, yes, he knew it would be forever, and would have to leave Kienast at the mercy of the other boys; and leaving would be the most dastardly betrayal possible. He must keep this to himself; he cannot tell them about it.

The first sentence made it clear that the secret Communist organization had made its initial move and, judging by the circumstances, Ingke Einbock’s mother was part of it.

He had not yet read the second sentence when he wavered. It wouldn’t be so painful to give up Ingke Einbock. He wanted to deny having read the first sentence. To reject this little note, to say no. For him, Kienast and Franke were more important than his father, who all his life had done nothing but leave him.

He’d left him.

It will be an escape, wrote his father in the next sentence. He will be notified in advance of the time.

It was good to forget about his father for another reason, which was that Hans was afraid he had inherited his father’s blood. No one has said so, but that seemed to be the examiners’ assumption, based on tests and observation, which by law made sterilization necessary.

Your father, it said at the bottom of the little card.

He wanted to read it again, look at it some more, and he felt the girl’s eyes on him. He knew he was being weak, that he could not abandon them. Yet those last two words were very strong; he also could not say no. So as not to weaken in front of the girl — he had never felt such weakness before, he had never fainted — he sought the warmth of the stone pier at his back.

This stone, gneiss, behaves peculiarly in every life situation. Lukewarm a moment ago from the rays of the sun, it was now ice-cold. Or perhaps he just felt it like that. Gneiss can easily be split, because of its foliation, though one could see no trace of any cracks on the stones in the streambed. Maybe this is the last time he will see these stones in the stream. Because of the constant friction, they had lost their hard edges and lay on one another like stuffed pillows. They deceived the observer with their friendly, fleshlike colors and cushiony forms. Anyone who bumped into gneiss or wished to go at it with a chisel could testify that it was as hard as granite. To which, in its mineral composition, by the way, it is identical.

The area’s characteristic nobiliary nests were all built of this stone, the mountaintop castles of Freiberg, Wolkenstein, Schwarzenberg, Schlettau, Frauenstein, and Hartenstein — fortresses and citadels raised at the end of the Middle Ages to protect the roads along which the silver, precious stones, and valuable industrial ores mined here were transported. He looked at what he had to leave behind, and everything seemed different. They would take him to Moscow. The even older bulwarked fortress churches, sacrificial chapels, bridges, viaducts, and — grandest and most impressive of all — the church of St. Anne in Annaberg had also been built of this stone. Every window of the Wolkensteins’ house gave on its soaring apse with its arched windows. The fleshlike color of the stone filled the interior spaces in every season and in every part of each day. A veritable cathedral that, with its rustic exterior of this cut stone and its interior suffused with light, was considered an exceptional Gothic masterpiece.

And while the two children squatting at the base of the viaduct’s central pier let go the tiny shreds of the torn-up letter, piece by piece, Kienast had to strip naked and lie down on the examination table, which in that first second felt frightfully cold.

This was not the first time it happened to him — something the boys feared so much that even later they wouldn’t talk about it, not even among themselves.

That Hans and Hendrik wanted to find Schultze’s secret notes was not by chance. They knew what they were looking for and which data they wanted to destroy at all cost.

It was a brand-new method and therefore they could not have known what it was, in fact, or what occurred during the specific examination, obviously focused on specific results. In order to make plaster casts of certain sensitive parts of their bodies, Schultze had to put them in a state of hibernation. The casts, in strictly sealed little boxes, were sent by registered mail to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics on Ihne Street, in Berlin. These samples came under the charge not of Baroness Thum but, in a separate unit of the great collection, of Baron Schuer. He prepared the plan for the examination together with directors of other institutes. The Psychological Institute’s director was of the opinion that any other, more legal form of sample-taking would have an unpredictable effect on the pupils’ mental development that might seriously jeopardize the examination itself.

Actually, they were dissatisfied with the results. They could obtain no data on the erect state of individual penises and rarely, mainly by chance, did they receive any of the boys’ sperm smear.

Yet they knew from reliable sources that American researchers had carried out similar examinations among schoolboys.

While lying down, they had to turn on their side. Schultze gave them an injection in their buttocks and within a few minutes they were hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Then he stuck them with another hypodermic, but this they saw only from his movements and could not feel. Because the peculiar feeling of losing a grip on wakefulness and bodily alertness spread quickly. Instead of the usual sense of being alive, only a strange feeling of themselves remained, reminiscent of nausea. Schultze kept guiding them back to wakefulness by telling them to turn this way and that. So it was clear the injection was not fully soporific. Their mental capacity could be awakened, while the brain stem forever swallowed up the pictures that went with the sentences spoken. The boys did what he asked them to do, though they no longer knew what he asked, who was asking, and what they did and how. It was like a severe state of unconsciousness, which is why they had no idea what experiment-related questions they were answering, answers that Schultze, sitting at his desk, carefully wrote down.

But even weeks later they knew that somebody had asked them questions about something, and this knowledge perturbed several of them, as when imagination slides into a sense of reality.

They also had memories of occasionally having to change position. Schultze or somebody helping him, perhaps a woman, would use straps to immobilize their limbs in certain positions, so that they would not move until the plaster had set.

This kind-voiced woman may have mixed the plaster too. They sensed this; they sensed things from behind the nausea but did not remember them the same way.

That somebody was shaving something.

This remained as a strange presentiment, probably near the place where the brain records the pictures of imagination.

They saw but did not feel, or rather they could not comprehend even their own thoughts; and since they did not feel, they continually fell back into the peculiar deep sleep, where awareness shunted their lives onto tracks other than the ones they’d started out on at the urging of their parents, or on which they would have progressed conscientiously despite their parents and superiors.

In Annaberg, the church hill itself was nothing but a massive, extensive block of this rock formation, barely covered with a surface of soil. Gneiss supported the entire small town on its back. A few steps from the church and built of the same stone stood Kirchber 1, the Wolkensteins’ modest town house where, to the great delight of the grown-ups, Hans always played with the housekeeper’s little niece Ingke more peacefully than with anyone else. The adults could safely leave the children to themselves for long periods. Not to mention that through this rock formation the silver mines’ narrow, ever-dripping shafts lowered themselves to the bowels of the earth; an endless labyrinth of narrow horizontal passageways led to yet more darkly gaping shafts from which one could reach still lower galleries. Ingke’s father was a mineworker who had been fired several times; he was always organizing his mates, although his grandfather and even his great-grandfather had also been miners, as was almost every man in the family.

This schist-textured, metamorphic, structurally composite and crystalline stone, whose ingredients include quartz, feldspar, and mica, does not differ from granite in its texture but deviates from it greatly in its fascinating colors. Its dominant color stems from orthoclase, a feldspar that is white, red, and gray, in which quartz forms limpid gray specks.

All this, however, can only be seen close up, preferably under a magnifying glass or microscope.

Keinast’s place remained empty during supper, there was not even a setting for him, from which the other boys deduced exactly what was happening to him upstairs. After hibernation, the boys awakened the following day, at midday or even in the afternoon, not in Schultze’s office but in one of the beds in the convalescence ward. When they came downstairs, everyone could see what they had gone through and was very considerate of them. For a day, they moved about confusedly among the others, like sleepwalkers. Yet it was not so much sleepiness or the leaden fatigue in their limbs that kept them captive, but their peculiar state of consciousness, from which they did not want to return to their frightening, boring everyday existence. Some of them remembered that Schultze threw a sheet over their shoulders and seemed to have told them to hold it tight about them because they had to go across the corridor on their own. Schultze followed them, telling them what to do, which way to turn in the corridor, and then carefully closed the high window in the recovery room and tucked them in, lest they catch cold.

Those who already had pubic hair were surprised to see the next day that it was gone. They’d probably shaved it off, Schultze or the kind-voiced woman who helped him occasionally. They did not talk about this either, not even when in the bathroom they saw what had happened. Residues of plaster revealed something about the nature of the examination; they had to scrape off white bits on the fuzz of their bellies or loins that had been missed by the razor.

A mass of gneiss appearing before us as a rock is wine-red when seen at a distance; from other viewpoints and at different parts of the day, it is more ocher, at times flesh-colored. When broken in pieces, it seems yellowish or grayish brown. The biotite or muscovite micas glitter in it; these micas always arrange themselves parallel to each other inside the stone.

This very prevalent stone, though it is not always easy to notice close to the earth’s surface, can thank its mining and architectural career to the parallels that dominate its structure, which allow it to be split easily along its layers. Several varieties of its texture are known; in veined gneiss, the micas are arranged in ribbons, in layered gneiss the ingredients change with each layer, while in barred gneiss they line up in vertical rows, in slabs.

Whatever the texture, the stone can be split along the parallel lines.

Humans do the least of the splitting. It is mainly wind, frost, and water that do it; one might say that miners merely follow the natural cracks when they split the rock with their chisels to get to the silver in the veining.

Gneiss forms a large thick envelope around the globe. On it rest all sorts of deposits and sediments; when the magma moves underneath it and opens the structural cracks, the eruptive rocks burst to the surface through this three-thousand-meter stone casing.

Gneiss was probably the first crust of the earth to cool off.




I’ve Been in This Building Before


I had no idea what would happen. But I was very familiar with the wind rushing into my face from the dark City Park.

I enjoyed knowing the wind.

I would have liked the love story to be over and just to leave without a word and continue my own doomed life. The street was sparkling wet, but the wind stopped hitting us in the face once the rain let up. I was past something pointless, something completely unacceptable, I should think. If I had to leave, well, let me leave. I must get over my stupid mistake at last. I longed for nothing more than to be able to walk away, without explanation, stroll to the bus terminal, get on the lighted empty bus, let the conductor come so I could buy a ticket from him, see the driver get on in his leisurely way at the starting time, and let the two of them take me away from here. Maybe I could get off at the first stop and, unnoticed, go back to City Park and watch what the men were doing in there.

I already knew where she lived and that was more than enough knowledge for one day.

What else should interest me.

But nothing was that simple. And not only because Simon didn’t want me to get him cigarettes. He wanted nothing from me and nothing to do with me; he indicated this clearly, as if he were ignorant of the rules of human tactfulness or deliberately wanted to violate them. He didn’t want to accept my politeness. I could think of no reason to give him for leaving, and I also couldn’t leave because of my silent promise to her. Or anyway she’d raised a silent request that I didn’t have the strength not to honor. I’d had enough of them, I’d had enough of her husband, yet I could not give up.

My muddled curiosity, my disgusting helplessness kept me here. I’d had enough of myself. I should have known in advance. Only a total betrayal could have satisfied me. It would have felt good to deceive the woman, take revenge on all the insults. What could she possibly have to do with me, with such a wretch. And what could I have to do with her if she belonged to such an uncouth boor. Whom I couldn’t figure out because of his coat. But what was the point of being fed up with myself and with them if all I wanted to know was how my damn life would continue in their company. I couldn’t get free of this woman until I learned to say no. I was doing what she’d asked me to do, I had actually become her mute slave. I am waiting for her again; for months I waited for her, making myself impossible — in my own eyes, mainly. And I wait in vain. At college, my absences were piling up furiously, I did not go to classes, and it was clear that at the end of the semester they wouldn’t let me take the finals. If Simon knew how laughable I had made myself already, he’d be content and not bother humiliating me further.

Of course, I couldn’t have known why I did or didn’t do the things I did or didn’t do. When it comes to judging one’s intentions, a person generally piles errors on top of errors. It’s possible that the woman had no silent request to make of me and I had fatally misunderstood something. Did not understand. I’d had enough of her daring husband, for whom I still could not deny my childlike admiration. I’d have been happy to get him his cigarettes. While looking for an excuse to set foot in a bar that had always been off limits to me. I couldn’t have anything else to do with him, even though I’d offered him my readiness to humiliate myself. Because of him, I became like a dog that, snarling and whimpering, submits to the hierarchy of the pack. As soon as I’d gotten into his car, I saw clearly that this was an unpredictable and overbearing man. But suddenly I remembered Ilonka Weisz, whom I had accompanied a few times to the bar when she went to get wine in a large clamp-topped bottle for her drunkard father. I’d always kept away from daring people; I knew well the senseless, power-hungry games of weak men.

The order of my accusations could not be reversed. If I could not find a good reason for a quick departure, then I had to chalk this up to my own cowardice and stupidity, and not blame him. All my moral fury fell back on my own head. Seeing his craziness, I was mainly ashamed of my cowardice. I could not have forgotten with what well-prepared wiles Ilonka Weisz lured me up to the fourth floor, where her churlish brothers beat me within an inch of my life. Why do I need a reason or explanation, I should just walk out on them both; to whom do I owe a reckoning; I am rebelling against myself.

Explaining the obvious to myself.

I cannot solve a problem that any healthy person could easily solve by relying on natural selfishness. I don’t dare decide what would be best for me. Or if I did decide, and now I really have, then the obligation to be polite, which had been hammered into me, proved stronger than any sense of my physical well-being. I have a weak character, or at least weaker than that of anyone else who steers his life according to his own physical and mental interests. The woman did not make me characterless, but she’s the one who pushed me most deeply into the pit of my character weakness. What a ridiculous person I am. Surely more vile and stupid than others. I was full of reproach; in my deep dissatisfaction, I kept saying I was born to be a servant. I’d rather get out of this thing than hurt anyone with my decision; rather endure things than relinquish my precaution. Incessantly, I wanted to get over my refined upbringing, and failed to notice how I was clinging to her, cherishing her every command with delight and tender loving care.

We were standing on either side of the car and I was watching, with confused longing and in search of a saving idea, the lit-up buses and the shadows of men drinking in the old familiar light of the bar. I did this also so I wouldn’t have to look at Simon’s repulsively thin figure.

He did not take his belligerent eyes off me; he saw something I didn’t know in myself.

He was leaning on the half-open car door with one arm, his elbow on the roof, his chin propped up on his thumb. As if he knew what I was thinking about, with what moral doubts I was struggling. His self-satisfaction was a slap in the face because what I sorely lacked was a healthy dose of self-confidence.

Although I held so many things against him, his openness, flexibility, and slimness, there was nothing I could do about or say against his complacency. There was no direct relationship between the physical presence of this other human being and my opinion of him, I understood that perfectly well. One keeps forgetting and therefore must repeatedly bring together these two kinds of experience and knowledge. In the darkness of the old car, I had first noticed the adolescent fragility of his neck. Now, unhindered and from close up, I had to cope with the reality of his face.

And why shouldn’t I want to comprehend with all my senses this person from whom I must tear Klára away.

What virtues should I have, how could I be completely different from what I am, to win her away from this miserable character. It was almost like asking how I might make myself as repulsive as he seemed. But the provocative reality of his face disturbed me and kept me captive — independently of the woman. As if with his features he was playing a game, and I had to accept unconditionally the rules of this game. While I was thoroughly ashamed for him and had no idea what to do about it. Still, I felt I was accepting something unfamiliar, willingly entering something I knew nothing about. Thin men like him seem always to wear shirts at least two sizes larger than their neck requires, which makes them look very vulnerable and fragile. But your surprise is all the greater when you come up against their tenacity, shrewdness, and aggressiveness. At the same time, I discovered that what until then I had thought was just a dark shadow on his forehead was a black spot full of ominous little lumps. As he leaned forward, his elbow still resting on the car’s roof, his dark shiny hair fell over the hideous blotch on his forehead. As if it explained the dread he aroused in me, although I could not think of the name of the skin disease.

The streetlamp on its cable was swinging in the wind directly above us. Shadows from the hair fallen over his forehead stretched into his face, long fingers reaching into him at the whim of the swinging lamp. Occasionally, light flared up on the dark surface of his eyes. As if he were saying something in tune with the swinging lamp, nodding along with its rhythm, but then it turned out he’d said nothing, after all. As if he wanted to ask which of us would put up with this situation longer. Come on, push your beaver up just a little. It was a provocation but not a challenge because he was without armor too. Let’s see how far we get, he seemed to say, how far with each other. Which to some extent referred to the woman but not completely, because with his look he touched my face, reached in among the various layers of my character. His posture called to me, his sheer gaze commanded that I do the same. As if both of us were looking into the same mirror, and in my surprise I had no choice but to lean closer, yet what I saw was not my own disgustingly familiar mug.

I can’t deny that the beauty of the face surprised me. It probably surprised me with the keenness of its intelligence. Some profiles say nothing; the sudden turning face-to-face is what takes your breath away. Or the other way around: you are disappointed when an impressive profile belongs to an unimpressive face. His beauty looked out at me from the drawn, bony face of a day laborer. As if he were looking at me from the depth of several centuries. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the very top, as road workers on the Great Hungarian Plain do on holidays; he was flaunting his stubbly chin and his gauntness. His features were symmetrical and harmonious; a long face, somewhat oriental, with almost motionless eyes. It was surprising how much undisguised suffering had been carved into his features. He seemed like a reticent man, or at least he wanted to seem like one. And not only the suffering of the soul had been carved undisguised into his features, but also deprivations of the body, penury, his inhibitions, the stifled, freewheeling fury of his possessiveness.

I had not had experiences like that, yet all this was not unknown to me, not distant, because the secret passion of sufferance brought me close to him. To a person who perhaps denied his feelings as passionately as I did. Denial had written horizontal wrinkles into the skin of his forehead. It was enough to raise his eyebrows a bit, as he did just now, looking inquisitive, to have his forehead show a piling up of centuries-old furrows, darkened by the spot of the skin disease. His eyebrows were beautiful, thick, dense, dark, very strong and manly. This man is a wolf. As I searched my mind for the name of the skin disease, I remembered that it had something to do with the wolf or with legends of bloodthirsty wolves.

Denial and experience left nothing distrustful or indistinct on his face; they planted radially expanding dry lines at the corners of his eyes and surrounded his thin lips with two aggressively sharp grooves. The features that denial and experience had drawn on his face did not allow him to hide his emotions or his affections. He must have been too sensitive to be truly reticent and negative. His intentions and his faculties were separate. I wanted to lean closer to him just as he too seemed to be offering himself up; with the flexibility of thin people, and with his openness, he somehow wound up closer to me. I wanted to have a glance between the dark shadows; I put my elbows on the car, with a movement meant to be as effortless as the ones his body had suggested.

He could not have anticipated that my interest in the characteristics of men was so uninhibited; I surprised and astonished him, but he accepted it immediately, with no revulsion. But I felt I was in danger, I’d got myself into danger, now I would abandon my upbringing, give up something to hold on to. It may have seemed to him that I was deliberately imitating his movements when the opposite was the case: I was guided by the raw feeling of attraction as, leaning on my elbows just as he was, I stared into his face or into the core of his soul. The only difference was that I put my chin in the palm of my hand instead of propping it up with my thumb.

He must have enjoyed managing to bend me this way.

That’s how we were staring at each other; the wet car roof glittered dully.

If his skin had not been so translucently tender and at the same time his stubbly cheekbones had not been so strong and wild, if his aggressive chin had not been marked by a charming cleft, if he did not have finely cut eye sockets, if no winding, lumpy, coarse vein ran down from his temple, and if his visage had not been buffeted by contradictory emotions, then he would have remained painfully vulnerable: a face on which every secret feeling and every humiliating experience may be quickly seen. However, as things were, one could see all the things which the man felt but which, in his own well-conceived interest, he deliberately, stubbornly, and brazenly denied.

Raw strength overwhelmed his refinement, responding crudely to his weakness. A born self-destroyer, a cool, clever ignoramus. He was put together well enough so one could not take one’s eyes from him and could not know just where one stood with him.

A dangerously long time passed without either of us saying anything.

The mutually risky game was precisely a challenge to take an open-eyed account of each other’s traits and abilities, not furtively or in secret; we should do it openly, the way animals do. Now I remembered that the oddity on his forehead, lupus in Latin, was called wolf skin in Hungarian. This name summed up my presentiment. He would be the wolf in the tale. For which one instantly feels pangs of conscience. How could I link physical attributes with a moral judgment; how could I be so unfair. The reflection of everything he could see on me quickly showed in his eyes and in the bitter lines framing his mouth. As if the aversion-provoking mark on his body was telling me that I had no chance in the current situation. There was a mildly vibrating mockery at the corner of his eye; still, I didn’t know what he saw or how he judged me. I only sensed he wanted something other than what is usual or acceptable in a relationship between two people. Perhaps his lumpy wolf’s spot filled me with disgust and his look with abject terror. I did not want to acknowledge the delight, the contemptuous satisfaction with which he was watching my face. And if, nevertheless, I opened my mouth, if I couldn’t bear the silence anymore or his supercilious and brazen visage, then the secret game would be over, because I’d refused to take a risk on the next moment, on my future.

I asked him what floor they lived on; in my confusion I looked back at the building and saw a light go out in a room on the second floor and another light go on in an adjacent room. I hated my own hoarse, hesitating voice.

He asked me in return, ready to attack, why I was asking. His glance was distrustful, as if he feared an ulterior motive.

I didn’t understand what he could be afraid of; I didn’t want to understand how I might possibly have offended him. I said, I asked because I’ve been in this building before, which is to say I know it pretty well.

He asked, when, why, how did I know the building. He was not interested in questions, and he would definitely not answer any of mine. As he spoke he pushed himself away from the car, stepping back a little, but did not let go of the open door, didn’t let it slam shut.

As if I had to follow his every move, I straightened up too.

In his leather coat, he became like an experienced interrogating officer.

I said, it was pretty long ago when I was here last, but it wasn’t just once or twice then, because my childhood is connected to this neighborhood. The woman who taught me, my piano teacher used to live here.

I see, the piano teacher, that’s very interesting, he replied sarcastically and aggressively, as if he had to retaliate instantly against my piano lessons. He hoped I’d had nice successes. My childhood must have been very happy.

I hastened to reassure him that that was not at all the case; though I got some idea of the instrument I never really learned to play well; and I didn’t understand why I was making such an effort to keep up this chatter. I said the only reason I asked was that I’d be interested to know if my piano teacher still lived here. She was a very kind, older German lady. More correctly, she was a very strict woman, I was pretty afraid of her. If she still lived here, he might know her. But I didn’t understand why I was making this report; what on earth was I explaining myself for. In Budapest apartment houses people don’t know one another, or they pretend they don’t. It was unpleasant to hear my anxious voice. Perhaps, if he knew the story of my childhood, he might be more forgiving. I won’t tell them the story. But I could not give up my false conversational style completely.

She had one of those silver-handled, black-lacquered canes, I explained; because of an accident or some illness, she limped heavily. Her hairdo and her cane made her look very refined. And the piano was in the same room where just a minute ago the light went on.

I received a short, dismissive, openly sarcastic laugh as a reply. Which meant that my refined manner, intended to smooth over all inequalities, had failed to convince him.

People who like to hide and be mysterious take every banal question as a frontal attack against them. But however I looked at them, my questions seemed harmless. People like that see a secret motivation behind every word or movement; their thinking is nothing but their own projections. Or perhaps he paid no heed to my questions so that he could ignore my presence altogether. I could not help thinking that this man might be involved in some sinister affair and I’d better keep clear of him.

Or jealousy had driven him crazy, in which case I should be more considerate.

I was angry.

I failed to understand how I could accept his surliness. Nothing should be the way I might like it, and certainly not the way his wife would. As if he were taking revenge and enjoying it immensely. Which was quite understandable, and I willingly reached out to him with my loquaciousness, to ease the tension between us, not to let the situation remain so raw; we needn’t be so vulnerable to each other. If we were already at this point and did not know how to wriggle free of each other, then at least we should give some acceptable form to the useless few minutes we were spending together. It’s really not such a big deal. But for him, it seemed, the very suggestion of a form was unacceptable and ridiculous; he judged contemptible the very method with which I meant to save what could be saved.

Every hypocrisy of the sunken bourgeois world crawled to the surface. He obviously was not familiar with what he so profoundly hated. He was a believer in openness and brute force, but at best, guided by such a belief, we could have a fistfight. I had to be the understanding party, after all, since I had elbowed my way into their life. And in that case, what was I doing trying to tone down my own surliness with this chattering tone of mine.

He could easily give himself over to any danger since he was not afraid of altercation. He saw no reason why he should let propriety restrain his emotions. He was not even afraid of running over someone with his car. I am always on guard, listen carefully, wait to see how things develop, and make myself believe that I might somehow blunt the sharp edge of existence; I continually talk beside the point. Go ahead and consider him surly, uncouth, or immoral, said the gaze, but his response was that despite my proposed method I was nothing but a wriggling worm.

I saw that he saw through me.

But that made me see him even better.

Now he is demonstratively silent, now he preaches shamelessly; he plays simultaneously with rejection and allurement, now he is talkative, now taciturn, because it’s important for him to remain unpredictable. He’s playing a calculated game with others as well as with himself, but his calculations are strictly confidential. I was even excited by the unpleasantness of the game, with him attacking me at my most vulnerable point. Because of my attempts at restoring predictability, he practically ran me down. As if saying to me he not only knew another world in which the rules of human contact were different in every imaginable way, which is to say unpredictable, but also knew me better than I could possibly know myself, and therefore, if I were brave enough, he’d offer to me this secret and unpredictable world.

He was afraid his wife would make thirty-eight minutes out of the eight she had promised, he said. She had a knack for it, for taking her time. She’s happy when she can make you wait for her. So now he’d leave me to myself and go upstairs, just to be sure she wouldn’t take even longer.

Every one of his words insulted me. I did not want to converse with him about his wife; I did not want to agree to it. Not in the tones he used, and not in any other tone. He was looking for a cheap way to squeal on his wife. To make her out as just a woman who always makes you wait. That made me even more ridiculously stubborn; I kept asking him insistently whether they lived in that second-floor apartment where my piano teacher had been.

And how long had they been living there.

But it was as if he hadn’t heard my questions.

Affably he said that he wouldn’t lock the car door. Should I change my mind and decide to leave — he saw I couldn’t make up my mind — would I first honk the horn briefly but nice and loud, to call him. The car shouldn’t be left unguarded for too long. And with that he let go of the car door and it slammed shut. He left me there; I was very confused.

I was cursing because I really couldn’t decide what to do. His words were like a coup de grace. He let me know that he had read everything on my face. If I left now, my defeat and humiliation would be complete. But it wasn’t going to be different if I stayed. His gait was beautiful, with long, smooth, and very decisive steps. He disappeared into the dim lobby, and then I heard his running steps echo in the stairs. Without thinking much about whether it was appropriate, I took off after him. As if I were claiming, completely unreasonably, that I was the one who was entitled to this building — but by building I did not mean the building.

And I certainly wasn’t going to guard his car.

Not even a bright summer day could chase away the terrible dimness from this lobby. I wanted to find out which floor he was going to, where he kept the woman captive. I already had seen how he did it, and with what. As if I could diminish the extent of humiliation I had inflicted on myself, I clung to this knowledge.

The moment I stepped into the lobby, stinking with cat urine and a musty exhalation from the basement, I froze. As if some vestige of bashfulness was stopping me.

I’ve no right to do this. Or perhaps the memory of an old fear.

With their claws sliding on the stone floor, grating and scratching, two cats disappeared down the steps leading to the basement, a dark and a lighter flash in the semidarkness. In the light of the single naked lightbulb, a black cat was chasing a red angora one.

I could hear that he did not stop on the second floor, but just then the number 5 bus rolled across the cambered cobblestones in front of the building and its noise blasting into the lobby overwhelmed the echoes of his receding footsteps. Over the racket, I could just make out a soft slamming of a door somewhere. It might have been on the third or even the fourth floor. Which again reminded me of the little girl from the fourth floor, Ilonka Weisz, and she in turn reminded me of a room in their apartment, facing the courtyard, its curtain drawn against the bright summer sunshine. Of my shame, which I haven’t been to tell anyone since then, and of the afternoon sunshine’s indifference to my shame. As I was looking at the familiar patterns of these walls in the pale light of the single bulb, I could be sure of one thing, that Uncle Pálóczky was no longer alive; only in his absence could everything become so filthy.

And then there was quiet, the light went out in the stairwell, but above the empty, yellow courtyard glittering in the wetness the wind was making great noises. There was another naked lightbulb in front of me; this one, above the list of tenants, was always lit; otherwise, darkness everywhere. Had old Pálóczky been alive, there would have been order and cleanliness, and a shade for the bulb. And the garbage cans wouldn’t have been standing like this next to the entrance either, uncovered and stuffed to overflowing. I felt as if they could not humiliate me because I wouldn’t fall into their trap. And as if the senselessness of this evening was not happening to me. Or, could I be in a different building, after all. As a child, I hadn’t noticed how seedy and run-down the place was. In the interim, the proportions changed, and the building seemed to resemble another one that was, who knows why, very familiar from a long way back.

Only ten years have gone by since then.

Or it was as if someone had told me the story of his life, from which I’d know that there was a building like this, with a piano teacher in it, where a little girl, with her little red skirt swishing on her buttocks, lured a little boy to the fourth floor, where that terrible thing happened. Just as the present evening was a useless and unavoidable disgrace. Where ten years ago he first had to pass by the foul-smelling entrance to the basement and no matter how carefully and quietly he came through the main gate, he’d still startle the cats stalking each other just as I saw them now. The red cat wasn’t familiar, but the black one was, as if the Pálóczkys’ black cat were still alive.

Strangely enough, I was the one who had these images, which that other someone hadn’t thought about since then, and if he had, he thought it best to forget them quickly.

Now too I had to reach those six steps that led up to the ground floor. In this building, because of those six steps, the ground floor was not called the ground floor. From the list of tenants, I wanted to ascertain whether my piano teacher still lived there. Or I was deceiving myself with this transparent alibi. As if I had some business there. I shouldn’t be doing this, I’ve no right, I’m ridiculous. Still, I won’t go away, I’ve nothing to fear, nothing to lose, whispered my unappeasable imagination.

One could get to the courtyard, paved with insanely yellow ceramics, from between two squat pilasters, and on one of them, on a white enamel plaque in old-fashioned blue letters, there was my childhood’s most mysterious word: mezzanine.

No doubt about it now, this was the building. A memory of quiet anxiety filled with anticipation was attached to this place.

It became a star-marked building; my piano teacher had to move out of it. When Budapest was liberated, she could move back in because it was no longer star-marked.* I never dared ask anyone what the star mark meant. I sensed from the adults’ voices that this too was part of the profound horror we had just survived and in which many had perished. Just as I didn’t dare ask what mezzanine meant. I wanted to be a famous pianist and did not want to reveal my ignorance to the adults; I was also afraid that because of my awkward question I might hear other terrible things. From certain signs, I concluded that mezzanine did not mean ground floor. Because sometimes my piano teacher asked me to go down to the Pálóczkys’ before we began the lesson and give him the piece of paper on which she had written what she wanted from the Garay Square market. When I cautiously asked her if she wanted me to take the note to the ground floor, she looked at me incredulously, not understanding what I hadn’t grasped, and asked, where else could you possibly take it, my angel, if not to the ground floor. But other times she didn’t say ground floor and didn’t say what was written on the enamel plaque, but something similar; luckily, though, she didn’t notice how bewildered I was. I wanted to learn what mezzanine was but also to be clever about avoiding the great horror.

Before you go, would you drop this key at the Pálóczkys’ on the mezzanine, she asked me once. These Pálóczkys are really angels, just angels. If he’s not there, you’ll be sure to find him in his workshop in the basement, and don’t be afraid of the cats, my angel. This mezzanine sounded almost like what she shouted when she wanted me to play a little stronger, a little softer; listen to me, my angel, this is mezzo forte, listen, this is mezzo piano now, my angel. Or should I have dropped off the key on the pianino. I was constantly looking for some acceptable solution, how to get to know more about the meaning of things without letting the horror — with all its details appearing unexpectedly — touch my skin. Uncle Pálóczky stayed in the star-marked building because concierges had to be real Christians, not converted ones. That I managed to understand from the hints. Another real Christian, my piano teacher, had to move out, but only a real Christian could be concierge, and therefore Uncle Pálóczky had to stay with the Jews. That I didn’t understand. There was this word in the building that almost meant ground floor and yet seemed to refer to the strength of a musical sound or an unknown musical instrument. Uncle Pálóczky, as he himself told it, became a living witness to how the old Weisz couple was taken away. Probably everyone but me understood the connections among these things.

Maybe I thought this building was classy because there was a better chance to see unfamiliar things than in our buildings, and maybe that’s why I didn’t notice how depressingly pathetic a place it was. People living here talked much more than in other buildings, they yelled more freely between floors and in the courtyard. Or perhaps my idea about its being classy was shaky, since I thought classy meant exceptional and alien, mysterious, and not linked to wealth or poverty. Mezzanine seemed grand to me because there was no such thing in any other building I knew. I also had to consider my piano teacher as very classy because she used a beautiful cane and limped a little. People said it was a congenital hip dislocation; this was no less exceptional than the mezzanine. That is how I thought about things. Probably decades must go by before one manages to free up certain concepts from one’s childhood imaginings. Just as I hadn’t noticed poverty, given the sparkling cleanliness and order, I paid no attention to our prosperity either. I did not know what it fed on or how unstable it was. With my grandparents, we lived on Stefánia Boulevard, where no one mentioned such qualifications, much as one speaks of breathing only when one is breathless. Earlier, my parents’ apartment on Aréna Road was no less spacious, calm, or well cared for, and neither was my maternal aunt’s apartment in Damjanich Street or that of my paternal aunt on Teréz Boulevard. Nobody talked about this, because they all considered spiritual values more important than the material world, and even when looking after their finances the reference points were spiritual ones; such allusions were part of the going bon ton. I did not sense the falsity of this for a long time, since I barely knew another world, which is to say I didn’t notice the differences. And because I had no idea about the criteria of wealth or poverty, it didn’t occur to me for the longest time that a place or neighborhood in a city had any particular meaning. And by the time I might have understood the connections among the various quarters and districts in the city of my birth, their social structure and architecture had been so extensively altered that the traditional labels had lost their meaning. There were no fancy or rich sections, and the concepts designating them sank into oblivion too.

Of course, I had a very clear idea of what was not proper.

The concept of good manners, strangely, lasted much longer than the social qualifications for bourgeois life. I could not judge the nature of bon ton, but I was free to decide what was classy. As if, for lack of a better qualified person, I had been entrusted with the decision, and indeed I behaved as a judge. Propriety, however, was set up with geometrical prescriptions coupled with draconian rulings. One had to avoid certain things at all costs, and one had to obey certain rules come hell or high water.

As to the issue of what was classy, one simply had to weigh things; no one hindered one in making the assessment. My mother’s kid sister, for example, in her infinitely large, airy, and sunny apartment looking out on the inner gardens of the always shady Damjanich Street, did not live in less privileged conditions than we did. Her rooms opened into one another and the windows reached down to the floor — French doors. That they were French was very classy too. Streetcars ran on the streets outside, yet I knew that although I lived with my grandparents on Stefánia Boulevard in a kind of provincial seclusion, if the need arose we could get to the city by taxi, and perhaps that was the reason we were exceptional. But for a long time the yellow streetcar was for me much classier than the taxi, though our secluded provincial life was classier than the noisy city. Which meant that sometimes disadvantages made someone classy and sometimes advantages. Or, put the other way around, it’s not advisable to look for the advantageous in everything if one wants to stay classy. It’s also possible that what is disadvantageous today will be very advantageous tomorrow. This was an important rule; no wonder people did not discuss it in public. You had to be two or three steps ahead of your nose to be able to judge your own position. There was some secret instruction by which not only the mere fact but also the degree or temperature of grandeur was determined. It didn’t have to do with the number of rooms, certain objects, or the condition of a given building.

Intellectually, Nínó on Teréz Boulevard had a very classy position in the family hierarchy while my aunt Irén in Damjanich Street, by dint of her person, as it were, also enjoyed a high position, since her beauty unfortunately swept everybody off their feet; yet because of her husband, she was not considered one of the refined or truly grand members of the family. Her husband was fabulously rich, people never stopped talking about it because somehow he could not get used to being rich or preserve his affluence; he was a common, uncouth man. On his hairy fingers he wore several jeweled rings and one particularly ugly signet ring of which his daughters were very afraid. He would slap them in the mouth with those ringed fingers. And the girls were no less ill-mannered. My grandmother said that my aunt Irén paid no heed to their upbringing. It would have been hard to say exactly what my aunt Irén did pay attention to. She picked the objects of her attention capriciously, making everything around her constantly move and change. The disorder in their apartment was always great; one had the impression that they were about to move out or had just moved in and had had no time to unpack. A radio was always blasting somewhere; they had several of them; they did not disturb the girls listening to the gramophone or whistling or even playing the violin at the same time.

When visiting them, Grandmother preferred to keep her gloves on and always made sure the taxi waited for her; thank you, my dears, but I’m staying only another moment.

I thought my mother was the classiest of them all, because she was the only one among us who dared openly to betray everyone, to just up and leave; she had no problem betraying the entire family, and she abandoned me without a word. I have almost no memories of her. More like a few sentences that others whispered in my presence in a way that I couldn’t understand. Regarding my mother, I can’t separate my real memories from my desires and imagination. Not only did she settle in Paris — this would not have been startling, considering her personality — but she lived in the woods of Vincennes, where the window of her bedroom gave on a lake with the fortified castle of the French kings on the far side. I knew these kings had been beheaded. I also knew that except for her name, Mother had nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing. People spoke of her with trepidation, about how she was impoverished and, save for that certain woman, had nobody and nothing, but absolutely nothing. I imagined her still wearing the same white linen dress with the red leather belt in which she had escaped on the last train. It was in the summer, a very hot summer. I knew her shoes and her bag had been red.

That certain communist woman with whom she left had come to Budapest for the World Youth Festival.

I understood the essence of these things, no matter how much they tried to hide them from me; she had run away because of the woman and she lived in this communist woman’s house at the edge of the Forest of Vincennes.

From inadvertently dropped words which I sometimes misinterpreted, I formed a picture of her in which everything had to be classy.

She was a ruthless mother, not even worthy to be called a mother, but I never believed this, no matter who said it. In classiness and strictness, she resembled my piano teacher. People also said to me, little boy, don’t even think about her, it’s not worth it. She was living in austere grandeur with someone, somewhere in a distant and alluring strange land. They said this was a moral slough. Which made me think of a puddle with pigs wallowing in it, snorting with pleasure. At other times, I imagined classiness as something like the dignity with which my piano teacher endured her lameness; she never complained. Or as the threatening act of destiny that will reach me too with its fury and one fine day strike me down.

In connection with the two women, people repeated a very beautiful word, which I also failed to understand or to remember. It was exactly the sort of word that mezzanine was. Only much later did I realize that I’d known the word for some time; of course, mezzanine meant intermediate floor. If that other beautiful word could reach and touch me, I’d become as classy as my mother was or that certain woman, who was a physician. The women in the family giggled when they talked of this, a woman physician should know what she’s doing, they said, laughing. Whenever they used that word in connection with anyone, they could barely control their squeals and giggles. The word might have referred to a specific pathological condition that the woman physician could treat as she liked. Or that Mother might have contracted this condition because she had left us for that certain woman. I did not understand why this was morally reprehensible if she’d had to do it because of her illness.

And how could she have known that a few weeks later they were going to take away my father and I would be left all alone. She couldn’t have foreseen this when she left, and when she learned of it she could no longer come back, sick as she was, to fetch me.

No matter how beautiful this word sounded, contagion and disease clung to it so strongly that in my fear I was unable to memorize it. Nevertheless, I could not withdraw my dreaded longing for my vanished mother. I kept excusing her any way I could, because I craved a mother of any kind. Sometimes I tried to imagine what if things hadn’t happened as I’d been told; what if nothing had happened, as was the case in most families. My body shuddered at the thought, I cried at the sheer happy thought that I hadn’t lost either of them; I cried a lot, but only in secret. I wanted her to come back one fine day; I even wouldn’t have minded if they’d arrested her and taken her away for what she had done. And I always worked up a fever with my constant shuddering — as I did while searching the streets for my father, whom one day, unexpectedly, I did discover.

I took after strange men on Teréz Boulevard, I walked in front of them, showed myself, maybe they’d recognize me.

The only time that I truly felt I was with my mother, that I was truly hers and nobody could take me from her, was when, to punish me, Grandmother locked me in the winter garden, full of tropical plants, where the smell of wet soil made it hard to breathe. I could endure the punishment without crying, but then I’d develop a temperature. The crying had to do with missing my mother, and it had to remain my deepest secret. I had no greater secret than this longing for my mother — until in this building in Dembinszky Street, because of Ilonka Weisz, fate finally caught up with me.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

It was hard to remember how much time might have passed, and counting from what point.

My last reference point was the bell of the Terézváros church marking eight o’clock. I couldn’t say when I’d come up these six worn steps and how long I’d been standing here, not as a child, in front of the roster of tenants. Pálóczky was gone, but on the second floor I found the name of the piano teacher, or at least her name was still on the list. And on the fourth floor, I could see the Weiszes’ name, and that meant Ilonka Weisz could appear at any moment.

In those years, young men like me tried hard to figure out what they should do to give some meaning to their complete and absolute hopelessness. I, however, was busy with the question of whether my entire life was anything but a peculiar hallucination.

I seem to exist, though in reality I have never existed, nor do I exist now and will exist only if I kill myself.

As if I could decide more reliably, given the positions of the watch hands in relation to the numbers, whether what I judged to be about an hour since the last ringing of the church bell had really and truly elapsed. I could not decide how much of that hour I had spent here, I had no reference point for that. As a saving idea, I remembered that the bus that ran in front of this building had gone past twice. The mind fixes occurrences like this, and one’s ears seem to hear them at will. But I couldn’t be sure whether the bus had really passed twice or I was only thinking it to reassure myself or to figure out what it meant if the bus had indeed gone past two times.

My mind broke everything down into tiny pieces but then left me to myself with the unconnected details. Something was happening or had already happened in the world that, without knowing the connection between the pieces and details, I could not understand.

As if feelings and emotions were not followed by value judgments and I was leaving behind periods whose duration or contents my memory could not account for.

This did not happen because my memory was faulty. Or because I remembered things randomly. My memory worked well and I remembered things not randomly but simultaneously: everything occurred to me at once. Everything was together in my mind but with no internal connections. Whatever this was, I could neither survey it nor measure its extent. It was too much and too frightening to be in the midst of a past that is all in the present. No sooner did I begin to sense or have some inkling about how things were connected in my life, and which of them were inconsequential, than paralyzing waves of emotion rushed hotly to my face. Anger and hatred for the two of them. Fear for myself. Klára Vay. Their names were right there on the nameplate. József Simon Hetés. Now I know. They lived on the third floor, in the apartment overlooking the street, above the piano teacher. And now I also know that the woman lied. They aren’t married, I know that too. It was as if I rose to the surface for a brief moment, and then timelessness quickly reclaimed me. To restrain myself, I used the fear I felt for myself and also the anger I felt for them. I had lied to her, but she’d been lying too. A half hour must surely have passed since I’d been standing here halfway between their apartment and their car, maybe only twenty minutes.

I knew perfectly well why they weren’t coming back out, and that was more important.

What a raving idiot I am. And I didn’t want to see what they were doing, as if I could possibly shoo away the image. I saw the half-open door of their bathroom, just as if I were peeking; I saw them pressed against the sink in the bathroom. Klára’s body shining in a short black slip. Ultimately, one perceives many things that never, or perhaps only later, register in one’s mind. I understood the man’s shameless and provocative winks above the glittering car roof. The dry lines on his face running together because of the deeply concealed sarcasm.

He knew why he was going upstairs.

They made each other moan and howl, just like the men on Margit Island.

While, like a dog, I was supposed to guard his car for them.

I felt as if I were being butchered; imagination made my heart pound in my throat; I was suffocating. I have to leave even if it’s just jealousy playing tricks on me, and I have to leave even if I’m making empty accusations. My breathing grew fast and heavy. Impulse carried me across the dark lobby; I ran out of the building.

But I stopped with the wind hitting me in the face.

Because I could hear noises from within.

A slamming door, a man’s voice from the depth of the courtyard, the quick tapping of a woman’s shoes. In which case it was only my jealous imagination playing tricks on me; nothing had happened in the bathroom.

Then silence, and again a door slammed.

Minutes were ticking by but they were not coming out.

And against my better judgment, this compelled me, as if I were a sneak thief, an assassin, a lousy little peeping Tom, to step back into the dark lobby. To stand next to the stinking garbage cans, listening intently. Not to go away, not to leave after all. The stench and the cold were not improbable at that moment; they were sole proof of the existing world order. But it was completely incredible that I had once again sunk so low, and the sinking wasn’t yet over, since I kept exposing myself to these things. Although nobody was forcing me, it was not a free choice. The power of the body brazenly made me do these things; I was sneaking in. The only pleasure in this was that while shamelessly obeying the compulsion, I could call myself despicable.

Perhaps for the first time in my life I realized that my physical being had nothing to do with my moral ideas or my upbringing.

While I sneaked upstairs in the dark, clinging to the peeling walls of the stairwell, all my limbs and inner organs were gently trembling with shame.

That I was capable of doing anything.

I didn’t want to fight down the sensation, yet I couldn’t imagine such a life.

In this familiar mute building, I wanted to gratify my body.

Maybe the moonlight suffused the rushing clouds, or the city lights were reflected in the sky. I really didn’t know what I was doing. In any case the well of the courtyard was shining blue. I was glad my shoes had rubber soles so that my steps were silent.

I stopped for a moment at the open gallery on the second floor. The iron railing cast an unfamiliar shadow on the patterned stone floor. As a child I’d of course never been out here at such an hour. I recalled winter afternoons when the air slowly darkened yet the yellow walls continued to glow. I wanted some certainty — about anything; or to ring their bell, to do anything that would stop the feeling of helplessness. To run up to the fourth floor, throw myself over the railing, hear the thud of my body, the shouts and screams; to end it all on the yellow ceramic paving of the courtyard.

Nothing stirred in the dark building.

I stopped on the last step and leaned my shoulder against the cold wall. No noise filtered in from the street. On the roofs, the wind continued to boom, occasionally strumming a tile or a section of the eaves.

I waited, ready to pounce.

Their apartment was the first one to the left of the stairs. If anyone crossed the foyer in the apartment, I’d hear it. The empty minutes of the waiting were measured only by my breathing. Again, I had to look in through the half-open door of the bathroom, and from what I saw there, my desire congealed in my guts. I could not help following her.

In my fear and pain I kept losing my breath, yet I was standing in front of the patterned glass of the entrance door.

The long foyer was dark, the kitchen was dark. I could see that the bathroom door was not half-open. I could hear no movement anywhere.

Their apartment did not differ from the piano teacher’s. Opposite the bathroom was the larger room’s opaque glass-paneled door on which only a weak light from the smaller room was reflected. Or who knows, maybe some light from the street, I could not decide.

Then they must be doing it in there, in that room.

By now I was not even ashamed.

On the patterned glass my breath collected as vapor.

I seemed to smell the woman’s fragrance in the air, which was the reason I had come this far and why I kept sinking ever lower. The effort not to ring their bell and a dread that I might break down the door weakened me, or my mind became hazy because in my pants fear had made my cock rear up.

Out of ideas, I staggered back down to the second-floor landing; that’s all my remaining sense could dictate to me. But my cock had stiffened to the point of real pain and hindered my walking.




The Noose Tightens


As if the question had called for him to rack his brains, the leather-capped driver did not reply for a long time.

Now and again he studied his passenger’s face in the rearview mirror, her seriousness, her self-imposed severity, the embarrassing sensuality of her features, her mildly wounded pride, and her haughtiness, which she was deploying so clumsily against him.

There was barely any light in the backseat of the Pobeda, but the oval side-window illuminated the older woman’s face. The driver scrutinized, analyzed, and seriously considered which of her features showed that she was Jewish. As a cadet in the Trieste Naval Academy he had learned from his Croatian platoon commander how to recognize Jews. Everyone had eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth, but from that it does not necessarily follow that everyone is equal at birth. When out on individual passes or when amid much noise the big gates on Via Belpoggio were opened and the cadets marched out together in smart ranks formation, they paid close attention to passersby and to the girls hanging out the windows.

That is how he explained to himself retroactively that it was not from meanness but at the dictates of their blood that they’d had an aversion for the Gottlieb child. He clung to the petty officer’s every word. Should he be tormented, as a devout Catholic, were they not obeying their racial instincts when they let the older boys take care of the Gottlieb boy.

Ever since then, observing racial features in any situation excited him.

Even though he had to keep his eyes on the wet road.

He was always able to behave very amiably with Jews, he did not make them feel what he truly thought about their race, and he was especially fond of his own gallantry and generosity.

But his momentary daydreaming, focused on moderate self-admiration, was not without danger.

The hastily applied lipstick on the lady’s mouth, the large amount of rouge and powder, could not conceal the devastations of pain, ice-cold indifference, and constant anxiety but, rather, mocked her.

The driver’s eyes meandered over the woman’s disintegrated features.

In accordance with her upbringing, the passenger considered herself a perfect being, a unique specimen, different in everything and from everyone. She had deflected all doubts about herself, because her upbringing had been perfect, flawless, and that is why she knew how to behave so amazingly well in any situation. Moreover, as the favorite grandchild of Grandpapa Demén, she’d remained a pampered child forever. It was as though the driver, prompted by the map of this strange face, was reciting the lessons of his own life, burdened with much self-aggrandizement.

I never learn anything from anything, he’d sometimes say to himself, and he was very proud of this.

Although there were different emphases in the way these two had been brought up, their tones were similar. They made the same mistakes and notoriously repeated their own errors time after time, since they were convinced that they’d risen above their mistakes and that their high position today was appropriate.

When in the past he had lost his way and began to suspect that he had confused his personal characteristics with his faults, he explained to himself that it was pleasant to stray. He couldn’t tell what he was covering up with which of his rogueries, or what he might have substituted for one of his shams and when. He couldn’t keep track of the consequences either; they burgeoned until he couldn’t help seeing effect as cause.

He accepted his own little frauds and deceptions because they were witness to his cunning and nimbleness. It was not only others he misled; he blundered continually and, one might say, followed flawed premises in his thinking.

He reveled in his own imperfection and attributed no special significance to the flaws in his thought.

To start with, he seemed to know when something was not as it appeared, but he’d give it a name in the interests of using it to succeed in a tactical maneuver. It was like what had happened in his childhood in Mohács in the big pantry of their palace on Városház Street, where he spooned preserved fruit out of the glass jars in such a way that the servants wouldn’t notice the drop in the level of the contents. Yet a small amount was indeed missing from the jar, and the next day the level would fall again, and the next day too, until the preserved fruit nearly disappeared — though probably no one in the household but he was secretly eating it. He liked peaches more but, by way of precaution, ate plums too, because there were more plums than peaches. He guarded his coveted goodness by deceiving himself. He managed to conquer his true desire. Sometimes he’d break a cellophane cover on one jar or disturb the natural skin formed on the surface of the fruit yet leave it untouched while eating stealthily from another jar. He had to manipulate things so that his mother would suspect a gluttonous maid. Or so that one maid would be set against another. He’d steer their suspicions in a given direction by deliberately dropping false hints. On the third day, the broken cellophane or filmy skin could be the pretext for stealing from another jar too. Then at least he could save the dangerously diminished contents of the first jar from his own hateful gluttony. But by then plum compote was missing from two open jars, even though he liked cherry or sour-cherry compote better. Sometimes he’d make whole jars disappear, so that the deficit in one jar wouldn’t be noticed; after he managed to devour the fruit to the last spoonful, shaking with excitement all the while, he buried the evidence in a deep hole in the garden.

It was enjoyable to play with the possibilities, risky; he knew his gluttony was a mortal sin, but he didn’t want to resist temptation completely, he’d give in to it a little, and with excitement and tension thus aroused, he caused much joy to himself. He knew he was a backslider. He did not notice how he combined his secret excitements with fear and trembling, how he intertwined them. He was moving among screens and scenery; illusion and make-believe gained an independent reality.

He had major sins, which he did not confess.

This was the source of his secret joy. And why shouldn’t he allow himself a daring exchange of roles. He’d believed all his life that it was enough to conform to certain behavioral norms to avoid punishment. Well, all right, he can’t avoid his temptations and the quiet punishments that follow, but he can at least avoid public humiliation. Virtually every situation can be mastered; one has only to remain smooth and nimble, gain some time, because everything in this world is transitory, is it not; everything is temporary.

Touch everything only on the surface, just there, do it but do it lightly; do not look into things deeply.

He was way off the mark with this, of course, because he did see deeply into things even if he didn’t want to. He preferred to deny what he saw. It was like denying his silent soul, his better self. He was unable to lose his miserable clear-sightedness.

Duty had brought him to this state, into the thick of it. It was impossible that barely past his fiftieth year he would find nothing but a pile of misery in his soul.

Weltschmerz laid him low; his cheerful disposition kicked helplessly against it.

He was daydreaming about himself, as was his wont, while scrutinizing a strange face.

Yet there had been a few unblemished, glittering moments, hours, days; he consoled himself with this — though he could not think of one right now. Maybe the enormous, timeworn, peeling wall of the Trieste Naval Academy, so thickly overgrown with ivy, and the salty fragrance of the sea breeze suffused with sunshine up on San Vito. He well remembered that sensation, though bitterness blotted out the memory of what had occurred there. He knew what he was remembering, but it no longer had a shape or image, and no participants either. He could also say how many times it had happened to him. Actually, whole hours had been like that, les très riches heures under romantic laurel trees. He seemed to feel around him the texture of their aura heated by the sun, their fragrance; surely there were at least some moments like that. And who knew what one should do to achieve those moments; what should be adjusted to what, and similarly, what should be given a wide berth if these rich hours were indeed acts of grace. There was only one spot in the park, over the roofs, from which one could see down to the bay. And what would he be looking for in a place where grace was meted out. To watch how a white ship swims through the opening. They were not allowed to climb trees; he was standing on tiptoe to see the sunny surface of the water.

And it seemed he had to take a good hard look at the map of devastation and decay in his rearview mirror so that he wouldn’t have to give up his contempt-filled hope. Or at least so he wouldn’t let his contempt for the world be stronger than hope.

Once they were off the bridge and in between the high apartment buildings, the taxi was no longer exposed to the raw, strong squalls, but on Margit Boulevard, now muddy and broken up for road repair, the cobblestones began to shake it, toss it about. Piles of stones and sand towered on either side, pipes and cables were strewn everywhere. The wind whistled, boomed, at times screamed down at them as it swept off the roofs and around the chimneys; the windshield wipers creaked, now smearing, now wiping away the splashing dirt.

The roadway had been dug up, revealing a long, winding wound; supposedly the city had been replacing gas pipes for weeks, but nobody was working at the bottom of the soaked ditches now, and the spring hurricane had toppled all the safety barriers and their paraffin lamps.

If these women don’t understand why he’s dodging them, why he’s let their importunate questions go by, then fine, let them not understand.

Contempt did not show on his face; rather, a pale and indulgent smile crinkled the thick lines around his eyes.

With people of his own rank, he never let himself get into an embarrassing situation in which somebody might inquire about his name. After all, a conversation is not made merely of questions or answers. The purpose of a conversation is to maintain, by musical means as it were, a noncommittal flow of chatter; what could be simpler or clearer than that. While he was driving the car between the gaping ditch and the curb at the first big turn of Margit Boulevard, he grasped the steering wheel firmly with his left hand and reached across the front seat to pick up Lady Erna’s beribboned hat from the ribbed rubber mat where it had fallen.

In the rearview mirror, in less than a second, they mutually traversed the areas around each other’s eyes, replete with wrinkles and shadows.

The driver had well-shaped, full lips; the short-cropped mustache above them, which he had sported since his early youth, was full of shimmering gray bristles.

My son’s name is the same as mine, László, he finally answered reluctantly, and to make his yielding to Lady Erna’s prying a little easier he said it as if letting his words out through his nose.

Nevertheless, his arm made a very strong impression on Lady Erna.

The way he was safely navigating the car across impossible terrain with that backhanded grip on the steering wheel. She did not resist acknowledging the impression. The movement swept even Geerte’s lips out of her memory. Only the feeling coursing through her nervous system kept the recollection alive.

At this moment, she did not understand why she’d been attracted all her life more to the beauty of men. What Geerte’s lips had done to her and what she had done to Geerte was something no other sensual experience could even approach.

The reality of her memory touched the reality of the sight before her.

In a certain sense unfairly, since Geerte and the driver made contact in her consciousness without her gaining any moral insight. This was so beyond anything acceptable that fortunately she could find no words for it. Sometimes, such little things, at times little lapses of memory and short circuits, can make one free.

She clicked her tongue. László, is it, she cried, well, what do you know. She did not let the reluctant man complete his sentence, because she was taken aback and amazed by the unfair contact; that at such an advanced age I should still feel something like this. She shuddered; really wonderful, she cried, to distract her mind from the intimate sensations within her. This is ridiculous; I am ridiculous.

In vain she rifled through the many drawers and cubbyholes of her memory, but among the professor’s favorite students she could not find one named László.

There must be some misunderstanding.

That means his name is the same as that of the charming hero of Casablanca, and to gain some time for her ridiculous sensation she politely leaned forward and laughed amiably, isn’t that right.

To which the driver responded by raising his leather-capped head, self-consciously and demonstratively, as if alarmed; the conversation could not continue like this. He truly did not understand what his passenger was talking about or what she was trying to achieve. What hero, what Casablanca was she talking about, but no matter what, she should not be using this tone.

He was probably disturbed by the secret current within him. It just could not be that without any transition he should suddenly desire this chattering old woman.

I beg your pardon, he responded coldly, though in a tone that was a shade more refined than one might expect from an ordinary cab driver; and to forestall further Jewish impertinence that such a Jewess von Haus aus might permit herself, he very slowly and deliberately returned his look to the rearview mirror.

Gyöngyvér sat sunken into herself, pale and motionless.

When, lounging in each other’s arms, they were startled into wakefulness that morning on the narrow bed in the maid’s room, she could think of nothing else.

No, they were not lounging; rather, they’d held each other tight all night long when she could think of nothing else. Not all night, since she’d slipped back to him only at dawn, when they could hear on the other side of the thin wall the foyer door closing above them, which meant that Mrs. Szemző had come back after all. But she could think of nothing else. The sensation of their own bodies dissolved in the sensation of the other’s body; that was what she was thinking about, and she could not retreat far enough into the corner of the backseat not to feel a similar sensation emanating from the man’s mother, a sensation out of which the man appeared and refused to leave. Even though she was here, in the taxi taking them somewhere, along with all her feelings and sensations. They held on to each other so they wouldn’t roll off the cot or slip out of each other.

She would have loved to do it, just once the good Lord should grant her this, so that Ágó wouldn’t take it out on her.

Never.

This morning, it would have made no sense for them to go on making love.

The sense of desire awakened with them — it always awakens in the man, or anyway is more unequivocal with him — but they could not tell which limb belonged to whom, whether they were feeling and sensing the other’s body or soul, and whether their own spirits had any boundaries.

The current of air kept moving the open window above them as it had throughout the night.

The summer morning breathed on them its coolness filled with birdsong.

Never more beautiful and dangerous.

With her power of imagination she would not accept the notion that that’s not how it should be, that nothing like this can ever happen again; she did not see the never-again standing before them as a gaping abyss, that this would never again happen to them.

She was already falling fast through the endless time of never-again, and she had to get used to the pain, otherwise she couldn’t bear it. She must anneal herself. It cannot be that there will never be mornings like this, never, never.

Each time anew, the image hit her like a blow to her head, this never-again. Not even a year had gone by and it was already over. And when she told herself that her heart would break and her head would split, she did not mean it metaphorically. The veins along the wall of her heart’s aortic arch trembled from this knotty tension of never-again, her skull throbbed with a migraine. Or she told herself that she would forget him.

Never. I will forget him. Never.

The meaning of the sentence was weak, its exhortation strong. Her consciousness was reminding her of the delicate border between physical and mental abilities. That somehow she should release her accumulated fear, regulate it, divert it in other directions, for it was threatening to burst its dam, her sensual energies were ready to rage, and they were naturally linked to blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rhythm.

I was thinking of that partner of the beautiful Ingrid Bergman, Lady Erna continued, literally shouting, which drove the cabbie to further venomous and contemptuous conclusions as he handed her the hat over the front seat.

Lady Erna accepted her hat from this truly congenial and attractive man and, as was her custom, conveniently forgot that only a few minutes before she had thought the same man obnoxious. The most she noticed was that from the time they began to speak more confidentially, the driver stopped using the unpleasant if-you-please-madam phrase, with which these terrible country folk continued to embitter Lady Erna’s life.

They got on her nerves with it.

It had become a maniacal urge with her to hunt it down and eliminate it; she would not suffer it from her own servants; her ears were alerted to it. She firmly believed that it expressed secret contempt, indicated lack of openness and honesty. Whoever worked for her had to learn that no such form of address existed in the Hungarian language.

Or the person could leave; after all, his or her character was bad anyway, probably given to stealing too.

She thanked the driver for the hat, for being so kind.

As the two of them were escaping from the Nazis, from Prague if I remember correctly, she added in the same loud voice, Mister Laszlo or Victor Laszlo, come on, help me, my God, I can’t remember the name of that famous actor.

Unable to do anything else, the driver burst out laughing.

You can imagine I’d help you out, dear lady, if I could only remember it myself.

And like close acquaintances of the same generation, familiar with the same pieces of music and the same movies, which is to say whose memories propose the same information on the first try, they laughed together contentedly.

Which filled Lady Erna with a certain relief, that the man with the leather cap could not possibly be a former Hungarian Nazi or a secret policeman.

When it comes to that, Casablanca is not the worst place in the world, believe me, dear lady. I’ve traveled a lot in my life, he said cheerfully and with not a small amount of self-mockery or self-contempt. Although the second time he used the dear-lady phrase it rang sarcastically on his lips. At this time of the year, in March, everything is in bloom there.

By the way, my name is Bellardi, he added, to end the embarrassing misunderstanding between them.

And as if moved by this mention of his own historic name, he gently combined the two names.

My son is László Bellardi, and of course that’s my name too.

And as he said it he thought irritably, now she’ll know everything and be satisfied, the old Jewess.

Who was dumbstruck, alarmed, as if suddenly reprimanded. Hearing the old familiar name, she grew silent in her soul, and the gravely serious little girl instantly pierced her way through the old woman’s worn and discomposed features. As she was being taken in the familiar buggy to the station along the elm-lined street, in the noise of hoofbeats and the sight of treetops she grasped the entire strange and hostile universe.

Suddenly every possible conversational topic became too delicate to propose, let alone talk about.

If only because of Gyöngyvér, they had to be cautious. Neither of them knew whether she was an informer. Although for long minutes she had ignored what the other two were talking about, things reached her in snatches, interfering with the high, love-induced blood pressure thumping in her ear.

You would be the father of little Bellardi, she said from her corner of the backseat, surprising both her listeners, her voice hoarse and loud.

Very kind of you.

You don’t say, she exclaimed.

She felt an impulse to yield to this chitchat; she probably sensed their distrust.

What a coincidence, she exclaimed.

She ignored Lady Erna’s imploring or rebuking glance.

But then Gyöngyvér feared she had once again done something terrible, behaved improperly.

In the car reeking of stale tobacco, Gyöngyvér’s panic made the mutual caution of the other two all but palpable. The affectionate indulgence they had allowed themselves took on a material quality in the air. What could they do with such a cackling goose, such an ignorant little servant. Bellardi drove attentively, with great practice and courtesy, while Mrs. Lehr, née Erna Demén, politely holding her mill-wheel-size hat on top of her handbag, withdrew from public life, as it were. Gyöngyvér’s noisy behavior irritated her greatly. Knowledge of where they were going in this stinking dark cab with its useless springs unexpectedly came crashing down on her again.

She sat firmly upright, back glued to the seat; with her self-saving posture she resembled Gyöngyvér.

Of course she knew.

She knew a great many things that it would have been better not to know.

Of course she remembered Bellardi’s son; she did not have to strain hard for that. But she hadn’t known that the boy’s name was László. Little Bellardi, or poor little Bellardi. Gyöngyvér was right, that’s how the professor used to refer to him. When she was introduced to people who turned up in their apartment on Teréz Boulevard, she mainly acknowledged their names or their presence. So this was Bellardi. She was surprised. This was the father whom the People’s Tribunal had sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy against the democratic order.* What an impressive neck this Bellardi has. He did not remind her of that person, at least not by his exterior, and that’s why she hadn’t made the connection in her mind. She was amazed. So that’s why his phiz was so eerily familiar. And at that moment she seemed to remember exactly the light summer suit the father had worn in that famous newsreel when, handcuffed and between two guards, he had to step up to the microphone and respond to stern questions put to him by the presiding judge of the People’s Tribunal.

They led him up there as if he were a dog; only there did they take the handcuffs off his wrists.

He must have cut a fine figure in that suit, if I still remember it today.

Of course there are men who never lose their boyish charm.

Actually it was a dispossessed man standing there at the microphone; he held on to it, but the presiding judge quickly warned accused number 3 that it was not the microphone he should hold on to. Because of this reprimand not a peep was heard in the courtroom for a long time, of course. Foreign correspondents in the first rows were especially alarmed. His suit hung on him as on a clothes hanger.

He might get the death sentence.

The person Lady Erna must have been remembering was this robust man, crucified in many ways. But his son was short, quiet, pale, charmingly fragile or rather puny, with no cheerful strength or manly brutality; perhaps he took after his mother. Whom Mrs. Lehr had met twice in Mária Szapáry’s hunting box in Vésztő, at the time it was being liquidated. Once hunters had gone there for small game, coot, wild duck, hare, pheasant, and bustard. Both meetings were brief; on both occasions Lady Erna spoke briefly with the young woman, who seemed to her like a volatile spirit. There was no reason for Erna’s mind to bring together information originating in two different historical times. So it unfortunately never occurred to her that there might be some blood relation between poor little Bellardi, who had belonged to the professor’s circle of favorite students, and the hapless beloved of ugly Mária Szapáry. She should have known that Elisa Koháry was the little boy’s mother. So he was the boy whom she had abandoned when he was only a baby. Although she had returned for a few years because she wanted to be heroic, wanted to overcome her terrible inclination and her maternal irresponsibility. There was no reason to link the two sets of data, stored at two different places and at two different depths. Lady Erna appraised and purchased objets d’art on commission from very wealthy collectors. She managed to include a few valuable items among all sorts of cheap wares and to acquire them for a lump sum that was the usual wholesale price paid for the cheaper items. An activity for which she earned Szapáry’s eternal ire. But who cares what an insignificant costume designer had to say.

That infamous lesbian chased younger women so tastelessly and aggressively that, soon after she returned to Budapest from abroad, she became the terror of young husbands and mothers of daughters. No matter how exciting events may have become between the two women — and no doubt the story had been exaggerated in social circles at different levels of Buda or Pest — they were not in contact and tracked the other’s love life only from a great distance.

The two of them, Erna and Mária, did not even address each other in the familiar form, though they had been students together at the same school.

Miserable harpy.

In the depressing, tense summer weeks following the disclosure of the conspiracy, people could not predict whether Professor Lehr would be only a witness in the proceedings or whether in a matter of days charges would be laid against him. It was impossible to detect the actual interest of each party concerned in the feverish preparations, where the different interests would clash, and where the associates would draw the borders. Whether the Russians would succeed in eliminating the entire secret organization or were intent only on slicing off the tip of the iceberg. How the national conservative wing of the Communist Party would position itself in the new situation. They were not prepared for this catastrophe. For the time being they had to lie low, safely wedged between the once illegal domestic activists, the slowly returning Western emigrants, and the Muscovites, and to become integrated into existing factions without undue gnashing of teeth.

It did not occur to any of them, thanks to the professor’s untiring inventiveness, to seek an understanding alliance — with the Russians, of all people.

Of course, Professor Lehr was powerful enough on his own to remain a mere witness at war-crimes trials. But only after he found a high-ranking supporter among the Russian nationalists — one might say only after he embedded himself in the heart of the enemy, helped in this by the Muscovites, of course, much more wary than he — on the Stefánia, in the garden of the former Park Club, which for a long time served as the Russian field officers’ casino, could he congenially review every detail of the future with the pathologically obese, wheezing lieutenant general as they strolled on the narrow footpaths covered with fine Danubian pebbles. Only then, thanks to the quick intervention of his high-ranking patron, did the professor become a scientific expert witness and advisor for the People’s Tribunal.

These days, many people condemn the professor for his terrible volte-face. Being familiar with his views, they should have understood that this was not betrayal on his part but rather the most recent manifestation of his profound loyalty to Hungary’s cause. If he had worked for the nation in the highest echelons alongside the Germans, why shouldn’t he work for the same cause alongside the Russians. Lady Erna knew of the fateful meeting in the Park Club garden, and neither she nor her husband doubted that the high-ranking patron was the Budapest representative of Russia’s military counterintelligence. That uniformed person, with his gilded epaulettes, red braids, general’s sword, and a great many decorations, had been introduced to her at the premiere of the new production of Fidelio at the Opera House in Budapest in 1947. On that memorable evening Klemperer conducted with especially enchanting dynamics. Luckily the formidable chorus of released prisoners in the last act is replete with tutti and forte. When the prisoners kept coming out of their dim cells toward the light, bidding one another to keep their voices to a whisper and singing what joy it was to breathe freely in the fresh air, to find peace and tranquillity at last, and they would trust God to guard their freedom, several people in the audience were heard sobbing.

Klemperer had to be careful with his dynamics lest sentimentality flood the orchestra pit and the stage. The strong basic structure of Beethoven’s music allows for this; the sobbing and wailing spread, quick as a plague, among the warm bodies. It swept across the audience, glittering with reflected golden lights; it spread and raced ahead like an unstoppable wave hurling its foam skyward.

At this moment, Klemperer thanked his good fortune and his fate for choosing this opera.

But Lady Erna could not have known what price had been paid for that congenial conversation on the Stefánia.

She did know the basis of the negotiation and careful agreement. Excepting only the highest positions, the Russians wanted as few Jewish elements as possible in the Hungarian government, in parliament and in the leadership of the political parties. The directive stated that the people’s democracy of Hungary needed, first of all, activists from the ranks of common people, and the Communist Party should be filled with them too. And they considered Professor Lehr an eminent guarantee that university and academic life would be steered in the desired direction. The laudatory attention the professor later gave to the young man must also have had its explanation in this weighty bargain. The price was like a poison capsule.

Better not to crack it open, just swallow it quickly.

Except that very often Lady Erna had to absorb with her own body the contempt, anger, and hatred surging toward the professor.

It was not enough that she swallow the poison pill, as she had done three times.

And now she was being taken to her husband’s deathbed by a driver whom the professor, true to form, had betrayed or at best left in the lurch for the sake of the great cause. Which fit nicely into the theory of tactical conformity. You have no other choice but to cooperate, to serve the prevailing conqueror willingly, but you must always remain conscious of what you are doing and why.

And when were you freed, if I may ask, she asked a little later, her voice lower than low.

She meant to express compassion and empathy, which had to function as a clear marker, and thus was part of their secret language.

In the spring of ’fifty-five, answered the driver, in the impersonal tones in which it was possible to speak of such matters during the years when prisons were still full of people.

He wanted to reciprocate Lady Erna’s empathy, would have said that it had been six years now, and thus indicate in their secret language that he understood and appreciated her viewpoint, but he had no idea who the young woman was.

Everyone feared informers. And he didn’t want to become too cozy with Jews anyway.

I certainly don’t envy your poor wife for those terrible years, if I may express myself like that, Lady Erna added, filled with genuine empathy and a mite disturbed by his lack of reciprocity.

She caught herself only after she’d said this — that she’d made a mistake, good Lord.

The instant she said it she knew she had committed one of the worst faux pas of her life.

Bellardi did not reply, not because he didn’t know how to respond to such rudeness but as if he hadn’t heard it. Even though from that moment, like a blow to the back of the neck, he was once again afflicted by the scandalous weeks, months, and years he’d spent at the bottom of the well. The state of feverishness and sleeplessness when he could not understand, during either the day or night, how Elisa could have done this to him. And when despite everything sleep managed to overtake him he would shudder and awaken to the question. Why did she do it. There was nothing to understand. How could she have left him. The person to whom he was more devoted than anyone else; he had never, never before or with anyone else; it was no mistake, neither hallucination nor loss of proportion, that actually they had bestowed on each other nothing less than the enjoyment of hell.

It could not have been hallucination, because no trace of happiness was left between them.

But at least the gift of hell’s enjoyment, if his life could provide nothing else.

The situation was intolerable. They both suffered terribly from each other, from their own selves when in the presence of the other. The more they tried not to wound each other, the more infernal the enjoyment became, giving it to each other at the cost of restraining their aversion and suppressing their emotion. They slowed down. As if love’s utmost value, passion, were draining out of their raw desire and pleasure. Mutual tolerance and consideration made it pale and more tender; it slowed down but spread out, flooding everything, and it did not cease or grow calm.

As if in place of passion they had reached the combustible matter slumbering at the very bottom of their minds, as if they had touched the body’s glowing magma.

How could she have left him.

They did torture each other all right, but they would have been hard put to find two other people with the same perseverance, strength, and irrepressible liveliness whom they could have tortured.

Elisa’s new whim seemed to be that she had left him and that was that; now she needed love to cling to, to the end. As if the female called Mária Szapáry did not even exist and Elisa had merely invented her so that she could torture him the more.

He did not understand it, though he did comprehend it.

She had thrown him into an unknown circle of hell so they could live through the very depth of the relationship they were now going to lose forever.

Much as if he had to undergo a final or great test simply in order to fail it.

Earlier on, one of them had to escape, now he, now she, so that both could gather strength and return.

How could he have thought that she’d left him or could have left him.

Or what would have weakened their mutual attachment. Did that terrible female know more about Elisa than he did; what was it that she knew, and what were the two of them doing at this very moment. He could see before him what they were doing. Although he was not curious to know, did not want to see it, could not escape it, with every fiber of his muscles he experienced what they were doing. And he trampled himself so deeply into pain that his loss was greater than death; from lack of pleasure and from pain he grew ill, feverish, shaking with a permanent fever, and his illness so sensitized him that his clear-sightedness was no mere delusion presumably.

Clear-sightedness struck him like lightning.

He had considered it but did not know when it would fell him.

It came upon him, and then he knew what was happening between them, and what the end of everything would be like; he did not have to see it to feel it and experience it. Here he is, sobbing, knocking himself against the floor and howling with his head swaying, so he won’t have to see what he can’t see anyway; won’t have to think about it, look at it with his eyes wide open, sense it in his testicles, in the roots of his hair, on the aching skin of the soles of his feet, in the hollow spaces of his penis, in his tumescence; but whatever happens he must remain silent so that their little boy won’t notice anything and won’t awaken from his sweet dreams.

The pleasure the two women were giving to each other now appeared as a physical sensation.

Because he patterned what he was imagining on what happened between him and his wife only weeks earlier when in their pain and prompted by their pain they had enjoyed each other. What was peculiar was that now he felt it very differently, in a way he couldn’t have imagined before. There was no such reality in his sensual experiences or there could not have been such reserves.

After a while he could not help thinking that he was experiencing not his own nervous fits but the women’s attacks; after all, he wasn’t seeing what he felt. Thrusts were coming from outside like gusts of wind; his ability to experience them was absent from his imagination, and the two women were doing this to him deliberately. Elisa was torturing him from the outside. Indeed, she could have had no greater revenge. With their bodies stuck together and trembling with happiness, they were sending Morse signals, would waken him deliberately when he finally managed to doze off, magnetize him with their mutual bodily reality and irradiate him with their happiness.

He must realize he could expect nothing from Elisa anymore; the two of them had become one, and they used this to torture him because his unhappiness made them enjoy each other even more.

Time became endless during those weeks. He could not interrupt it by sleeping; at best a sedative helped a little, but there was no starting anew, he kept shaking with exhaustion, became greatly agitated. His testicles had swollen to worrisome proportions and become ruddy, which he found especially disgusting in himself. He averted his face from the sight as if nature were slapping him in the face with this prank. He was so disgusted with his own corporeality and with his blinded sensual excitements that he stayed dressed even at night to avoid having to see his body; he would not wash up to avoid touching it. Elisa had a bone-handled, gilded pair of scissors in the bathroom. Mesmerized, he looked at it for a long time. But he wanted to save himself from this, if only because of his little boy; not to let blood spurt, not to let the boy find him like that.

He did not go to confession, even though he wanted to be free of the shame and degradation, no matter how high the price.

He felt that he could hardly restrain his own hand. When he writhed on the parquet floor of the living room, glowing in sunshine or lamplight, he saw himself from the outside, silently, as if he were an epileptic.

He had nothing to live for.

Silently, whimpering, occasionally whining.

Yet the next day he might shower normally, wash the bulb of his penis, stinking under the foreskin from the continuous erections, and with nothing woeful in his face he would go to Vienna, knock off another five days of service on the Carolina. He pleaded with God but could not pray to him; he called on that goddamn God, though he knew that something else, not the scissors, not self-mutilation, not self-punishment, but only one thing would satisfy him.

Only murder.

He was very cautious, he did not go to confession and did not go near a church. Lest Jesus Christ or the saints or Mary or the Franciscans get involved. He knew there was another, incomprehensibly sober and mendacious life that his church supported. He had fallen out of it, out of this sober and mendacious world, but because of his little boy he would have to force himself back into it. He did not go to his confessor because he did not want to be diverted. To take his coat, not to stay here as they irradiated him with their happiness, that’s what he wanted, to go when they rushed at him with their pleasure, to break down the apartment door on them and bump them off in their great, noisy happiness like two mad dogs.

By the time his muscles tired of the rhythmic spasms, his completely purposeless and disgusting erection had become so strong and painful that he had to free himself of it somehow.

If he had to touch it with his hand, he would have vomited.

But after a while, even without a sedative, his limbs relaxed with fatigue, his enormous arms and thighs as well as his furrowed features. These parts of his body had to rest for a while to preserve the pain. He lay stiffly, like an uprooted tree. He breathed loudly so he wouldn’t shout even more loudly. Actually, he could not hear his own rhythmic howls. His consciousness still had a clean spot in which he could comprehend the lovely entirety of his existence. He was so dehydrated that he had no more saliva, snot, or tears. And still he had no answer to the question why Elisa had done this to him.

But then they irradiated him again; with their bright rapture they alerted his muscles; he thirsted to know what the two of them were doing at that moment, together, against him, as they immersed themselves in each other’s wickedness and milked the last drop of enjoyment from it.

Without me, without me.

He was howling, writhing silently on the floor because they had shut him out of their wickedness, or because he should turn against himself with his own wickedness. The damned parquet floor creaked in his ears with the shared rhythm of their wickedness, their lovemaking — in which he was Mária Szapáry, so he would not have to abandon Elisa. On the floor, he lived through Mária Szapáry’s experience with Elisa, like animals; then he sobbed dryly when he noticed that for some minutes his little boy had been standing in the doorway in his nightshirt, startled awake; he had awakened the boy with his awful condition.

The boy had been watching him with wide-eyed amazement and dread.

If this little boy dares ask again, if he once again opens his mouth and begins his nerve-racking wails, where is his mother, why doesn’t his mother come home, then he’ll kill him. Tear him apart, rip him to pieces with his teeth. It would be best to kill him right away. The little boy knew, his father’s lies notwithstanding. Or it had been useless to tell him the truth, the whole truth, so as not to beat around the bush. The boy did not believe him, did not listen to him, only waited for his mother to return. Just as these horrible women would not let him rest — Szapáry virtually possessed him, dwelt in him — now the two of them had spun him around and his little boy crawled into him, dwelt in his flesh.

He had to see what the little boy would do; he knew, knew everything but also deceived himself.

These days, he and the little boy were like flesh within flesh, like perfect emotional mirror images of each other.

If he stayed a father, he would most certainly kill him, cut him down, so he wouldn’t have to see him and would leave no witness alive, but he had a secret compulsion to metamorphose into a mother for the little boy’s future.

The pleasure that the two women bestowed on each other not only kept his consciousness awake but also alerted his last humane reserves, for their pleasure had grown much larger than his passionate suffering.

He did not know that one could suffer even in a brief, induced slumber.

For that reason alone he had to put an end to this.

He did have a pistol.

But first he would kill them.

And even before that, he wanted to tell Madzar the whole terrible story, from the beginning almost to the very end, leaving out what he was preparing to do lest Lojzi try to hold him back by force; he would not have that.

So that nobody besides him in this fucking world would ever know about it.

He’s the only one I’ve got left.

And this too was not a coincidence; it had to be a secret signal or otherworldly hint that, after so many years and so completely unexpectedly, Madzar was standing before him on the deck of the Carolina, exuding confidence. But of course he’s on his way to America. When he is most needed. How can he be stopped. And then he did not tell him, did not even begin to, because he found no connecting path or witty turn of phrase from their own heavy and worrisome present situation, no opening sentence for his story. And on the next occasion, when again Madzar appeared on the deck or they arrived together, when he had the table set in the command salon and they sat opposite each other in the fluttering candlelight, he blessed his former distrust which had made him not tell the story.

Suddenly he realized there was no living language in which he could tell it to this reticent, vigorous, strong man. He had no one left. Every feeling proved to be an illusion. It would have felt great to squeal on Elisa to this bullheaded man. To spill every one of her filthy little secrets, their infernal happiness, the disgust he felt for her, the hatred and contempt. To tell him that already on their honeymoon in Alexandria he had cheated on Elisa. All he had to do was cross the poorly lit Corniche, with the uniform noise of the waves, and grope his way down a dark, urine-smelling set of stairs.

If he told this story to Madzar, he would have used up the last remaining bit of love or illusion that he and Madzar retained from their childhood or perhaps could not abandon.

It did not help to take an inventory of his acquaintances, lovers, and all the people who had abandoned him. Or those whom he had abandoned, even though they loved him or he loved them; he found no one among them. And in that case, he could not vomit up all the human beauty and all the human filth onto someone’s feet, it would be impossible.

All in vain, it was all in vain.

It would probably be better, morally more correct too, to kill his sleeping little boy first and then do away with himself.

But he could barely catch his breath, saying, well, I’ve calmed down a little and at least half a year has gone by, it’s time for me to accept that she didn’t leave on a whim and will soon be back, but that she’s left for good, she’s gone.

And on top of it all, here is the bright, sunny, life-filled sensation of a horrible summer morning. As he stands in the living room of their apartment with the telephone in his hand, and does not understand.

Bygone seconds were passing.

But he does not understand what Mária Szapáry, at the other end of the line, is saying, what sort of clinic she is talking about. On such an ordinary Sunday morning.

Then she finished what she had to say; there was silence on the line.

Fate had taken its revenge on the women; their fucking fate screwed them but good.

So what had happened, and what was he supposed to do. Revenge had been taken for everything done to him and to his little boy, and it was very nice of fate to have done this, it was wonderful. Life was worth living after all, because there was such a thing as revenge, and God has given us murder as our freedom.

And then he was saved, at least.

At last, at last.

Summoned by Szapáry’s telephone call, now he was mindlessly racing with his car up and down the empty, freshly watered Sunday-morning streets and roads. In his confusion — at once disgraceful happiness and uplifting dread — he felt the breath of freedom on his skin, and he lost his way a number of times before he reached the neurological clinic.

Let it end, if it has come to its end.

Or it shouldn’t depend on him, though everything is already lost. He knew it; he knew what would happen, though his revenge was sweet. There was no hope that one fine day Elisa would return with her little suitcase. Yet she looks at him with her innocently open and indifferent visage as if nothing has happened for more than half a year.

Why must he still love this horrid being so much.

Or why must revenge taste as sweet as honey.

Why does he love this human creature, lacking every moral standard, so much that he can’t give up hope even at the penultimate moment.

She comes back to torture him even more.

He could no longer cherish even this little hope.

There will be no new beginning, there is no such luck, only pure disaster prevails on earth, and everything is lost.

I’ve put my foot in it again.

Lady Erna did not know exactly what she had put her foot in, but she felt in the stiff silence that she had.

Actually, she had a high opinion of her own heft, including her sturdy feet.

And even if she knew what she had done there was no reason to blame her for anything. To her overweening self, the decent Bellardi boy was not an independent figure whose fate one spends time thinking about and possibly even identifying with a bit. He simply belonged to the populous team of young men who performed certain personal and scientific services for Dr. Lehr. They too were considered devotees of tactical conformity. Following the professor’s instruction, they zealously studied the source, the works of Baltasar Gracián. They translated him from the Spanish or Latin originals, from French and German, or made extracts from his writings based on the old texts. They jotted down and then typed out multiple copies of Professor Lehr’s relevant comments. They compiled small catechisms from the original and not easily understood texts of El Discreto, putting them side by side with Dr. Lehr’s aphoristic notes. And as happens with other copied and commentated literature, after a certain time one could not exactly tell where the Gracián text ended and the Lehr interpretation began. At any rate, adages were born from sentences such as, few manage to avoid the guile of Fortuna, or, thus great fortunes usually end in ignominy.

The squeezed-out blood orange too is turned out of the golden bowl and thrown in the garbage can.

Most of the students had never seen a blood orange, let alone a golden bowl.

They too saw no option except tactical conformity, and that is why they understood the pretty simile in their own ways.

They had to know what was useful or useless for the secret movement, what they should cherish in their private lives and what in their social life, what they should carefully nurture and what they should discard, uproot, weed out, trample on, and throw in the garbage.

They should have no scruples. If necessary, they should exploit anyone; squeeze the last drop of talent out of anyone, as they would the juice from a blood orange. The apparent selfishness and possible ruthlessness of their decisions should not disturb their moral sensibility. Fool and deceive anyone they needed to deceive. It is through the students, by the work of their hands, through their collaboration or, in given cases, through assassinations or murders committed by them, that the collectivity of the race will save what can be saved.

The fate and existence of entire generations are at stake when they make their decisions and act according to the selfish interests of the Hungarian people.

Should not let go of and never harm the holy bond.

And they should not act the same way all the time; they must occasionally confuse their antagonists and enemies.

It’s easy to hit the bird flying in a straight line, but not the one that flips over in flight, that makes unexpected turns.

A good card player never plays the card his rival expects, and definitely not the one that would help his rival win.

Unless Dr. Lehr wished it otherwise, his wife, Lady Erna, too, conformed to the feudal system of relationships. She never asked the professor about matters that were not her business. She did not spend time with his young men, because she kept a strict distance from the perfidious power-related intrigues of the professor’s hangers-on. She minded her own business. They both knew that these intrigues were unavoidable, and they could not mention them even between themselves and not even scornfully; they had to remain above it all, they had to use and exploit the group’s inner conflicts imperceptibly or mete out justice among the insurgents. Pretty girls or attractive women could not be mixed up with the hangers-on, because only males were members of this secret society, which was more than enough for her own security.

But she did not let down her guard.

On his part, the professor saw to it that he acquired permanent or occasional lovers from places where no one had any connection with his university or the academic world. This was not difficult, since commonness was his weakness; classical promiscuity, things dirty, the darkest obscenity, held his senses in thrall, everything beyond the range of legitimate social life.

He struggled valiantly with himself all his life; he wanted to conquer his weakness or at least clean it up a little, if only because for long decades the pure, spiritualized manly life was both his ideal and his hobbyhorse.

At least the need for cleanliness, if not cleanliness itself. Life, conceived in blood and ending in darkness, must seek light and cleanliness, as Gracián would say, it cannot do otherwise.

However, Dr. Lehr simply loved everything that was nasty and hideous. He could not resist loving everything that was filthy, dark, base, treacherous, soiled, and vulgar. Of course, he dismissed the theory of instinctual life.

Jewish idiocy.

But he valued very simple copulations, which he believed were inherent and which most emphatically confirmed life. He loved that; there was no other way to put it. He pitted Jewish libido against a theory of innate copulation. Biological and racial conceptions stood behind this theory, which he spoke about to his students in detail. Who could consider it accidental that Jews preoccupied themselves with their instinctual life so as to guide the world along the alleged libido of that life. He did not elaborate on the nature of inherent copulation with his students; they all probably knew what they were supposed to think about, what natural theory.

True, he did toy with it in a different register, the way, let us say, he loved his wife. Whom he treated with great courtesy and appreciation.

But what could he do if he loved unsought-for copulation, he loved its inherency, and therefore he had to immerse himself in it again and again. He submerged himself, but he loved not knowing the names of these women. To know nothing, to be not curious about them; it would disturb him if he did. Sometimes he didn’t even see their genitalia or faces.

At most, he might feel a sharp elbow in his stomach. He would be groping and pawing under unwashed sweaters and blouses reeking with sweat; the breath of the lower classes would touch him, the smell of onions and carious teeth.

But there’s no need to fear this, because the impersonal feeling of orgasm quickly overwhelms sensations that are imbued with social ideas.

Besides the memory of their being unwashed, nothing remained of their persons.

I’ll go out for a spell, my darling.

Go on, my sweet.

For a little walk, with your permission.

You move frightfully little as it is.

On evenings like this, he simply had to get up from his desk.

I’ll air out my head a bit, he would say to himself on evenings when he could no longer resist the temptation or suppress his darkly gaping proclivity. It was not that raw, physical signals reminded him of his desires, no, there were no such signals. Rather, he feared the consequences of such an outing and therefore felt completely devoid of desire. But he could not resist an indefinable mental attraction, a sort of barbarian inclination. And he knew this was a pagan, mystic attraction, a primordial one, an archaic proclivity.

Symptoms of his inclination were reinforced during the previous week, or perhaps symptoms from previous millennia signaled their permanence in him by suggesting that he could do it with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

They signaled to him and he followed them. He could not have known — and this was the essence of this intimate pagan attraction — what drew him on in the night, why he did not even try to understand why he should go and where; he should simply go as if under a magic spell.

He had to set out in a night filled with unknown dangers, to follow nothing but the call of the blood pumping from his heart, its restless beating, to surrender himself, defying all danger, to the primal forces of an unknown, natural godhead. He had to be swift and inventive. The mere thought filled him with strength and charged his cool, passionless spirit. Sometimes he would not give in to the call for days, fearing that his passion would devour him whole. He could not stay out longer than an hour and a half. And he could not think he was alone with his pagan sin and enjoyment in this city, because at different secret points it turned the reality of its other parts upside down. He didn’t need more time. He knew these places and saw what he saw in the motionless city night.

Besides, he could not take more without giving in to contempt and disgust.

Dr. Lehr was a man of the old school, a spiritually demanding real gentleman, and Lady Erna especially appreciated his refined sense of discretion. No matter how much she suffered because of these little anthropological sallies, which always left small innocent traces, she both respected his need for them and found an explanation for them. Any of those traces could have exposed him, yet she thought it better not to mention them. She knew well that scientific activity had strictly confidential strands and currents that might lead to very dangerous political illegality, and she accused herself in her infernal jealousy of mixing up these strands. While in her feverish imagination her husband was chasing some unseemly female, he in fact had to attend a conspiratorial meeting. Instead of making unfair accusations, she should worry if he forgot to take his hat or scarf, and she should consider his brief absences part of his academic work.

Even though she saw mud on the heels of his shoes in dry weather.

Occasionally, Lehr wound up at the City Park lake, where human traffic was intense under the plane trees. That is where he met the greatest inherent love of his life, to whom his memory continued to return with an unquenchable thirst. As they cautiously approached each other in the alternately stronger and dimmer lights from the gas lamps on the promenade, uncertainty gripped him. Perhaps the figure coming nearer was not a shapely woman but an effeminate man. He had to be careful about that in the darkness; it could turn dangerous. There were places in the city where the boundaries of areas favored by different sexual preferences were uncertain or simply overlapped and merged. But uncertainty did not halt the steps of either of them. Professor Lehr carefully avoided places that had lost their borders. Anyway, the figure brought with it the sound of swishing feminine clothes and was dangling something in its hands. He saw that she was barefoot, which made his heart beat in his throat, a sign at once of joy and dread; obviously, she’d taken off her high-heeled sandals on the mowed lawn. Above their heads the leaves of the plane trees rustled quietly in the silent night.

They both behaved erratically in the dark.

Farther off, other human shadows could be seen approaching and then receding. First the two of them would observe each other, retreat a little to observe again and gauge the other’s interest from a distance — that was the accepted safe thing to do at places like this — and then, estimating the degree of danger, approach each other again.

But that is not what happened.

They both stopped and the young woman unhesitatingly dropped her shoes. The shoes landed silently. On the morning of the day this happened, he had given his first talk as an appointed expert at the People’s Tribunal. That is why he behaved so bravely at night. This was the phase of the attack—la petite troupe fut attaquée par surprises, as he described it to his most trusted students — which allowed him to consider that his work as an expert in the courtroom was not a tactical betrayal. There was no doubt that the figure was a young woman wearing waterproofed silk overalls, which might for a few seconds have made her seem like a man; and it was beyond doubt that she was insane.

He had never seen such innate, inherent agitation, the strength of which his mind could not follow.

Mechanics in the American air force wear overalls like this.

During the one moment when he could not possibly know what was or might be happening to them, what her hands were or might be doing, the young woman with one decisive gesture unzipped the zipper that ran diagonally down the overalls. He heard the metallic susurration. Stark naked from her neck to her pubic hair, she whimpered with expectation. An insane nymph, a pagan priestess. Never had he a more convincing body in his hands. Never had all accompanying thoughts so completely melted away.

Only much later did he manage to recall everything that happened between them, because right afterward he was too busy trying to sober up from the experience as he staggered home.

For months he kept going back, until in the late autumn a verdict was reached in court, but he never found the insane nymph again.

He should have been pleased, because although accused number 1 and number 2 were condemned to death, he managed to yank accused number 3 from under the gallows.

He could never make up the enormous loss, which also made a sensitive dent in his theory of copulation, though he remembered her face, the texture of her skin, her eyes, and the incredibly rich pubic hair. He was compelled to remember every personal thing that he now missed, and missing them was not possible without lasting pain.

Libido is inseparable from a person, and therefore the Jew rightly holds it to be the cornerstone of individuality, he pronounced at the end to his students. To realize his aspirations for world domination, he must not only destroy the nation but also break down human society into its individual parts. As opposed to this, in inherent copulation each individual experiences the communality that characterizes us all — even the Jew, strangely enough. In inherent copulation the communal overrides the individual, as it were.

He did not understand why he could not find the insane young priestess anymore.

It did not matter that he found others.

Lady Erna discovered the smeared green of grass on the elbows of his jackets and the knees of his pants. She also noticed sticky filth clinging to his fine wool overcoats and to the velour or rabbit fur of his hats.

In the years after the war, the city at night was full of great dangers.

She always found some kind of grayish fuzz that reminded her of cobwebs. She did not understand this, because in her great jealousy she thought about the things she and her husband did together, which weren’t to be sneezed at, and embellished and colored them a bit in her imagination, to make it hurt. Let it hurt, and may her jealousy perish in the pain. But she could never have imagined that the famous professor, object of both general esteem and public obloquy, was driven by a passion of an entirely different nature, which lured him to danger, to abandoned promenades and strange attics, which pulled him into dark doorways where it would happen amid filled garbage cans, while he trembled with the insane urgency and risk, and that this was the only way it could happen, in a state of impersonal excitement brought on by a childlike fear of punishment and a sinful desire for union.

Not to mention wafts of smells and odors that one simply could not have in a well-cared-for apartment.

She dismissed the scandalous odors by thinking she’d gone mad, but she couldn’t go mad. And she couldn’t go around smelling her husband’s underclothes. But she did, and frequently too, for the smells always caught her unprepared. And then she would acknowledge with considerable relief that her husband had stepped in dog shit or human shit.

It could not be that his own shit was smeared on his underpants.

It’s not possible, István, that you went in your pants.

That would surprise me too.

There was no scientific career that could exist without secret, rather dubious human relationships; also, generally speaking, there was no such science.

Still, with her imagination bordering on hysteria, Erna sometimes so upset herself that she would have preferred screaming to having knowledge and understanding.

I can’t bear it.

The things I keep imagining.

But what if I can’t endure this very hour.

I can’t endure an entire life like this. What hell hasn’t this accursed man thrown me into.

She was unable not to love him and want him; the thought made her loins ache. She had piercing pains in her ovaries and she could not understand her longing after so many years. Soon I’ll be an old lady, so why is my body doing this to me. I’d rather perish. Why are you punishing me like this, Almighty God, why are you humiliating me. Even though she did not believe in any divinity; humbug, she could not believe in anything or anybody. We are born, we suffer, and then we perish. C’est tout. Therefore, all her life she thought that a body, her own, had to be given its satisfaction occasionally, and that should take care of this whole frivolous business.

She saw it on her son, she saw it on the two good-for-nothing friends of her son, what her husband had been doing behind her back, and what these good-looking filthy men were doing to poor women. There is not one among them, not one, she could call a human being; there are no exceptions, they are all animals. It was the exceptions that repelled her most because they were the loudest — the murderers, the possessed, the Arrow Cross men, the priests, the psychologists, and the party chiefs.

I must be paranoid, mentally ill; I’m exaggerating, taking things too much to heart.

She could not help noticing that these men did not extricate themselves from one affair before becoming entangled in another. She could not help noticing that they did not bother to keep their disgusting little affairs separate, and, what’s more, shoved and pushed one another around in the fray, with their softer or louder show-off challenges. They thrive in a single large body. These men are not persons but rather identical bundles of impulses that must, in as large a circle as possible and as abundantly as possible, spew forth their sperm.

All this hugely disgusted her and filled her with furious envy.

She positively approved that her son was doing this, at least.

A good thing too that he’s not tying himself down forever to a goose like this Gyöngyvér.

These men, with their single body, simultaneously tempt and deceive all women.

And this woman is really a shapely bitch, nothing more.

What more should her son do with her; at most, he could pass her on to another man so that he too could empty his sperm into her. These rotten men consider women to be nothing but vessels into which to empty their sperm.

Here I go with my eternal Jewish accusations, as my dear István would say.

Instead of defending this birdbrained little Gyöngyvér, this wretched little foundling, against my damned son.

It will overwhelm me, I will drown in my own malice, but what can I do if I hate every one of them; and indeed she hated all women. And that’s also the women’s fault, my mother’s fault; I left Geerte only because, thanks to my mother, I loathe every woman.

And since she loathed every woman, she tended, with some relish, to despise herself.

I did not trust her, I couldn’t trust her, because somehow I did not think it natural that someone should be a woman. What need is there for different sexes in the world, anyway. And in time, there must have been something of the mentally ill in her, because she began to see how she turned her own son into a misogynist, how she imbued him with her own hatred for and aversion to the sexes.

And when her husband infected her, once mildly, once more seriously, and once, to her great astonishment, with crabs, she remained silent, mute, made not a peep, merely endured it. After having consulted her physician, who sent for additional tests even though he had no doubts about the diagnosis and treatment, she merely remarked at the breakfast table that the professor would do well to seek the help of a dermatologist.

To which the man, from the far end of the table, with a single elegant flick of his wrist replied that he had already done that and everything would soon be all right.

I hope you didn’t go to see Szemző.

Dear Erna, you should know me by now, you’ve never had reason to complain about my tact or courtesy.

But why didn’t you warn me, István, she asked him without any recognizable sign of rebuke; she was genuinely curious.

She wanted to understand the man, to see whether their entire life had not been a sheer misunderstanding. Truly to understand, just once, what the other was thinking. Perhaps to understand him now, at this particularly difficult moment.

No, no, answered the man with buttered toast in his hand, from which, as usual, honey dripped onto the tablecloth.

Which, of course, had been changed only that morning and which, because of her husband’s absentmindedness, they would have to change again right after breakfast.

I’m the one who must thank you for your advice, Erna, for your fairness and understanding, Erna, for your kindness.

You are teasing me, István.

You know I am not; you must know that you cast a golden glow on my life. Vous avez pour moi un coeur d’or, ma petite.

My one and only, Erna whispered in response, her eyes swimming with tears.

I worship you, whispered the man, and neither of them moved from the table.

Which is to say that neither of them left his or her half of it.

From which, of course, Erna understood what she already knew: that once again she had dared to come much too close to the man and would have to back off. Something inexplicable and unavoidable was happening in this creature shaped like a man, though not a very spectacular one, whom she despises and loves; and now she might be carrying one of his painful diseases too. In other words, she could not avoid what was happening in the man until she understood him, and by then it might be too late. If fate had inflicted on her this strange, slightly paunchy man, with his narrow bony shoulders, pathologically concave chest, too large hands, thick thighs, and too big head, then this is how things must be. From which it follows logically that, along with him, she had accepted insanity.

He is a leech. And she did not yet allow herself to think of their little girl, who had been killed by the deliberate negligence of this human wild boar, this coyote, this polecat, this eel.

And she did not think of her son either.

But how could she not think about them.

She was living with two men, living under the same roof with two common criminals. In the building that her adored, handsome grandfather had built and left to her. He must not have been very different from these two, she could not help thinking, maybe even meaner than they. But this is what a solid bourgeois upbringing is supposed to do, help one to gauge, understand, and accept every circumstance and situation and then, armed with this knowledge, to resist chaos. Yet occasionally she felt she’d collapse under the spiritual and moral weight of it, which was far greater than her load-bearing capacity. But she never talked of this with anyone. More correctly, it never occurred to her that she could in fact speak to anyone about the peculiarly muddled organizational and economic aspects of her life.

Had I stayed in Venlo with Geerte, I’d have had another, I don’t know what kind of life.

However, couples leading lives similar to theirs, in high social positions, discussed mental problems, concerns about their emotional lives, or even strictly professional matters only when they touched directly on the family’s existence. Similarly, they did not chat about their household problems or daily routines from the standpoint of their emotional lives. Lady Erna had to solve such problems alone, because her husband was weighed down with his scientific work, his correspondence, the required and recommended reading of texts that towered in piles all over the apartment, his public life with its labyrinths and complications, the obligations that went with his official duties, his travels, and his lectures. Their lives were measured out to the hour and minute, which meant spotless shirts that could be changed at a moment’s notice, ties and suits sent to and delivered from the dry cleaner, vests, overcoats, and fur coats, but also rugs, table linen, curtains, and tableware — she had to see to the maintenance of all this. The brass door handles and brass ornaments had to shine brilliantly and at least once every two months the silver dinner set, along with all its accessories, had to be polished. This meant a house where unexpected guests could be welcomed at any time with the greatest reverence, and the same for guests formally invited to dinner. Or where hungry students were to be given used clothing and stuffed with slices of bread spread with goose fat or crunchy goose crackling, scallions, and salted black radish.

Who would not have wanted to break free of this yoke, this terrible treadmill of obligations, at least once a week.

When, of an evening, the professor would suddenly stand up from the table, and this happened at least once or twice a month, and reach not for a bottle of his favorite Hungarian wine, egri leányka or soproni kékfrankos or szekszárdi bikavér, but, having shed his corduroy housecoat for his jacket and hat and, after breathing a gentle kiss on his wife’s tastefully bejeweled hand, leave the apartment and step out on the boulevard, he had a choice of several places to go. The nearest beer hall was in Király Street, but because of its proximity, it could be the most dangerous. The simplest solution was to walk toward Lövölde Square, at the corner of which was a very dark, in the strictest sense of the word barely illuminated, and stinking bar, a plain drinking place with an oily floor, which in Budapest argot was called a stand-up bar, consisting of two enormous rooms that opened into each other; they were always jammed. There, while nursing a red-wine spritzer, the professor could almost always pick out and then quickly pick up a female who suited him. He loved the women here, in the condition they were in, to the point of adoration, though undoubtedly he did not love their persons, not their inner characteristics and not even their pitiful bodies. Lost petit-bourgeois women sunk to the bottom of alcoholism, or bitter proletarian ones filled with brutality. Who did not want anything but a drink. Or, at most, hoped he wouldn’t hit or pummel them but either stroke them or leave them in peace. They were grateful for his stroking, which never ended in the usual brutality; after all, he loved them, each one of them individually. They were so pleased with the refined manners of this peculiar man, with his pleasant smell and with his fee arranged in advance, that they would cling to him, hang on to him, until they reached the next doorway or cluster of bushes, and they never remained dry.

For a twenty-forint bill, they took care of everything very quickly. They were grateful to providence that they could be done with everything so fast and with such a fine gentleman to boot.

If he wanted a higher-quality woman, which happened rarely, a more artful and more sophisticated one, someone in theory more suitable to his social standing, then he continued along the former Queen Vilma Road, under the chestnut trees, to the Moszkva Bar, where once Hedda Hiller used to sing her bittersweet chansons. Love again, always that damned love, again and again. And if he wished to sink as deep as possible into filth, then he could just walk on the boulevard to the Ilkovics. Here he could find whores riddled with nicotine and alcohol, looking worse than ghosts; this was the pits, rock bottom. They never gave hints concerning their origin or condition; at most, they complained or cursed. He could thank these creatures sunk in the swamps of the city for his strongest erections and most elaborate orgasms. Around the railway stations, things were neither clean nor danger-free. Here he could be mugged or knocked out, and he might also run into unemployed, dissolute former colleagues who came to this part of town to warm themselves or have a helping of boiled kale without meat for one forint and forty fillérs.

Out of mercy, the servers would splash some onion sauce on the kale.

Bellardi’s son, who also frequented this place to have kale and watch the whores, had a special ability to remain unseen.

Only Gyöngyvér noticed him.

Every time they ran into each other in the spacious hallway of the Lehrs’ apartment on Teréz Boulevard, by chance, as it were, they caught each other’s eyes and found it hard to let go. While they exchanged a few noncommittal words, they openly and shamelessly gauged each other’s mental and erotic abilities. Bellardi looked deceptively like a little boy, but his gaze and scrutiny made the woman, older than he, gasp for breath and shudder. One of them would be coming, the other going; sometimes Ilona was also there, standing between them to let one of them out and the other one in. This did not keep them from continuing their shameless game.

And one could not claim that between their meetings Gyöngyvér did not daydream about the young man in the personal service of the professor. Who continued to come to the house to correct proofs of the professor’s latest articles and arrange books and papers, even weeks after the professor had gone to the hospital on Kútvölgyi Road.

Gyöngyvér was taken by the suppleness and energy of the frail small body; in her imagination, she contemplated the weight of a feather and the manliness of a reed. I could blow this little boy away like blowing out a candle, like a feather, my voice would make him fly away. I’ll swallow him whole, I’ll suck him like candy, she wanted to say to herself, and she felt the boy, soaked sopping wet with her saliva, along with his innards melting all over her tongue; but his severe look pierced her brain and stopped her imaginings.

Jesus, he can see right into me.

A lunatic, a madman; I shouldn’t start with him, she said to herself, ordering herself to be cautious.

She was afraid of him, yet she longed for the fears and risks of meeting him again. She could not give up wishing this. The boy’s slender childlike body stood at a generous distance from Ágost’s physical attributes. And she began to weave plans to free herself from the monster with as little pain as possible. The monster whom she couldn’t live without. But he was too heavy for her, at least two sizes too big for her, destroying and crushing everything. She would prefer a sweet little child like this, whom she could play with and on whom everything looks sweet and nice.

The young males orbiting around Professor Lehr were in close contact with Ilona. Most of the time it was she who answered the telephone and went to the door when they rang the bell; in her simple way, she judged correctly when she should take the telephone to the professor’s bed, when to deny some calls, and whose messages to put on ice. Although she had never heard of the scientific questions his work was concerned with, she could judge what service or professional connection the famous professor needed, and whose service might further increase the professor’s prestige.

From the time his illness kept the professor in bed and his mental state kept him from appearing in public, Ilona acted as his private secretary. Everyone tried to keep away his actual secretary, a very ambitious and exceedingly nervous woman named Kati Geyer, who had come from the Communist Youth Movement and everyone knew worked for the state security services.

There was no reason to fear her, because for her the weakened professor’s case was closed. Kati Geyer was interested only in people who were in some way important to her career. She came to the apartment to help with the professor’s correspondence and to have the necessary allocations and departmental orders signed.

Ilona learned her role well, and she got along better than Lady Erna did with this impossible sniggering female, who was always shaking her dyed mane, if only because they were both from the country.

And Ilona was particularly keen on ensuring that signs of the professor’s occasional loss or lapses of memory were noticed as little as possible. She arranged visits for the days and hours during which the professor could still show something of his immense knowledge, far-reaching interests, and engaging affability. Lapses of memory have their own strict regularities, of course, but like the feeling of helpless falling in a dream, they are incomprehensible and interminable. Periods of slow improvement would occur in which medical practice could intervene to stabilize the faculty of speech for a few hours or, in favorable weather conditions, a few days before the next regression, the speech being more damaged each time it returned. Whenever she arranged a visit, Ilona had to coordinate the urgent wishes of feared and powerful men, the limited allowances the professor’s physician made, and the professor’s anticipated condition.

Lady Erna was the only one who saw through the little freckled woman’s scheme.

Once she innocently opened the door on them, or who knows, maybe she suspected something; the sight waiting for her in the professor’s book-lined room was so delicate and heartwarming that she silently closed the door.

She never found out whether Ilona had been aware of the silent intrusion.

It was in Erna’s interest not to disturb Ilona in the performance of this service.

Ilona also arranged the little Bellardi’s visits.

He came as he had used to in his student days, though for some weeks, thanks to the professor, he had been working as a researcher at a scientific institute. But he came to read foreign-language works to the professor, who tried to keep his mind off his deadly illness by keeping his mind alert. The professor’s students had to know Latin, had to be fluent above all in German but also in French, so they could read without hindrance and speak flawlessly when it was time to emphasize something; acquiring further languages he left to the personal interest of each student.

On his visits, Bellardi would receive a glass of tap water, sit in the winged easy chair by the window, and not interrupt his reading even when the professor dozed off.

He would politely go back and read the same text again when the patient awoke of his own accord.

They were just passing the Franciscans’ building, which for decades had been wrapped in scaffolding.

Lady Erna again addressed Bellardi very quietly.

Please forgive my inconsiderateness, she said, embarrassed, a remark that only deepened her clumsiness of the moment before. Now the pretense of her embarrassment was important. It was how she wanted to help herself get through this delicate situation and why, relying on the sheer sense of rhythm, she then stopped talking.

I’m at your service, Bellardi called back readily.

Less than a year earlier the friar here had died; for his whole life he had been the spiritual advisor of the family’s men and boys, and he had been Bellardi’s confessor too.

It’s most embarrassing, but would you mind telling me, please, Lady Erna continued in a livelier and sharper tone, after the pause she had made for effect, how is it possible that when last winter, as you mentioned earlier, when you were good enough to take us to the Opera—

To the Erkel Theater, Bellardi corrected the woman.

Now it would be better not to hear the sharp Jewish voice.

He felt as if everything together in one mass were crashing down on his shoulders and chest, all his former happiness in love, turned to torture and anxiety, were falling on him, everything he couldn’t ever confess to the old friar. He had never wanted to ask questions the good friar could probably not have answered. He hated to disappoint the friar, because he felt closer to him than to his father or his father-in-law, whom he truly respected and loved.

He could not have endured the friar’s noncommittal silence.

You’re right, of course, to the Erkel Theater, not the Opera House. But as far as I remember, you did not talk to the professor at all. I can’t get it through my head how that could have been. You and I haven’t been introduced, but the two of you must have met many times in earlier years.

I can certainly confirm that, of course, Bellardi replied, with the boyishly charming smile he used as a substitute for contempt. This time he showed his still strong, white, and irregular teeth.

The professor several times honored me with his attention and engaged me in conversation. In earlier times, I must add.

But then how could it happen.

Bellardi did not reply right away, because he was thinking of something entirely different and didn’t understand how or why. It happened so long ago. And it was pointless to think of such things. And now he could never tell anybody about it; he had no confidant and never would have.

I learned with sorrow from my son about the professor’s critical condition, he said slowly a little later. He would have thought it improper to name the real reason, yet at the same time it would be arrogant and deceptive to remain silent.

And truth to tell, he continued reluctantly, after a while the professor no longer paid attention to me.

On the backseat, both women leaned forward a little and listened carefully, spines straight and heads up.

Bellardi hesitantly continued to weigh things, even though he had said what he said, and ultimately it was not he but his dead confessor who spoke from his mouth. The old Franciscan had been of the opinion that at times there’s no point in avoiding saying something that flaunts one’s virtues or is involuntarily rude. Absent such remarks, one is likely to flaunt something even more unpleasant.

There is nothing more embarrassing than flaunting one’s modesty and humility.

To be honest, I didn’t want to embarrass him, because there are very few people I respect more than him.

He grew weak the moment he said this, but that made him talkative, and for a while they barely let each other get a word in edgewise.

I understand, I do, I’m very grateful that you answered. It was a very nice gesture on your part, understanding my poor husband’s condition.

On the contrary, I regret I couldn’t do more then and can’t do more now.

But as a matter of fact what I really wanted was to ask what has happened to your boy over these many years. I don’t know, I’ve no right to expect answers to such questions. And I’ll understand if you don’t want to answer.

Me, you know, they took me away at dawn from my apartment, but in the morning, without any warning, they carried off my little son too.

You’re not serious.

What could I say that would be more serious than this.

Because in that case, what happened to you is exactly what happened to us. Forgive my incredulity. My older brother was also taken away at dawn. The next day they came back and took away my little nephew.

It took two years for my father-in-law and mother-in-law to find the little boy.

It seems that was their way of doing things.

If it hadn’t been for an influential woman friend of ours, who was in special contact with such circles, they could not have fished him out from where he was. They had changed his name, his mother’s name too; luckily they didn’t change the date and place of his birth.

You’re not serious.

It sounds improbable, I admit, legal nonsense, Bellardi exclaimed, and at that moment many different emotions stuck in his throat.

They did whatever came into their heads.

Legal nonsense, I admit.

Matches our own family story, word for word, believe me.

They spent everything they had on it, whatever they were left with. What they deigned to leave them. But at least they weren’t relocated. That was our great good luck. And our influential friend told my father-in-law whom to bribe.

But where on earth did they find the child, if I may ask. My God, you’ve no idea how similar the stories of the two children are.

They so upset each other with their careless words that they both forgot about Gyöngyvér.

Pardon me, Bellardi said impatiently. Excuse me, but because of the strong wind I couldn’t hear your question.

And only at this moment, after she had spoken, did Erna understand fully that the stories of the two boys were identical in all respects. She shuddered at the thought. After all, Kristóf’s mother also left her child because of a woman, and in that case, how was the story or history to be understood.

She stared the devil in the eye, as if in the bedroom of the house in Venlo she and Geerte had not planned to run away and escape together.

True, they wouldn’t have fled without the children; they planned to escape their familiar world and take all four children with them to the Dutch Antilles.

After all these years, her quondam cowardice and her own flight struck her as a curse. She comprehended for the first time what she had accomplished with this miserable betrayal, of what she had deprived herself. Of nothing, because she made herself a different life, and no matter how she looked at it, her fate and this life were one.

Where, she asked, alarmed, her voice barely audible, if I may ask, where did they find your dear little boy.

She should stop thinking about these women. It was about time that this overpampered Geerte disappeared from her mind.

What a wonderful young man he has turned out to be. My husband is literally amazed by his mental abilities.

You’ll laugh, Bellardi answered and laughed himself, though there was not much joy in the laughter. They looked for him everywhere, at least in Transdanubia, they went to every remote orphanage and reformatory.

They figured it had to be a secret out-of-the-way place and, in the end, they found him in Buda, on Rózsadomb Street, only a few blocks from our apartment.

No, it can’t be, that’s unbelievable.

But it’s true.

You can’t be serious.

Why would I lie. If anything, I’ve been making myself ridiculous with my openness.

The reason I’m asking, man, is exactly because my mother also found my older brother’s son at Emmi Pikler’s place.*

I think that was her name, yes, that was the famous woman’s name, Bellardi answered, contempt making him hesitate, though he was trying to remain cool and neutral when confronted with these bygone matters. Or maybe that was the name of her famous school, I don’t know, probably, but today it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

My mother had to dig our nephew out of the same place too. But Erna of course kept quiet about how they had left the boy’s mother alone in that struggle. Our little Kristóf also had a different name when our mother found him. But my older brother never turned up, we haven’t heard anything about him since.

And she didn’t want to mention who her older brother was, the famous communist who had given his inheritance from his grandfather to the Party. For a short time, he had been minister of reparations and construction and had so enthusiastically and cheerfully shipped every intact or movable machine and other equipment to the Russians, as stipulated in the cease-fire agreement, that even his own party couldn’t put up with it.

Perhaps because of these thoughts, it happened that for the last third of the trip to the hospital no words passed between driver and passengers.

They had to retreat into themselves.

Bellardi was used to being treated as a servant, with his language he seemed to invite this role, but that someone should call him man, as they do with a jobber or ditch digger, that was too much.

And Lady Erna could not mention her brother or what he had done because for long minutes she couldn’t even moan for the pain, which now intermingled with the pain over the loss of her daughter, the betrayal of Geerte, and the dread released by the thought of her husband’s dying.

István, my God, Geerte — as if in her thinning voice she were whimpering or praying silently.

She had to think about the little nitroglycerin tablets that had been gathered off the cab’s dirty floor only a short while earlier, and about her silver pillbox. The only thing she wanted to mention quickly to Bellardi was that they never succeeded in learning anything about her brother’s fate. She also found very little trace of her young daughter. Where they might have taken her or where her bones or ashes were. Might her brother have been in jail together with someone who might still be alive. If they hadn’t beaten him to death the day they arrested him at dawn.

If she let one more sound out of her body, if she squeezed out one more syllable, she was sure to break into a howling sob.

As it was, she only yelped into the noises of the cab’s jouncing on the cobblestones, into the squealing gusts of wind.

As Bellardi drove his cab to the hospital that Monday morning — and when he looked into the rearview mirror to speak or listen to this other person, this lecherous Jewess, and felt compassionate toward her — his memory preferred to take him back to that long-gone summer, recalling every little detail. To the endless clinic corridor where all the doors stood wide open and his steps made an infernal racket. To the brass handle on the door to the ward, which he had to press down; to his own shadow.

His shadow was going to meet Elisa’s shadow.

And then, in all its reality, there lay before him that morning what remained of Elisa.

Both he and Mária Szapáry found some gratification in the half hour or forty minutes they spent sitting together in the noisy corridor; being close in a time of trouble and in the most profound feeling of being in the same situation because they loved the same being. For without hesitation they would, for Elisa, have strangled or murdered with a pistol, hunting rifle, anything, a knife or their bare hands. And their peculiar solidarity was enriched by their being a man and a woman, proportionately entwined with Elisa’s life.

What other human joy could she possibly expect.

Later Bellardi’s father-in-law arrived, which is when Bellardi took his leave of both of them; he felt he had dutifully done all that was humanly possible to do. Szapáry accompanied him to the turn in the corridor, where Bellardi kissed the woman’s forehead and Szapáry kissed him lightly on the mouth.

Vainly, he thought that with a firm decision he could free himself of the pain.

But he took the pain with him and it hadn’t left him since. From the lobby of the clinic he called and gave instructions to his housekeeper and then, as if preparing for a carefree little summer trip, he absentmindedly put the top down, got into his open car, and drove to Mohács. What else could he do if he had already forgiven unhappy Mária Szapáry.

It was high time he transferred his aunt’s house, sold and almost completely emptied, to its new owner so he could collect the money for it.

The blazing summer and the breeze created by his uniform speed managed somewhat to cleanse him of his past. Perhaps only for a few hours, perhaps only for the brief duration of his arrival. Madzar was about to cross the stone-paved yard, was halfway between the veranda and the workshop, when Bellardi arrived late in the afternoon and suddenly, with lots of noise and a playful gait, walked in through the arched gate. Frozen in their interrupted movements, they stared at each other.

Bellardi did not step into the yard, had not even opened the gate completely.

His leather cap sat rakishly on the crown of his head, the wavy tufts of his chestnut hair falling loosely from it; the milk-white skin on his neck and on his face had burned red on the trip. Madzar blushed deeply with joy and dread.

And they did not greet each other.

Perhaps they did not consider formalities, or the lack of them, to be significant. Both felt the presence of the other as the greatest possible surprise. Perhaps there was no formula for a salutation in such an encounter. Madzar was still filled with noisy and blissful memories of the Szemzős’ visit, with the shouting of the little boys, the smell of the Danube, the taste of the woman’s lips, the sensation of her small breasts, and he could see Bellardi had come by neither boat nor train.

In the most significant moments of life, one’s mind is busy with completely inessential, insignificant things.

Bellardi’s brand-new leather cap caught his attention and the fact that Bellardi had come in his new car, which his father-in-law had given him along with the cap.

The Szemzős had left in the afternoon of the previous day, by train, and he had sat on the veranda until dawn, feeling empty and drinking insanely, drinking in the infernal barking of dogs, to forget her, just to forget. But he felt he couldn’t get drunk, not even a little. Just struggling with his mind, fuck, why couldn’t he just pass out. He wanted to wind up under the table. To crack open his torture with moans and whimpers and let all the pain flow out. He trampled one naked foot with the other, alternating them in short intervals, stared at his disgusting toes, writhing like maggots in battlefield corpses.

Unable to wring a single sound out of himself.

Still, what he felt was not pure pain because he had been made permanently happy by the knowledge that with the furniture he was making he could at last reveal his secret self to Mrs. Szemző.

Jealousy tortured him; a sense of deprivation hurt him greatly.

They stood side by side in the great silence and coolly spoke of styles.

He could not tell either of his selves, not the one holding forth on furniture styles or the other, sterner one, so far removed from cool discourse, that he did not like Mrs. Szemző or did not know what Mrs. Szemző liked in him, because he so unbearably wanted her body. Which, on the morning of the previous day, he had had a chance to see displayed in a bathing suit. And when in his workshop, in the steamy afternoon of the same day, in a stolen, not entirely safe moment and in dizzying confusion, they fell on each other, laid hands on, patted, bit, and grabbed each other, hugged and kissed, and with their kisses stamped each other with all the hunger, longing, and desire they had previously stifled and denied, he felt he was touching a taut bow; at the same time he felt on his chest her girlishly tender, trembling breasts.

When he had to get up to urinate, to piss on his mother’s roses, he felt he had managed to get drunk.

He could hardly stagger to the steps without some support.

One can’t urinate with an erect prick.

I’ll piss on it for her, anyway, since I’m already a Hungarian and love my country.

I don’t give a shit about my German mother’s fucking roses.

He could not get a proper hold on his penis because then the urine wouldn’t have started to flow, but he didn’t want to piss on his feet either. Holding it properly would have kept up the erection and blocked the urine. Because of Mrs. Szemző, he’d completely forgotten that for weeks he had been waiting thirstily for Bellardi more than for anybody else. And now he was here. Or perhaps he should fuck this little Izabella what’s-her-name instead of Mrs. Szemző; the one with her scar had been left here for him anyway, and he could tell by her smell that she had nobody. A lonely animal, like me.

Why do I always wind up with women whom others have discarded.

And now he could not remember why in hell he had been waiting for this Bellardi, what could he have wanted from him, from such a man; and because of the rotten women he also couldn’t remember the miserable sentence he had so carefully prepared to surprise Bellardi with, and himself too.

What could I have wanted to tell him, what could I have wanted from him, and about what.

Bellardi shook him on the shoulder, nodded to him that he should come, it was time for them to go, and narrowed the slits of his usually smiling eyes even more.

Madzar greatly missed Bellardi’s permanent smile and disdain for the world; their absence made Bellardi a stranger to him.

He saw that something irreparable had happened to him.

His wordless reply was clear; they should go to the Danube.

Where else.

While the sun is still up.

Then I’ll bring my bathing suit, said Madzar.

Leave it behind, said Bellardi, why make a fuss.

From which he knew where Bellardi wanted to go, the place where pants weren’t necessary, and if only for that reason he did not object.

I’ll tell my mother.

Go ahead, tell her, grumbled Bellardi. I’ll wait for you outside. Why don’t you fuss some more, my friend, go on, worry a little more.

But Madzar turned around from the veranda steps, where the previous night he had several times managed to piss all over his mother’s beloved roses. Within the pungent odor of his own, he unexpectedly began to smell the familiar odor of his father’s urine. Bellardi always and in everything had been more foresighted than he, and Madzar as a child had grown used to following him almost always, and in almost everything, despite the fact that he, Madzar, was the more thoughtful of the two. He usually followed Bellardi without due reflection. There was no need to tell his mother; after all, they were going only a stone’s throw away. If he told her, there’d be no end to the rejoicing, to the feeding, to offering more than necessary, to the familiar display of affected manners.

And meantime the sun would set.

When he and Bellardi decided to do something or took something into their heads, they usually forgot everything else. For which Madzar had suffered many serious slaps on his face. He never knew what would happen; with Bellardi things kept changing, growing, multiplying, losing their boundaries, becoming almost incomprehensible. He took his place next to him in the fancy car, unkempt, unwashed, with a two-day growth of beard, wearing the work clothes he had not changed since the day before, and even before he slammed the car door shut Bellardi stepped on the gas.

It was a Maybach Cabriolet with red-and-black leather seats, red gearbox, its dashboard also covered with the same red leather.

As if on purpose, Bellardi first made his perfect automobile cough and jolt, as if he couldn’t get it past its basic starting mode, but seconds later, smoothly and with great speed they flew along Duna Row, lined with round-crowned elm trees, which followed the course of the river on the reinforced-concrete embankment.

They could smell the water.

He slowed down near the church of the Roman Catholic Episcopacy, where a majestically swaying high-piled hay cart, drawn by oxen, approached. Farther away, nervously bleating goats were being herded along the road. Women on foot carried baskets on their backs, and from Fürdő Street, boys and girls were rolling out on their bicycles, probably the local jeunesse dorée.

I realized I was wrong, Madzar said slowly, now remembering his cleverly prepared sentence. He wanted to be done with his deceitful confession, to avoid dealing with Bellardi’s foolish conspiracy and his whole secret life.

But he was not accustomed to insincerity and betrayal.

It’s a good thing you gave me time to think it over, he said, glancing cautiously at Bellardi.

What did you realize, what’s wrong, Bellardi asked, his tone hostile; he kept looking impassively at the increasing traffic before them. As if he had not felt the other man’s eyes on his face, or as if with his mind’s eye he were following a hovering figure whom only he could see.

I changed my mind, Madzar replied, shocked.

What mind, what did you change, that’s what I’m asking, Bellardi said, becoming irritated.

You told me that at the appropriate moment you would come for my answer.

Bellardi said nothing for a long while; the silence was icy. As if he were busy with the thickening traffic and could say nothing until they got out of it. When they had left the boat station behind and then the silk factory with its long brick wall, the riverside road again became empty and he could once again speed up.

When, twenty-three years later, he thought about this long, deep silence of his, they happened to be driving past the jail on Margit Boulevard.

What I told you then, he finally said, unexpectedly, after Madzar had given up on getting a response, was that I would like to spend the rest of my life with you.

You must have thought I was joking.

Madzar turned his head slowly toward Bellardi, looking at him in alarm, even though alarm is always rapid.

What could he say to this.

Leave off with your embarrassing jokes.

Everything else is delusion, Bellardi replied with his most playful world-disdaining smile. Believe me, this was my only sincere sentence, perhaps it will be the first and last one of my entire life.

You don’t have to call special attention to it, Madzar replied hoarsely, this makes it even more embarrassing.

I meant everything else was evasion, prevarication, and who can remember all the things I rambled on about and when.

But you can understand, can’t you, that I also thought about your patriotic fantasies.

And now I ask you to forget them, please.

Should I understand, then, that in the meantime you and your friends have dropped your plans concerning me.

Now it was Bellardi’s turn to look at his friend.

My reluctance must have made a discouraging impression, I understand, Madzar continued, to his friend’s curious disdainful look.

This must have been the test. I have to acknowledge I passed the screening.

A rare moment, given that Bellardi detected offended vanity in Madzar’s melodious voice. Which he liked. That with his offense he’d managed to penetrate Madzar so deeply.

If you reject me, my little friend, I also reject you.

We’ll see who is the stronger.

Only now did Madzar notice how alarmingly his one and only friend had diminished in his shirt and pants while he had waited for him in vain all summer.

How the bitter grooves of his face had deepened.

How chapped his lips were.

But now I must tell you something entirely different, Bellardi said dryly.

No, not that, exclaimed Madzar to himself, guessing instantly what kind of story Bellardi wanted to tell him with his shockingly chapped lips that almost looked like one large sore.

Actually, his friend continued relentlessly, I wanted to tell you about it in April.

The very moment, he thought to himself, when I saw you on the deck of my ship. How good to see him; he had been my only friend, I’ll tell him about it, he’s my man.

Which made him, as a hot flush would, love the other man even more.

We’re not yet thirty, Madzar shouted desperately, his words sounding like a thunderclap because of his deep voice.

I thought these things then, now I can say them aloud.

It’s possible I can’t tell you even now, Bellardi continued, as if he had not heard or understood the reason for his friend’s shout.

You don’t have to be afraid of me.

Madzar didn’t want to hear from his friend’s lips what he could know from his own life; he did not want to hear about Elisa.

He wanted to force Bellardi; they should not yet give up hope, should not seal their fate by talking.

Which the other man instantly understood, how could he not understand his friend’s insane and sober rejection, and he stopped talking.

That is why Madzar loved him.

No matter how insistent he was about something, for the sake of a little sensible love he could give it up. But it was hard for Bellardi to stick to the cavalier exchange. He could not quite understand what the other man had not understood. He could not accept his friend’s incomprehension because he could not explain to himself why, for the sake of his little son, he should remain all alone in life.

They had not left town when, just past Gottlieb’s abandoned lumberyard, the paved road ended at Calvin Street. And then he’d have no choice but to kill his little boy before ending his own miserable life. The cloudless blue summer sky expanded above them with a flock of swallows preparing for evening. Madzar wanted to ask Bellardi what his view was on why he, Madzar, always had to fall in love with married women. What sort of weakness was this. That’s what they should be talking about. And he’d ask Bellardi to name this weakness of his, no matter how harsh his verdict might be. He should not be spared. But he did not ask Bellardi, and therefore Bellardi could not answer him. Why does he have to snatch these used-up ladies from their boring marriages. Why does he always fall into the same trap. And if this keeps happening because that’s his destiny, then why do these same women always destroy him instead of letting him pull them out of their predicaments. Why wouldn’t Mrs. Szemző go with him to America or anywhere else. And why wouldn’t she go as far as letting him fuck her at least once.

Why don’t they let the new life find its voice in them.

Wasn’t he worth at least that much.

The screeching of the swallows above them overwhelmed the noise of the engine.

Sweet Irma, it was the first time he addressed her like this when talking to himself, why can’t we.

He did this, busied himself with this, so he would not have to grasp Bellardi by the shoulder.

Could they possibly predict my inconstancy.

Meanwhile the bright and vast vanishing greenness of Réti Lane filled their eyes as their ears were filled with the swallows’ evening screeches. Which drastically changed many things; it turned their mood around. Their mutual rejections made them finally turn to each other. With its enormous willows looking like uncombed heads of hair, the Cigányzátony, or Gypsy Shallows, lay before them, splitting the river into two channels; these shallows, obeying the force of currents over the centuries, had become a romantic island.

Bellardi drove slowly along the high embankment.

Their thoughts had retrieved so much from the past, immersed them so generously in the present, that there could be no room for talking about anything.

But Bellardi felt once again that Madzar’s sheer presence had a calming effect on him.

He looked for a place where they could drive off the embankment. On the dangerously damp soft grass he wouldn’t be able to get close to the willows on the shore. By the time they got out of the car, both of them were dazed and a bit woozy. Bellardi had had nothing to eat or drink since morning, but in his current giddiness he did not notice his hunger. They sank to the bottom of a green sea in their daze. High up in the blue sky, swallows went on twittering. Bellardi sought a physical antidote for giddiness by undressing hastily and provocatively; Madzar followed him hesitantly. Telling himself that Bellardi’s showing off had no effect on him. And in fact it didn’t, because he didn’t let it. Bellardi threw his things back into the car, his white shirt, his white linen pants; Madzar put his things, carefully folded, on a black-and-red leather seat. When Bellardi stepped out of his brightly striped white poplin underpants, Madzar took off his own. For a while they stood naked on either side of the car, both of them bashfully enjoying the warm air, laced with cool currents, on their nakedness.

Because neither of them wanted to look at the other just yet.

The sun’s disc glowed at the rim of the western sky.

And the little Cabriolet remained at the vapor-filled bottom of the slowly graying green meadow, like a colorful insect at rest, wings spread wide.

The willows on the shore swallowed up their figures. A little later they showed up on the sandy stretch near the water. But before they threw themselves in, after more than a decade’s absence, after many eventful years during which they’d barely thought of each other, they took a long moment to observe each other. They did this simultaneously and unreservedly. As people who couldn’t do without it. They did not stand too close together. They acknowledged with a certain satisfaction that during their adult years spent without each other everything had changed and yet nothing at all had happened to the other’s body. This was beyond comprehension yet its reality could not be denied.

And from then on, everything happened the way it had happened so many times before in the heart of time.

Bellardi hit the water first, snorted and splashed about a little, and then began to swim with large strokes toward the opposite shore; his crawl was impressive, his feet fluttered powerfully. Madzar followed him in a more deliberate clumsy manner. The lateral arm of the river had no significant current; still, at the deepest part its strength caught them and carried them along. Bellardi looked back occasionally; they both tried to keep up the tempo and stay on course.

With his denser musculature, Madzar resisted the current more, but he was slower.

Bellardi did not wait for him when he reached the other shore; he quickly disappeared into the island’s vegetation, flaming red in the advancing twilight. They did not see each other among the trees, where every year, because of repeated inundations, wild undergrowth sprang up in the sunny spots. They signaled to each other with hooting and ululating sounds; they signaled their belonging to each other. When Bellardi didn’t ululate for a long time, Madzar’s hoots sounded impatient. He had to be ready for Bellardi not replying on purpose.

Even as a young child he had liked to toy with the idea of disappearing.

At such moments, heavy with the other one’s sudden absence, the riparian woods suffused with light began ominously to close in on Madzar. But Bellardi always waited for him on the shore. Madzar could count on that.

Where the world finally opened wide and the broader branch of the mighty river showed itself with its raw power and the colors that revealed its depth.

Madzar was afraid of it, but Bellardi could not resist trusting it.

Madzar was afraid that even after these many years Bellardi still knew no caution or self-restraint. For a while they traipsed around on the stony shore, letting the water dry on them, enjoying being naked, and with occasional glances trying to gauge what the other one was planning to do or how he was managing.

The edge of the opposite riverbank and the woods reaching deep into Mohács Island were improbably red in the setting sun. In the empty sky, however, the moon was already shining hazily over the water. From far away, somewhere from the endless plain on the island, the low sound of a cowbell and sharp little yelps, the barking of nervous shepherd dogs, could be heard. But mainly they heard the plashing and lapping of water breaking on the shore in uneven thrusts. The creaking and grating of stones, pebbles, and shells under their feet. Occasionally a nearby splash made by a jumping fish; the brief flash of a slick body followed by a graceful downward arc back into the water. The current had a steady, uniform whisper, like a susurration of silks rubbed together, as varying masses of water of varying temperatures drifted and rolled over one another. The willows above them were quiet now except for an occasional solitary drip.

The great summer heat remained motionless in the air, despite the proximity of the water.

What madness had they got themselves into now; there was no other name for it, madness, insanity.

Not even a childish or adolescent madness, because neither as children nor as adolescents would they have started something like this so late in the day.

And now it was Madzar who headed for the water first, Bellardi following him only when, fighting the strong current along the shore, Madzar popped up to the surface. Then Bellardi took off too. It had often happened like this in their childhood; Madzar would be first to throw himself into some madness that Bellardi had cooked up quietly and treacherously, just so he didn’t have to follow Bellardi.

A good ten minutes must have gone by before they began to look for each other in the water. They were well into the middle of the river, where speed is speed and water is water. There is nothing but water and speed. One can feel how much energy is lost by a careless movement of the head or a searching look, and how the place of the lost energy is filled with the all-powerful force of the river. Which within a split second can change irreversibly, setting back one’s personal situation and chances. Though here, in the middle of the mighty water, the river is harmless.

With its innocently smooth current, it can take one straight to eternity.

In the middle of the river, where the enormous mass of water with its changing surface and refraction of light blinds everyone, Bellardi had to be careful that nothing he wanted to tell Madzar would reach his consciousness, especially Elisa’s dying.

He had to keep himself on the surface of his consciousness and to continue with his strokes on the surface of the water.

It seems that the opposite shore, bright red with the last rays of the sun, toward which you are heading with all your most efficiently dispensed strength and strictly controlled breathing, is being pulled away from you, taken farther and farther away with incredible alacrity. They wasted much energy, had no idea how much, did not find each other on the endless surface of the water for the longest time. It’s the vigorously changing mass of the surface water that blinds one. Eyes cannot cope with so many consecutive and overlapping changes. And the mind gapes vacantly when it has nothing to comprehend over the terrible depth below it. While in fact one should feel most secure in the middle of the river, where there is no whirlpool and seemingly nothing needs to be done in order to progress.

One begins to fear and tremble.

Theoretically one should not look around until one is close enough to the wildly retreating opposite shore, let alone think or rise out of the water.

Not become paralyzed by the terror of existence.

And then they both ascertained each other’s location. Madzar seemed to have risked more.

If you break the rhythm of your strokes for even a second when swimming upstream, the current will begin to carry you back, and then it is very hard to reclaim your physical independence from the mass of water rising from the depths of the river.

Not only are you afraid, you also begin to feel cold.

When they looked around and acknowledged each other’s position and instantaneously gauged the necessary reference points on the impossibly reddish shore, still retreating, they both knew they had as much ahead of them as the distance they had already covered. Bellardi had always been faster, he was a little closer to the shore but affected more by the current, while Madzar with his stronger, more stubborn strokes remained more or less on the course he had set with his eyes; the current had not deflected him too much.

It must have taken another eight minutes before they reached the shore. And there, in the heavy silt, they had to walk lifting their feet high.

They felt happy when the warm air fully embraced their naked bodies.

There they stood again, basking in the paradisiacal abundance of warmth and gentleness, jumping, hawking, spitting, shaking the water from their ears, wiping their eyes, their bodies shivering foolishly, of which they were ashamed before each other, they were slapping and rubbing themselves, both of them thickly covered with goose bumps, their teeth chattering.

In their momentary condition, they did not seek each other’s closeness.

That is when the last red trace of twilight vanished from the shore, though an orange reflection turning into hues of lilac remained, which made the moon shine more brightly and show its outline more brightly in the blueness.

They looked at each other from a distance, only to see if the other was there, all of him. That’s all they wanted to see; though, a little bit, this was like mutually acknowledging their physical condition that had let them run aground in their mad adventure.

To see if there was still a way back.

The water must have carried them about a kilometer and a half from the tip of Cigányzátony. On foot they would have to cover twice that distance to be back again at their starting point.

But it was better not to think about it.

It would be dark soon. There would be hardly any reference points in the water. And when they happily reached the other shore, they would still have to swim across the river’s smaller channel.

Now, however, they must warm up. They should not jump and run around too much; it was important to preserve energy and keep from cutting their feet on shells.

When their teeth stopped chattering they lay down at a respectable distance from each other. They did warm up a little on the slowly cooling sand, and Madzar even dozed off after a while. He opened his eyes to see Bellardi squatting at his head. The world around them was somewhat cooler and full of stars; he felt the warmth emanating from the other’s body. That he was lying on the sand in the heat emanating from his friend. Stars now penetrated the still-blue sky.

He sat up. Down here, on earth, it was dark enough for them to start out.

For a while though, he observed what this male image of his own soul was looking at.

In truth, already in April I wanted to tell you, Bellardi repeated, his words heavy, that Elisa left me for good, and you’ll be surprised to know that she did it because of Mária Szapáry.

Madzar said not a word; he would not have had the strength to breathe enough air to form the words.

They looked at the moon together, not daring to look into each other’s eyes, at the glowing of its cold outline above the water.

She called me at dawn yesterday to tell me Elisa had had a cerebral hemorrhage. That I should hurry if I still wanted to see her.

Madzar cried out involuntarily, or rather he moaned.

Bellardi had to get up in response to this so the other one would get up too.

Now they looked at each other, also held each other somehow, but their nakedness stopped them. They could not have known what the other one was thinking; no one could ever know. They were standing in the warmth of each other’s skin, and Madzar felt very fortunate, though he tried to talk himself out of this feeling because it was inappropriate just then. The movement begun could not be completed. There was so little chance of completing it that he thought it better to get away from the place.

He thought that regardless of the occasion, regardless of Elisa’s death, touching each other should be repeated at least every ten years, so that his life, despite all the misfortunes, would be a fortunate one. Bellardi, however, thought he should continue what he had started.

And then, as they were, they set off, up on the darkening riverbank.

Neither of them could squeeze out a word.

As Bellardi followed Madzar, who was finding his stride, and could see nothing but the powerful thighs, large buttocks, and stooping back with its slabs of muscles, he felt that, yes, this was when he should continue his story about Elisa. Because of the enormous happiness that was his now, he could no longer keep his secrets locked within himself, the terrible suffering he had to endure in the last months.

Gyöngyvér sat sunk into herself, pale, sucking in her lips, abandoned for long minutes, motionless.

It would have to happen differently because he could not speak. He could not surrender himself to someone who probably knew everything about him. He walked in the footsteps of the beloved being, and that seemed satisfactory for some time. On a summer evening like this, it grows dark very slowly and tactfully. And they had to hurry. They would not have had time for a detailed confession. Neither of them had ever learned from anyone, perhaps they should have learned from each other, how to talk about their feelings. Suffering has no language, and its muteness only deepens it. Later they lost their way in the darkness, for a long time they lost track of each other, they could not find the tip of the island and the water carried them both past it. They each had to swim alone in the night.

Although the moon lit up a riverbank opposite them, it was as though they could no longer be sure which bank was pulling away from them so rapidly. They swam, worked their lungs and muscles, swam on, alone and abandoned, and they did not reach it, did not reach the far shore.

It probably couldn’t have happened otherwise, though it would have been impossible to give up what happened.

Perhaps he should have taken Bellardi into his arms, right there on the riverbank.

Gyöngyvér in the cab could think of nothing else either; she was continuously compelled to think of that one thing, never again.

And if she could think of nothing else, how could she free herself from all the various senses of never-again. Her body filled with all the sensations contained in never-again. There were many kinds of pain, suffering, each according to its kind, and much pleasure, much lightness, and joy.

It would have been impossible to distinguish among them.

And she could not possibly live by his side, in his icy apathy.

Could not live without him.

And, because of her self-respect, she was the one who should initiate their breakup, she must take the first step.

I’ll move out.

They will humiliate her.

If she doesn’t go away, these Lehrs will humiliate her more than anyone ever had, anywhere and at any time. If she doesn’t manage to say tonight, I’m moving out.

It’s over.

If he does it again in front of her, if he dares, and won’t let her close to him.

You must be a pig if you can beat your meat in front of me and not even look at me. But at least I had the chance to see what men do with themselves. Now I know everything about you pigs, you lousy wretches.

Yet she felt there was no humiliation she could not endure. If only she could stay with him.

But he should spurt it on her, spurt his semen on her instead of spluttering his come on the floor, not on the parquet floor, so Ilona could see what the pig had done; how could anybody be such a filthy pig.

Lady Erna watched the young woman silently as they left Moszkva Square behind them.

You’re so quiet, Gyöngyvér, my dear, you look unusually pale, she said in the backseat of the Pobeda, her voice quite loud though she still held herself aloof.

Listen to me, Ágost, Gyöngyvér kept saying to herself, because she wanted to rehearse what she would tell him that evening.

It’s over, I should have known it would be over because of you, but now it really is, everything is over between us.

After what you did to me last night.

And she heard Lady Erna saying something to the effect that she sincerely hoped everything was all right.

Except I might faint, but I wouldn’t say that to you aloud.

Lady Erna has nothing to worry about.

What a lousy, rotten old woman, she thought, as rotten as her little son. What could be all right, what in the fuck could be all right.

But heedlessly she begged Lady Erna’s pardon, she said everything was perfectly all right, she was only ruminating on something.

Ruminating on what, what was she ruminating about, Lady Erna cried with an offensive laugh.

She’d have given anything to know what Gyöngyvér had to ruminate on so thoroughly.

Luckily the other person can’t know it.

Aunt Nínó should not worry about her.

Well, she has enough to worry about Ágost. Who keeps disappearing. That’s the cause of her heart trouble, and the constant maternal worries have ruined her general health.

Gyöngyvér has no idea how much.

The moment they get to the hospital, she will call him, Gyöngyvér responded in her servile voice.

What did Aunt Nínó think he’d been doing to her. That maybe he’d made Gyöngyvér an exception.

No, not a chance.

He’s rude.

Says, I’ll pick you up at six.

He’s not there at eight or even at ten.

Something’s come up — hard to believe, but that’s all he says.

But what has come up, Ágost, my dear.

Unfortunately she always talks to him as if she’s already forgiven him for everything, in advance, for anything.

How could she be kinder or more polite to him.

He doesn’t answer.

And why didn’t you call me, Ágost, my dear, to tell me that something’s come up.

He has no explanation for the simplest things, acts as if he hadn’t even heard me.

Of course she would try to reach him, to find him.

He just keeps staring with his big eyes.

It’s very insolent of him to cause his own mother so much grief.

And at a time like this, added Lady Erna and, quite unexpectedly, still somewhat mellowed by her wickedness and sentimentality during the previous minutes, she cried out, then cut short the sound and swallowed her tears. Though she felt at home in Gyöngyvér’s company because of the younger woman’s submissive tone, she also pitied her almost as much as she did herself.

That’s very kind of you, Gyöngyvér, and it will be important to do, since I think we won’t have much time.

Lady Erna could count on her, absolutely.

Because if she couldn’t find him, she was sure she would find one of the boys.

They were still calling to each other, seemingly in vain, when they both reached the shore on that enchanted night, which they felt to be endless.

I can always leave him a message if I can’t reach him otherwise, that he should come right away to Kútvölgyi Hospital.

After continued and desperate hooting, they found each other, teeth chattering.

Or if I can’t find the boys, their secretary will surely be at her desk, by the phone.

As if it were the world’s greatest miracle that neither of them had drowned in the river and suddenly they were both standing there among the pale moonlit trees, their bodies trembling, only an arm’s length apart.

But then, shaking and trembling, they had to look for Bellardi’s abandoned car, and he did not even hear what the two women behind him were chattering about.

They looked for it so long in the darkness punctuated with the hooting of owls that they thought the entire night would be spent in the search and that they were merely dreaming that it was possible to find anything.

From then on they said not a word to each other; in the moonlit darkness they even restrained the chattering of their teeth, so that they’d have absolutely nothing to do with each other, not even what chattering teeth might betray.

They could reveal nothing about themselves to each other, and mainly not their weakness, nothing about the fallibility of their bodies.

There was a terrible chance that they might loose their infernal wrath on each other’s goose-bumpy body.

They would have loudly reproached each other for something for which they could not reproach themselves. As if they had lost each other because of each other. They could not find the damn car with their clothes in it because of him; it was his fault, that damned other one.

Luckily they were stubborn and determined enough to hold their peace, though each felt strongly the silent wrath and hatred of the other.

And when he finally discharged the two women in front of the hospital and they, tugging on their gloves and holding their hats against the wind, slowly made their way up the steps, which remained blindingly white even under the overcast sky, Bellardi could hardly comprehend that in his unfolding life this might have been the happiness which until now had not proved worthy of even being mentioned.

A completely different, strange life that might have been his if it had found its substance in him, not only resistance and toleration. His happiness could not escape him, though it did not possess him; until this very moment, he had not even acknowledged that it was precisely with this pain and this lack that happiness did not escape him. There was no continuation, and the beginning had vanished in obscurity. Once, a long time ago, his alien life with all its futility and unexpected pleasure had snatched him up from the bottom of unhappiness to take him to itself, body and soul, as an empty object, into its iron fist, and then, just as unexpectedly it had dropped him and left nothing behind except the deadly bleakness of boredom and fatigue, war, humiliations, jail, and privations.

He had to get across it.

Now it was wringing his heart.

He did not know why he should have to get across it or whether that bleakness would even have a far side.

At any rate, he had no strength left to turn the key in the ignition.

And there was the realization that with Lojzi Madzar and Elisa he had indeed tasted and enjoyed the happiness of being privileged, however their story ended or had not even started.

That is the sum of what was; everything else would begin only now.

Leaning across the rim of his consciousness, he managed to comprehend the strangeness of his condition; I wouldn’t have this much strength left, I shouldn’t have even this much strength, but actually, I’m not surprised.

I was still young then, a young man. I could swim across the Danube at Mohács with my young friend, a number of times too, and now I can’t turn the damn key in the ignition.

Back then I also knew I was swimming across my death, which I enjoyed immensely. What I enjoyed was that despite all my misfortunes my muscles and nerves functioned flawlessly in face of the elements.

In the hospital lobby, decorated with tropical plants, palm trees, and giant ficuses, inspired by the fascist spirit of wondrous sterilization and furnished in the style of imperial modernity, whose coffered ceiling was supported by smooth marble columns, and in which at this hour not a soul was to be found, the porter showed Gyöngyvér where the telephone booth was.

This hospital was perhaps the last edifice left in the city that had once dreamed of a Hungarian empire, before everything collapsed.

Follow me as soon as you can, Lady Erna motioned to her from the elevator that was to take her up to the psychiatric ward on the top floor where the professor was being treated for brain softening.*

Looking out of the spacious glass phone booth while she waited, dialed, and then talked, Gyöngyvér noticed that the pike-gray Pobeda was still parked in front of the hospital.

She spoke to the secretary; none of the boys was in, but she managed to arouse the secretary’s curiosity as well as her willingness to help since they were talking about a matter of life and death, and Ágost Lippay’s father literally had only a few hours left to live. She saw the pike-gray Pobeda make a sharp turn in front of the building, its wheels screeching; it barely missed slamming against the sidewalk across the street. Gyöngyvér almost cried out. And then the cab pulled into the hospital parking lot but stopped as if there were no marked parking spaces or as if the engine had been suddenly throttled.

They hadn’t told him to wait; it was very suspicious, what this Bellardi was doing in the parking lot.

She could not give him her full attention because the secretary on the phone was promising that she’d try to track down the boys right away.

And as if she were saying.

Where.

What are you saying.

Track down the boys where, Gyöngyvér shouted, because there was much noise around her now.

She thinks all three of them are there, the secretary said, involuntarily raising her voice at the other end of the line. They can’t be anywhere else, she shouted. No doubt about it, today they seem to be staying a little longer than usual.

The poor things, sometimes they work at night too.

A bus passed by on Kútvölgyi Street, going uphill, its engine loud, and Gyöngyvér could not hear where the secretary thought Ágost and the boys might now be. She was relieved that he was not with another woman who might take him away from her, so she wouldn’t have to break with him tonight.

You can count on me, shouted the otherwise lazily indifferent woman, I’ll do it right away.

But where are they, for God’s sake, Gyöngyvér insisted, what did you say, I didn’t get it.

That’s the part I didn’t get.

I’ll get to them, Gyöngyvér, leave it to me, don’t worry, I will.

You must have other things to do now.

You don’t have to worry about this.

But despite all her promises, the secretary did not manage to find them. Gyöngyvér put down the receiver, calmed herself, and, with a last glimpse at the cab, headed for the elevator.

As if being able to drive his cab into the lot had been a great accomplishment. Bellardi took off his worn leather cap and did not understand why he was perspiring. In the oppressive dimness he leaned on the steering wheel for a while to rest a little. He was ashamed that one of the wheels had hit the sidewalk, as if his greatest concern now were damage done to the cab, property of the state-owned taxi service. However, not only his forehead was covered with perspiration. As soon as his head touched the steering wheel, he felt that his bare neck was soaking wet, which made him feel cold.

But why am I cold if I’m so hot, which I can’t feel.

I don’t feel anything, I’m becoming numb.

This is the reason that in the darkness descending about his shoulders he had to recall the particular summer night that most likely had accepted his life and absorbed it. How curious, how his shoulders throbbed and how weighty the past proved to be.

When his entire naked body trembled.

As if, at the sight of the unknown future, he were trembling for life, fearful of what was ahead because of his abandoned life. The life he would have gladly given, all his life, to Elisa, and had feared — he now at last realized — giving to Madzar. He saw how helplessly Madzar’s naked body was trembling only an arm’s length away; Madzar could not control his either. And perhaps it had been in his power to stop or relieve the trembling.

But his armpits and chest became drenched under the ice-cold shirt, his loins and, oddly, the crook of his knees too; he could feel sweat dripping down his calves.

The secretary could not reach the boys because at the end of the glass-covered corridor of the Lukács Baths, nobody bothered with the telephone ringing in the cabin attendant’s booth. It rang insistently and long and then it ceased for a short while only to begin anew a little farther away in the public phone booth.

The bench, on which a little while ago and under the indignant gaze of the new attendant the three friends had been lying in one another’s laps and arms, was now empty; those attractive men, with their choice rudeness and equally choice gentleness, had been trying to keep Ágost from another attack of despondency. The realization had never reached Gyöngyvér’s awareness that the man she loved, whom she would have to leave during the approaching evening, was a seriously afflicted and endangered melancholic. The thought would have paralyzed her or would have ruined her amorous enthusiasm, which she considered a gift more precious than anything else in the world.

She could not have imagined that with her enthusiasm she had failed to reach, let alone mitigate, the other person’s weltschmerz.

At this moment, André Rott’s cabin stood empty. Unquestionably the most envied cabin even among the most privileged bathing guests, it was the very last in the row of cabins, next to the bathing master’s booth and the stairs going up to the sun terrace. In front of it was the famous bench on which one could lounge, sunbathe from spring to fall, receive guests and chat with them, not to mention the public phone at hand on which, in contrast with all other public telephones in Budapest, one could receive calls. A short while ago, Rott had had only enough time to throw off all his clothes and, with a certain physical repugnance, put on his wet bathing trunk before dashing off.

Events, running on various tracks, now followed at fever-pitch speed.

When a few moments earlier, as the ambulance people had put the young man slightly injured during his epileptic fit on a stretcher and taken him away, the prime minister’s private secretary appeared in the corridor, having come from the steam bath; he was still red and perspiring. A rapidly balding, not very tall man with a slight limp, who, according to his official title, was head of the prime minister’s secretariat with the rank of cabinet minister, had arrived through the secret side door, which invisible hands closed behind him.

He went about the world as unimpeded as if he could walk through walls.

As he passed, he motioned to André Rott, who was just putting on his socks, to follow him, go for a swim with him, and with his thumb pointed upward, signaling that celestial persons had ordered something very important.

And Rott knew very well who the celestial ones were in this instance.

The young man’s protestations were in vain, he begged them not to take him to the hospital, he had had this problem many times before, in the Gellért nobody paid attention to it, and in a little while everything would be all right.

Of course everything would be all right.

He should not worry.

Just a little dizziness, that’s all he feels.

His head nearly split with pain; that was the truth, a sharp throbbing pain that sometimes remained stuck in his brain for days, making him vomit a lot of the time, but he kept quiet about this because the doctors could not help him anyway.

See, he can stand up already.

Whenever this happened to him, all he wanted to do was walk out on the world or hide at the bottom of abandoned mouse holes and shut out every bit of light. But Rózsika, the ticket taker, with her blood-red beads, her thick neck layered with rings of fat, pushed him back down, did not let him sit up; she had the same kind of blood-red beads on her massive wrists and in her small ears.

They rattled softly with her every movement.

You, now listen to me, my child, you may have a concussion. Don’t ever forget that, my sweet Jani.

And that means you must not move.

Everybody knows that.

I’m just telling you so you won’t forget it. You’re lucky you didn’t split your head on the faucet. I can hardly believe it; you missed it by a hairsbreadth when you fell, my God.

She followed them, she walked with them across the inner courtyard with the plane trees, and when they stopped for a moment she would stroke the young man’s limp hands, arms, and shoulders, his marble-pale forehead. The stretcher bearers stopped and changed direction several times under the storm-beaten wet trees, discussing loudly to which building the physician on duty had asked them to take the patient. All the while Rózsika whispered in a voice sweet as honey that he should not be afraid because she would not leave him, she would go everywhere with him, she will take care of everything but absolutely everything.

In the ice-cold wind she gathered the thick hand-knitted sweater about her, and the strangest thing was that in the following years she kept her promise. To the general indignation of her friends, colleagues, and relatives, she did not leave the young man, and they learned that the young man clung to her no less ardently once he left his little fiancée for Rózsika.

For a few steps the cross-eyed chief attendant also followed the stretcher in his white short-sleeved shirt and his white trousers tight as a drum on his paunch and buttocks. His wooden-soled slippers clapped along as they walked. He was turned back by the security people streaming in from the steam bath to take up their observation posts around the pool, in the corridors, and at other important points of the building as required by the presence of a high-ranking visitor.

Of course Wolkenstein, known here by his Hungarian name, János Kovách, could not see any of this because a moment earlier he had finally had the chance to take his chilled limbs and disappear behind the sailcloth curtains, where hot, unadulterated medicinal water gushed freely from the shower heads in great spurts, smelling like rotten eggs, just as it burst forth from the thermal spring. He shampooed his gray head, rubbing it pleasurably, and then did the same to his substantial limbs, which over time had grown a little heavy; he worked up a foam, his strong hands gliding as he massaged himself while over the gurgling water he sang at the top of his voice.

Ágost, however, did hear from the other end of the corridor the relentless ringing of the telephone call looking for him. He was quickly getting dressed in his cabin. He thought the Lukács cabins were disgusting, smelling of various bodily exhalations and of the insecticide scattered everywhere against cockroaches. He had no intention of waiting for the others; he wanted to decamp alone. He had had enough of them and of this morning. He’d had it up to here with their insipid political arguments. He did not understand why these men, so full of hostile sentiments, could be his friends. He felt anxious, though he knew he could not afford to. Their opinions did not differ, really, yet they could not be reconciled. He could not imagine what he would do with his unhappy life, which was probably unsuited for happiness. They should spare one another all this awkward strutting about. Waste of time. He was bored with everybody always having to have a different opinion, why does the world need different views. He had no sensible answer. And the wind was knocking about outside. They never got anywhere with their opinions. The wind raised the mist and blew it about; gusts of air continually lifted, perturbed, slid across, and bared the surface of the water.

There was now no one in the men’s pool except two closely watched persons.

Ágost was firmly convinced that man was not a political animal, that was too flattering a definition, but a chattering animal. And where politics are not made but only endured, as was the case in this cunt-size country, where only servants and gentry prattle, there’s no point in opening one’s mouth to debate political issues.

How could they have suspended their argument if this conviction of his so infuriated both his two friends, albeit for different reasons.

While the storm raged unabated above the pool André Rott tried to remain one stroke behind Karakas, who spoke to his subordinates only when he reached the end of the pool. On the opposite wall, the big hand of the electric clock impassively kept clicking away on its axis.

Another hour went by; it now showed 11:20.

Any number of people might accompany Karakas on his early- or late-morning wanderings between the steam bath and the pool. He could instruct his underlings as he pleased — to let him have a towel, not that wet one, the other, the dry one, to give him his swimming cap or take away his bathrobe or, after a few years of suspended activity, to renew the construction of the Budapest subway or to start an equally large project. With insiders like André he would discuss strictly confidential matters that in the life of every state belong in the category of destructive secrets. He would also see petitioners, at least those whom his always invisible security men allowed to meet him. And there was always — or there would have been — a procession of famous novelists, well-known radio reporters, eminent scientists, successful actors, and high-ranking officials who sometimes waited for long weeks to see him, here in the Lukács, for the hope-filled moment, for the great opportunity. They hoped to reach the influential man with their irregular requests outside his office, and they always held in reserve a small favor they could do for him in return. They would want a passport; a higher place, reserved for the more privileged, on the list of those permitted to purchase a car or be allocated an apartment; a starring role in a movie or a play; a reprint of their rightfully forgotten novels or a new publication of their selected poems; an appointment as an ambassador or clemency for someone in jail for life. Or they just wanted to gush and brownnose, to buzz around the influential man and fawn. Which is such a wonderful feeling that one could practically faint with joy. The lucky ones would shudder for hours afterward when they thought about what they had said and what the man had said to them, recalling their chance to talk with such a powerful personage. They would boast breathlessly to anyone they could collar, eager to strengthen their position with this exceptional bit of news.

Karakas would not even listen to most of the insidious and cunning suggestions offered in exchange for favors. He despised these people, all of them, these worms, the choice bootlickers and ass kissers, though sometimes, mysteriously mimicking God knows what and making especially nasty remarks, he would be generous enough to accept a clumsy act of some service; he simply bought them.

The lucky petitioners would be beside themselves with joy.

And later, they could not recount these great acts of heroism, since betrayal and bootlicking had generally accepted limits. Yet keeping quiet about them was fearsome, as if they’d regressed to being bedwetting little boys, now with a little pleasure in their loins or anuses.

Today, however, the powerful master had arrived at an unusual time and remained alone.

Perhaps he needed André to avoid feeling so alone or to feel the privileged magnificence of his loneliness.

Perhaps he wanted nothing from André.

It was good to have a strong man by his side who was not an ass kisser.

Karakas was a mysterious man, nobody could see his cards. It was impossible to tell whether he was siding with the inveterate dogmatists, the Stalinists, the Muscovites, or the dispersed but still vengeful hordes of ÁVH men — in which case his helping various nationalist groups was only an illusion — or the other way around. Perhaps with all these possibilities or despite them, he was trying to maintain, in his Anglophiliac way, some kind of political pragmatism, in which case his common sense was breathtaking. Except for his wife and children, no one thought he had any feelings or emotions, or wanted to share them with anyone in the cause of political action.

He was a basically uneducated man, but once his glance strayed onto something he would note it for good and sense its essence; with lightning speed he would read everything and anything, and understand it.

He was uniformly characterless when it came to his face and his physique. Smooth as a well-sucked lemon drop, his enemies said behind his back, inside and out everything was licked down. He exuded the aroma of some strange soap or not too pleasant cologne that reminded one mostly of mothballs. He spoke to everyone in a conspicuously low tone, with a cordiality both threatening and threatened, frail and vulnerable; he never raised his voice. Perhaps he never lost his temper because in reality very few things interested or touched him.

Although this morning he had received two pieces of terrible news.

The one concerning the mass disaster reached him a little after 9:30. An overhead streetcar cable had snapped in front of the National Museum, killing a number of children — students being taken by their teachers to the celebration — who happened to be crossing the street. And that was not all. Because of some fatal fluke, the snapped cable did not trip the fuse at the big power station on Váci Street; in all probability the still-live cable made contact with the streetcar track, which hungrily conducted the electricity further, and the bodies of the victims had started to glow and smolder. The high-voltage current killed quite a few of the shocked teachers, fellow students, and passersby rushing to the aid of the children, before all the eyewitnesses realized there was absolutely nothing to be done, and they began sobbing and screaming at the top of their lungs in the stormy street where traffic stopped and became hopelessly congested.

In response Karakas ordered a full military and police alert throughout the metropolitan area and a total news blackout; he caused all the roads leading out of the capital to be blocked, public offices and institutions closed, no trains were allowed into the railway stations and no trains were allowed to leave the city. To the president of the state radio, whom he had to treat with kid gloves because she was the only female member of the Political Committee and in that capacity under the personal protection of comrade Kádár,* he suggested maintaining calm and discipline.

Considering the last days’ reports on internal affairs, provocation could not be excluded, he whispered in his most cordial voice over the telephone. He was talking to her on the special line that, at least in theory, was safe from any kind of tapping or interception, and told her that as the result of his consultation with comrades of the highest echelon only a little while ago, those were the proper guidelines, calm and discipline, and everyone concerned should follow them.

She should therefore recall her reporters; no radio personnel or vehicle could remain on the streets.

This is a sabotage action.

He can assure her that this is not his personal opinion.

But not to worry, any possible disturbance will be nipped in the bud, that is the authoritative assessment.

And then he hung up without saying good-bye. He had no time for this priggish hysterical female, about whom the generally accepted view in the highest circles was that she had already lost her head on the evening of October 23, 1956.

She retreated to the space under her desk and issued her orders from there.

Karakas mobilized larger forces to reestablish order at the critical site so that the official celebration could commence, if not exactly at the announced time at least with no more than a half-hour delay, precisely because of the planned radio broadcast. He reported again to the prime minister, who happened to have comrade Kádár in his office. The two men got along well, even though they came from very different social backgrounds and held diametrically opposed views.

They were both slow and jovial, but while the thinking of one was very simple, bordering on simpleminded, that of the other was very convoluted. They listened to the secretary’s report attentively, and with a seriousness appropriate to the situation, and then comrade Kádár opined that comrade Karakas would need the help of a few comrades well trained in carrying out operational tasks, and all of them together should hasten to the scene of the disaster to aid the comrades there.

Karakas had the swarming groups of onlookers and passersby first dispersed by these helpers, then followed and cleared from the nearby streets. He had the windows of buildings giving on the Museum Garden closed; he ordered superintendents to chase everyone away from behind the closed windows. He acknowledged the list of the dead and injured. He ordered the sound crew to play, at the highest possible volume, lively, energetic patriotic songs. While ambulances, firefighters, sanitation workers, and electricians were doing their best, cursing and getting in one another’s way, the entire area resounded with a medley of music — stately palotás dances, wild verbunkos or recruiting dances, and rowdy drinking songs.

He made one mistake. He judged correctly that the schoolchildren, who had been brought from nearby schools and were now forced to wait behind ropes, might be upset by this feverish activity, the quickly spreading news and rumors, and would find it hard to endure quietly a ceremony scheduled to last an hour and a half. It would not be wise to add mass hysteria to the catastrophe. So he ordered that the children should be taken back to their schools but not sent home until further notice.

They should be replaced with other children brought from other schools.

The square had to be filled with celebrants; workers’ militiamen should also be ordered to the square, but in civilian clothes.

The police officer to whom he gave the order did not dare remind Karakas that there were no other children available, since March 15 is a school holiday everywhere in Hungary.

In the Spanish Civil War, Karakas had been adjutant to the current Hungarian prime minister, then the International Brigades’ dreaded commissar of political security. Before 1950, when the prime minister came home for good, they had carried out several well-coordinated cleansing operations together, though sometimes they were not even in the same country or city, and thanks to their mutual support they had managed to be left out of every cleansing campaign and operation since; this did not generate much confidence in them among their dearest friends and best comrades. They were friends, yes, if there were reason to make such a judgment. Yet the same comrades against whom the two had conducted these tough campaigns for decades were the ones who arrested them.

This was no laughing matter. Karakas was nearly tortured to death during his interrogation.

Although he limped because of an injury received in Spain, he suffered from several organic diseases as the result of the later beatings and torture in Hungary. About these he spoke with no one except physicians at Kútvölgyi Hospital; thus no one knew which of his inner organs had been smashed. A number of people knew that Vladimir Farkas had personally urinated into his mouth, as he had done to comrade Kádár too.* But others reacted to this by saying, no, that’s simply unbelievable.

He was considered a communist who could not and indeed did not have any personal grievances. Today, however, he remained conspicuously quiet, almost fearful; he did not say a single word to André Rott in the stormy pool. Neither did he look at him when, having reached the end of the pool, he turned around. As if he had forgotten him or changed his mind, and then his silence or fear acquired a diplomatic character.

He must have a reason for softening up Rott.

But in fact he was enjoying the water, the storm, and it gave him a special pleasure that he was enjoying it after a double ordeal and shock. Anyway, Karakas was a man who was content with small amounts of enjoyment; a few spirited movements were enough for him, he was satisfied and done.

They swam like this for about six minutes, from one end of the pool to the other and then back again. This was no small torture for Rott. Being an excellent swimmer, he found it very hard to swim slowly. But Karakas swam as if his fear of drowning at each stroke was not completely baseless. And then, unexpectedly, after a turn, he waited for André. While both of them trod water and held on to the railing, he said to the younger man that yesterday the Political Committee put an end to the matter.

The Jews are not allowed to study the Eichmann papers we have.*

Surprising.

We prefer not to have Israeli detectives around who are charged with special missions.

Obviously.

Let them give us the date for when the trial begins, and a few days before that they’ll get the necessary papers.

Or at least copies of the necessary papers.

That would mean, André remarked, to give himself time to think, that the memorandum about the extradition is also canceled.

The Hungarian government will not request Eichmann’s extradition, because rejection of such a memorandum would not be desirable. At the moment Moscow does not want to make a big deal out of the Jewish question.

But we shall offer them appropriate documents that may be important to the Jews, and in exchange they should keep quiet.

Maybe not just any documents, and mainly not all of them.

Then they swam for another four minutes.

Which, this time, was not part of the obligatory theatrics of male power play.

André wondered what this powerful man’s intentions were for sharing this confidential information with him.

At this late morning hour, Karakas gave no sign of special anxiety or perturbation, and Rott could not have heard of the terrible accident.

When Karakas, cold and wet but very content, had returned to the parliament from the garden of the National Museum, he first made his report, which was received with satisfaction. But the moment he stepped out of the prime minister’s office he was given some news that had no official significance, but from which he had to sort and rearrange documents on his shiny desk for long minutes to recover.

Finally he got up, very irritated, and in unusually harsh tones told his secretary that he’d be back in forty minutes; until then he could be found in the Lukács.

The secretary’s concerned look followed him out.

He had ten minutes left for the steam bath.

André Rott accompanied him there too.

In the dim hall, dating from the Turkish era, there were only a few naked figures.

Karakas and Rott took their place in the farthest corner of the hot-water pool, sitting on underwater stone armchairs pitted by sulfides and mineral deposits. Simultaneously, security men appeared between the columns and then withdrew discreetly, which unavoidably made for much slipping and knocking noise in the hall. Karakas, holding on to the carved armrests, absentmindedly floated his paralyzed leg for a while, staring in front of him, but not at his pencil-thin penis peeking out from under his apron or his little testicles floating in long folds of skin, at nothing in particular, perhaps nothing at all, and then suddenly he immersed himself completely in the water. When he surfaced, seeking André’s face, he said, so far as I know, comrade Rott’s friends are not involved in any bad-smelling business.

One expects that much from one’s good friends, comrade Karakas, replied André Rott quickly, though with some reserve, considering the powerful man’s surprising statement.

It would be embarrassing if an ugly mole dug up the ground somewhere.

André added, without thinking, that he was afraid Lippay might be growing prematurely rusty.

Don’t be.

Luckily, Jancsi Wolkenstein is more patient.

I believe we’ll have to entrust him with a dangerous task, Karakas said, and as was the wont of powerful comrades, he made it seem as if he had not heard the warning about Lippay and the recommendation regarding Wolkenstein.

What’s your view, he asked quickly and sarcastically.

He appeared genuinely curious as he observed André’s features, now motionless with surprise. Of course he did not fail to notice that André feigned this surprise.

For once, two pros were talking to each other in this town. In the meantime they had both sunk into the rust-brown water up to their lips and were floating their bodies. It would have been impossible to talk more quietly or intimately. Which was necessary both because of the subject matter and because of the echoing bathing hall. Occasionally a splash could be heard from a neighboring pool when someone was getting into or out of the water.

The more dangerous the task, comrade Karakas, the more responsible one must be.

That’s right, comrade Rott, and then the glory won’t be small.

The timing is good, comrade Karakas, if I may say it like that, one can only approve.

Which in their professional language meant, if you ask me, perhaps it’s not too late. We can sincerely hope that our friend Ágost Lippay has not yet dug himself a tunnel underground and indeed is not a mole.

He would never have thought he’d be able to think of Ágost in such plain words, so that with such a simple falsehood he could avoid his own death sentence, or at least find a solution whereby he would not be the one to be hurt by the friendship among the three men.

He could not have imagined that the betrayal would be so easy, that betrayal was as easy as falling off a log.

Occasionally some dripping was heard somewhere, and then echoed loudly in the dark hall.

It wasn’t as if he were committing a serious betrayal for the first time.

But Karakas had left him no option. He wasn’t going to let himself be held uniquely responsible for this definitive solution. Or at least the weight of the responsibility would be shared. The undisguised strength of this little administrative certainty gave him a peculiar feeling. Not dizziness but raw joy. As if from the pervasive joy of perspicacity he was on the verge of fainting, feeling at once strong and weak. Like Faust, not only had he gained insight into the unmasked nature of the world, but he also proved to be more loyal than he had expected or hoped himself to be. A sense of his own grandeur was reinforced.

Because he was more loyal to the cause of communism and to his oath than he was to his friend, he was more loyal to his profession and his conviction, and because he succeeded in making this loyalty prevail over all his other feelings.

He was nearly choking with tears.

Which surprised Karakas. It was as if he had caught himself out.

At this moment, tiny cracks opened up on their faces among their various pretenses. They looked into the depths of their mutual source of joy. Another drop dripped from the dark, cold medieval cupola.

I betrayed him, Rott rejoiced to himself. And he rejoiced exuberantly, as if this had happened for the first time, as if in the past he had not worked a long time as a mole for the British secret service.

But that was an institution and this was a bosom buddy.

He had to utter the magic word to himself, because otherwise he could not have comprehended that betrayal becomes not a moral weight but a physical relief. And he can thank this physically rather repulsive male person for it, for lifting the oppressive burden of procrastination off his shoulders. There was no way back, he too no longer had any secrets; they had let him know that they knew everything about him that had been or could be known, he had no place to hide.

Like a crevice in a rock that remains open to the destructive light.

Karakas raised his eyebrows almost involuntarily, a sign of his wonder and amazement, and, to keep Rott from seeing this, made the most telling possible move: he ducked his head again in the hot water.

Oh, he did not wish to conceal himself; he wanted to spare Rott from his own shame.

At the moment of betrayal Rott was finding pleasure in himself, however, exactly as he had during his darkest inner struggles and amorous confusions, from which he had fled to secret drinking and solitary binges. Once again he broke free of terrible fears and trembling and of lovely childish delusions. In his childhood they had warned him that betraying someone was to throw oneself into a kind of moral abyss, caught in morality’s whirlpool, from which there was no way back. And once again it was proved that this was not so. I am the abyss; I am the whirlpool. He could be glad of this, because it was something he had known for a long time. A living person had become free of the burden of a friend once lovingly bound to him. Whom until then he had tied to himself, to whom else, and whom now he nevertheless set free, hoping for the liberation of them both. He could be thankful to providence. Let him go. The feeling, the knowledge offered a stronger pleasure than lovemaking because, finally, another human life was no longer tied to human organs, skin, smells, or gestures, and had no perishable juices.

He had to feel himself light, airy.

Now anything could happen.

He had nothing to do with him, and this suddenly rolled back and liquidated their common past. As if he no longer had any need for breathing, for anything, for eating, shitting, anything that earthly existence demands of a human being.

I killed him; and the sober phrase, the clear accounting, felt especially good because it was as if he were the sole possessor of this knowledge, even if meant that he had killed part of himself as well.

When after a brief yet substantial moment Karakas surfaced again, he said that Lippay’s mission of course had a rock-hard condition.

He laughed hideously as he said this.

He has to get married within a week so that he can travel in the company of his little wife.

As two tourists.

They will hardly need luggage.

It will be done. André nodded to this coarse man while keeping his expression, excited by joy, dutifully somber.

He was not happy to see the powerful man go so far.

But you, comrade Rott, will also have to create more orderly conditions in your private life.

And he sounded the same hideous laugh. Rott joined him, laughing at his own nonexistent private life, which the bathing hall echoed several times.

Even though Karakas would have preferred to sob and shout.

By now, he could see nothing on Rott’s face. Which did not fool him in the least. No stranger to betrayal, he knew from his own experience that Rott’s jubilation and fear were increasing as a spiral of self-gratification and self-admiration carried him away, with a phase delay.

Rott understood this to mean, however, that there would be appropriate blood money; he would get his promotion and that would be it. He’d have to get married and start behaving like a conscientious clerk, and to all appearances that is how things should be.

So that this perverted little asshole, this lousy turd with his pencil-thin prick, can have his revenge.

As if Rott understood that Karakas grasped all his ulterior motives.

And to snuff out the elemental joy of becoming pals and also to show who was boss, Karakas, with true manly affability, gripped Rott’s thigh under the water.

Comrade Rott will forgive me, I’ve had a tough day, I must excuse myself.

Contemptuously he let go of the strange thigh, motioned that he would take a dip in the cold-water pool, and their audience ended.

And Rott was free to go on his way unhindered, with his breathing regained in fear and trembling. He regretted that he would no longer find his friends behind the little green door. He felt especially sorry about the anticipated loss for Hansi. And he could not imagine how life would be reorganized between the two of them once the third member of their group disappeared for good. He was afraid that the two of them might not be able to bear the solitude, which he could well endure on his own. Karakas did not lie, he very rarely did, and he was indeed having a difficult day. He needed the cold-water pool, and he repeatedly immersed himself in it. The movements pleasantly numbed the skin covering his warmed-up muscles. Above the pool they were waiting for him with his bathrobe and various towels. He dried his head as he walked. The masseur stayed close behind him and continued to massage him with the rich material of the robe, kneading his back and shoulders while buzzing in his ear that comrade Karakas should really stay for a few more minutes today, take time out to see to his health because he could feel how knotty his muscles were through the robe.

They opened the cabin door for him and handed him his clothes item by item. A few minutes later, curled up on the deep seat of the large Russian limousine, the Zim, they sped him back across the Margit Bridge to the prime minister’s office. When they reached the ramp to the island, where the arc of the bridge rises to its highest point, he looked among the flat roofs of Újlipótváros for the roof terrace of Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment. Behind the high solid parapet, he quickly found the pale little light of the salon’s always-open glass screen. In time, on their way out, the policemen most likely had to close the door they had found open.

The reason he loved Mária Szapáry was not because in November 1944 she had saved his life.

It probably happened the other way around.

The woman must have hidden him in the big wall closet because she could not otherwise reciprocate his silent and persistent love for her. By then other people were hiding there too: Jupi, who had given him only his name used in the movement, a field officer from a very good family, and a Jewish engineer from the neighborhood. Later, Mária Szapáry spoke to her women friends about Karakas as she would about a loyal canine, very kindly. Which he also knew, because with her customary noble simplicity she called him dog straight to his face. Listen to me, dog, I want to come up to your office, when will you have time for me, you could do me a number of favors. I’ll go see dog about it, he’ll take care of it, he’ll smooth things over. I’ll talk to dog about it, I won’t go to see him, but sooner or later at some upcoming reception. Even if she had any interest in men left in her, what could she have done with such a shop assistant with his slicked-down hair.

Karakas had been ordered home from Paris for illegal work, but after the German occupation he was no longer safe, his false papers notwithstanding. The potential danger of his situation could hardly have been greater, but neither of them had a choice. He did not know what to do with the news of the red countess’s death. It pained him and made him sentimental. He wanted at least to see the apartment, if he could not comprehend his completely unreasonable attraction. In the last few years, he had been preparing for such a visit, as if he were threatening Mária Szapáry with it.

Yes, of course, I’d be very glad, please come for tea, we’d love to see you, anytime.

They had seen each other exclusively at public places, in theaters, at the opera, film premieres, or state receptions to which the countess was almost always invited officially because of her role in the resistance; sometimes she showed up to have something quickly taken care of, though since 1956 she had let Karakas feel that despite these meetings they would not retrieve their earlier harmony.

Of which neither of them wanted to speak.

To open the wall closet through whose sliding back panels one could gain the flat roof.

From there they reached the steel door of a more distant elevator shaft. When Mária Szapáry was taken away, that is where they holed up for two days and two nights, without food or water. They had to go out to the roof to shit and to urinate. And then they got to the street during the heaviest bombardment, when the front had reached the nearby streets.

According to the first police report, and this reached the highly placed man in the form of a verbal accounting, his secretary whispered what had just been communicated over the telephone, that in the early morning hours Mária Szapáry had taken Elisa Koháry out of the apartment, in a wheelchair, to the corridor, where she had earlier pried open the door to the elevator shaft, using a screwdriver later found in the apartment.

And what she was preparing to do must have been clear to the other woman too.

They also found crude material traces of her resistance and struggle and, given the sensitivity of the case, secured them.

She had pushed her into the elevator shaft along with the wheelchair. It made an enormous noise, and the neighbors heard a woman’s screaming, probably the hapless woman’s last shouts.

Despite the early hour, many people ran out to the echoing corridors.

They heard something, but the noise was actually subsiding; when it completely subsided they heard someone slam and lock the door to Mária Szapáry’s apartment, but they could not say whether it was Mária Szapáry.

With her strong deliberate steps, in her rope-soled Basque slippers she clattered across the hallway, across her workshop, out onto the terrace where now, at the ides of March, the flower boxes were still empty. She was as calm as if she had just let out a tarrying guest.

Indeed, that is how it was.

But a year earlier, when she for the first time had confessed to Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, that this was it, up to here and no further, because she could not go on like this, she no longer had any reserves left for the woman, none, then Irmuska did not say not to do it.

They just kept sitting until it became light outside.

In the widest possible arc, she threw herself over the parapet.

Not to get caught on anything.




This Sunny Summer Afternoon


I don’t know how things had started between us, but Ilonka Weisz always waited for me here on this landing between the first and second floors.

I’d known her from before because she was friends with Viola and Szilvia. Sometimes she visited us in Damjanich Street and occasionally she came with us to City Park. But she would never talk to me, as if I didn’t exist.

Viola and Szilvia said this was because she positively detested me, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she looked right through me. And the reason they could not make Ilonka Weisz change her mind was that whenever they were close to softening her heart toward me, I would behave callously again. They had to endure my insensitivity because they were my cousins, and one puts up with a lot when it comes to relatives, but I shouldn’t expect Ilonka to tolerate it. And they asked me confidentially to stop behaving so callously, at least with her, even if I went on being callous with them.

I would have been glad to comply, if only I had understood what they were talking about.

I was amazed at them, at how they could prattle all this nonsense to me while Ilonka Weisz sat on another bench, dangling her feet and pretending not to know what the girls and I were talking about. This is how people talked in Damjanich Street, and this sort of talking was understood in Dembinszky Street too, but I had a lot of trouble with their words. People there used different words and actually behaved differently from the way people did on Stefánia Boulevard. I could not imagine what callous behavior was or what I should do so as not to be callous. I also didn’t understand why on earth anyone should be softened, or what was meant by softening her heart toward me. Steel could be softened; or we say that cheese, water, or a spring breeze is soft. To soften a person implies that the person first is hard. Ilonka Weisz wasn’t hard, just a common little girl with a big mouth.

Except she detested me for some reason and that was pretty confusing. Her detestation was attractive in a way, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

On Stefánia Boulevard, one would say to something like this, well, that’s her problem.

The change might have occurred one day when she was coming from her lesson just as I was going to mine, and to my huge surprise I saw she did not detest me so much. She said something to me or, I don’t know, maybe she asked me something, and I answered her politely. I didn’t understand why she had changed so suddenly. Before that, she’d turned her head away whenever we met by chance in the staircase or on one of the landings and then, to be sure I had no doubts about her feelings, she’d make a face to show me that my sheer presence disgusted her.

Or maybe they had already planned what they were going to do and that’s why she was friendlier, out of plain calculation. From then on she always had something to say about the piano teacher, the lesson, Szilvia and Viola. One day she said I should go up to their place after my lesson because her mother would be going to work then.

The piano teacher gave her free lessons, and she practiced on the teacher’s piano because they didn’t have their own.

Because of all the beds in their apartment, they couldn’t fit in even an upright piano, Viola said, and they didn’t have the money for it either.

The image of the congestion in their apartment scared me and did not make me want to go there, though she repeated her invitation many times and always added that she would be alone.

Come on, Szilvia said, they’d have plenty of money for a piano if only they knew how to economize. The reason we have money for everything is because Daddy makes sure every penny goes a long way.

They squander everything, I’m telling you, they’re a bunch of spendthrifts.

But we’re telling this only to you, confidentially.

We’d never say this straight to Ilonka, not for anything in the world.

The truth is they haven’t got enough money to rent even a lousy old upright for her.

On the Stefánia, no one would have said anything like this. And if the girls talked so arrogantly and conceitedly about Ilonka Weisz, then why did they call themselves her best friends.

It always seemed to me that Aréna Road was a real border between the two sections of the city. On the other side of this border, one did not understand many things.

There were three siblings in the Weisz family; Ilonka had two older brothers, Ernő and Dezső, famous hoodlums in the neighborhood who avoided school, but Ilonka was considered such a great and brilliant musical talent that the piano teacher could not let her go to waste. Many people in the building had a great respect for the piano teacher; they called her an unselfish soul. True, the boys lugged up wood and coal from the cellar every Friday afternoon for her, and their mother scrubbed her floors during the spring and fall cleanings, thus giving proof of the family’s gratitude, but the boys showed absolutely no interest in Ilonka’s piano studies.

Neither did her mother, she just let it happen, if it had to happen; she had enough troubles of her own.

I did not talk to anyone about these things, but Viola and Szilvia told me about them along with many other matters. They gave me the impression they never stopped prattling. The moment one of them stopped the other continued, and sometimes they spoke over each other’s words so that I couldn’t understand either of them. I learned important things from them about everyone; without them, I wouldn’t have found out where Ilonka Weisz lived.

When she came from the piano teacher, we met on the landing between the first and second floors; their third-floor apartment opened from the rear staircase. After a while she stopped asking me to go with her to the third floor after my lesson.

One time she said, I am so alone. But I couldn’t go with her, because anybody in the building would have seen my secret. After her lesson she went down to the mezzanine, crossed the courtyard, and from there went up to the third floor by the rear staircase.

People also called the rear staircase the maids’ stairs.

Another time she said I was callous, since I wouldn’t listen to her when she complained of loneliness.

Szilvia claimed she would rather die than have to use the maids’ stairs to go home.

She hadn’t finished saying what she wanted to say and Viola was already annoyed.

Sure, you’d die; come off it, why this foolish talk. Why do you have to make such a tzimmes over the maids’ stairs.

Szilvia began wailing that she didn’t know who was talking more foolishly, but if you really want to know, you’re making the bigger tzimmes.

And would Viola talk so casually if she had to share a toilet with strangers.

Of all the foolish nonsense; somebody, please hold me back. You’re only saying that to protect your sweet little Ilonka.

They were talking as if each of them knew in advance what the other one wanted to say and lost interest the moment she said it.

I don’t remember seeing maids in this building. One recognized maids from far away. I explained this maids’ stairs business to myself by thinking that Ilonka’s mother must have been a maid once, and the name somehow remained stuck to the stairs.

When I told my grandmother about Ilonka’s existence, about the girl whom the piano teacher taught for free and let practice in her own apartment, my grandmother nodded and said that was a very decent thing to do and we too might help the girl by buying her sheet music.

She’d write a letter about this to the piano teacher and give me the money to take to her when the time came.

Somehow I tried to protest, saying that no one had asked us to do this.

I was terribly ashamed of my grandmother’s eagerness and sorry I had told her about it. I told her the story only so I wouldn’t despise Ilonka Weisz as much as she despised me.

Grandmother looked at me severely.

She asked what sort of help I thought was help that had to be asked for. What makes help really help is when we give it without being asked.

But I sensed this wasn’t going to turn out well. Ilonka would detest me even more because of this. And then I had better tell my grandmother what I did not want to tell her.

I asked her if it mattered that Ilonka Weisz detested me.

She said, why shouldn’t it matter, of course it did, it mattered very much.

Then let’s not buy her sheet music.

She did not reply for a long time; she was thinking. It’s impossible to buy someone’s empathy, I was right, we should not give the impression that that was our intention. However, we were talking about two different things and they could be separated sensibly. With this gift we would show our appreciation for Ilonka’s talent. Grandmama would solve this problem in such a way that Ilonka wouldn’t even know about it. And I should somehow make her stop detesting me; I should also think seriously about what I might have done to offend her.

Still, I hoped Grandmother would forget about writing the letter. She and Grandfather always laughed at themselves for forgetting so many things.

But she did not forget, and on her nice butter-yellow handmade letter paper she wrote to the piano teacher, to whom we should be very grateful for her decent behavior during the Hungarian Nazi era. Grandmother had said she would make an arrangement with the teacher in such a way that Ilonka would not know about it. She did not seal the envelope, because she didn’t have to hide the contents from me, but still I didn’t dare look at the words describing the terms of the arrangement she was making. Here was another word, another something I didn’t understand, which people sometimes used to specify what they had agreed, or how they had decided to leave things at that. The term they used was that that, but I could neither memorize nor understand it. I didn’t quite understand the word maids either. The piano teacher had a cleaning woman but she didn’t have a maid, though in her apartment there was a tiny maid’s room in which nobody lived. My grandparents had a maid, Rozália Török, but it would never occur to anybody to talk to her the way my aunt Irén in Damjanich Street and my aunt Erna on Teréz Boulevard talked about their maids, whom they often had to dismiss.

Such a stinking beast, Szilvia would say, and despite our mother’s good intentions we couldn’t keep her on.

And she made a haughty face that perhaps disturbed me more than the word beast.

My grandmother always told me I should be attentive to Rozália. Or she would reprimand me in no uncertain terms for irritating Rozália and warn me not to do it again. I should be more considerate and polite to her than to anyone else because we owed her so very much.

When with her friends they talked about their maids, she always said, well, Róza is a treasure.

And one evening, looking up from the book she was reading, she told Grandfather that she was amazed not so much that we were still alive but that providence had chosen to guide such a soul to us, and it was because of her that we’d survived.

Whenever they talked about this, tears welled up in Grandmother’s eyes.

And she’d say that goodness always makes me shed a few tears.

For a long time Róza went with me to my piano lessons so I wouldn’t have to cross dangerous Aréna Road by myself. When twice a week the time came to set out, I’d feel I was leaving my grandparents’ house forever. I did not protest, but the finality of the act hurt me in advance. Stefánia Boulevard vanished in City Park at the horizon of infinity. And how far away was the incredibly wide Aréna Road; I couldn’t even begin to imagine how far. As if on each occasion one were swallowed up by a foreboding: this can’t happen again, ever. My school on Hermina Street always seemed within reach even when I walked there alone, while Damjanich Street or Teréz Street seemed halfway around the globe. Yet we always managed to reach it. On the way the sun shone on our heads or it was cold, the wind blew, and the air had a certain quality that I had to overcome with every step but couldn’t. It was dense or too rough; we walked within it as though we were making no progress at all.

Whenever I felt like this, it was no use holding on to Róza’s strong hand. But I tried not to let her notice any change in me.

This was the last thing I wanted to talk about with anyone, the air, because I saw that the air did not hinder anyone else in any way, maybe they didn’t even feel the air resisting their progress.

People were downright glad of it, positively cheerful, that they could be moving.

Róza would simply grab her large kerchief and run.

Grandfather would begin to whistle, the dog would start fooling around, scurry to get his leash, ready to go, and Grandmother would hail her cab as if going to conquer the city.

Something was going to happen to us.

I was afraid of everything that might happen beyond the high fence around our house.

Things were a little better if we took the bus, which we did when making jam for the winter, cleaning windows, or doing the wash did not give Róza enough time to walk with me. Then the bus instead of me had to overcome infinity and all those things in the air that hindered me. Then it was easier to believe that I might soon return time.

The bus was always crowded.

This bus, the number 37, had one of its terminal stops at the corner of Kerepesi Road; it went to Erzsébet Square and from there over to Buda. It reached our stop jam-packed. In the evenings I saw it go by empty among the dark trees. Its passengers were from Kőbánya or country people from the train station. If we wanted to get on, we had to squeeze between strange legs and bellies. The pressure increased at every stop. Everybody wanted to get on but nobody got off and the conductor never stopped yelling. Róza could not protect me from the pressure of strange bodies. Adults could hold on because they were tall enough to reach the straps, but I was being rattled, blind and deaf in the midst of living flesh and powerful odors.

I also had to be sure people didn’t knock the sheet music out of my hands.

Yet whenever we walked, I could not help telling Róza that it would be better on the bus.

Getting off was simply impossible. We had to get off at the corner of István Road, but sometimes we couldn’t. Or getting off required merciless pushing and shoving forward, which I could not do without feeling ashamed of myself. People around us were yelling at the top of their voices, the conductor could not calm them down and Róza yelled back. They pushed and I had to push too because I couldn’t let Róza do the fighting alone, I used my elbows, stepped on feet, and kept kicking so that they couldn’t kick me.

After fighting our way free at last, we stood on the empty sidewalk like agitated battle-weary animals, panting and exhausted, arranging our disheveled clothes. Our anger and agitation subsided slowly.

I said next time we should come on foot.

That was too much for Róza.

She sputtered that I should make up my mind about what I’d like to do. One can’t do two things at the same time, and I was beginning to get on her nerves.

I could never be cautious enough to avoid provoking somebody’s anger or dissatisfaction.

Standing in the middle of the sidewalk she was yelling that hadn’t we had enough crazies for one day. She certainly had, and it was time I pulled myself together.

I also noticed that the more cautiously I spoke or the more cunningly I phrased what I had to say, the more offended and irritated people became. They never had such problems with my cousins, even though everyone said I was a much better child because I wasn’t as impudent and violent as they were.

It was hard to remain good if my best behavior wasn’t good enough.

They had grown used to me as a child who did not look for excuses, was not obstinate, quickly acquiesced in whatever was asked of him. Perhaps my grandfather was the only one who did not want me to be better than I was. He was indifferent to my behavior, good or ill; he did not want anything from me. Sometimes I thought he also pretended that nothing touched or interested him. Just as I always had to pretend that I had no objection to anything. They always wanted more, demanded more. But there was someone inside me who made giving in very difficult; it was some sort of obstacle, I don’t know what or who it could have been.

I wanted to give in, but because of this being I could not.

Maybe that’s why my cousins accused me of being callous.

Yet I could not remove this last obstacle from the path of my goodness.

Because I was already too polite, too quiet, exceedingly considerate, and attentive. It was as if I were mocking them, and that made me feel insincere and wicked.

Even if they were most satisfied with me at times like this. But I knew that no matter how much they praised me, how much they stroked me, I wasn’t like that. And I was often close to the brink: one more glance, one more word and I might have revealed that I couldn’t go on; I felt dizzy, as if I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a long time. Of course they noticed nothing, which made the play I was putting on for myself even sadder. I had no hopes that in the hereafter I would not be such a giddy person, since my fate would be less false; at least I’d be able to understand more of what I couldn’t understand now because of all the falsehoods. I feared the promised great punishment, namely that the only world I knew would one day either slip out from under my feet or come crashing down on my head. They would unveil my dishonesty or suddenly discover that I wasn’t satisfied with anything. Viola and Szilvia could do anything they wanted, and even Ilonka Weisz could go on with her roguery to her heart’s content.

At least she had a mother who defended her when necessary, who lied and raised hell for her and then slapped her around.

I, on the other hand, had to be grateful to my grandparents and other relatives that I could stay with them at all. That they didn’t eject me from their lives. And I had to do my own lying. Occasionally my grandmother saw through me, took pity on me, and helped me lie to the others. But I also saw through her. She helped me with the lies simply to keep me from not loving her, and then she could be even stricter with me.

I barely remember the two years that preceded Grandmother’s final success in reclaiming me from the boarding school on Rózsadomb. Yet the tribulations of those two years determined my so-called good behavior. Because they might always send me back there again — the hour of truth might arrive at any time — and then I’d once again cease to exist. If I don’t behave no one will protect me; I can’t be a burden to people. They’ll take away my name again, the name that my grandmother’s enormous efforts had managed to retrieve in some office where they did not treat her as well as she’d expected they would.

And I remembered this situation clearly; it felt as if I were recuperating, as if the throbbing noise of a high fever had just subsided. The problem was not that my classmates and teachers — all the latter were women — had a hard time acknowledging my new name, but that frequently I myself didn’t know which one was the real name. My old name felt more familiar, felt more like mine, even though I knew it was only a name given to me by those gangsters who had dragged my father away from Aréna Road, my father whom nobody has ever seen again and of whose name they wanted to deprive the world.

I remembered well that day on Aréna Road, because they let me watch from the window as they took him away.

Grandmother got me back from them and retrieved our good name too; she said she’d paid a lot of money for it, a great deal of money, since she had to bribe many crooks and scoundrels. Still, the family name and my real first name lay on me like a curse. It was hard to accept that my new name was, in fact, my old original name, because I no longer remembered that in the boarding school on Rózsadomb they had given me a different one.

I had to learn the old one again, that this was who I was, after all.

I didn’t know how long I’d be allowed to remain as this one, or when it would be my fault that I’d have to be another one.

I mixed up the two names frequently enough.

Instead of my real old-new name, the old one kept popping into my mind, the one that wasn’t my name at all, regardless of how the others in school yelled at me and laughed, saying, this little idiot can’t even remember his own name.

I suspected that besides that name of mine, I might have not remembered the boarding school because they had mixed me up with someone else, and in reality I wasn’t the person they or even I thought I was. By mistake my grandmother may have taken away another child, thinking she was taking me. I tried to feel who I was, whether I was really the person they thought I was. I had the definite suspicion I had been exchanged for someone else, I was someone else. But they mustn’t learn of this, so they won’t be disappointed in me, since they’ve accepted me so nicely. Or at least they pretend to have been taken in by this lie or sham. I must be on guard; I was terribly ashamed of the deliberate, premeditated deceit. Perhaps they knew what an enormous mistake my grandmother had made and they said nothing about it because they wanted to spare her.

I must make myself unobtrusive or at least useful, if I can’t be completely unnoticed and useless.

That’s why I didn’t care about the shooting, I was going to get bread. At last I could prove my usefulness. I saw how my aunt Erna feared my disgusting cousin and her famous husband, so I chose, unlike them, to behave as a grown man should and went to see about getting bread for all of us. They willingly believed that I was brave and self-sacrificing since that was safer and more comfortable for them.

Ultimately, I was as self-seeking as they.

That is why it hurt me whenever, on either Damjanich Street or Teréz Boulevard, either in the midst of huge quarrels or coldly and pitilessly, they dismissed a maid.

They would say the maid had not proved worthy of their confidence.

At times like that I felt it’d be better for me to find a fast-acting poison among the cleaning compounds and do away with myself. Or this was the reason that Grandmother’s words about Róza filled me with hope, since she was the great exception.

I couldn’t imagine where those dismissed, unwanted maids would go.

By the same token, where would I go, where would I find refuge for myself, or find a way to evade my pursuers.

One day the adults were sitting on the balcony of the Damjanich Street apartment, under the white sunshade, and I was staring out among the flower boxes at the trees on Queen Vilma Road bathing in the sun.

It was late afternoon and down in the Moszkva Garden the waiters were busy setting tables, dishes and utensils were clattering, the band was tuning up for the five o’clock tea. Large striped sunshades were lowered over the tables with hand-operated winches; they cranked them exactly as they did on Margit Island in the Grand Hotel or the casino.

Five o’clock tea was a strange expression, because it did not mean that people had tea at five o’clock or that this was a salon de thé, as Grandmother and her lady friends called the pastry shop; it meant that dancing started at five o’clock.

That’s what I waited for.

At ten after five, when they had finished their second number and there were a few people still sitting at the tables, everyone started to clap and shout when Hedda Hiller appeared on the little stage, which was almost completely hidden from me by the leaves of the horse chestnuts. She began to coo, hum, drone, buzz, and purr into the microphone in her deep mellow voice, and occasionally she’d sing out a crude tune with unexpected force, and lots of twists and turns and halftones; and she appeared each time in ever more wondrous dresses.

My aunt Irén was carrying on behind me about the girl she’d fired the day before, as if the scene she’d made the day before, which we had had to live through, was happening again.

Pack your bag, dearie, and get out of here. I give you five minutes to get your things together. Where could I go now, sweet madam, in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, and she had the nerve to call me sweet and say it was the middle of the night. Please let me stay until I find a new place. Go, stay under a bridge for all I care, my angel, anywhere you want to, but make yourself scarce, get lost.

Grandmother quietly asked Irén whether she had really sent the maid away like that or upset herself like this only afterward.

If only she could be trusted.

Grandmother had come to take me home with her and now here she was, confronted with this story that visibly shocked her.

You don’t think I could possibly have stayed another minute under the same roof with such a creature.

Her voice receded from me on the balcony, along with the sound of the band tuning up, as twilight slowly approached. Then it became completely dark and although I heard the drums, trumpet, saxophone, and piano as they were looking for their correct positions in the ensemble, I was on my way to somewhere where things were not so musical.

Luckily they never found out why I fainted on the balcony.

They said the little fool must have stood in the sun for hours again and they shouldn’t let me do that in the future. I was too sensitive a child, which of course was understandable. Dampened cloths were put on my forehead and chest, and for a while longer I lay there at their feet on the warm stones. He always waits for Hedda Hiller, would you believe, and for some reason they all laughed at this remark. They always laughed at my enthusiasm for the singer. Then they lugged me inside, I let them, though I felt I had nothing wrong with me, I could have made it on my own two feet. They laid me on the sofa, everyone stood around me and I could see on their faces that they felt they had to do something with me or for me. Szilvia and Viola took turns running into the bathroom; they were in charge of changing the compresses. Grandmother fanned me with a newspaper; my aunt Irén took my pulse. The only unpleasant thing was that this sunny summer afternoon was pouring in through the many floor-to-ceiling windows, together with the jazz band music.

Hedda Hiller was crooning something about love into the microphone, then said a few words that made the men and women in the Moszkva Garden laugh, and then the saxophone kept wailing.

They asked if I felt better, because now my color was coming back.

I said I felt really good, though I had no idea how I felt.

They asked if I hadn’t eaten something on the sly that might have upset my stomach.

I said I thought there was too much light in the room.

Did I understand what Irén had asked me. She asked me if I’d nibbled on something.

I said I understood, but still there was too much light in the room.

But they were asking if I had eaten anything before lunch that they didn’t know about, whether I could remember what it was.

I said I hadn’t eaten anything before lunch, I remembered very well, and I didn’t take any pastry from the serving table.

That calmed them down but I was afraid I might faint again; I was afraid of myself.

I kept insisting — not that the air was filling up with something — but that the light was becoming unusually dense. My grandmother drew me to her, as if she’d sensed what was happening to me, and said, no problem, darling, the girls will darken the room right away, and with that, she may have kept me from fainting again.

It felt good when they finally shut off the light.

Let’s leave him alone for a while, Grandmother whispered, he’ll sleep now.

And I did feel as if I had to fall asleep.

But the moment they left the room on tiptoe and stopped making the floor creak, I opened my eyes. They had closed the double door leading to the dining room; the room became dark. That reminded me again of the night, the bridge and that girl, who was me, having to sleep under the bridge.

But why did they lie to us the next morning, saying she had left of her own will.

I felt that I was born to be a girl.

There was always a truth that later turned out to be a lie.

The feeling that I was not who I imagined myself to be, and not who others thought I was, always tormented me. Actually nobody is what he or she appears to be, and I’m not the only one who doesn’t know who he is or to whom he belongs. I observed the torments of others; I wanted to understand how they decided when they had to lie and about what, or what it was they could consider the truth for a while. That was the reason why I later so obsessively followed the half-man trundling himself down Teréz Boulevard on his board with casters, since no one knew where he came from or where he was going every day, or the woman with her big hats and no face left, nothing but a walking burn.

As if by watching them I could crack their secrets.

Since these two were so obviously not what they appeared to be, it never occurred to me that they might not have any secrets. And since I could never shake the thought that my father surely couldn’t have disappeared without a trace as claimed, and our mother couldn’t have just left us — that too had to be a lie, and something entirely different must have happened — it followed that these two, the man on the rolling wooden board and the burned woman, were my father and mother. My mother had survived the war, though she’d suffered terrible burns during the siege of Budapest. And my father had heroically stuck to his truth, and when they saw they were getting nowhere with him and were unable to force false testimony from him about anyone, they simply threw him out of a speeding car.

He was like a living piece of flesh. He could just barely crawl away from where they dumped him.

A stranger took him in, with whom he’d been living ever since, somewhere around Hunyadi Square. It would be nice if Hedda Hiller were that stranger. Since I couldn’t decide what would be better for me, sometimes I imagined that the kind stranger was a man — a more convincing version of my story, since a woman couldn’t have carried the wounded man to her place.

His legs could not be saved. The truth was that in their condition neither of my parents wanted to be a burden to us.

That’s why my mother kept hiding from us, that’s why she pretended when looking out from under her large hat that she didn’t recognize me. I also tended to avoid her because I could not imagine the moment when she’d give up the playacting, take me back, and press me to herself for the first time. I was scared that I might push her away because she had become repugnant, because she had left me, and because I really hated her.

Of course I suspected that this woman, whom I sometimes imagined was my mother, was among those who were crushed when the marquee of the Duna Cinema crashed down. Probably not one of those whom the rescuers scraped out alive from under the rubble after the dust settled and everyone was sobbing, fleeing, helping, or only helplessly screaming and watching the incredible. That would mean I’d lost my mother for the second time. Later some good people carried the corpses to the corner of Antal Nagy Street in Buda, and then, at the cost of subdued altercations on top of the rubble, the line for bread re-formed itself.

They lay side by side where the tank had appeared earlier.

People in the line slowly kicked the rubble off the curb.

The chaos was too great, and I never saw her again on the boulevard or anywhere else.

Somebody said that the marquee was made of cinder blocks, which is why not more people died, since it’s much lighter than regular concrete.

I preferred to continue weaving the story for myself. In my story she was taken away with light injuries by a Russian military ambulance that showed up for the injured. She recovered in a few days but had no doubts that I’d recognized her, and that’s why she left the country in the last days of December, along with other refugees.

My imagination protected me from the pain somewhat, although the more cleverly it worked, the more doubts accumulated in my mind.

I stood there on the landing above the second floor, leaning against the wall, bent forward a little, my legs slightly apart, like someone preparing to throw up but hoping not to soil his suit with his vomit; I was waiting for my imagination to calm down, so that jealousy and senseless physical desire would not drive me mad. I held my unbuttoned coat together with my fists sunk in my pockets. As if afraid that someone on the dark staircase might see what was happening inside my pants. I was clenching one fist hard to keep my fingers from stretching out, from crawling onto my painfully rearing hot cock, to keep my warm palm from closing around it.

But I could not deactivate my imagination. For that I would have had to scrape the pictures off my brain cells. And since I couldn’t do that, there I was all alone with my cock. And they were doing it in their warm bedroom. I saw not her eyes but a single flash of her eyes, a single flash of your eyes, the sadness of her closed lashes, your sadness, her thinly arched eyebrows and naked shoulders. But I had never seen her shoulders. I was not the one who had seen them, but, together with me, this hateful man had. I wanted nothing more than to open my fly in the cold staircase of this familiar building so I could come together with them.

The pain was somewhat mitigated by my imagination, but only gratification could have expelled the tormenting pictures.

If I could do that, I’d be ready for any disgraceful act, that’s what I felt.

And why should fate save me from disgrace.

What I have done until now, along with my stupid scurrying around and my stupid enthusiasm, has been disgraceful enough.

But one can neither deflect oneself nor hold oneself back with self-inflicted moral judgments.

No humiliation can frighten one away from committing ever-worse disgraceful acts. As if a raw desire for pleasure was saying, no matter what you do, your disgrace can still be increased, only make sure you don’t drown in it.

I knew they were not going to come down again.

Maybe Ilonka Weisz would come, said my imagination.

Nobody came.

I opened my fly, not hurrying at all. The way one prepares for a premeditated revenge.

Potential danger always sharpens the sensation of pleasure, I don’t know why that is. With the booming of the wind in my ears, blood pulsing through the cracking and snapping of the gutters. This was the voice of fear, desire, and trembling. In the pulsing of blood, I expected to hear the opening of the door on the third floor, the sound of their light footsteps on the patterned stone floor of the staircase, their chatter, their wrangling, their sensual banter, anything, even their amorous cooing. I was sure they weren’t coming, but I could do nothing but keep on waiting for them. And now waiting not only for Klára but, though I didn’t notice this significant and involuntary change, for Simon too. And if they were to come, I’d surely have enough time to flee silently from them, out of the house.

I’d go to City Park, that’s how I imagined my escape.

Out there, in the storm, I’d betake myself among the wet trees.

Until then, however, it was as if I were cowering at the bottom of a dark lair, waiting for my prey and ready to pounce.

I was cold and I was hot, but I did not dare execute the last movement on my open pants. Another bus went by; the empty courtyard echoed the rough sound of wheels dancing on cobblestones for a long time. My hand kept pawing the slit in my pants, perhaps to move on, perhaps to be ready to button it up again. The yellowish sky was shining above the roofs. There was no light at all in the Weiszes’ three windows on the fourth floor. I thought that Ilonka Weisz must have grown into a beautiful girl in the meantime. The first was the kitchen window, the other two those of the one room.

By fantasizing one builds a more predictable world, and then one has no time to notice what is really happening, because of the din made by one’s expectations crashing down. There was some noise from the second floor, followed by a laughing female voice. I paid little attention, the usual sounds filtered out from a kitchen, but I quickly buttoned my fly. Then I heard the piano teacher’s door open, but it was immediately closed, very quietly.

I didn’t understand that.

Maybe it was closed from the inside.

Then for a long time nothing happened, the wind kept booming. And when I was certain that only my useless waiting would continue, and while I heard the pervasive patter of women’s shoes, someone turned on the pitiful staircase lights. It barely made a difference, but it was a little less dim around me. My first urge was to flee. Like a miserable bug. She called after me; she called me by my name in the echoing staircase.

I wasn’t sure I’d managed to finish buttoning my fly. I froze, as if naked; I looked back and her voice made me happy. I hoped my coat covered everything. Suddenly I had many things to say and to ask. How did she know my name, but in my shame my heart stopped beating. It was as though she could see not only what I had done but also what I would have liked to do. And she was standing there, at the top of the stairs, in a long fine fur coat, shining like silk, and I saw she was nearly bursting with her triumph.

I would have asked her but I didn’t have the courage — or enough air.

She raised her gloved hands lightly above her head as though playfully asking, with a modicum of self-mockery, aren’t I wonderful, and what have you to say about this transformation, and isn’t the fur coat wonderful too; look how nicely it falls when I spread my arms like this. She raised her head as if wearing a crown, and look, what a wonderful hairdo, created all by herself. It surely was wonderful. My wish had come true. The most wonderful thing was that she so easily transformed herself; there was no end to the surprises and transformations. I forgot everything; I forgot all the anger and shame of having had to wait, and they dispelled my presumption about what they had been doing in their bathroom or bedroom; I forgot all my accusations.

Her beauty made me forget my entire meaningless life.

I did notice, though, how unsuspecting she was, how preoccupied with herself or with something I could not have known, and therefore she did not care what was happening to me. As though she weren’t interested in that or not interested in me. I was only some odd decoration on her completed life. But I had to forgive her for this instantly. Nothing could possibly have happened to me that would be of any interest to other people; I realized that right away. I had nothing to complain about and I had to keep my joy on a short leash too, lest I become overexcited by something that might disturb others. I had learned that I could not burden people with my feelings and, having no choice, I made myself believe I was indeed someone who not only wanted to avoid being a burden but who positively tried to please everyone at least a little.

And it seemed that in her own play she had cast me in a role that called for my presence but did not cramp her style.

She was wearing black antelope shoes with incredibly high heels, and under the fur coat a tight-fitting unadorned black dress at once soft and tight, which left her knees and thighs exposed — shockingly so by the prevailing standards of good taste. Her snow-white neck, her legs shining in their stockings, and the power of her knees and thighs were her jewels. Her strength was her most conspicuous feature, showing how strong that body was, carrying the proportions of her strength as some kind of armor. Her maddeningly blond hair, now done up in an utterly new coiffure, was her jewel. The glittering of her eyes, her plump lips painted blood red were her jewels. I wouldn’t have dared touch her lips, though I wanted to take them into my mouth, I ate them, I reveled in them, and they threw me into terrible confusion.

It had been in the air already that women were wearing short dresses, but until then only a few had dared to go this far, and right away I worried about being seen with such a striking woman. Although I had never seen a hairdo like hers, it reminded me of someone, I didn’t know whom. Not knowing somehow felt good. I would have started up the stairs for her, but I took only two steps because of another struggling impulse within me.

She would sweep me off my feet if I touched her.

I was left with words colliding into one another, a stammering, which happens usually when one is trying to do something against all odds.

I asked where she was coming from.

And she latched on to this, to the raw words, as though in doing so she could rescind the exaggerated gestures she had made.

She said, what do you mean where from, where could she be coming from.

And how did she know my name, I asked. It’s a pretty insane thing, but actually I had never introduced myself.

How does she know. Well, she knows everything. In other words, she knows what she wants to know or has to know.

She started down the steps like a scheming prima donna. She must have seen someone do this in a movie or something.

Indeed, we hadn’t been introduced, so perhaps she couldn’t talk to me now.

But she was quickly embarrassed by her revealed beauty which she had just shown me. Her temperament proved weightier and more somber, so she was able to ignore the fact that she had already shared it with me.

And where did she leave Simon.

She said, we’re going without him, because suddenly something cropped up that he had to deal with; he was furious, ranting and raving, would probably break everything in the apartment. Can’t do much damage, though, they have hardly anything. This time they had a really terrible row, they weren’t talking. Until tomorrow for sure. If he wants to, he can come after us; if not, he can stay home and then he’ll drink himself under the table.

He’ll throw up; she’ll have to wash everything he’s wearing.

While her words echoed impassively, bouncing dully off the stained, filthy walls decorated with graffiti and bullet holes, she kept coming down the stairs as if to demonstrate that she was granting me the grace of her approach in well-apportioned doses.

She made me feel like a stupid little kid.

I said I’d told Simon that I’d known this house for a long time.

I asked her if she knew the Weisz family, did she know Ilonka Weisz. Because while I waited I had plenty of time to check the list of tenants, and it seems that almost everybody still lives here.

Protecting herself from my childish flood of words, she laughed. Then, slightly taken aback, she asked what Weisz family, what Ilonka, and she was sorry she’d made me wait so long but she’d thought I was sitting downstairs. They hadn’t lived here long enough to get to know everybody in the building.

Of course, I continued, and I’d be happy to tell her about it one day, but now I had something more important to ask: how was it that she came out of the apartment on the second floor when they lived on the third floor.

Because a friend of hers lives on the second. And was I a police detective. To interrogate her like this.

She couldn’t have thought that seriously, and I asked if her friend was renting a room there.

This really got her going. She protested, why should her friend rent just a room; she lives there, it’s her own apartment.

But my old piano teacher lives in that apartment, Andria Lüttwitz.

There were no more steps for her to take during these superfluous sentences, because now she was standing right next to me on the step above. She flooded me with her fragrance. I should have stepped back, but I could not make myself do that and stayed put like a dumb obstacle. Nor could I keep myself from touching her fur coat, at least with my fingers.

I said, this is mink, as if voicing a professional opinion, and my hand remained where it was.

She responded quite vehemently to my movement, as if she had been waiting for it; she put her gloved hand on my arm.

Yes, it is certainly mink, she said quietly, as if revealing a secret, and how did I know about furs. She borrowed it from her friend because she’d seen that her spring coat had bothered me.

Because of me, I asked, alarmed.

You’re right, it’s not a very attractive coat.

I asked how she had noticed, what sign of mine had she read, and I was ashamed — but she could not reply because suddenly I shouted out, now I know, now it was clear what had been so familiar.

It was Andria who had done her hair.

Yes, she did, but how did I know, and she asked me to go back to the second floor with her and bring the drink bottles she had left there.

That’s what she said, the drink bottles.




Only Inches from Each Other


How did I know, how did I know that Andria also had that same hairdo. Nobody but Andria has hair like that.

Not only that, I also remember, but exactly, how such a hairstyle is made. Because, I admit, I liked Andria’s hair a lot. First, the hair at the top of the head is combed and then backcombed in the other direction.

Sometimes my cousins helped her because they loved digging their fingers into her hair. My role was to hand them the hairclips.

Andria’s hair is really beautiful, she said evasively, as if she’d been suddenly interrupted. And did I know what had made her turn so gray.

It felt so good talking to her that I impolitely ignored this question and kept on talking, saying that the girls, my cousins, also took lessons from her and were much more accomplished than I.

I had to stop taking lessons, unfortunately.

She was swaying her head, smiling at me as if she could see back into those strange times, and saying that I must have been a very peculiar boy.

My hand, longing for a touch, was still sunk into the warmth of her fur coat; her gloved hand was still resting on my arm. It was as though we both were paying attention to this — how some strange power was flowing from one into the other — and noticing how reassuring it was. And as if we both were talking the meanwhile just to keep ourselves from noticing how important this was. At the same time signs of bewilderment and aversion were deepening on her face. She was glowing and smiling, yet she seemed to be receding. I spoke faster, hoping to stop the sun from setting.

I asked why she thought I had been a peculiar boy. I didn’t remember that there had been anything peculiar about me.

Because boys in general don’t notice or remember things like that, they rarely help out by handing hairclips to someone, and they don’t usually say they like gray-haired ladies.

All right, I said, but Andria was different, and the whole thing is much simpler than this. I spent a lot of time among women, since my grandmother and our maid raised me. Grandfather would only take me for a walk, at best. By the way, he usually brought me here, to City Park. I have hardly any memories of men, had no chance to be with them. That’s why I observed things that other boys might not. Or I don’t know, I was always more interested in girls.

She laughed at this; of course there’s this certain Ilonka Weisz. If I told her more about her, she could see better just what sort of boy I must have been.

I got scared; this was an embarrassing subject. I would have liked to crawl onto her bare neck when she threw her head back as she laughed. Between her sparkling wet, beautiful teeth I would have crawled into the dark hollow of her mouth. She had teeth like a wild animal’s. But her laughter seemed more like an excuse to remove her gloved hand from my arm. I also had to withdraw my yearning hand; I spoke even faster, lest the mutual withdrawal become too conspicuous.

I said I knew something about furs because my uncle had a salon downtown, furrier and fellmonger, that’s what people in the trade called the business, but since they took his salon away he’s been working at home.

Fellmonger, she repeated the strange word.

Furrier too, I explained, perhaps this mink is from his business. I explained that what Budapest parlance calls mink is in fact the name of an innocent animal. There is something inexplicable in this whole fur business, and I probably thought about it only because I had an aversion both to furs and also to this uncle of mine.

So what should one think about when one says mink.

Minks are living animals, and wearing a coat like that is like having committed a robbery and being proud of it.

She interrupted to say that my uncle must have been a Jew.

Indeed he was, I said. Actually, he still is, but that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t stand him.

We both laughed hard at this and our mingling laughs echoed for a while, but that did not please me much.

My jocular mood began to dissipate. It seemed we were offending this miserable dark building with our echoing laughter.

Our laughter probably disturbed her a little too. Hurt a little.

Let’s go, she said, seeming disconcerted.

All right if she wanted to, I replied, but I’d like to know why this was important or interesting, interesting from what point of view.

Why wouldn’t it be interesting, she asked. Everything is interesting, so is this. Just as it is interesting that she is a Catholic apostate. That’s something of interest, isn’t it.

Perhaps she’s right and everything is equally interesting. Still, it’s also interesting that she was interested in this in particular. Because she could have asked so many other questions. She could have asked what was the color of my uncle’s eyes and I would have willingly answered, black, my uncle has black eyes or brown, which is to say I don’t know, I don’t remember. Or she could have asked whether he had a mustache or was he bald, and I would have answered, yes, my uncle is bald, has a small trimmed mustache and a disgustingly hairy body, and he stinks from his furs and leathers.

She doesn’t understand why I’m so irritated all of a sudden.

I am not irritated at all.

Then she doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say. She doesn’t understand what I am insinuating.

She thinks I’m the one who should do the explaining.

No, I don’t have to explain myself. She’d be happy to answer all my questions — but hopes this won’t keep us from starting out.

Prevent or not, I replied sharply, that depends on what kind of explanation I get.

This strong emotion that could not be concealed attacked us from the outside, and it paralyzed us both.

Why is she asking me that, of all things.

Out in the courtyard the wind was making loud noises.

We were both angry and agitated, and we looked at each other with alarm; actually we were looking out, searching for whatever it was in each other that was causing our inability to endure each other’s words for another moment. This was something neither she nor I could give up, let alone terminate.

Let this business end right now, if it has no chance, if nothing good can come of it.

I should forgive her, she said angrily, but she’d really like to go.

I’m afraid it would hinder me in many ways if I don’t get an acceptable explanation.

Right now I was the one hindering her, if I hadn’t noticed.

In what way might I be hindering her.

In my free movement, she answered with a little laugh. But, believe her, not for long.

I laughed back. Only until I get the explanation. She should consider that the condition of her freedom to leave.

She was afraid I had a persecution complex. She was afraid that I had to overcome it on my own. How could I have thought for even a moment that I’d be able to stop her, that I could be violent with her. Did I dare imagine dictating conditions to her.

We were standing on the stairs in this cold, dim, filthy staircase, and the whole thing no longer had any sense, purpose, beauty, or charm. She wanted to go but she didn’t, because she didn’t want to offend me by pushing past me, leaving me high and dry. But I thought — for who knows how many times that evening — that I shouldn’t stay, despite the alluring promises of happiness, I shouldn’t stay with her, not even for a moment, no.

If I stayed, I’d be engaging with an impossible and unpredictable monstrosity, I would seal my fate forever.

Not for a single day could I endure that other man’s company.

She had begun the same game with me that the two of them had been playing together for who knows how long.

And even if I could put up with him, what would I do with my own lie. How could I correct it, make it right. Even if I confessed to her that I wasn’t studying at the School of Physical Education, what reason could I give for lying to her in the first place.

A lie I couldn’t sustain. Yet I could not tear myself away from it either, and every moment, whether we were talking or not, pushed me into something or shoved me on to something that was mine and also belonged to her, and these two could not be separated.

This something had no external signs; more correctly, I saw her looking for it in my face, on my forehead, my scalp. Her gaze rested on my shoulders as if at any moment someone might chase this something away. And I did the same in the same restless way on her naked neck, on her heavily painted lips, on the hillocks of her breast, on her shining knees and beautifully arched feet.

Our glances ran on rapid courses but they did not find what they were looking for, always finding something else; they found the beauty of another, strange body. Why should I have to swallow her remark about Jews. And I grew even angrier because my cock was sticking to my underpants. There is always that one fat drop of seminal fluid that bubbles up, smeared at the top of the foreskin, and then it doesn’t matter that the erection subsides, the smeared drop acts like glue. I should reach for it, pull the underpants away from it. I can’t do that without drawing attention to it. And my anger at this frustration somehow linked up with my anger at her words about Jews.

This is a Jewish neighborhood, yes, and this is a Jewish building, why did they move in here if they didn’t like it.

What did I want from this insensitive young lady from the country.

She should have swallowed my little insult of not letting her get past me, for I was acting with her exactly as her uncouth husband would have. There was something unpleasant in the parallel; I couldn’t tolerate it, and she couldn’t either. Selfishness was whimpering, I want to be left alone, to break off, to put an end to it. At moments like this one forgets one’s screaming, shrieking loneliness. I’d rather have no one. Our shared and desperate anger must have stemmed from this, because she was crying out against me and I against her. I was protesting that I very much wanted something of which I knew nothing. I wanted her but did not know who she was, and how is it possible to want a person; I didn’t know that either.

Then you’d better go. I finally stepped out of her way, let her go.

At the same time she must have reached the opposite conclusion. She’d rather surrender; she’d give up the game, whatever happened.

She said I shouldn’t be angry but she couldn’t tell me everything in one go. However much she wanted me to know, there was a terrible sense of decency that would not let her, or maybe it was her terrible Catholic upbringing. She is a good Christian girl from a good family, and this should never be forgotten. She admits that her question was unguarded or inconsiderate, and she understands my sensitivity, believe her.

I cut in, saying that we weren’t talking about sensitivity.

All right, so it’s not sensitivity, it doesn’t matter. There’s really no need for us to talk like this. If there’s one person I shouldn’t be afraid of, it’s her.

I’m sorry I spoke so harshly — and I heard my voice sounding more frightened than I actually was.

What surprised me was that I didn’t accept a single one of her sentences as true; I gave her more time, but in fact I wanted to challenge every one of her words.

Come on, she called back quietly. We can’t do everything all at once, let’s take our time. We can tell each other everything calmly, without getting upset. She gave the impression that in our deadly embarrassment she thought we were simply striking out in all directions.

That was true.

For lack of anything better to do, we took off; we had become like a defeated army. Her glitter was gone, her heels pounded hard on the stone stairs. I let her walk in front of me; as she was going down I saw her a little from above in the pale-yellow light; she moved as if she were being made to drag her discouraged limbs across an infinite desert of grief and mourning. All this was familiar, streaming into me like blood and aching, aching terribly. As if, with waning strength, she had to make her way from one place, where despite her hopes she had found not a mite of goodness, to another unknown place, and to do this without knowing what was in store. I didn’t understand where we were going or why in hell we were going anywhere. No, she is not hoping for anything, but I felt as if that too was my fault. If I didn’t go with her, if I didn’t accompany her, if I didn’t protect her, I would suffer damnation.

Yet what I felt was not empathy for but frantic curiosity about her.

Her beauty was gone, though I wouldn’t say that her being was any the less touching and engaging. As if the pores of her skin had suddenly shed the powder covering them, the lipstick had turned into foreign matter on her lips, the borrowed fur coat was hanging from her shoulders as from a hanger, and her stupendous hairdo showed mainly an effort to be eccentric. She became gray and crude, bare and undistinguished, depleted and needy. When she had first appeared in Andria Lüttwitz’s fur coat at the top of the stairs, she had shown how dazzling she could be. Now I could see how empty and futile her attempts at strutting and showing off were.

I also noticed that the leather on the heel of one of her shoes was torn and crinkled. That often happens when the high heel of a shoe like that gets stuck in a damn grating, hole, or crack. Her body was emitting rebuke. And I kept staring reproachfully at her shoes. She was waiting for something, she was hoping very much for something, and again she did not receive it. It was as if I had to sniff the air to learn her desires. Her fragrance was the only thing that had really changed.

I followed her and despised myself for this.

I became her servant. Ten minutes earlier I hadn’t been her servant. Why do I wind up serving everyone I meet.

We were inundating each other with blame and rebuke; we almost drowned in them.

I asked if she’d noticed that she had already used the word deadly twice this evening.

She did not reply but made a tiny movement that generated a series of other movements with which she once again managed to dazzle me. She just barely shrugged her shoulders and looked back at me with a single sharp glance. I’m talking nonsense. Then she grasped the coat collar with her gloved hands and raised it a little, maybe so from that moment on I’d see nothing but absolutely nothing of her neck, nothing uncovered, and she quickened her steps. That was her reply. That is how we crossed the stinking entrance to the building; that’s how she stepped out ahead of me onto the street, where the wind was raging even more strongly.

She clasped her arms above her head to protect her hair. The long fur coat opened and as she took off its two wings fluttered lazily behind her. Much as I disliked furs, I had to admit I was enthralled by how the soft, uniform longitudinal patterns rippled down her back. That’s how her own body became the image of an animal’s body. Then suddenly she stopped at the curb, turned to face me, I almost bumped into her, and we found ourselves only inches apart in the lashing wind. I had the feeling she was completely naked. I hadn’t counted on taking the car; I thought she’d lock it and we’d get on the bus. Her full, powerful, yet somehow still little-girlish body was straining toward me as from an opened shell.

It was straining forth from the opened shell of animality. I couldn’t tell how many transformations she had gone through that night.

The wind blew her fragrance into me with renewed strength, her new indecipherable fragrance.

Almost nothing kept me from slipping my arms under the shiny lining of the shiny fur coat and pulling her body against mine. Now she was flirting with me, inviting me, luring me, opening herself up like a seashell, like a deep-brown chestnut.

We were shouting and screaming in the wind, which felt especially good because it was as if we were throwing sounds into each other’s laughing mouth.

Not to let the wind blow them away.

She asked, actually she screamed whether I’d dare trust her with my life.

Not willingly, but without hesitation, I screamed back at her.

Because she didn’t have much experience in driving, which is to say she had no experience at all, she screamed, and for the first time in my life I could smell the scent of her mouth — lipstick, her sweet saliva, and the cleanliness of her flesh.

But I hoped she had a driver’s license.

She laughed, she’d managed to get one, but just barely. She had seduced at least three policemen for it.

I screamed congratulations, I screamed that I’d be happy to die with her.

The street around us took wing and was swimming. The shining arc of the roadway spread over our heads, the worn facades of old buildings fluttered and rose, the heavy sky slipped under our feet.

She turned the words back toward me, yelling them into my open mouth; yes, she too would be happy to die, in bed, among pillows, but not on the street.*

Her fragrance I caught not with my nose, her screaming not with my ears; they assaulted my groin directly. I had nothing to defend myself with. Because now it turned limp, now it hardened a little, sperm kept dripping from the constant pulsing.

Don’t, please don’t talk like that, I beg you, and my screams no longer vibrated in my vocal cords or touched my throat but burst straight from the rising and falling depth of my chest, from the throbbing flesh of my heart.

How shouldn’t she talk. She laughed, she laughed at me and screamed, in what way not talk.

I am scared, I screamed.

And that put an end to the laughter; she nodded that of course she was scared also. The brilliance of her eyes shone through every darkness for a long moment. She could see everything, both my future and my past. The wind had whistled, howled, pushed and lashed at everything while we were still in the stairwell; it had besieged the city with renewed force. There was before me a face clouding over and a body thrust toward me. I saw everything too; it made me dizzy. I saw how forlorn I had been for close to twenty years without her, and now this would end. I felt immensely sorry for myself, for my passing forlornness, as a child would, heartrendingly, pitifully, tearfully, helplessly. As if not daring to leave my desolation; this was odd, quite odd. And the dizziness vividly reminded me of that long-ago moment when, not far from here, on the balcony of the apartment on Damjanich Street, everything began to go around, slip away, become distorted, and heaven and earth slipped into each other. I didn’t want to, I did not understand why I was remembering an experience that did not belong here at all. And why is it interfering now. Why did I go limp because of it. She too needed to lean on something, and that made everything even more improbable. What I felt inside I could see on her. She was no longer protecting her hair with her arms; she leaned lightly against the car and I thought that in response to that positively inviting movement I would swoon at the sight of her.

To keep this from happening, as if grasping at words to rescue myself, I said, screaming, that I’d like to tell her something. I was actually breathing into her because I felt I could not wait any longer and I was ready to own up. I’d tell her about my earlier lie right then.

No, I shouldn’t tell her anything now, she didn’t want to hear anything, she shouted into the wind very rapidly and sharply. She was in fact scared that something irrevocable might happen.

And with that, either out of giddiness or because she was tearing herself away from my effective range, she thrust herself from the car, knocking against me slightly, her knee flicked mine, her breast brushed my chest, she spun, went around the car, and tore open the door on the driver’s side.

She must have anticipated something very different from what I wanted to tell her.

All I wanted was to confess that I was going to a teachers’ college and not to the School of Physical Education; I had lied to her and didn’t know why and she should despise me for it, guard herself against me and forgive me. I wanted to throw myself on the ground before her. But probably she didn’t feel like listening just now to an idiotic confession of love.

She misunderstood my confusion, my determination, and the fervor of my words.

If I had wanted to confess my love to her, that would indeed have been out of place now. I don’t know why. The only proper thing to do was to stay with my lie.

I too tore open a car door, plopped down next to her, but saw on her face that now I couldn’t say anything, because everything had changed again.

Just the two of us, at last, locked in the car, having managed to lock out the insane whistling and clapping of the wind, and this felt meaningful, promising. Yet our misunderstanding had created a new situation; it was as if we’d both stumbled and fallen over each other. Which put me in an uncontrollably good mood; I laughed. And not least because I’d spared myself, or at least deferred, the unpleasant admission, and that gave me a satisfying advantage she couldn’t possibly understand. She must have dreaded something else entirely, expected something entirely different. Somehow all this was there, in her, all at once, in her bewildered wide-open eyes — an unexpected heavenly gift for me. It meant that I had not misunderstood anything; yes, she loves me, she is waiting for my confession of love, though the moment I open my mouth to make it she’ll reject it.

Well, she shouldn’t hold her breath waiting, nor did she know what to make of my laughter.

She looked away abruptly, hurt, turned on the light, and began to fix her hair in the rearview mirror, to smooth out her lipstick with the tip of her tongue. She had to balance somehow the advantage my baffling laughter gave me. It was strange to see how quickly she became busy with herself as a means of escape. As if she were saying, no, she would not surrender her independence even if she’d wavered a bit, not to me, not even for a moment.

Which did not mean she didn’t love me; it just meant not now.

Still, she couldn’t keep quiet; the tension was too high and somehow she had to find a way to reduce it.

Would I mind telling her what I found so funny.

I could assure her it was not her hair, or her, but the situation.

It wasn’t necessary to reassure her, because she was not upset, but what situation did I have in mind, or whose situation.

I said she was probably expecting something entirely different from what I actually wanted to tell her.

She asked what it was I wanted to say.

You mean I can tell you now, I asked.

Why not.

You weren’t so agreeable just a little while ago.

Out with it, I had her permission.

But now I couldn’t tell her. First, she should tell me about this great transformation, and then I’d think about it.

That’s really a very generous offer on my part. It means that what I’d wanted to say was, after all, exactly what she’d thought it was when she’d kept me from saying it.

No, that wasn’t it. I wanted to tell her something she could not possibly expect to hear.

A surprise.

Most likely.

And now we’re going to play twenty questions.

No, I don’t think so.

Because she wasn’t in the mood to play dumb games. She sees that I like to take life easy. I could do anything I want with my own life, but I’d have to do it without her, not with her.

I said it would be better if we stopped talking for a while because I was afraid we were only hurting each other for no good reason.

Then at last we once again agree on something, she said.

What I don’t understand, I said, is why she has to quarrel with everyone in this kind of tone.

First, she isn’t quarreling. Second, what do I mean everyone.

I don’t mean to interfere with her life, but I do have ears and eyes, I can hear and see that she talks to her husband the same way, and she doesn’t speak differently to the men in the shop either.

How touching it would be if I was going to protect her husband or the men in the shop from her.

I said I was protecting myself, not your husband, I asked whether she could hear her own voice. And how does she know, how could she know, the suppressed shout burst out of me, how I like to take life, easy or otherwise. I can tell you, I am not taking life in any way. And how would she know what kind of life I used to have or what kind I’m having now.

She didn’t know, she answered quietly, almost frightened. But I could no longer restrain my anger.

And why do you insist he’s your husband when he isn’t. Why this lie, why this game of hide-and-seek. In the list of tenants in the lobby and on their apartment door, I saw her maiden name. Anyway, if she had a husband or if he were her husband, she wouldn’t behave like this with me. Couldn’t she see how common she was. She wants to use me to make that miserable man jealous when he’s about to explode with jealousy as it is.

No, that’s not so at all, she said patiently.

I wasn’t listening, I just kept saying what I wanted to say, that she’d lied, telling me he was her husband, so I wouldn’t have high hopes.

No, that’s not so, she kept repeating more and more quietly. One cannot tell everything all at once, it’s impossible, she said, fiddling absentmindedly with something on the dark dashboard.

But it would be much better to tell somebody something instead of constantly evading things or, excuse me for using such strong words, lying.

I am making a mistake, I am wrong. It’s not like that, not like that at all, I am wrong.

Well, how and about what, that’s what I’d like to know, what am I wrong about. And why is it impossible to tell everything at once. If she wanted to, I would tell her everything, all at once. Or twice.

I shouldn’t shout and mainly I shouldn’t mock her.

But I am shouting, why shouldn’t I be shouting in my own voice.

She leaned on the steering wheel with both arms and ran her fingers over the dark dashboard. I didn’t dare look at her straight on, and she wasn’t looking at me. Or maybe she had already forgotten I was there. That wouldn’t surprise me, because I myself had no idea where we were or what was happening.

What one managed to say aloud gained enormous weight, but the things one could not possibly utter became even weightier and more threatening. I felt that now I could tell her, all at once and in a single sentence, my entire life and everything I had ever thought or was thinking now. There was this terrible, insurmountable entirety. There was no place where one could begin and no proper weight for it.

Still, somehow, each of us should have entrusted it to the other. Everything that could not be told.

She moaned that I was torturing her.

It was as though there existed one gigantic emotion and a tiny piece of it had chipped or broken off and I shouted that I wasn’t torturing her, with what would I be torturing her.

At the same time, my conscience was gnawing at me. I wanted to understand her, see her clearly; I was shouting and throwing accusations around because I didn’t have the strength to fight my way out of my miserable lie. What’s more, it felt good that I couldn’t, and instead I kept on with my insistent, domineering huffing and puffing, even though I was deeply ashamed of it all.

Why is it a crime, I shouted, that I want to see things clearly.

Oh, come on, those are nothing but big words, she responded morosely. Who’s talking about crimes here, and what do you mean clearly. She doesn’t know words like that. Anyway, how dare I use such words. She can see very well that what I want to do is get away with something. I want to avoid her. I had taken a deep breath and run after her, but what I really thought was that it would be better if she didn’t exist, that’s what I thought. And why would I think she can’t see through all my little tricks.

Why would she think I don’t see them myself.

That’s why she’d said before that I’d like to take life easy. That’s all she had in mind. I think that one can solve everything with words. And for my information she did not mean to hurt me. She really didn’t know much about my life, though she had heard a thing or two.

Then you could at least tell me how you know my name.

From Terike.

What Terike, I asked, surprised, I don’t know any Terike. And I noticed that we were staring at each other again.

And that again I saw she was phenomenal.

And that I had never seen anything so beautiful.

Terike, her boss.

And her eyes were roaming over my face, she was letting her gaze glide all over it without stopping anywhere.

And how could her boss know my life’s story when I don’t know her.

How could she know, well, from your own dear aunt, that’s how.

This I hadn’t expected, though I could have, because Nínó, always looking for her little girl, asked every woman she met who had a number on her arm.

Her face became a strange object in the dim light. A single patch of yellowish light fell on her nose and lips. Her innocent statement opened up a secret world in which people discussed one another’s lives behind one another’s backs. For her, this world was probably neither secret nor strange nor repulsive but familiar and natural. She appeared little-girlish or awkward in this world, and this must have been one of her transformations, which I had not understood until then. She could change her age even between two sentences. Now she was older than I, now she was like a child. I couldn’t easily imagine a world in which my aunt would talk about me to a stranger while another stranger eavesdropped. Although I knew that such a world existed, just as I knew that in the real world every sentence was an assassination and betrayal; but in the world that existed only for me, in no circumstance could a thing like that possibly occur. And with the help of these feelings, or thoughts, within a fraction of a second I had finally understood something about this woman, yet somehow I still didn’t know what it was I had understood.

I asked when and in what way my aunt had talked about me, how had I gotten into the conversation, and from where could her boss have known my aunt. But I didn’t wait for an answer; as though I dreaded her answer I turned away and stared out at the street.

The street was more familiar than her face was.

No, she did not think the two women knew each other from someplace. They like to talk to each other because they are about the same age. Her boss had a child very late in life. Sometimes they talk about this, sometimes about other things, about this and that, anything.

And I didn’t even know, I said, that my aunt frequented your shop.

Not only my aunt, she said in her lively, enthusiastic, little-girlish voice, but my older cousin too.

Meanwhile I was looking at the street, because for some reason I had to.

No, I said, it can’t be, she must be mixing him up with somebody else, because my older cousin has never in his life set foot in a store. Unless he was with my aunt.

She laughed and said I was wrong about that too, because he does come to the shop on Wednesdays and Fridays, always between four and five, and he always buys the most expensive dessert.

Dessert, I said. You mean to tell me my cousin buys dessert, I said. He had never bought a box of matches, let alone dessert.

But there must be something to this story.

And I kept staring steadfastly through the swaying, yellowish sphere of the lights from the streetlamps as if I had not the slightest wish to see this unknown woman’s face and was willing to hear her voice only from a distance. This lively, little-girlish, distant voice I didn’t know what to do with. She was talking to me from another world, and the image that Ágost bought desserts at that shop so he could court her was simply unbearable.

There was no woman who would want to avoid his gaze.

And the street was now commanding my gaze. As if I were slightly forgetting what we had been talking about, I too was becoming a bit lost. Or I longed to be lost, I don’t know. I began to long to be out of the car, to lean into the wind and to go home to Stefánia. To return to the country that no longer existed for me. To see at the far end of the garden the six high arched windows all lit up and, until Róza came to open the gate, to lean my forehead against the cool, lance-shaped pickets of the fence.

She asked what I was thinking about, or looking at so hard, or why did I become so quiet.

I said I was remembering something from my childhood.

I should tell it to her.

That’s it, I said, laughing, and went on staring out into nothing in the tunnel of the lights on Dembinszky Street. That’s exactly the problem, I don’t know what I should tell her about, because suddenly so many things were on my mind at once.

I had to look back at her; I asked whether she came from the country.

Wherever did I get that idea.

I didn’t get it from anywhere. I’m just asking.

But she is asking why does that interest me.

Because if she was from the country, then maybe I couldn’t explain anything to her. This is an idée fixe of mine that I had even as a child: that there was a border on Aréna Road and life on the far side of it was completely different from our life on Stefánia Boulevard. I asked her if she wanted me to show it to her. But suddenly I remembered that we hadn’t brought down those drink bottles from the third floor.




The Spice of Happiness


It was clear he was at the right place, and it was equally clear that he was in the grip of a peculiar feeling.

Perhaps happiness in love is what makes such a wonderful promise in the air made fragrant by vegetation.

It would have been foolish to be taken in by such a spiritual promise, but it would have been no less foolish to deny himself the exceptional and groundless feeling of lightness.

Dr. Kienast saw a solitary, one-story house in the forest, standing in the middle of a long, rather narrow clearing, all its windows lit up, and he had to goad himself to look so he could see, instead of being preoccupied with what he was thinking and feeling. It was as if he had strayed back into the same winter twilight. But where in the devil else could he be walking if not at the place where he happened to be.

Everything might have occurred once before.

In light moments or frightening ones when, who knows why, one is gripped by irresponsibility and suffused with happiness, one can easily have the impression that one knows the world by heart. And it wasn’t the first time he had experienced this particular hallucination. A little farther on in the clearing, he saw a smartly built wood-framed shed and, facing it, a handsome little structure whose use he could not guess. This was the fruit-drying shed in which, in Döhring’s dream, Isolde had found the hidden gold, and perhaps the oldest of the three buildings.

The beams and wide trusses of the wood-framed main building must have been repainted recently.

Kienast was laughing at himself a little; one tends, when nudged by an illusory feeling, to make daring discoveries regarding the inner nature or structure of the world that only a moment later may prove useless. In the silence of the foggy woods the noise of fine dripping could be heard. The air was still. And he could be truly content with what had happened in the previous two days. He had escaped, run ahead of himself, and everything was coming together very nicely. He reveled in the joy of discovery, though nothing was exactly new for him. As if he were someone arriving on this miserable muddy globe not for the first time and in all probability not the last either. It’s love again, that damned love, he sang the old song to himself.

Always and again, love, he had sung to himself — and whistled the tune too, to escape the stupid lyrics while traipsing along, going about his dark little criminal cases among unsuspecting people in the city, which was preparing for the holiday and already decorated with electric garlands.

And now he was standing before the unknown house, still whistling the same song, always the same song, and he will sing the same song tomorrow too. Although most of the things he was thinking about now he had not thought about before. Words like providence and muddy globe usually escaped his attention or failed to settle permanently in his consciousness. He had no penchant for rapture, no inclination toward mysticism, he found esotericism laughable, Nazi drivel, and he felt no special joy in secret correlations or in having exceptional thoughts. Neither his uplifting sentiments nor the volatile upheaval in his love life could make him smile happily. One really must not let signs of such things show. Still, he well remembered that just before his trip, when discussing the first test results in the lab and after he had handed over a few very promising pieces of new material to the lab technician, he had felt like heartily slapping the back of that gaunt, bespectacled man.

Listen, pal, let me tell you what happened last night. Felt like doing it especially because something like that had obviously never happened to the other man. But in the end he didn’t; the man was not his pal. Even so, the lab technician gave him a certain look. What had got into him anyway; he knew it wasn’t quite proper to entrust the technician with the examination of materials that he, the detective, could not have obtained by legitimate means.

When the first sketch of an investigation quickly comes together with almost no missing pieces, one must be especially careful. In the universe a strict logical net holds up not only great truths but also great errors, so it may often happen that one believes one is on the trail of a great truth when in fact one has only been taken in by a rather weak idea of one’s own.

He did not continue under the neatly pruned fruit trees — mainly apple and pear trees, and plum trees farther off — and he did not step out onto the grass of the clearing.

What petty things I investigate, what shitty little things I let myself brood on, and I make myself a laughingstock even with the little stuff; as if he needed bigger and bloodier cases, and much less diligence, for his well-being. He destroys everything with his ambition, as if he were doing the opposite in his life from what common sense required. Which meant that he stood on no firmer moral ground than criminals did.

From behind the shed door he heard the dull thumps of wood being chopped, the banging and the splitting.

A few moments earlier he had stopped his overheated car where on the map the paved road ended. He had hardly eaten or drunk all day, hence the feeling reminiscent of dizziness and a surprise about the twilight, which perhaps wasn’t real. Or he was driving not in today’s twilight but yesterday’s. To stuff something quickly into his belly, he had shouted to the sausage man through his lowered window. The man wasn’t surprised; for almost ten years he had been stationed at the edge of the city in his tin hut smelling of burned oil; he was accustomed to madmen locked in their cars; he made his living from them.

He had to watch it, though, so that they wouldn’t beat him up or stab him and mainly so he’d get his money.

Mustard or ketchup.

Mustard.

With one hand on the steering wheel, he had squeezed together the roll and the hot white sausage with the other and driven on, taking quick bites, aware that the mustard was dripping. Patting the seat next him, he realized that the napkin along with the paper tray must have slipped under the seat. I am empty, busying myself with other people’s shitty little affairs, I have lawful authorization to do stuff forbidden to others, but that doesn’t really get me anywhere. He was dissatisfied with himself for having nothing to fill his emptiness with, and just as dissatisfied with these recurring attacks of dissatisfaction. As if thinking that with such an awful profession as his, which makes him sticky all over even when he does his job properly, he probably wasn’t worthy of the woman, and not just her but anyone. And how should he do things properly. She’s an uncomplicated, fragrant, fragile being whom for years I didn’t even notice. He should honestly tell her, before disappointing her, that he’s not worthy of her and stop the whole thing. Bodily joy isn’t everything. But he could not reassure himself with this foolishness. Why shouldn’t it be everything. If he had a good fuck, he felt at home in the universe. Anyway, who in the world wants to separate fucking from spiritual joy or anything else. He wiped his greasy mustard-stained fingers on the seat and smeared the traces of grease and mustard at the corners of his mouth. As if he should instantly become someone because of a woman like that, or as if the lack of dignity in his life — the problematic relationship between his daily activities and his human compulsions or abilities — were becoming oppressive. He did not know exactly what was missing, but he was missing it very much. Now he’s stuffed full and, having assaulted his system, belching profusely, and certainly he’ll soon be hiccupping. If he didn’t have to sneak around, avoiding daylight, in the thick of humanity, he too might have noticed earlier that he had no one in this world, just like this wretched Döhring.

He was wary of hiccupping, he had vowed many times not to stuff himself with those lousy rolls and sausages and mainly not to top everything off with all sorts of cola.

When he had to hiccup, he had to hiccup, no matter how many well-known anti-hiccupping methods he tried.

Although Kienast was one of those cops who, endowed with great strength of mind and fortitude, did not lose their composure at the sight of even the most horrendous crimes, he was alarmed by even the slightest physical irregularity or the most banal pain of his own. Either his daily activities had dulled his natural good faith, which was why he could not engage himself with another human being, or he had chosen this profession in the first place so that he could experience the affirmation of his natural bad faith every day and thus keep from finding anyone to share his life with.

No one with whom he could be as naughty as he liked.

He went to the doctor with impossible complaints, sometimes to be reassured that the symptoms were harmless, sometimes to hear the fatal news he always expected. A toothache, pinprick, nosebleed, bee sting, blister, or splinter was enough for him to see his approaching end, which he was ready to forget the moment the inconvenience passed; after all, he was busy with nothing else but the deaths of others. Now, against his good judgment, he popped open the Coca-Cola can and drank in almost uninterrupted gulps. He quickly tried to let the carbon dioxide out of his body, opened his mouth wide, stuck out his tongue, sort of burping himself. A little later he raised his bottom, firing away cautiously, not pressing too hard lest he soil his underpants. Which temporarily made a considerable stink in the car. But he rather enjoyed this, sniffing eagerly, not to lose the familiar smell before it dispersed.

Occasionally, no matter how dissatisfied he was with himself, he protected what belonged to his body, pampered it, and found it enjoyable.

The old car, pulled over by the woods, was gasping for air, its overheated red body steaming and knocking in the reddening twilight.

The sky was blue over the low pine forest, light blue, the air mild for the season, somewhat misty, and the weather report did not call for snow during the night.

According to the map the farm was five hundred meters from here but a locked barrier blocked the trail-like dirt driveway leading to it. He had to jump high to hurdle it. He noted that the owners maintained the road but must not be using it much for vehicles. He saw no fresh wheel tracks among the old ones. He observed and carefully registered everything that might be important professionally, but in the meantime he was also daydreaming about his sweetheart, and he especially enjoyed his thoughts running on parallel tracks. Of course, it was enough for his happiness that he was walking here in the forest dressed in Christmas silence, breathing and moving his limbs, stiff from the long drive. As one coming home at last, body and soul rising to an unknown level of reality, excited yet relaxed. In his amorous daydreams, this was the definite impression he had of himself. As if he had found his own life’s unknown basic rhythm in someone else. The ground was soft in the woods, springy, sandy; he noticed no fresh footprints. As to the smells, he could choose between two kinds of pleasant sourness, and he became even happier because he was thinking of such trivial matters.

In the vaporous air he experienced differently the resin trickling down the rubescent trunks and the juniper crawling everywhere in great profusion, its berries ripened to a downy blue, sprinkling the rust-colored carpet of pine needles.

Later he waited patiently and a little insecurely at the edge of the woods. Everything that had led him to this point had something to do with smells, but smells were hardly palpable. He had a tendency to overdo little things; at least his intuition often told him something about a case that differed from what his factual knowledge and experience claimed. Döhring had to be alone; he hoped he was. The two locations from which Döhring had telephoned had been successfully identified, and before Kienast had set out he had listened to the recordings again. The call from Düsseldorf had been made in hysterical haste and the second call, made from the telephone of a solitary gas station somewhere near here, gave evidence of obvious panic. A person not in control of his conscience is unlikely to call the police right away, though Kienast realized that Döhring had meant the call for him, personally, more than for the police in general. And he did not seriously think Döhring was contemplating or preparing to commit suicide, though he was not a harmless boy, indeed was a serious threat to others.

Solitude has a tendency to magnify things that hardly have any perceptible significance for others.

Professionally there was no justification for him to set out from Berlin because of those insignificant phone calls. He could have said to himself, knowing what he already knew, that Döhring, given his mental tendencies, was not going to run away and would not even hang himself. And what if he did. Or if he chalked up another victim. That would make the case neither more valuable nor more complicated. Let him go on his insane way; let him go to hell. It’s just a shitty little case anyway. It would have been more sensible and more comfortable that way, if only because his mother was expecting him for Christmas Eve dinner. Although he had not become cynical in the midst of so much sorrow and dread, he never deceived himself or others that an individual life had any special value. He had a personal reason for not wanting to dismiss his unexpected idea. At least he wouldn’t be spending the next night with the woman: that was the most important thing. Give the suddenly turbulent emotion of love a little breathing space, retrieve from her a little bit of his freedom before any fateful turn of events and only then decide. Because he felt more strongly than anything else that it had already come to pass; at best he could give his conscience a belated blessing for what had already taken place in his senses and the higher regions of reality; he was still defending himself. His freedom was at stake, and he was not ready to part with it. I’ll fuck up Mother’s holy night, that’s true, I’m getting into irresponsible professional adventures because of a woman, that’s also true, but by the time I get to him, this unfortunate boy will have softened up and then I’ll kill two birds with one stone.

Kienast’s mother lived alone; his father had ended his miserable life by his own hand. In the family no one ever talked about the father’s depressions and manias, and since his death they never uttered those words or mentioned epilepsy or the father’s profession, which the father had given up prematurely so as to keep as far away as possible from his own father’s career — the latter being something that Kienast came near to, given the profession he had chosen. Although he did not dissect bodies, he knew as well as a well-trained dissector or renowned forensic specialist did what to find where, or what biophysical processes occur in the human system after death.

He could not have said in what area or how Döhring would soften up, but his mind was feeling its way in that direction. The morning of the day before, he had found significant clues and therefore could not forbid himself a few suppositions about the student. Even if there was something irrational in his interest and suspicion. Deep in his heart he pitied the young man more than was necessary. No investigation can be carried out without empathy, but this was too much warmheartedness; psychologically speaking, it was transference. As if he were unable to override his professional responsibility with the imperative of his love and was now asking himself, why have I come here, what am I looking for, why don’t I let him go, why am I messing up my evening and my night. One doesn’t do this kind of thing out of sheer pity, or rather, one should ask what trick of the soul does one’s pity conceal. He could not seriously imagine he had often disappointed his mother. Yet the belated rebellion gave him pleasure, that he had not even called and she might worry. This means that no matter how long a man lives he can never outgrow being a boy, which keeps him from coping independently with his life. Where is the big freedom then. Kienast was positively a good boy; he had been one even as an adolescent; the tragedy cooled off slowly in the family, though its narrative dimensions were so vast that it could never cool off completely. He got along with his older sister, something of a prankster, or at least he had managed to live up to the male role, not perfectly tailored for him, between the two women. And that was the very reason he could not forget that epilepsy in their family was hereditary on the male side.

This remained with him as a secret threat for both possibilities: that neither as boy nor as man had he behaved properly, or fulfilled his duties.

It lurked out there somewhere, it would not be wise to awaken it with intemperance. But he knew he was scaring himself in vain. The yellowed final report prepared by the racial biology service’s expert was included among the family papers, and he had gone over it in great secrecy even before his father’s death. It set his mind at ease because according to strict genetic estimations, in his family at worst only a male grandchild of his would be in danger. And one reason he feared engaging in a deeper, more serious relationship was because he did not want to have children. He considered both the world and himself unsuitable for raising children, and was unwilling to discuss even whether it was worth discussing such a possibility. Or whether there was a suitable world. It even occurred to him that he might comply with the verdict of Nazi science and have himself sterilized, which his father for inexplicable reasons had not done despite expert medical opinion.

Which meant that his children could thank this happenstance for their being born, which was not very encouraging.

And Kienast for once in his life could allow himself to break a promise to his mother.

He did not expect this complete illumination. The solitary house with all those lights on might be full of members of Döhring’s family preparing for the holidays, but there was nobody to be seen behind the windows or in the clearing. He saw no garage door, there was no ramp leading up to a garage or old-fashioned carriage shed, and he did not see any car parked outdoors.

Was he at the right place; he knew he could not be mistaken about that. When the basket was filled Döhring put the short-handled axe among the freshly cut wood, lifted the basket as high up against his side as he could.

He had to kick the shed door open with his knee.

His grandfather had taught Döhring that the devil tends to disguise himself and never sleeps deeply. And even if he sometimes dozes off, a careful peasant never leaves an unguarded axe, hatchet, knife, pitchfork, sickle, or scythe near him, because that’s the first thing the devil reaches for when he awakens from his brief slumber. Yet now he headed unwarily toward the house, carrying his basket. He didn’t even look back, the door still worked on the old spring, he heard it slam closed properly behind his back.

For the moment Kienast did nothing, let the poor boy go; within himself, though, he was jubilant to see how things were coming together, how damn lucky he was, and maybe his future wouldn’t be so miserable after all. He can’t afford to fuck it up now. He called to the student from the edge of the woods but not until the student with his basket of firewood reached the middle of the clearing and became defenseless. He greeted him with a loud friendly good evening, called him by his name, and addressed him as mister, all in compliance with police regulations. However, in his surprise, Döhring’s body was shaking from head to toe, which the detective could also see clearly.

Döhring immediately recognized the voice. He thought it best to put the basket on the ground, nice and slow.

His bodily response dissipated the specters and alien beings that had been gathering around him; they vanished, evaporated in the light evening mist, so that he could consciously attend to the presence of the other man. He couldn’t utter a word, let alone return the greeting. He stood with his head bowed, and as his gaze fell and lingered on the old axe on the cut wood — because very clearly it did linger there if only for a moment, and his defensive posture could not escape Dr. Kienast’s eyes — he thought of one thing only, that he would not cease his activities.

He would continue doing the job he had begun, as the Creator continuously placed successive tasks within his reach.

However, Isolde had urged him — and the reason she had not begged him more urgently was that she did not want him to become violent with her — not to think anymore about any kind of creator or anything like that, and just stop whatever he’d been doing.

The first thing she’d do after the holidays would be to get her lawyer involved, if Döhring had indeed done such a foolish thing and was now making a mountain out of a molehill.

She would not tell her parents what he had done, she could promise that. She did not believe they’d think of coming to the farm before New Year’s Eve, he’d be safe there. But he must promise not to take a single step without a lawyer and make no phone calls to anybody anywhere.

She really couldn’t stay with him, however strongly she felt it was necessary. She knew, sensed in her every pore that Carlino was not only lying but also possessed by madness, he was insane; what she saw and heard were the lies of that insanity. But that evening, her agent was expecting her at dinner in Paris with representatives of the Drouot auction house. Over dinner they were going to prepare a large-scale benefit auction for which they had great expectations.

These are all stupidities, those thoughts of his, he should believe her, and he can’t go on torturing himself with them. He’d taken some impossible ideas into his head that were nothing but barefaced lies, he had fallen victim to some clever deception, he should believe her.

She spoke hurriedly, heard herself hurrying, and was a little ashamed of herself.

Such things simply did not happen in their family. She had no idea where Carlino had come up with such an idea. Who had told him such a thing. Something that nobody had thought about, let alone taken seriously for at least two hundred years; why is he going around scaring her or himself with it now. If he can be taken in by such idiocies then there’s not much point in his studying philosophy or psychology.

But that’s exactly what he was trying to do, to look into the depth of things, Döhring said, defending himself.

Things have no depths or surfaces.

Isolde should know. In the fashion business, she had to learn the lessons of pragmatic philosophy well.

It’s a good thing he hadn’t joined some crazy cult, or maybe he should join the neo-Nazis.

Isolde should not exaggerate, should not mix up different things. He was interested in very concrete questions, and that’s hardly the same thing.

But it is, Isolde cried out, with the full force of her penetrating voice, and she blushed deeply in her anger.

Döhring went along with this childish quarrel, repeating that no, it’s not the same, because he wanted to see Isolde surrender, at least to him. But she could not or did not want to understand his allusions. At least for the sake of their own peace of mind, for their private use as it were, she should confess what she had done. What she had been keeping to herself for decades, which, by the way, everyone knows about.

Gerhardt Döhring killed at least four people because of the gold that had vanished.

Then he had to realize that Isolde didn’t remember anything; no matter how he tiptoed around the subject, she did not want to acknowledge and would not admit anything; and he fell silent.

If she did not understand what was at stake or if she did not want to understand, then let there be tranquillity.

Then let her quickly take herself off for Paris.

He realized that it was not by chance that it wasn’t happening. It was not by chance that Isolde was slow on the uptake and kept denying and denying. Things that fail to occur have the same value as divine portents. Isolde was the only person, the last one who to some extent tied him to his family, and this tie had to be loosened so that he could be perfectly free in his actions and able to carry out his mission. He never understood how he’d wound up among them. He despised his stepmother and had always hated his lily-livered father and ass-kissing younger sister, who allegedly resembled their mother.

It will be like a tooth extraction, it will make an awful cracking sound but then he will be free of hatred.

So he decided to promise her, yes, he wouldn’t think about it anymore, about these bygone things, about this creator or whatever, Isolde should go and not worry, leave him to himself. But he was tired of her atheism.

Sweet Carlino, there is no such thing as a creator, so how could you have anything to do with him, how could he exist, what sort of mission should you have. Before I go, I shall talk this idea out of your head, you can think of it as an accelerated university course.

She should know that he was very grateful to her for letting him come out here, now she should go and not worry.

One does not have any kind of duty in the world, nothing, nada, and there’s nothing that one must accomplish either with or without a creator. And most of one’s fellow humans are beyond help anyway. You might do this or that for them, but that would be worthwhile only if you had a penchant for senseless charity. And you don’t have a penchant for that.

Neither do you. I at least am struggling for it, suffering, why don’t you want to understand that.

As if at the very last moment he risked beseeching her, and his most enlightened aunt did not understand this last appeal either.

No doubt for young people it is very hard to swallow this bitter pill without a sugar coating.

He also knows that there is no creator, he’s not an idiot, has not gone completely out of his mind.

Then don’t drive me out of mine and don’t make fun of me, and mainly stop whining at me. I can’t stand it.

The one I’m talking about, or the thing I’m talking about, is not as the Christians or Jews imagine him, or the way you do. He is much more ancient, much simpler, rawer and more brutal. And it’s not important whether it has a persona or not. It bothers you because right away you think of it as a person and worry that it might be crawling out of some Germanic myth.

Perhaps I could follow you, but I don’t want to.

The reason she needs the whole Germanic mythology or the Christian God is only to conceal or protect herself with them for a while.

Somebody did murder Gerhardt.

No one ever found out who.

He killed at least four people.

You must be listening to too much Wagner, Carlino. Or you’ve become addicted to some cheap drug, you can tell me.

You’re on the wrong track, but crimes must be confessed, no doubt about it, there’s no other way, and I agree about that. Everyone should confess his or her own.

At least you should leave off with this. After Christmas we’ll go not only to the lawyer but also to my doctor. Whatever you’ve been taking, believe me, we can take care of it in no time.

He’d try to formulate it differently, but he didn’t like censoring his words.

As if he were standing on a promontory across which waves were slowly crashing right before his eyes, and soon there’d be no solid ground left under his feet.

Perhaps Isolde is right, that his agitated fantasy is carrying his thoughts in the wrong direction. But why should she be so frightened of him, why call for a doctor right away. This too is only a cultural or cultic collective term to label one’s recurring fantasies, or fantasies of the collective. Wagner is in it, no question, and so are the Greeks, and the Germans — as in a large bowl of soup.

You’re not answering me.

I haven’t become addicted to anything.

Then something very unusual has happened to you. I understand if you don’t want to tell me about it, but then we’ll have to find a trustworthy psychiatrist.

I’ve told you more than once that if you’re ready to undergo your obligatory analysis, I will pay for it.

What’s to be done, Döhring shouted, if there are cultural fantasies with these brutal gods or even the creator sitting in the middle of them. Yes, the Creator. Whether Isolde likes it or not, such words do exist and one can’t avoid them. He knows that everything is very fragile, concepts are also very fragile and one must be very careful, but that’s why. He won’t keep quiet anymore, he cannot stand it, and he doesn’t much care if he offends other people’s convictions with this concept. He will wreak havoc, will smash the system of concepts. He can’t help it, the job of cultural fantasies is to excite, and how can he keep his mind from becoming enlightened at last regarding certain issues that eventually urge him to action.

What are you talking about, Isolde interrupted, trying to turn her entire being into a palpable threat, what words should you avoid and how.

Maybe you can tell me how to protect myself from them or from my own thinking.

He said this because he did not dare mention becoming enlightened again. One day I will tell you what can be done against it, against becoming enlightened, because you’re a big boy now.

You haven’t got very far with it.

Until now I’ve never wanted to interfere with your most intimate private life.

But you have, you’ve done nothing but.

Come on, what do you know about it.

Or, all right, maybe not from them, but how is one to protect oneself from one’s own imagination.

Nevertheless, the detective was coming toward him, leisurely and cheerful, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

Which told him right off that no matter how risky it was, he had acted correctly when he let Isolde go, let her go to her happy little paradise and take her limitations and irresponsibility with her. He had broken the last thread that tied him to their reality. Where is it written that because of them he should censor his dictionary and even his imagination. He would do his own worrying about his vocabulary. He and the detective had to be left alone. The Creator’s hound has found not only the needed spoors in the universe but also his hangman, who will carry out the sentence.

This is as it should be, how could it be otherwise.

He did not understand the other gods but, at last, to himself, he could easily translate this more brutal god’s language into human language.

Let Isolde go to her dear rue Cassette, let her go and not worry.

Nothing more can go wrong.

At the very most they would be unable to decide whether cultural or mythological images are uniformly part of a cosmic reality, or whether they function as independent entities in a reality that is homogeneous for everyone.

Everything will be all right.

What he should say is yes, now the one I’ve been looking for has found me. And I shall carry out the sentence entrusted to me.

You called me, the detective said gently when he reached him in the patches of light cast from the house, and he showed his bright teeth in an overly nice smile.

Döhring wanted to reply just as gently and lightheartedly, he too wanted to attempt a smile, this obligatory flashing of mood, but instead he said to himself, I have to behead this man who has finally found me, and he shuddered at the happy thought of this verdict, that he has to finish him off.

He thought that wherever there was sin, there had to be virtue as well.

Not that having seen the axe, the detective wasn’t clear about the danger facing him.

While they were looking into each other’s eyes in the coldly dripping twilight, as if it couldn’t have been three days since they’d met for the first time, as if in the meantime not many things had happened to them and they needn’t think about so many other things, other dangerous persons and other dangerous occurrences.

If you take one of the handles, I’ll take the other, the detective said cheerfully and reached for the basket filled with chopped wood.

A man in love becomes very generous even with total strangers, though right away he saw how little enthusiasm the other one showed in accepting the generosity. He saw in Döhring’s very sharp features, and mainly in his compulsively small steps and tight movements, that his initial impression had been wrong. He had to correct himself. As though standing in the Tiergarten he had not acknowledged that this young man was not just an egomaniacal urban jerk; what he had was not neurosis, but schizophrenia. He saw the obduracy and the destructive desire to break free, he saw how the two clashed and did not let each other breathe. As if Döhring were urging or forcing himself to take steps to flee, or as if he were lurking around his own body. He was at once driven and treacherous.

If he wanted to learn something from him, he had to be on guard and address not the young man but the lurking stranger; he would have to overtake the fugitive in his flight.

Döhring’s eyes were wide and alarmed; he looked at the other man and showed that he did not understand what was happening or what more might happen as they walked together, carrying the basket.

He felt a kind of defenselessness that he could not resist, but neither could he forgive Kienast for it, and these contrasting feelings tugged and pulled his features in different directions.

And at that moment he accepted something he did not know, something he should not have accepted or come to know. A love-filled sentiment radiated from the other man for which he had no words, which he did not know, and which was not intended for him. He realized he was scowling, though in his own interest he should have been smiling at this miserable cop.

His grotesque silence felt oppressive once they reached the house; he felt he did not have enough air and was behaving in ways that did not serve his own interest, especially after they put down the freshly chopped wood by the fireplace. Maybe it was only because of a single bad move. Kienast hardly had time to look around, for they’d brought the wood in just in time; the fire was about to go out. And Kienast was, very politely, about to lift the short-handled axe out of the basket so that Döhring could quickly throw a few pieces on the fire, or who knows why he did it.

Döhring grabbed at it as if someone was trying to take it away from him or as if he feared being assassinated. As if Kienast were an assassin. Human blood had clung to the handle of this axe once before, and it had been carefully washed off so the axe could be used again and not given or thrown away; both handle and head had been sandpapered clean. The Döhrings did not talk about this, but everyone knew what had happened with the axe. Even though no trace of his uncle’s blood or marrow remained. And objects cannot be held responsible for their being used for irregular purposes. He managed to grab it, but this move embarrassed them both, the embarrassment of one only strengthening that of the other.

As if they were mutually familiar with every episode in the other’s life.

The mutually revealing move and mutually felt fear offended them in their shyness and dignity, affected them all the way to the groin. Surprised by the unexpected contact, they had the presence of mind to exchange furtive bashful looks, as conspirators do when they take large risks and then turn quickly away.

Which emphasized the silence all the more — the fact that until now Döhring had said nothing, had not returned the detective’s greeting, and was unlikely to be the one to break the silence of this house in the woods. Nevertheless the detective decided he wouldn’t be the first to speak, no need for hasty politeness, he’d bide his time. He had come here in response to the young man’s schizoid outburst, having understood the hidden meaning of the personal invitation, and that should suffice for now. He could not appear weak. It was warm and there was a smell of apples, and anyway it was time to look around, see who these Döhrings were, what he might expect. The walls were covered with old wainscoting, wooden stairs led to an upper floor, and every light was on, every lamp and sconce as well as the chandelier.

Döhring hastily leaned his carefully guarded axe against the side of the fireplace as if his very body, his bodily existence, had become shameful. To avoid facing the leisurely, brazenly inquisitive detective with his intrusive physical self-assurance, he squatted down before the fire. But he was unable to break their mutuality. He quickly surrounded the dying flames with thin pieces of kindling. Everything was positioned on its prescribed course; he could not deviate from it. The detective actually liked to see how practiced Döhring’s fingers were at this, though he had no movements that weren’t hurried, sharp, unrestrained, compulsive. He probably always leaned the axe against the fireplace at the same angle.

He blew on the fire so the flames would catch the new kindling, his agitated blowing obviously meant not only for the embers but also for the detective. Who then turned away, as if to absorb the young man’s quiet performance with his shoulders, as it were, and with leisurely steps creaked his way around the room, whose beamed, old ceiling seemed low. The rather friendly space seemed to be struggling under the weight of the upstairs bedrooms. He looked out every one of the small windows.

A man in love likes to flaunt his body. He became terrifically excited at the sight of the threatened young man. He would not have admitted to himself that he considered him easy prey. According to the rules of his profession he must remain indifferent.

His profession demanded from him two things that could be carried out neither simultaneously nor in parallel.

To avoid exaggeration or to keep his embarrassment at bay, he carefully observed the view that someone taking refuge here would see from each window. And the blowing on the fire behind him strengthened his impression that from the first moment of their encounter this unfortunate young man had been broadcasting distress signals in his direction. Being asked for help, having hope placed in him, was a very touching experience and not exceptional for the detective, but this young man was already beyond the point where he could be helped.

One kills not only out of need, interest, or selfish enjoyment but also out of suffering.

Suffering that might be eased but cannot be relieved.

A lonely bird was hooting outside, perhaps an owl. This too was rather odd at this tense moment, as if deriding the tension. And while he examined each small painting on the walls, one by one — undistinguished landscapes or still lifes done by untrained local painters or perhaps family members — he thought that no matter how colorful and rich the world might appear in its various transformations, ultimately it was a pile or collection of homogeneous materials, and that was why objects seen for the first time seem familiar or full of significance. The owl brings no misfortune to anyone, but the person anticipating danger notices its hooting. The young man’s back curved nicely. Under his thin sweater his spine was nicely outlined, vertebra by vertebra. He was staring at the flames licking the kindling, which he carefully nudged with the poker, and kept radiantly quiet with his back.

The miserable people we should consider exceptional are those who do not kill out of suffering or at least acknowledge in retrospect what they have done.

The room was furnished simply and sparingly. Between the two larger windows stood a chest of drawers, above it a rustic mirror which for a fraction of a moment while he passed before it distorted Kienast’s face, but he nonetheless found himself attractive because he was looking at the two last nights he had spent so joyously. He saw that it was really he. Facing the fireplace in the middle of the room stood a threadbare sofa with flower-patterned upholstery on which the young man most likely had slept the previous nights under the shabby blanket; perhaps he stayed there yesterday too. Next to the sofa was a deep easy chair, upholstered with the same flower-patterned material, from which a hitherto unnoticed cat jumped out and silently disappeared under the sofa as he approached. Kienast stood behind the abandoned chair. He resisted the murderously tense silence with all his physical self-awareness, overheated by love, and alternately looked out the little window, under which stood a single rough-hewn peasant chair, and kept an eye on the nape of the young man’s neck as he squatted before the fire.

Döhring sensed this precisely on his bare cervical vertebrae — his nakedness, his spinal marrow, and the forever-lost dignity in his groin.

Kienast made himself comfortable in the flower-patterned armchair abandoned by the cat, almost voluptuously stretching his limbs, like a person who, because he believes in the total homogeneity of the material and spiritual world, also believes he can feel at home in a strange place.

Kienast impudently reciprocated the young man’s disdain for mutuality, his defiance wrapped in apathy.

Does anyone smoke here, he asked after a few moments, when the flames were humming and hissing in the fireplace, which helped both men become used to the presence of the other.

Döhring said no but Kienast could light up anyway. He’d find an ashtray by the fireplace, and he pointed at it with the poker. He wanted the detective to be closer, let him come close to him and the fire; he loved the fire. Cigarette smoke didn’t bother him. He liked to light fires, play with fire, stare into fires. He found it hard to tear himself away from this one. Maybe his twin sister would grumble, but he liked that too, it actually made him feel good. It’s easy to get her mad and then it shows more clearly what sort of person each of them is.

He giggled a little at this, though the giggle turned into a rough and grating laugh, not a pleasant one.

He didn’t know Döhring had a twin sister, Kienast remarked, sounds like you don’t like her very much.

So what if he hates her.

They probably look alike.

Why wouldn’t they.

Unfortunately he’d left his cigarettes in the car, Kienast replied, and could Döhring help him out.

He asked for a cigarette mainly because he wanted to know what brand of cigarettes he’d find in the house. When he’d traveled seven hundred kilometers he wanted a fast return, if a small one. In the coat pocket of the dead man they’d found enough scraps of tobacco to determine the cigarette or brand of cigarettes he smoked, et cetera. During his illegal visit to the victim’s apartment in Fasanen Street the day before, Kienast had pocketed a suspiciously crumpled cigarette pack while the concierge helpfully looked the other way.

Experience told him that in such a much-crumpled pack he might find either grass or hash.

Presumably Döhring is lying in this and in other matters, but everything’s going along on its steady way. By now the lab technician has probably identified the tobacco.

Unfortunately there’s not a cigarette in the house, the unsuspecting Döhring answered. Unfortunately he can’t help. Even though he knows what this lack means to a smoker. Moreover, he added, for once he wouldn’t mind having a smoke himself. Because it’s a real shock for him that Dr. Kienast took his telephone calls seriously and really came all the way here.

He is not a heavy smoker either, Kienast remarked, very satisfied with Döhring’s response, but he’d driven seven hundred kilometers in one go and had even made a little detour into Düsseldorf.

It would be good to keep up the tone of this slow-to-start chat, and so he quickly continued, if he smoked four a day that would be too many for him.

Maybe one, unless I’m in company, Döhring responded willingly, though he did not answer like this because it was the truth.

Döhring indeed lied continuously, now to himself, now to others, which in itself caused no great problem for people. But he could not always neatly separate the two levels of his lies; he was too young for this, and his schizoid attacks further hindered him. Of course he kept no company of any sort and did not go anywhere, yet that’s how other people usually learned how to say things, and he thought he could say anything that others had said. And why would he share something about his private life, on any level, with a stranger, especially with such a miserable common man.

In that case, if I may trouble you, please let me have a nice glass of cold water, if you’d be kind enough, said the policeman after a silence and in a surprisingly quiet voice, as if he was testing him. Where are the limits to his self-contempt. He already had the impression in the Tiergarten that this young man had no one in the world, never had had and never would either, not a woman and not a man, or if he ever did he wouldn’t feel them on his skin.

Then the awful voice turned into a buzzing in his ears, perhaps his ears began to ring, which slowly roused his snoozing hypochondria.

Almost frightened, he repeated that he would not mind a nice glass of cold water.

But despite his deliberate intention he failed to surprise the young man with his request.

I can offer you some apple wine.

Apple wine, Kienast repeated hesitantly, as if this unusual suggestion, or perhaps the circumstance that this time he had found his match in deception and simulation, had somewhat startled him and made him think things over.

Maybe I should be a little apologetic, the apple wine is our own and frankly not of very high quality, he said with the same unpleasant laugh as before, but there’s not a single additive in it, I can assure you of that. Which by the way gives everyone headaches.

I have the feeling I’m dizzy from dehydration, so I’d be glad to have some apple wine or water, anything.

That’s the kind of thing people around here drink.

Since I left Berlin I’ve had nothing to drink.

He lied now to make the image he had given of his thirst sound spectacular. He wanted to draw the other man’s attention to himself, but this quickly became a fiasco.

Drink apple wine, make children, grow asparagus, and dry plums, that’s what people do in this region. The asparagus, which they also eat, they poison carefully and with due forethought.

Forgive me for burdening you with my request, said Kienast, who was not quite certain whether the young man was listening to him.

Mothers’ milk is poisoned with heavy metals. Other people’s apple wine is either stronger than ours, in which case they’ve mixed in a separate cancer-causing apple aroma, or weaker than ours, in which case it keeps its natural aroma, fortunately. These people’s obsession is that they must constantly choose between two bad things, and don’t forget these are my relatives, this is my extended family.

You’re probably expecting guests, perhaps your sister, and here I am bothering you with a weak spell.

Wholesale or retail, everyone deals in asparagus here — growing it, storing it, or selling it. My parents — which is to say our father and stepmother, because this woman is not our real mother, I’m telling you this so you understand everything — grow asparagus.

Perhaps I’m not being too forward, after all, by asking for a glass of water.

Or maybe I’ve already mentioned this.

No, you haven’t. I don’t remember your mentioning it.

I’m saying it because it doesn’t go in any other way except with effective plant-protective sprays. Don’t ever eat asparagus.

It’s very awkward if I’ve disturbed you with my visit.

Who said you’ve disturbed me in anything. I’m not doing anything, how could you have disturbed me.

I didn’t know that asparagus was so dangerous.

They’ve got this weak apple wine, they don’t really have anything else. They have money, though, but not under their pillows, they keep it under their skin. If you take just two steps over to Holland, you’ll see how much more modestly people live there. Yet we were the people who lost the last war. In the spring the trees get a little rinsing spray, nothing more.

Both of them stared wearily into the fire when they reached the end of what they had to say.

The detective had no response to Döhring’s last remark, the young man’s rigid isolation and deaf attitude having truly nonplussed him. Whether from the reflection of the flames or his sudden loquaciousness, his face seemed to be all heated up. The sight of his sick face and sick body strengthened Kienast’s aversion, touched with disgust; it gained shape. Which he himself could not accept. Their profession often exposes detectives to experiences they would prefer not to see or live through. He saw the young man in an agitated state that theoretically he should not have seen, even though it was the young man who had called him and even though he now had no way of avoiding the effect the young man’s agitation had on him. Which meant that this young man had another face, one that he himself may not have known, and if the detective wanted to extract his secrets he had to witness the bodily manifestations that went with that other face.

The voice the police had recorded on magnetic tape, with its diffuse, dark tone and deep vibrations, indicated something of the young man’s secret life.

Kienast could not tell whether, given the agitated face and dark tone of voice, the young man was attractive or insane, whether he was attracted to his insanity or whether all these impressions in fact repelled him.

Anyone poking around in the drawers of a schizophrenic’s brain is likely to feel close to the person’s whims and perverse ideas. At any rate Kienast’s peculiar feeling, which he’d been struggling with independently of the young man, was growing stronger.

Everything in the world that surrounds one and might influence one is, in reality, only a copy, and everything on earth is condemned to permanent repetition. Once, ten times, a hundred times, infinite times, even the feeling of love is but a copy of an earlier feeling. The act of love is surely more important for everyone than the object of love, more important than the other person is, though without an object of love one cannot perform the act of love. Perhaps his exertion had made him overly sensitive and he had grown so weak because of his barely two-day-old focus on love, or perhaps he had become both weaker and more sensitive because what really interested him, certainly more than what has been happening here, was the person he’d left behind. Something was definitely not right. The phenomenon of love is probably preceded by the idea of love, but that truth greatly irritates and humiliates the person in love, no matter how hard Socrates tried to convince Alcibiades of the opposite.

It would be pointless trying to understand something, get to the bottom of something, find something tangible in the other human being, or any proof of anything, or a handle on something, if everything is constantly being repeated a hundred or infinite times, and therefore happening within a person but not to him.

On some future night it might seem to him a delusion that he had actually discovered something the night before, or was discovering something now, but at the moment he was assailed by memories of nights alive with the sounds of amorous grappling and helpless pounding of flesh accompanied by shouts and squelches coming from the lubricating secretions of two different sexual organs.

In reality he had not become dizzy, of course — more precisely, his sensations did not have much to do with dizziness — but he could not have said whether they were copies or the original. There was a humming, like that of the wind in telegraph wires or an idling engine. Was his body simulating thirst because he was supposed to test the young man and possibly jolt him out of his schizoid fit.

Who had been waiting for his help, who knows why, but then pretended he hadn’t even heard the stupid request for water, or maybe he really didn’t hear it.

Which meant, again, that neither of them was an original specimen, only two copies working on each other. But a copy cannot satisfy a personal request.

The two of them had stepped into a world in which cues intended for the roles they were playing could not impede their mutual, laborious legerdemain.

Illusion, everything is only illusion.

The thought made him thirsty, or at least compelled him to get up defiantly and get a glass of water for himself in this peculiar house.

He had to pull himself out of his own illusion.

The short corridor opening from the far end of the room had three doors, which he had noted earlier. The first door was to a broom closet full of cleaning tools and miscellaneous items. He had no more time to waste. Like an electric shock it occurred to him that what he felt was neither thirst nor its illusion but the prelude to an epileptic fit, which would be his first; just when love was supposed to free him, his father’s fate was catching up with him.

That is how the final judgment arrives, ridiculously repeating itself. Then he went into a very clean toilet, and as in alarm he kept opening and closing doors, Döhring said not a word behind him.

Perhaps he would have made a move if Kienast had gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He must have been preoccupied with his own madness, because he sensed nothing of Kienast’s dread, which was ready to erupt; oddly, it was already enough to strengthen the embarrassing mutuality between them.

At least he will find out, before he has a fit, where things are in the house. The kitchen was icy cold. That meant the bathroom had to be upstairs. He was glad his brain was still under control and working professionally. He greedily drank water, which helped somewhat, and when he turned on the faucet a second time, the pump connecting the pipes to the outside well kicked in automatically, which made him wince, like a civilian. But he had a quick response to this: he slapped water on his face and drank from the palm of his hand in order to wake up from his torpor or from his illusion.

From the kitchen window he could see the old well.

Then he changed his mind: whatever has to happen, let it happen. He will not resist the madness and he will not surrender to his own fit, no way. He would have poured himself some apple wine; there were at least ten wax-sealed bottles of it on the table. But to have a little apple wine he needed a glass, a knife, and a corkscrew; he had to pull out drawers and deal with all sorts of objects. One can’t say he was calm when he returned to the living room; he at least admitted to himself that he was dead tired and extremely vexed. What with the things he’d had to do and those rotten little tools in the kitchen drawers, he was on the brink of losing patience.

He would rage and demand results.

The young man, poker in hand, was still squatting before the fire as if, as opposed to Kienast, he had found no reason to change his position.

Kienast continued shamming, however; he had to. He was the adult and the stronger of the two. Not only because of his profession but also because having grown up with two women meant he was used to the stereotypical role of the long-suffering strong male. He resettled himself in the armchair and, feigning great bodily comfort, busied himself with the wine for a while. What else could he do. He examined the wine’s color and bouquet, while watching himself to see whether he could weather his fit of anger.

I’d be willing to have an epileptic fit just so as to jolt this miserable little fairy, this little meat-beater, this sick little shit-head out of himself. But why should I. This is what his ambition dictated — his insight into human nature, his empathy, his compassion, and all his inclinations and abilities — which also happened to destroy and devastate his own life.

Less would have been more.

At least this way he understood something of himself and of the young man; he even understood that it would not be good for him to jolt Döhring out of himself or engage his attention. What interest would he have in that, save for the possible result.

To forgo that result would not be a professional self-sacrifice.

He found the young man abhorrent, but he was ready to do anything for him now, even show him some kindliness.

Noisily, he tasted the wine, found it rather awful and, clicking his tongue, went on sipping it. Under the guise of this purposeful activity, he had to reassure himself that his rotten life, his brand-new love — of which, by the way, he could have said anything but that it was animal-like — and his very ordinary, idiotic career weren’t going to end now because of an epileptic fit or because of his own dread.

It’s quite weak, he said, raising his glass in belated agreement.

Usually it doesn’t even keep until New Year’s.

What can I say, it has a pleasant bouquet, its temperature is good, what else could one wish for.

It becomes like water without any warning.

But until then it’s not bad at all.

To your health then.

You were probably saving those bottles for the holidays.

Come on, stop bugging me about the holidays.

Who else but guests would you be waiting for with so much wine.

And he became suspicious in his own eyes, for he was trying too hard and insisting on making headway with these stupid holidays and this pitiful boy. As if he had thought that with the help of this copy he could step into the original, the source of his premonition. Before their fits epileptics disappear into the trap of repetition.

And in that case, suddenly kindled love is not the exit from but the terrible entrance to monotony.

Because you have lit up the house so nicely, he said — and no matter how much he did not want to, he had to repeat some of the words — in nice holiday fashion, so festive, as if he were hearing similar echoes in his own skull: holidays, festivities.

There is no holiday, I’m not preparing for anything, Döhring exclaimed, elemental hatred against everything and everyone seething in his voice, but I tell you, since you’re so curious, I am afraid, he shouted, scared, do you understand, he shouted, that’s all, that’s why I lit up the house.

Haven’t you ever been afraid when you were alone in a house, he asked, and his voice faltered as though he was about to cry.

What did he have to be afraid of.

I’m not expecting guests, stop pestering me with this stupidity, and I’m certainly not going to wait for my kid sister.

I thought you were twins. Twins are inseparable.

I hate her anyway. I hate every kind of holiday, he fumed.

As though his hatred had no object at all, only it would have been nice to lower himself to the very bottom of the word designating hatred.

I don’t need calendar holidays for my joy, or for guests. I don’t want anybody yakking at me about holidays or whatever. I constantly think inwardly, on my own I am pretty much enough to make me happy, I can reassure you about that. And I certainly don’t need company to think. Even if I had something to celebrate I wouldn’t have a holiday for it, or I couldn’t celebrate it with others, it’s that simple.

Of course, while he was shouting he suddenly had an insight into this older and undoubtedly more experienced man. Who was sitting here with him, his big thighs spread, his feet in his big shoes, his short jacket open, and, in his large, loving self-satisfaction raising high the misting glass.

As if he were truly drinking to Döhring’s health. As if he could serve himself here to his own satisfaction. He drank to his love, to his happiness; Döhring saw perfectly well what he was drinking his toast to.

And since his sentiments could not be turned off like a faucet, his love spread out over everything, including this unhappy boy. Who was just staring at him, eyes wide.

How does one become so shameless and arrogant with one’s freely gained happiness.

There was indeed much to be astonished about in this question, and what a pleasant astonishment it was.

Kienast felt that he was blushing at having been discovered; the other one had seen through his weakness. He had never blushed before in his entire career. He must have been ashamed of the little secret that he was here because of the woman and nothing else. He was even more ashamed of his soft-heartedness, and not only did he turn away from the young man but he also looked for a place where he could put this stinking glass in case this goddamn epileptic fit decided to get him after all.

He should take off his jacket in this heat. He’d have enough trouble with this miserable man as it was, and he stood up to do this while there was still time; he put the wet glass on the edge of the mantelpiece. He slipped out of his jacket and successfully lobbed it to the sofa, not letting the other one detect the inner struggle in the movement. To which the young man responded by straightening up in front of the fireplace.

It’s a long story, he said in his deepened, manfully ingratiating voice. I won’t spare you, I’ll tell you in great detail.

I have no right to pose questions to you. I must say that right off.

I’m aware of my rights, you don’t need to instruct me, but perhaps I have the right to ask how you ended up here.

Nothing could be simpler.

Because I have the impression that we are way beyond written rights.

Frankly I have the same impression.

I don’t want to give up on getting a clear response from you.

I may not look it, but I am capable with a little bit of luck of solving far more complicated problems than this one. I’d like you to tell me a few things in greater detail than you did before. After all, from the very first moment you’ve been very helpful, that’s why I bothered to come. If you still remember words like the common good or helping, and if they still mean anything to you.

Even my parents don’t know where I am. Only one person does, with whom you can’t have talked.

You must be thinking of your dear aunt.

She is everything but dear, but she’s the one I’m thinking about.

Why couldn’t I have talked to her.

You could have, but you didn’t.

It’s very clear there’s no trick here. At the examination in situ, you were the one, Mr. Döhring, who gave us the important reference points. After that it was quite easy to uncover everything else.

Not from the things I inadvertently blabbered to you, you couldn’t, I don’t believe you. You think I’m stupider than I am.

I haven’t made any direct inquiries anywhere, Kienast replied, I haven’t gone around asking questions, I can assure you, if that’s what you’re worried about.

Well, all right, you’ve found out whom I telephoned, where I made the calls from. Which I didn’t count on in advance, I admit. I made phone calls everywhere I could in the whole world so that I could talk to you as soon as possible. I did it unthinkingly.

And Döhring was terribly ashamed that he’d managed to say something like this; it was such an ignominy that he should still need anybody, especially someone who was nothing more than an ordinary detective.

This is a closed system, Mr. Döhring. Nobody but I and my immediate supervisor can get to your data, and so I couldn’t have given you a bad name.

Which for the time being would not even be justified, he added, yet in his words fluttered the hint of a threat.

I hope you don’t expect me to be grateful for that, replied Döhring quickly, trying to sound as crass as possible.

Kienast had to allow more time again for chat, if only to gain time, more time to catch up with or overtake him and keep him from slipping into his own well-established way of thinking.

He’ll jolt him out of it.

Yesterday you called from the gas station. That’s not a public phone.

The owner’s phone on the counter. I paid for it.

You mean you’d have left a message on my answering machine that the gas-station owner could hear. No, I don’t buy that, I don’t believe it.

You should. I waited until he was dealing with a customer.

The first time you called from a public booth, if my colleagues are not mistaken.

You can check this as easily as you can check anything else.

Well now, the detective said, directing his most charming laugh at the young man, slowly but surely you’re learning the trade. But I did have to puzzle out, and on the run, that the phone booth was in the Hofgarten, opposite the house on whose third floor madam Isolde Döhring has her apartment. Believe me, these are not facts one can’t easily find out. It’s not the person of the murderer that’s hard to identify — the final result is almost always there, ready and waiting for you, someone saw the murder, or some seemingly inconsequential circumstance will give it away, et cetera, et cetera — but gathering legally admissible pieces of evidence, that’s what’s sometimes almost impossible.

I understand what you’re saying. Maybe I can’t immediately adapt to the way the authorities think, but I understand.

Although my visit is a private one, we can’t put ourselves outside the law, Kienast said, and this time Döhring remained silent. From that moment we met at the scene of the crime, we haven’t been private persons, and I must in no uncertain terms correct your ideas about this.

He wasn’t sure Döhring understood him.

I am the one you called, your trust in me is truly touching, but I am the police.

This too had no response.

True, I had a free evening, or I made myself free for this evening, that’s also a fact. But anyway, based on your calls and no matter what the nature of your worries was, my professional responsibility told me I shouldn’t leave you by yourself.

Maybe then you’ll have time for me. You don’t have to leave so quickly.

This was so unexpected, sounded so gentle and convincing, so full of pure human hope, that Kienast was alarmed.

I can’t demand more time or attention than you are willing to grant me, I wanted to warn you about this.

But you wouldn’t give any more, either.

That’s something you don’t need to ask about. My personal feelings and professional sense of responsibility are not so far apart.

You must be every inch a democrat.

No need to mock me. A thing like this doesn’t happen to you every day.

No, it doesn’t.

Then how can you miss the personal sympathy, or empathy.

I know what you mean.

There, you see.

But you should know, said Döhring, embarrassed, that I’m a strange bird, a man locked into himself, restless, thinking, and I’m not a great democrat. I’m not on confidential terms with other people, I have only limited experience — I mean in the intimacies among people.

I can assure you right now that you’re not alone in this. Everyone has to learn anew on each occasion — I mean, how to gain someone’s confidence.

But this entire human confidence thing is nothing but a bad game, sheer hypocrisy.

Mostly it is, yes.

Like stepping into a terrible tunnel of mirrors. Nobody trusts anybody. It’s best for one to stay outside. It bothers me especially that people talk too much because they are incapable of even the smallest abstraction.

That’s almost completely true.

They keep lying senselessly.

No reason to reproach them, they need to defend themselves.

I can’t speak of anything but myself, of course, and why should this interest you or anyone.

So as not to hear one’s own lies, people are afraid of that too.

Yes, something like that.

You may think it’s a sin, but no one can exist without lies, I guarantee it.

I don’t know whether several needs don’t combine to do the thinking in one person. Whether one doesn’t have several selves, all at the ready all the time, and one can neither choose one nor express all of them at once — only one in place of another, or one after the other, or one in opposition to another.

The faces of young people are most revealing; he must consider this. Their instinct to hide tends to expose them.

Maybe you should sit where you sat before, please.

Thanks for your kindness, but I’d rather get up. Before you say anything you think is essential, it is my official duty to tell you that nothing you say to me here may be considered as a confession.

I understand, the young man replied, though at that moment what he truly did not understand was what, if that’s how things stood, the Creator’s intentions might be.

He was ready to make a confession, against his own family, to save all of humankind, and perhaps the Creator might say that he would not accept the confession as valid.

He faltered, shook his head as though trying to shake this disturbing formulation out of his skull, out of his brain, much as a helpless sick animal would.

No matter how much I’d like to change the situation, he moaned at last — his voice very loud or rather very penetrating, because he knew this was an obstacle — I can’t be familiar with anyone.

You may be disturbed by anyone’s physical proximity.

I guess you can put it that way, said Döhring, as if suddenly relieved.

Our being distrustful is mutual, if that’s any reassurance.

But I feel it’s better than dissembling.

I understand.

I know you do.

I must tell you a lot of things so you can see clearly and understand the connections.

I’ll try to understand them, anyway.

Though my case can’t have much to do with the case you’re investigating.

If that is so, you are making me especially curious.

May I ask something of you.

First let’s hear your request, then I can decide whether you may ask it.

Would you tell me what I am suspected of.

That’s a rash question. If the occasion arises it would have to be asked not by you but by your lawyer. But I can give you a clear answer.

Please do.

Suspicion arises when factually and objectively we know what happened. I am free to suspect someone when the evidence allows me to raise charges against him or her. It’s not worth doing before then.

This would be the paradox of your profession.

I don’t know about that, but this way it’s practical. Otherwise one goes astray. One should not shut out other possibilities because of one possibility, and this is a basic premise not just in our profession.

But I had the impression I was under suspicion. Maybe not by the others, but you suspected me. And I must admit that really got to me. As if I were truly the culprit.

You’d probably find it flattering if it were so, but I had no reason to do that.

I know what I’m talking about, I don’t need you to flatter me with such things, I’ve been preparing for a murder for years.

I understand, I should have known.

To be precise, I’ve been getting ready for it for two years.

You probably want to share this compulsion with me so you won’t have to commit it.

There isn’t necessarily a causal relationship between the two.

How should I understand that.

It’s hard to explain, or rather, impossible. I’ve never talked about it seriously. I’ve no experience in it. And I hate people gushing about themselves.

You despise them, you’ve already said that.

I despise them, but I also hate them. I know I should be ashamed, others are ashamed of it, but I’m not. I can hate them individually, but I especially hate them collectively.

That is why I’ve come, you made me curious to know where you’ve acquired so much strength to despise people.

I see you’re at home in psychology, you’re trying to calm me down.

I studied it for two and a half years, to have some idea of it.

Or to learn a few tricks of the trade. When you say I’m strong, for example, you can count on my growing weak.

There’s hardly anyone who wouldn’t grow weak from that.

That I should be easy prey for you.

When we use tricks in our conversation, that doesn’t necessarily mean our intentions are false or treacherous.

I have to kill my father.

There was silence for a while; Kienast sensibly let it be a long pause. And Döhring didn’t even dare swallow during this time, because he wanted to carry out his mission: he wanted to tell all, but the problem was he didn’t have the proper method for doing this. His Adam’s apple moved up and down too rapidly, like that of a young adolescent.

Had Döhring not become so sharply outlined in his exertions, if insanity had not distorted his features, Kienast might have said to himself that Döhring was amiably childlike.

He was struggling with the air, or struggling for it; it can’t have been easy to combine such great trust with such great distrust and then express this.

Almost everyone has to kill his father, said Kienast by way of helping. But that’s not a personal problem but rather a ritual, which should be considered a ceremony. In earlier times the Elevation of the Host or Holy Communion must have had this significance. To take to myself a body that others have murdered and whose bones they have broken, when you think about it, that’s no less brutal and barbaric. I, for example, am in trouble compared with others because my father killed himself instead of killing me.

Döhring was silent again; his eyes shone soberly out of his insanely distorted features.

If you want me to, I’d be happy to tell you about it, Kienast continued readily. And we’ve reached a point, given the various beliefs in supernatural powers, where even girls have to kill their fathers, and I tell you, this is based on my professional experience.

He stopped for a moment, as if he had lost his breath like the young man, because he did not understand how two things that have nothing to do with each other could cross paths so powerfully.

Little girls seduce their fathers so they can kill them, with the help of their mothers, for the incest committed.

Somehow this created a profound silence between them.

From a sociological viewpoint this is a salient symptom in the new era, Dr. Kienast continued cautiously, wanting to say something rational in their mutual silence. You must have read the story of Lolita, or you will read it; the secret of her success must lie somewhere in that attitude.

That’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about our own father.

I don’t mean to take the edge off what you’re saying, don’t misunderstand me.

I’m not very interested in ethical questions, so I’m not interested in commercial novels either. Our father had no personality of his own, anyway, so in the sense that you propose, the way you think about it, I’d have no reason for wanting to get even with him. He was a nameless, clumsy petit bourgeois, a nobody who preferred to go around staying out of the way, avoiding everything and making sure not to stand out in the crowd.

Now it was Kienast’s turn to wait and see what the young man was getting at.

He’s the fellow who wouldn’t harm a fly.

Is that why you think, asked Kienast, still guided by surprised caution, that he might be in your way.

It’s not so simple as you might imagine. I’d have to squeal on or accuse family members individually, including dead ones. And you’re coming on with these miserable conceptual dichotomies. If I may, I beg you, please stop it. The others are truly frightening murderers, but not disgusting. Because one can understand them. But my father is a common opportunist. Legally speaking, this seems like a ridiculous accusation, as if I were harping on obsolete business. But it’s the matter of obsolescence, of statutory limitation, that gives me no rest. I won’t lie to you about essential matters. This thing torments me, nothing urges me on so much as that they continue to make a living out of this statute of limitations — until someone exposes them. And there, at that point, that’s where it has to be cut, you understand, so they can’t go on living off the statute of limitations. It’s not the legal process, I don’t care about the law — everything is legal or everything is illegal, that’s a matter of litigation, it’s all the same anyway — what interests me is the way later developments push aside earlier events and the sly way they play with this. I enjoy it too, the place of dread always filled by the next dread. Why should I remember anything, that’s what I want you to explain, but I bet you don’t have an answer.

Kienast did not want to reply to this question, it was simply not his business.

Or why do I still have this penchant for remembering things despite everything. This cannot be understood, and we cannot forgive one another for it.

He stopped suddenly and looked at Kienast as though he now saw or realized why he must kill his father or at least forsake his family.

But I will ask you to leave God out of the game, don’t go on mentioning him to me, because I hate Jesus Christ with all my heart.

Grave silence settled between them, silence of a quality that belonged to neither of them, and for a while neither dared break it.

I despise him, if you’d rather hear it that way, Döhring shouted desperately.

Your preferences are clear: you don’t care about the law, don’t bother with ethical questions, and hate God. However, I haven’t mentioned them, you’re wrong about that, neither Jesus Christ nor God.

Of course you have. You are a blasphemer and so am I. You mentioned their holidays, that’s enough for me. You mentioned the Elevation of the Host, the sacrifice of the body, of course you did, all those flowery words.

Again there was silence between them.

Don’t mention him again, Döhring shouted, you’re probably Catholic, that’s why you mention him so loudly, but don’t mention him to me here, because I hate him, I hate him.

Perhaps they were standing too close together; the poker protruded dangerously from Döhring’s hand. They were barely an arm’s length apart.

Until now, I thought I could follow you without difficulty.

The one they call Jesus Christ I cannot take seriously, I despise him.

Kienast’s glass was still on the mantelpiece; he wanted to reach for it.

But what does this have to do with what they’ve been talking about, and Döhring has to explain that.

It’s probably not his fault, maybe he’s not the one to blame for not redeeming anyone’s sin, Döhring continued, as simply and smoothly as if they were talking of the beneficial effect on the world’s stock markets of the fall of the Berlin wall, which was also something factual, but perhaps it’s really impossible to comprehend or understand what sort of crime it is to let others delude themselves with false hopes of redemption. Why would that be a more forgivable nastiness or crime than murder. Why shouldn’t every person be able to end this ugliness of several thousand years, or one’s own life.

You may be right, but not only am I not a Catholic, I’m not even a Protestant. I left the church, have nothing to do with it. The matter is much simpler than that. I’m thirsty, Kienast answered rather softly. I left my church, you understand, I’m hungry as a wolf, that’s how simple life is.

He was not in the mood for a theological debate, did not want to discuss religious wars, would have no counterarguments. If only because he saw how great the adolescent confusion was in the other man’s head, and he did not believe it.

Maybe you know a roadside place nearby that’s open now.

Upon hearing such an indecent proposal, Döhring was not only taken aback but momentarily struck dumb.

Man, oh man, he shouted after a brief silence, and then, flying into a passion, he laughed strangely, very strangely. Here I am, asking you about the existence of the deities and you come back with material things, your hunger and thirst.

Perhaps his laugh was not even a laugh but the beginning of a convulsive dance of his facial muscles.

But that’s what I’m talking to you about, your hunger and your thirst, which Christians can never appease or quench.

He cried out as if he were deeply wounded.

You can’t seriously imagine that anyone around here would dare spend Christmas Eve outside the family circle.

How could there be anything open tonight. No, you won’t find such a depraved place here, not in our neck of the woods. The people who live here are all decent hypocrites.

Isn’t there a different kind of place.

You don’t understand what I’m talking about.

Still, despite your theoretical resistance, I invite you to be my guest, Kienast replied relentlessly.

Just this once, I ask you to sit down and listen to me. Hear me out.

Come on, get your coat, stop groaning and moaning.

I won’t leave the fire. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to leave the fire just because of you. I didn’t chop all that wood to let the fire go out now.

I’ll relight it for you when we come back. That’s one thing I’m really good at, lighting fires in fireplaces.

Go by yourself, I’ve no objection to your coming back.

I didn’t see any food in your kitchen, have you had anything at all to eat today.

The refrigerator is full.

I didn’t ask whether the refrigerator was full but whether you’ve had anything to eat.

What do you want from me, and so what if I haven’t eaten anything.

Get your coat, we’ll go eat something and while we eat I’ll tell you what I want from you. We can also have a glass of something and talk about theology.

You will not talk to me about the object of my hatred. You may not do that.

What, are you preaching to me again, I understand you very well, but please stop these tasteless tirades.

This God of yours has been torturing me all my life.

I have nothing to do with him.

I hate him.

Stop shamming and get your coat. You think other people don’t suffer or other people have no god. I’m not suffering. You think you’re the only one who does.

I don’t think that.

You’ll live through it.

That’s true.

There, you see.

We’re not talking about suffering.

Good, let’s keep it that way, because I can’t stand your mawkish gushing.

But what can I do when my family is crawling with murderers.

We can’t decide before supper which of our families offers the more meaningful example, because my family is crawling not only with murderers but also with suicides.

That’s true.

How would you know. Stop talking like an idiot.

I know.

You see.

I know more than you can guess.

Where’s your coat.

The young man went upstairs and presently returned with the expensive Scottish windbreaker he had received from his aunt.

Wait, he said when they both had their coats on, and he grabbed the poker again.

First, he had to find the cat and chase it out of the house.

Meanwhile it had grown dark outside.

It’s a stray cat, he explained.

He reached under the sofa with the poker. Sometimes it disappears for weeks or months, but it always turns up.

He can’t stand seeing the cat slyly scurrying around, sneaking in and out. He so can’t stand the sight of it that once he managed to hit it twice in a row with the poker, on the spine, right above the rump, ready to destroy it.

He saw the spine crack.

There was snow on the ground that day, and he threw the cat out into the snow. It made no sound, as if he had done it in his sleep. The body sank into the snow.

But the next day, in daylight, he could not find it.

He didn’t tell the policeman the whole story, though he wanted to, but he could not forgive himself for it. He doesn’t feel sorry for people; he wouldn’t feel sorry for their brats either. If he killed a child, it would be like carrying out a verdict of acquittal. Whenever he found himself near a small child, he was afraid he might do it. Regarding children, he felt ready to do anything to save them from the life awaiting them. The cat, however, reappeared after a few weeks, sneaking, scurrying, alive, and he found no joy in this.

The owl must have perched somewhere in the bare orchard, emitting a single sharp sound at regular intervals. It sounded like water drops plopping on metal.

Another owl responded from a great distance.

The car was still breathing warmly when they got in it. For a while they sat mutely side by side and actually had a cigarette. They did it so they could engage in at least this small activity without lying.

Pardon me for asking again, the young man said after a while in the dark. I’m still curious to know your possible answer. In your opinion is there a god in this world or the universe, not the Christians’ but anybody’s, and I mean any kind of god.

No.

And in that case one is permitted to do anything.

Yes.

But how can a person coexist with this knowledge, he asked, and then suddenly he let the question dwindle. Is it even possible.

Exactly the way you coexist with it, not any other way. Only people who are soft in the head can believe that freedom is a good thing that one should strive for. I’d say, instead, that freedom is necessary, you can’t get around it.

You can’t be serious, or else you are cynical to the marrow of your bones. Even if it was so, how can it be acceptable to strive consciously for evil and do premeditated harm.

Nobody accepts that, even when a person has done it. This is something everyone fears.

Then maybe I wasn’t wrong after all, maybe murder is better.

They would have liked to continue this, sitting in the dark; it would have been nice. To continue thinking about how they should mutually avoid the subject of murder, if for no other reason than that it didn’t get them anywhere. At best it would confirm their feeling of complete futility. But the detective, preferring to leave the question undecided, was willing to relinquish even the beauty of asking questions or engaging in a dialogue. As Humphrey Bogart would have, he stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, turned on the ignition, and backed up, making the wheels screech as he turned his old car around and, pulverizing their intimacy with immense gusto, took off at great speed.

He would have been annoyed at, and for practical reasons could not have approved of, their surrender to the sentimental spirit of theological contemplation.

He wanted to talk about simpler things and did not want to stray from them. It was not so much hunger or thirst that urged him on; after all, he had had something to eat and drink and did not really care about the other man’s hunger or thirst, but now he simply had to find a restaurant that was open, since he had promised he’d find one. He thought a neutral location would be more appropriate for their conversation, which he had more or less planned out while driving to Döhring’s place, mapping out various possibilities, but until now he hadn’t even come close to sounding his themes in their natural tones. He had to get closer to the young man, to get even closer, to be dangerously close, and to obtain the most intimate pieces of information, and he could not afford to be taken in by the other’s playacting.

He was wise to that, though. He saw through Döhring’s role playing. He didn’t grade the young man’s insanity as more than average; however, unlike others with this kind of insanity, Döhring played not a normal person but, oddly enough, an insane one. This is how he defended his real insanity, the points of his outburst. Everything he had committed until now was a mere taste of what he might commit in the future. And it made no difference whether all this was unintentional, unpremeditated, whether he played his role not consciously, for he performed what his real schizophrenia made him perform.

His suffering could not absolve him. He might go completely berserk, this is what Kienast thought, but until that happened he could not legally be declared mentally unaccountable.

Kienast already knew what brand of cologne Döhring used, and that cologne in all probability matched the one smeared on the dead man’s belly and pubic hair. He knew that the brands of the two men’s special-quality underpants also matched, and he also knew that both these matches could be mere coincidence. He was grateful to Döhring for this information and would probably have called himself not only cynical but also perverse if he had admitted to himself that he had come here to express his gratitude. He felt the most humble gratitude toward criminals, because when he finally discovered something, when he managed to penetrate the details of details, he could not help enjoying his profession; he always drank the cup of poison to the last drop. There was a moment when his moral superiority and professional expertise met in the joy of crime. He had been to the special store where those tight underpants had been sold to both men; he had been to the bar adjacent to the store and in the infamous cellars under the bar where, with choice and expensive instruments of torture, men surrendered themselves to other men.

It was only a question of hours before he would obtain photographs of both men and then it would be possible to determine whether they had been seen together at this notorious place.

Had it not been for this case, if chance or his fate had been slightly different, if the young man had not behaved so peculiarly, then Kienast would not have met his sweetheart. This was now unimaginable, though he feared that his gratitude toward the young man might just as unexpectedly turn into profound hatred. He had dived into the pool of love too many times, for episodes that were all too brief, and he was therefore wary of sobering disappointments. Not to mention false trails. Or the painful realization that she might not be the one, again not the right one, and perhaps there was no such being. He already dreaded the moment when he’d have to move out of an apartment once again. Or start on a different trail because he had gone astray on this one. Or that somebody once again would leave the key on his table, throw it in the mailbox after having locked the door, and another one of his crazy hopes would go up in smoke.

Better not to start a relationship at all, but then it is very difficult to maintain human contact with anyone.

If it hadn’t occurred to him that the cologne he’d smelled on the corpse’s stomach and pubic hair might not be the dead man’s own; that on other parts, on the limbs and in the crooks of the body, he detected another very different cologne, and yet a third one, the banally intrusive fragrance of some aftershave on the shirt and underpants — he would not have remembered Annick van Bruck and her enormous collection piled up in her much-larger-than-average bathroom.

And that she could tell which one was which.

He had to forget this absurd idea quickly.

The moment he closed the file on the unknown corpse, he’d gone about his business.

But about ten minutes later he stopped absentmindedly in front of the decorated and illuminated window of a perfume store.

For good business reasons, the door of the establishment was left open not only to let fragrances emanate outward, but also because now and again an assistant, hair plastered down, would saunter out to arrange and rearrange the quality merchandise in the two baskets on either side of the door now being offered for sale at rock-bottom prices, and at the same time to spray a frightfully expensive fragrance into the air from an old-fashioned atomizer. For this purpose there were large bottles of Chanel and Guerlain lined up in a row. Strange as it may sound, vaporized perfume tends to intermingle with particles of steam and soot already in the air whose relatively greater weight means that the perfume rides on them, as it were, is carried into the currents of air that passersby produce.

With a made-up story that he had not bought any Christmas presents for his sister and mother, he entered the store.

He was looking for a fragrance that was familiar to him from somewhere.

It took only a glance at the shelves for him to realize he had undertaken an impossible task. The salesgirls, faces made up to the smoothness of porcelain, followed him as he moved among the other shoppers. He hesitated a long time about whether to search among the fragrances meant for women or for men. What the salesgirls were interested in was whether he was a sneak thief.

Döhring spoke after a while, to remind Kienast that soon they’d be at the border.

A salesgirl asked Kienast if he needed any help.

He was looking for a particular scent — not too surprising in a place like this.

They both had a good laugh, and she was already leading him toward the fragrances for men.

Do you have any specific idea of the scent.

Of course.

The salesgirl looked at him expectantly, but at this moment it became clear to Kienast that Annick was unavoidable; he didn’t have the words for characterizing the scent. To his surprise, when he telephoned he found Annick at home, and she eventually agreed that Kienast could pick her up and bring her into the city. He promised to take her home too. She had to help him identify a scent if such a thing was possible.

Why would it not be.

He did not reveal the circumstances in which she would have to carry out the identification, however, and then everything got complicated. He fumbled some of the official details. He had to go back to his car. To write an authorization for consulting an expert, which required a little cheating and fudging. To have it signed so he could bring Annick into the building.

Annick finally became very curious on their long ride in. He told her what she’d have to do, and she did not panic or wonder. When the corpse was pulled out of its compartment and lay there before her, she looked at it and said they had better wait until it warmed up a little. Then, looking around, she remarked that they surely did not heat the place much.

As if to say, let’s first look at this scent while it’s cold, she started to bend over each of the delicate parts of the body Kienast had named, one by one.

The flapping of the swinging doors could be heard again. Which meant that somebody had once again opened the fucking window in the hall.

Even though Kienast himself closed it several times a day.

If only he could catch the person doing it.

This was probably the moment when Kienast noticed the human being in her, the person he had not known until then. Which surprised him. He should have known her very intimately; after all, he had slept with her a few years before. If memory did not deceive him, they had both reached great heights of satisfaction. The mutual pleasure had its endearing little characteristics, as it were, which made both of them see and experience the other, and they could not have forgotten each other any more than they forgot other partners, but let’s say there was nothing more to it.

Occasionally one can very definitely feel something like this: unforgettable but nothing beyond that. And that’s enough for a pleasant memory. But not strong enough to make one go back. And the other one must feel the same way; after all, s/he’s not coming back either.

It was as if back then he had only seen something mechanical about her, and now he saw something essential, and there didn’t seem to be a direct connection between the two. He could not have told himself exactly what the nature of the mechanical pleasure may have been or, in contrast, what the nature of pleasure might be with this essential being. Or what her essential self would promise. But he saw clearly that the two were not the same.

Perhaps the essential in itself is beyond description, but seeing it enables one to describe the former experience as mechanical.

There’s no point in waiting to fall in love; one can’t resist surrendering to one’s own great mechanical pleasure, which may be the very thing that blocks falling in love.

Annick surprised him with her very fragile professional passion, though her manners were rather crude, like her voice and physique. In the brightly lit hall with its floor-to-ceiling tiles, she gave no sign of her passion. She may have swayed her head, pensively, raised her eyebrows a little, but even that she did cautiously. She must have captivated him with her professional objectivity, which in no way clashed with humility or devotion. As if he were saying to himself about the woman that he’d never seen anything so beautiful even though he could see she was not so beautiful. Just as one’s distance from and proximity to an object meet on the object, without which the object might perhaps not exist.

Conclusion, asked Kienast, impatient to know her findings.

We’d better wait a little more.

Kienast suggested they leave the corpse, go to his office, have coffee in the canteen or go anywhere, but out of here.

No, they’d better stay.

Just because they are staying Annick doesn’t have to look at the corpse, and out of politeness, he held her eyes.

Then he said that the scent had been properly applied, but it might also have been smeared on.

They could not have said what they were looking at with each other, but they remained like that for a long time.

Eventually they spoke of Annick’s exceptional vocation, which made it easier to remain in the mute and neutral realm and to keep the corpse from slipping back into their consciousness.

They did not sit down.

Two days later Kienast would not remember what they had talked about.

But they did not grow tired.

Then, just as Döhring had indicated, the barrier became visible, the small border station. Kienast stopped the car but did not turn off the engine, only lowered his high beams so as not to blind the border guard sauntering in their direction.

Kienast asked Döhring if he had his papers with him.

Döhring answered that he really hadn’t expected to cross the border.

He laughed irritatingly — literally neighed.

Well, then, tonight you’ll do that too, Kienast answered and showed his official badge.

They were on their way within minutes, but that irritating laugh hovered in the air between them for some time. A short distance from the border, near Venlo, they found an open restaurant overlooking the dark river, the Maas. At the far end of the hall, around a long table festively decorated with clusters of candlesticks, sat an all-male group, loud and jovial. The candle flames seen between their faces showed the direction of the draft.

Kienast and Döhring sat down at a table by the window where it was cooler, almost offputtingly so, but they stayed far away from the men at the big table.

The choices tonight aren’t much, said the waiter.

Tell us what you have.

Cream of asparagus soup.

They both laughed, which the waiter did not understand; he looked at them suspiciously.

No, thank you, we won’t want that.

Fish in aspic, and the waiter indicated the long table, what the friends there are eating.

What d’you say.

Made with river fish — bream, perch, tench, the waiter said, and he pointed toward the Maas.

They ordered the fish in aspic, some wine to go with it, and then looked out at the river, of which they could see only as much as the restaurant’s large window faintly illuminated, as though a motionless slightly cambered metallic mass were lying out there.

Annick returned to the corpse two more times. But even before that Kienast had asked her if it was possible to take samples.

Theoretically, yes, but for that it has to warm up more. And I’d need some blotting paper.

And if you can take a sample, can the sample be preserved.

Theoretically.

How.

We put it into a phial, seal it, wax it, and analyze it.

And would she give her expert opinion on it.

Why would she not.

An hour later they returned to the corpse for the third time. She was almost certain, and seemed to be excited about this, that it was a very expensive and rarely used scent, prepared by special request at the Paris perfumery of Eugène d’Estissac.

What’s it called.

L’Épice du Bonheur.

Standing at the feet and head of the corpse, they burst out laughing.

Perhaps they acknowledged that this might be the only spice of happiness.

It contains a few unrecognizable ingredients, which is only natural, probably some animal gland or secretion, then leather, bark, pepper, and coriander, which give the scent its male character, cedar, probably some hesperidins — lemon or orange, I think both — and hay and even some tonka beans, which dissolve and lighten the masculine elements, and then patchouli and vanilla, which give it a feminine tone.

But how can you know this so precisely.

Coffee, he added.

For me, this would be too many good things to choose from.

You can’t always tell who the murderer is, either.

Not always.

But sometimes you can.




In Full Swing


In the spring storm, the city remained deserted at night; not a soul anywhere, but this did not dishearten either of them.

They were preoccupied with themselves, with their own little past and their own little future.

On Queen Vilma Road, Kristóf excitedly showed her the restaurant garden, which had been empty and closed for years, where a long time ago Hedda Hiller used to sing at the sunny afternoon teas. Their eyes searched through the bare, nervously swaying branches of the horse chestnut trees to find the terrace from which he had watched the heavenly chanteuse and fainted in his fright.

It was as if he were giving away a guarded family secret.

As Klára leaned forward the better to see the terrace, the smooth mink coat opened on her body.

Not that way, look over here, it’s the third one from the left.

Amid the busy pointing, their faces touched, perhaps accidentally, and there was her scent, her shoulders and her breasts. The contact was so light and accidental, their bodies taut as bows, that they both burst into laughter and then laughed in each other’s face. In which act there was enough death-defying courage to make them recoil. Their future became heavy and their past threatening; they said nothing.

Later, at a slow pace, they turned on to Aréna Road so Kristóf could show her the building facing City Park that his great-grandfather had built in defiance of the prevailing notions of his era. Klára was interested, curious about everything, or at least she gave the impression that she wanted to know everything about him and all at once. In the distance, somewhere around Heroes’ Square, they saw police assault cars again, parked with their searchlights aimed at each other above the darkly glittering pavement, but the two of them ignored the cars and searchlights since they were going in the opposite direction.

The squalls were strong, yet occasionally there was a sweet, spring lightness in the air.

The pigs set up a veritable light barrier on the streets, Kristóf said, but no one in those days would have said anything about it out loud or even thought it. Bright light from the assault cars came though the rear window of the car and turned their faces eerily pale. Even if one didn’t have a guilty conscience, this light made one feel that one’s unguarded thoughts might be exposed at any moment and one would be caught doing something unawares; one cannot deny all one’s unguarded thoughts. Kristóf preferred not to look at Klára. He wanted to show her the many abandoned locales of his life, and he also wanted to initiate the ignorant country girl into the stormy events of the city’s living history and into the stories of its compulsive destructions and compulsive reconstructions. To flaunt his knowledge, his familiarity with world affairs, which of course was mainly familiarity with styles and languages. He could only barely hold forth on matters concerning which Klára was presumably very curious. To share the city’s jealously guarded topographical secrets. He chose to head in this direction, lead her this way; this would be a less dangerous route. After all, this is where in glimmering darkness his mother had met the older communist woman for the first time, in the dark crowd thronging under the swaying lamps at a block party. At that time the streetcar line was still running here, and he told her what direction the number 11 streetcar came from and where it went to, how it rang its bell for the dancers to let it pass.

And Klára cried out that she had never seen a block party and would really like to.

How well he remembered that warm night, the noisy party on the street, the phenomenal auntie in her glittering dress who danced with his mother, how both women threw back their heads as they laughed and kept on laughing and how both women later disappeared, the auntie and his mother, leaving only the name of a city behind: Paris.

The revelers wouldn’t let the streetcar pass until all the passengers got off and danced with them.

It sounded improbable this evening, too sentimental, but it was from here, from the second floor of this blackened building with its peeling plaster, that they had taken away his father, where now, behind the curtains, a lamp was shining at the far end of the room.

They stopped here for a while, in front of the building, in the middle of the deserted, glimmering roadway. If he could have had his way, he would have taken back every sentence, every word he had uttered about his mother and father. But the question remained in the air, hovering between them, the real question: why a new love if everything ends like this, if everything is so brittle and every story is destruction and devastation.

Wonder if Kristóf has someone else.

They remained gravely distrustful of each other. The thought that perhaps he was in love with someone else began to take root in Klára, as if her jealousy was greater than her desire.

It’s not possible that such a handsome boy didn’t have anyone.

That’s how it is, though.

Then you must be hopelessly in love with someone, she cried in her teasing voice, a voice she deeply disliked. I can see it with my own eyes.

With you.

If Kristóf had had enough presence of mind, which he did not, that is what he would have answered and then drawn her close, taking his chances.

Why didn’t I hug her.

However, he was repelled by her teasing, by her tone — borrowed from the chatty dramas featured in boulevard theaters. If he had wanted to gain her for himself. He looked at her in the dark, and the shining surface of the woman’s large eyes did not reject him. But he did not reply, and he did not want to lie to her; like a little boy, he drew up his shoulders. He did not risk rejection, perhaps on behalf of their future. He did want to gain her for himself, of course he did. Yet he couldn’t think about this openly and unreservedly. And what an impossible notion it was anyway, to gain someone for oneself. And he dreaded the other person’s bodily presence, anticipating what that notion might mean in their lives. Their silent individual efforts to avert or evade their current feelings clashed head-on — and then met, as was vividly registered in their faces, animated by the lights filtering in from outside. This changed their lives. So rapidly that they couldn’t follow it, and the woman somehow had to yank the steering wheel back to its normal position.

It would have been better not to raise, comprehend, or hear these delicate inner questions.

And what’s this about him being a handsome boy.

Where does all this disdain for him come from.

It would have been hard to comply with conventional custom and start talking again in the dark as if nothing had happened between them. He moaned, or rather groaned, under the weight of the presentiment that one might possibly possess another person. The future tense kept marching ahead of them, and at every moment, they realized, belatedly, what they had just said or done. This frightened them, and so they tried to create the illusion that it wasn’t even worth talking about. They had to conquer themselves on their own. As if love’s fear of death had to avoid or overcome a much larger fear.

He thought of Aréna Road as crossing the city like some magical border or no-man’s-land that he could not get across alone — if you try it you become anyone’s prey — but he also wanted to show, right away, that he was completely at home in the two different zones on either side of the border: in the thick of the city, up the rear staircase, or in the precisely apportioned quiet streets by the boringly vast desert of City Park, in the once ransacked and then reconstructed grandiose villas of deceased wholesale merchants or banished industrialists.

But why so much disdain toward him on the woman’s part.

No, his great-grandfather had not built pretentious or grandiose buildings, no, not in that style, no, he wanted to have nothing to do with that sort of architecture. He disdained ostentation; being in proportion, that was his hobbyhorse, always talking about what was and what was not in proportion, what had to be made proportionate to what, and that’s why he was shoved to the periphery of his profession even as a young man. He could say no but not yes. But he was the one who had the idea for those crazy yellow tiles at the Lukács Baths and later for the paving on Pozsonyi Road. He was so headstrong that in the end he preferred to serve others. All his life he was ashamed of not having become a great architect but only a very rich contractor, a nobody to whom money stuck because he worked to please other people’s tastes and quickly squandered everything he earned. He built his brick factory on the outskirts of the city, in Budakalász, and from there he shipped his crazy yellow bricks everywhere, even to Vienna. He had one other great patent, the coke basket, which is used to this day in big construction jobs when they want to dry something very quickly. At a high temperature, the sulfuric content of coke becomes gaseous and engages the hydrogen and oxygen of water, burning one and precipitating the other, thus extracting the water from mortar.

How could it have remained the family’s property. Why does Klára ask such stupid questions. In 1944 there was no longer such a thing as Jewish property.

Leave off with that already.

Why does she think she can provoke him like that.

Lucky for the old man that he did not live to see it.

The last Jewish transports were taken away to their doom from his brick factory.

Anyway, he ruined everything at the right time, when everything was still in its heyday.

At last they could have a laugh at something: that the great-grandfather had managed to ruin things.

There was no inheritance.

As if they were saying that nothing could be more uplifting than penury, when one is free of the dread of ownership. And one has to have a certain talent for ruining things, a sense of rhythm.

They too will become worthy of their own doom, they too will squander and ruin everything in good time.

He has nobody and never has had anybody.

And why does he lie so shamelessly.

Maybe some stupid affairs.

One right after the other, probably.

But he didn’t dare tell her that he didn’t really desire anyone. Didn’t want to. Instead, so as not to bog down in this uncomfortable subject of love and also to keep himself from thinking about the giant, whom he loved, yes, loved, or his mustached assistant, he quickly told her about standing in line at Glázner’s, but the woman had no idea where Glázner’s was or who Glázner was, and he told her he had stayed there after the bombing, how could he have left. The bread was more important. In emergencies one’s conscience narrows down its area of activity. He told her about the unknown lady who in the dust cloud and general chaos around the Duna movie house had disappeared from his life forever, about her injured face, her eccentric hats and cashmere turbans, to show that he understood the secret signals of feminine fashion in the city of his birth and if he had had his way he’d be still searching for his mother, which had become his obsession. Even in his sleep, he knows where she lives. From the Gare de l’Est he’d have to get to Châtelet, there take another métro to Saint-Mandé-Tourelle. Then go past the School for the Blind on République and it’s the first little street on the left, 3 rue du Lac. Looking at it on the map, he figures that the windows, at least on one side of the house, should face the Bois de Vincennes.

He had been daydreaming about those woods.

So he hasn’t seen his mother since then.

How could he have seen her.

They don’t even correspond.

What on earth could she write to him about. My dear son, I think about you a lot, or what. And what could he write to such a mother. Although once in a long while she and his aunt secretly write to each other, they seem to think it best not to show him their letters.

But why doesn’t he read them anyway, why not steal them, why is he such a coward, damn it.

If they don’t want him to see them, why would he.

Why is he so submissive.

He shouldn’t be so tolerant.

He made the excuse that he was merely curious.

Curious, what could you still be curious about.

Kristóf had no answer to this, though the question touched him deeply; indeed, about what could he still be curious.

Anyway, Klára did not believe him about its being curiosity; she thought it was plain cowardice.

He is a coward, doesn’t want to acknowledge his own situation, and prefers to daydream.

It was time to get rid of this great cowardice of his.

It embarrassed them both to have Klára so annoyed with him. She was ready to explode with the anger she felt about him, that is to say on his behalf.

He should rebel, why put up with it. Why doesn’t he rebel against his family. They must be a terrible bunch, at least judging by what he had been telling her. At the very least he should rebel against them, if he does nothing else. Nothing sensible, that is. And why, actually, doesn’t he do something sensible with his life, she kept crying out in a low voice, shaking the steering wheel with her gloved hands.

Kristóf asked her in vain what he could do, against whom and how and what for.

She could not calm herself down.

Let them feel the crack of his whip, why must he suffer everything without saying anything.

He chose to tell her quickly about Ilonka Weisz, about his unspeakable shame, as if mentioning his silent suffering had reminded him of it, and he told her almost everything about what they had done to him on the fourth floor when, because of his pathological curiosity, those Weisz boys had managed to entrap him. He also told her about the mutilated man on the rolling board, in whom he had recognized his hauled-away father, and whom he could not follow on the sidewalk as the man propelled himself forward among the people.

Among their feet.

He could not really tell the story; that is how great his humiliation was.

And really, why does he put up with it all.

That is why he kept babbling instead about his grandmother’s women friends and the autumn weeks spent in the Grand Hotel on Margit Island, so he wouldn’t have to tell this story either, down to its painful marrow, not to let it hurt so much.

When he had followed his father or, who knows, perhaps a total stranger through the bustling city.

And he wanted very much to ask the woman how she saw this pathological curiosity of his; she should tell him, just this once, exactly what she thought about it, honestly. But this too was only a substitute for another question that he wouldn’t have asked of himself. He would have asked it of the woman, except that her silence was so belligerent, so he decided not to risk the question about his curiosity either. Had he gone out of his mind, how else could he do such a thing, keep spying on a total stranger for weeks.

Does she see signs of insanity in him.

What should he do.

Or what does she want from him, from such a madman, and what does her obstinate and reproachful silence mean.

He was not hallucinating, why would anybody hallucinate about such a thing; his curiosity guided him to the right place because that miserable wretch was his father, in his bones he felt identical to him.

What idiocy, how could he feel someone else’s missing limbs.

Yet he did, no matter that he knew it was insanity and he shouldn’t be doing a thing like that.

He only regretted — and he could not possibly talk to the woman about this either — that because of the black dog he hadn’t had the strength to get undressed at the right moment. That he could not throw his clothes, soaked with strangers’ piss and jism, off the bridge and then jump after them into the Danube.

He felt as if he had deprived the universe of a painfully beautiful scene.

In the name of the universe too, he felt sorry for himself.

But though it hadn’t happened then, it might happen tomorrow.

One more thing I have to tell you, he said, surprising himself a little, when he wanted to jump into the Danube from the Árpád Bridge, it was perhaps the devil that held him back.

But why did he want to jump.

His rotten black dog held him back. It had broken out of the garbage bay and come after him. He literally ran him down, literally shoved him against the railing in the joy of finding him and started licking his face with his big tongue.

But what kind of black dog and what garbage bay.

As if he had not heard the woman’s questions, he kept telling her about his disgust, his shameful weakness. When animals get too close to him he begins to choke up, he doesn’t know why. The roof of his mouth begins to blister, he retches, and he has to pull himself away from the animal. He cannot share anything with them, not even with a lizard or a porcupine. So for him to do what he had planned long before, he first had to free himself of the dog. But he could not chase it away. The dog simply wouldn’t acknowledge that it was being chased away. It was happy, it wagged its tail and barked hideously. Throw it over the railing, kill it — he really couldn’t think of anything else. It would have fit between the uprights of the railing, he could have shoved it through, but the dog thought he wanted to play.

Klára listened to him for a while, morose and silent, as though disapproving, but from her face it was impossible to tell what she disapproved of, the entire story, his way of telling the story, or the subjects of his story.

She had lowered her gloved hands from the steering wheel and into her lap some time ago.

What garbage bay, what dog, she asked again. She worried, forlornly and quietly, about her own questions.

Kristóf had not yet told her the whole story, how was she to understand it.

They were standing in the middle of Aréna Road, which hadn’t been called Aréna Road for a long time, just as Queen Vilma Road did not stay Queen Vilma Road and Stefánia Boulevard was no longer Stefánia Boulevard, though decades later people in the city were still referring to them by the old names.

The cambered surfaces of the cobblestones were shining.

The dog would not let go of him, it kept barking, jumping, snapping at his hands, in the end they were rolling on the pavement. The dog was literally writhing with joy because finally they were playing together. But he had to get away from it. He had really had enough, and he didn’t want to prolong his life just because of a dog. He was not so curious that he was willing to put up with everything. He lifted the dog by its forelegs, it wasn’t easy, its large body was heavy, but he managed somehow to gather it up and raise it over the railing to hurl it down. The dog didn’t know what was happening but looked down and saw the drop. Although it sounds improbable, the dog seemed to understand that this was no game but that someone was after its life, and it jumped out of his arms. And as the dog did this it was digging its nails into his shoulder bones, ripped my shirt to pieces, he shouted, laughing; as he went on with his tale Kristóf became louder and louder. He was guffawing, not to mention my skin. As though he were reciting a saga of heroes, or as if his own death wish had been the greatest amusement of his life.

With its hind legs it succeeded in clearing itself of the railing.

Pushing me away and whimpering. It stumbled across the sidewalk, I flopped down and it ran away with its tail between its legs.

It fled back to safety on the island, whimpering the whole time.

But he did not tell her that he kept hearing the dog’s whimpers even when he could no longer see it, nor did he tell her that he stayed there on the pavement with his face pressed to the asphalt and went on screaming.

Sobbing so as not to hear the fucking whimpers.

In truth, he was summoning God; he couldn’t kill that dog, let alone himself. He didn’t notice that he was bleeding from several wounds. And he didn’t tell her that later Ilona was the one who washed his wounds and that now, if she wanted to, Klára could still see the two four-pronged scars.

But how did you wind up on the island that night in the first place, and why did you take your dog with you.

And he did not tell her how sorry he had been ever since that he had chased away the dog, and how sorry he felt for himself for having to live.

He does not understand anything.

Klára repeated her objective questions as desperately as if she had known or at least had an inkling of the whole story, and as if she preferred not to know why he had wanted to die or why he thought he must kill himself.

This astounded Kristóf.

That other people wanted to go on living and he did not.

But what’s the connection, for God’s sake, say something I can understand, the woman begged him, though actually her curiosity was not quite serious. As if she felt compelled by social convention to mock and make fun of painful facts and unpleasant truths but actually found it amusing, most revealing, to witness another person in the midst of senseless turmoil. Having heard so much confidential information, which suddenly enriched her and which she would certainly use, she should have been embarrassed.

And Kristóf noted with surprise how many things he had told her against his will. He couldn’t not lie to the woman from whom he couldn’t escape. He did not want to escape from her but expected nothing good from her. Yet he revealed his chaos to her as if he were begging to be freed from his prison.

It became clear to both which of them was the stronger. Klára could free him, but not the other way around.

And without taking a deep breath before telling another lie or giving any thought to what he was about to say, he cheerfully told her he had gone dancing with a girl at the casino and that was how he’d wound up on Margit Island the evening before the incident with the dog.

But it wasn’t his dog, he explained, only a stray dog that had joined them, and then for a while he could trot out genuine details from his rougher tale, as he had done before. She was quite pretty, the girl, he said in a loud voice to make the words sound genuine.

And he was devastated, he told Klára, when this girl left him for someone else, whom she loved, which she explained while they were dancing.

Actually, there was such a pretty girl and there was some similarity between the story about her and the one Kristóf was telling Klára, but it was not there that she had pressed her hip to his, and it was not then that she had held him in her arms and whispered into his ear, forever, forever.

So that’s how it happened.

But one doesn’t want to jump into the Danube because of a little affair gone wrong.

That’s true.

Then why.

There’s always a last straw, it was because of the last straw.

And you were so scared that you roamed the island all night long because she had left you.

Yes, that’s what happened, it was a little more than being scared, and he hoped Klára understood the connections.

Then he must still be in love with this quite-pretty girl, Klára said provokingly so she would not have to doubt Kristóf’s words.

Of course she understood this banal story. Because of that girl, he had been ready to throw the miserable dog into the Danube.

It was as though she wished to announce well in advance that she was jealous and would keep track of every one of his secret thoughts.

So now they were both left with a promise of jealousy, which in fact was her doubt about the authenticity of his story.

They were sitting in the friendly old car in which the heating system didn’t work. There was no island, no quite-pretty girl, no dog, the dog’s story was very different, and the giant was nowhere. Klára’s malice was deliberate, she made no secret of it, and why shouldn’t she protect herself. Wasn’t she justified, after what Kristóf had involuntarily revealed to her with his assorted lies and profound confusion. Now everything was very clear, layers of undisturbed and unsympathetic reality resting neatly on and behind one another, and the two of them could not extract the deceits in this: that was the naked truth. As if Klára were able instantly to avenge things she didn’t even know about.

Kristóf could not take offense, with the giant being his one and only, no doubt about it; compared with the giant, nobody could be a more significant one and only.

And how could he tell her about the giant. That was a dream, a madness, a nightmare.

How could he be hopelessly in love with anyone, how would hopelessness fit into the picture. He preferred to be quiet. He could not say to her, those poor girls before you, I’ve never been in love with any of them. Under the protection of this phrase, in love, we tested and used each other a little, that’s all. He preferred to be quiet. He did not weigh or evaluate his laughable attempts at love, did not compare them with what actually happened. He was beyond all realistic hope that he would ever live with the giant. His hopelessness resided in a region very different from the one in which Klára discovered it. Even if he could ever find him again, and he couldn’t. Sometimes his mouth became filled with the giant’s powerfully odorous cock, it made him retch, it was hard with his tongue and lips to thrust back the meaty, almost fat foreskin rising like waves from the rim of the bulb, helping it carefully with his teeth; and this would happen when he wasn’t even thinking about the giant, the cock would simply pop into his memory. How could he be hopeless once the giant and his mustached assistant had taken hold of him, mercilessly tasted on him everything that was delicate and worth touching in a person, had turned their tools on him and brutally satisfied him, helping the young man over his first shock, and then, the job well done, had quickly left him.

Factually, he was not without hope.

He understood and comprehended everything very well.

How could he have wished for anything else or more from his fate.

Of course he had not forgotten it.

But how could he or why would he tell anyone about it.

It never occurred to him to tell anyone that those two had shared with him their most obvious secret. A curse would befall him if he did. The men knew that anyway, all of them, and would have killed him at the first word if he’d started to talk. And he hadn’t even had the chance to complete his research. If I had been born a woman, maybe then I could live with him, with the giant, without arousing suspicion; with some common sense, that was all he could think of to resolve the situation. But he was already very far from common sense, and this was something he took into account once he allowed himself to live. It would be better not to think about it, about the peculiar nature of his common sense, seeing as how he obviously had not been born a woman.

They didn’t want him, the men, that was the most painful part of his story, why would a giant like that want him, why would he want such a dark little lunatic like me, what for.

And he did not understand why not, could not fathom it no matter how hard he thought about it.

The most he could make his mind accept was that living beings in this world probably cannot simultaneously both understand the demands of their lives and satisfy them.

Those two people had appeared to be cheerful beings in the depths of the city night, yet sometimes he thought about them as obstinate and merciless Salvation Army soldiers. Mischievous elves, gleefully cruel in their loving. And why would they have wanted to take him on and lug his heavy historical baggage around. On the other hand, if they did not want him, why had they accosted him, why were they so steadfast in their seduction, or why had they disposed of him as they did, what did they gain by it. How did he fit in among other human bodies and souls. His rebukes were weighty.

He understood the accord between the two but how could he find his place between them.

Or why couldn’t he, with his sheer being, oust the other one. Perhaps he couldn’t understand things even when he knew them. And maybe he too should look at his life this way, enjoy its objects and themes to the full and then move on, however modest the return.

To not bother with getting to know things and making sense of them, to cast aside the more dangerous wishes since he’d get nowhere with them anyway and they had no satisfying outcome.

How could he get to know him better when he already knows him to the marrow of his bones, as though in the pain of pleasure he recognized him by the tissue of his bones.

Yet there must be something he does not know.

Not to keep still, not for a moment, and to plan things accordingly.

As if they had said, go that way, but how could he.

If he managed to comprehend this sort of existence, perhaps he’d understand why the others stay far away from curiosity about desire, from the nature of their physical common sense, from what their indifference to one another is all about. Why does the mind always want more. They had initiated him, why isn’t that enough; they had shown him the hidden, silently indifferent nature of the world, what else or what more could he wish for. For this moment right now, yes, we’ll take your body and show burning passion for every part of it we fancy, we’ll soften you up and bend you our way so you’ll obey us in everything, but not in the next moment.

But this thinking was pointless, inasmuch as he always got to the same place, and the most he could do was start brooding anew.

It made no difference what he did or didn’t understand. In his imagination the giant lived beyond all everyday hope or sensible condition; he had a life of his own with him, and for that he considered himself lucky.

What those two men had rubbed his nose in was precisely what he understood in this life of his. He’d follow the giant anywhere without giving it a thought; he understood that. And at any time; he understood that too, if only momentarily. Of course, his imagination did not bother with hope, madness, or norms. He would never again make the big mistake of not reciprocating the giant’s surprising and generous love calls and strange kisses, whether because of the giant’s lack of restraint or his own paralyzing dread. It took him a very long time to understand the sensual meaning of those kisses. But in time his imagination repeatedly completed or continued every unfinished movement and gesture. Nor would he behave differently; in his imagination he turned loose on the giant all his mental strength and physical cheerfulness. Perhaps the giant perceived his cheerfulness on his lips, perhaps in the kiss that was not an immersion but rather a brave staying on the surface. It was not a figment of the imagination that he had been living with him in his imagination ever since that first time. It’s not that without him there was no self-gratification, without his cheerfulness. They did it for each other, not he for himself.

How could he have thought he was hopeless.

He couldn’t think something like that because of Klára.

No greater devotion or loyalty is possible in a person’s life. How many months, how many hours had passed, and he was still clinging loyally and cheerfully to him. The clinging between them was not one-sided. Their mutuality had turned their lives into pure kitsch. Without it he’d never have known about lovers’ harmony. This clearly meant, however, that other people, if they could see into him, would consider him completely mad, because in reality he lived in the giant’s imagination as the giant did in his, and they would never find each other or their place among people, only the mere illusion of that place.

And knowing this for certain made him totally happy.

He should not have made the woman’s acquaintance. He thought of himself using the giant’s head. But using his own head, he had to think that the giant probably would not want to be betrayed.

Sometimes he did not know which one of them was doing the thinking for him.

Except for him, nobody could have known about this cheerful coexistence encompassing all the senses, but the giant did — and how.

What would he accomplish with a primitive and boring rebellion against his family such as the woman had suggested.

He knew of a different rebellion, perhaps the only heroic tale that might impress the woman.

Their imagination, or their mutual loneliness in the realm of imagination, the continually gained sensual knowledge about each other and their parallel lives, than which there was no stronger bond — this he had discovered on his own. Not the law of free fall, not the Demén-style coke basket — those he did not discover — but this he did. With the giant they did not look at the water to see its currents. It was very clear that Klára belonged in the realm of ordinary people, and it was to that realm that she wanted to entice him. She weighs the offenses and figures out the retaliations, but no thanks, he doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to accept her suggestion. And the giant’s mustached assistant believed they’d managed to get rid of this little prick for good, and since he needed the giant just as much, he said, let’s go, we don’t have to worry about this little jism anymore, but boy, was he mistaken, and he also couldn’t have known that the pictures mutually nurtured in their imaginations never faded, that Kristóf and the giant had made a gift to each other of the sensation of these pictures.

Ordinary people don’t consider such things.

Ilona could not help noticing the big stains on the sheet, some on the silk quilt cover too, where it must have fallen back after the semen had shot up in a double-beat rhythm as if breaking through an obstacle, soaring high and then falling down heavily. They did it every night, how could she not notice it; torn with jealousy, Ilona followed the events as she changed the bedding on Lady Erna’s instructions. Not to mention his handkerchiefs flung into the hamper, which Ilona sniffed fearfully; how could she not have sensed what was happening during the night without her. Sometimes he saw on her face that she not only had discovered their secret but was also afraid or afraid of herself for him. They did not talk about this either. Something happened between them early that morning when, after he’d failed to kill himself, he staggered back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard, his clothes torn, his body filthy and, standing in the kitchen just as he was, bloody and unwashed, wolfed down the leftover rice chicken straight out of the pot; neither of them could mention this to anyone, ever.

To catch it at least with a handkerchief.

Even after the inevitable moment, he didn’t have the self-control to tear himself away from the giant. All he could do was follow him with the handkerchief. He was no longer in his right mind, and given the nature of the thing, this should not be understood metaphorically. And the reason he and Ilona could not talk about anything was not that their sense of decency forbade it, but because everything was right as it had happened. Which he also attributed to the giant’s strength. This made him feel so strong and powerful that he expected he’d be the one who at the right moment would block the giant’s way in his frightening and cheerful urge to run amok.

For that he would have to find him first, to go back to him from his imagination, as it were.

That is how the heroic tale might have been realized, their terrible happiness.

It did not occur to him that the giant might have another life, small children who were his spitting image, but that the giant daydreamed about him he felt on his skin, in his aching frontal lobe or in his unavoidably erect penis, in the temperature of his body and the rhythmic tempo of his breathing. Or that the giant might be making love to someone else in his stead, doing it very seriously and, along with this stranger, might be looking for him, Kristóf, in the universe. He saw how they filled him with themselves, with their parts, but he was not envious of them, he had no reason to be jealous. In his imagination the giant had to remain as free as an outlaw. This was the basic condition in the functioning of his imagination, and it would have been senseless to cancel it with jealousy. Neither his body nor his soul was tied to anyone but the giant; that was the big truth; he had become the giant’s prisoner, his slave. Impartial curiosity and imagination had set him loose from everyone else; there was no one left to whom he’d earlier been bound or belonged; put another way, impartiality would not let him get close to anyone. He observed impartially even those to whom he was close. He had to distract Klára’s attention from all this so they could more thoroughly observe each other. And while flitting among his various stories about the city and its architectural styles, explaining things loudly and pragmatically as they drove along, he felt how immoderate a man he was, what an evader, a rambler who made himself laughable with his awkward, pitiful life, and no matter how hard he tried, his story was never nice and round, and there was no way back.

Only forward, deeper into the thick of things.

When it comes to sharing one’s story with someone else, the storyteller tries to retailor the story to fit the measurements of the listener, as it were. Then many things come to mind that cannot be told or shared with anyone, which slows down the telling; and with the constant jabbering the storyteller never gets to the end of anything or never returns to the beginning. Either another story joins the storyteller’s own censored tale, or the storyteller trails some silly fairy tale behind the original story.

It’s not necessarily modesty that keeps him from the story of the other person; of course, that too.

But he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Which makes him think he should strictly separate the stories so that they won’t ever again make contact so dangerously and unguardedly. To separate the secret story from the acceptable one; they mustn’t dribble into each other. But how could things have turned out differently from the way they did. The mere question tortured him. Or what might have happened if he’d managed to make them turn out differently. After all, when telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself. He keeps telling the legend until he too is taken in by the credible presentation, according to which his life has a nicely rounded conclusion, a brief clever punch line, an epilogue, and a lesson to give some meaning to it even beyond death. And it occurred to him again how many things he and the giant should have done differently to arrive at a different fate, one that might have led him not only to the shuddering happiness of presentiment, intuition, and imagination, but also to the other man’s ordinary, boring, everyday life story.

No matter how he looked at things and events, this other possibility, this should-have-done-it-differently, planted itself before him, constantly, demandingly. The way things did not happen and wouldn’t have been decent if they had. To achieve another story, he most likely would have had to do things about which, without information concerning the giant or himself, he could not know. How many things they had missed. One after the other they’d mishandled every illusion. Perhaps they missed another story. But lacking the necessary information, how could he describe his misses, or how and to whom could he complain about the lost illusions. His body had revealed much more of the giant than he could factually be aware of; his palms, his thighs, everything, the scent of his hair revealed him, and for that Kristóf did not even have to know his name. Perhaps he had come to possess knowledge of his soul. But he remained unfamiliar with his ordinary weekdays and couldn’t share his own with him. And what if he could. Did fate’s plan, if fate had a plan and if there was human fate at all, include impetuosity, profligacy, and enormous omissions.

And if these latter were taken into account and his fate could not be imagined without them — because the Creator, let’s say, built them into the plans as a gaping lack — is it worth talking about misses and omissions.

Why would it be.

Is it worth trying to make up for his omissions and to pursue his pleasure to the point of exhaustion. Or, to put it the other way around, one should ask how the giant could have known him well enough to hit all the right keys on the keyboard of his guts and take possession of him just as he wished. How could there be such congruence in nature. He did not understand this. Perhaps there are no differences between men because they are nothing but stupid mirror images, which is why they immediately recognize themselves in one another. And in that case, men’s life stories are nothing but repetitions and empty experiences. Any intelligent mind can foresee everything that might happen to them. Sometimes primitive things are harder to understand than complicated ones. And how can he hope to make up for his omissions with a person whom he’ll never meet again, no matter how hard he searches day and night all over the city.

He had the same difficulty imagining this never-again as he had with infinity, or with space, or the complete emptiness at the original place of creation: the Beginning. He made several attempts but did not succeed, because he saw that the vessel of space might be infinite, and then what sort of a beginning would it have, would it have a limit, could it fit into a larger vessel; he could not imagine that there was nothing before the beginning and therefore there wasn’t a beginning either. Or it happened that suddenly the giant was there, standing before him in his corporeal reality, even though he hadn’t found him in the city. As if he knew his name, János, his name was János Tuba. And if not the man’s corporeal self, then his memory stood before him, a picture, the memory of a gesture or an odor, the giant’s thinking emerging as his own.

And as if in the darkness he were blinded by the dazzling of days, he buried his face in his hands.

In the light of day he never would dare ask anyone out loud, but now from behind his hands he did ask.

Locked inside the friendly darkness of the old car he felt secure.

It was a special pleasure that the question he addressed to Klára Vay referred to the giant.

With whom can’t one talk of such things, what one calls philosophy.

He would have to leave him, and reflect and meditate on him with the woman. Philosophy must be a painful activity, then. Had he told himself forever, he could not have borne his pain, infidelity, and betrayal of the giant without Klára’s noticing it.

She must not notice it.

So he tried to keep some of the cheerfulness he had appropriated from the giant.

And he managed to surprise Klára with it; she was unprepared for it after his serious questions; she stammered — a bit mockingly and not completely free of her earlier banter — as she took a new hard look at the young man, seeing him as for the first time, at the height of his physical and mental powers, at the border of insanity, perfectly composed.

Have you gone out of your mind, she asked angrily, but her eyes flashed with joy when she heard the splendid questions.

Why would I have gone out of my mind, moaned the young man, and for a moment he looked out from between his fingers.

Klára Vay had inherited her improbably large eyes as well as her persistent and neutral attention from her father.

And what if I’ve gone mad, so what, he added so as not to sound too childish.

How did he know from whom Klára had inherited the physical texture of her eyes. And the organic world was presumably based on these silly resemblances and relationships.

Your response depends on it, Klára replied, beaming, and now it was she who ignored Kristóf Demén’s banter and disregarded his viewpoint — and in her great excitement didn’t realize she was addressing him in the familiar.

First of all, you should be able to formulate your response, she corrected herself, speaking formally.

But I’m the one who’s asking, I’m the one asking the questions, cried Kristóf in the darkness, at least this once I am.

To show what your viewpoint is, whether you’re a determinist — in which case the world is a strict system with no room for faith or chance, that’s the question you have to answer — or maybe the opposite.

How should I know what my viewpoint is, the reason I’m asking is because I don’t know.

Do you think that vital life processes, or life’s phenomena, even your own, are absolutely and exclusively in a causal relation with one another. Or in your view is there no such relationship among them. That’s another big question.

The young man lifted his head from his hands, looked out at the pavement glistening in the rain as the moving car gradually devoured it; amazed at how many stones he had tried to move in his great spiritual quest, he preferred to remain silent.

First he must answer these questions, after that they could talk about anything.

Klára answers questions with other questions, he replied, dissatisfied; this was too trite even for a trick.

Why should she need a trick, or what sort of trick did he have in mind.

To avoid things, to go around them.

He may not be aware of this, but asking questions is a classical method used in philosophy.

Then he’d rather take back his dangerous questions.

Does he believe in predestination, answer that one quickly. What does he base his faith on. Does he believe in free will or believe that the Almighty conceived and decided everything well in advance.

With the same effort she might as well have asked whether he believes in free fall.

Exactly, because he can imagine the universe as a gaping void, with not a living godhead anywhere, a kind of desolate metaphysical wasteland, and in this void he would attribute greater significance to contingency or chance than to will, decision, necessity, and so on.

He doesn’t know; how would he know.

Doesn’t he understand that people must talk over these things among themselves, people have to show one another the way and make one another realize things, why doesn’t he want to understand this.

He often has the feeling that one acts before thinking, though it would probably make sense to do things the other way around, Kristóf continued after a brief silence. At any rate, he says things first and then thinks about them, and as a result he justifies them only later, which makes his whole life kind of laughable.

Klára did not respond for a while, but clicked her tongue admiringly.

Perhaps she was busy with the car, with the driving and the empty streets, or perhaps she liked and enjoyed the thought.

Later they could not have said when they started in again or how many times they stopped.

How would he know what the order of things should be.

Kristóf had to know this for himself, and she could not decide it for him.

They were approaching Dürer Ajtósi Row, where they’d have to turn.

He should name the reference points of his personal perspective, the so-called pivotal points.

He has no personal perspective.

But of course he does.

He’s one big knot of feelings, nothing else, he’s a nobody. That things might have pivotal points — what an idea.

Enough of this maudlin stuff. They should be talking more sensibly.

It’s Klára who’s talking to him like a strict schoolmarm.

And right now I’m being relatively gentle, I’ll have you know.

Klára should stop sounding so high and mighty too.

Sensing the possibility of falling back to pointless mockery and teasing, they both had to tamp down their aggressiveness.

It’s not about categories that he wants to talk with Klára.

Does he think that world affairs will slowly become knowable and, once they are, can be sorted out in line with his admirable views. Like pralines, candy, dragées, and bonbons. These here are the ones with fillings, those over there are without; or sorted according to the kind of filling, caramel or hazelnut cream, raisins or almonds.

You’re joking again.

It’s easy to joke, but at the store they must perform this thankless sorting job at least once a week because even when one takes great care and pays close attention things have a way of becoming mixed up, and it’s no laughing matter, not at all.

He doesn’t understand why this haughty contempt. Does Klára disdain everyone this much, or are there exceptions. Why did she become suddenly so haughty.

If he could successfully sort out each thing that suits him and separate it from all other things and be aware of boundaries, his response would sound very different than if he thought world affairs were unfathomable, their individual phenomena inseparable or having no difference or connection among them. Because that would mean there were no borders, no such thing as a person’s character; people would have no traits, will, or ethical justification for their actions, at best only arbitrariness and blame or resignation or habit, and so on.

Ridiculous.

Why ridiculous.

Somehow he too had to make a decision, unless he wanted to consider himself an exception in the universe.

In any event thinking comes first — for the sake of the official definition, first comes thinking in the descriptive mode, and only after does one begin to speak. Which is not so exceptional. One surveys the possibilities, reviews what are one’s own or other people’s favored viewpoints. It’s hardly worth mentioning.

But why would this be important or interesting.

Because you are not alone and alone you can’t get anywhere, you’d be a laughingstock if you didn’t know about these things, or if you ignored them or failed to coordinate them with others. Thinking is not a solitary activity.

This made them be quiet for a good while.

Kristóf had a chance to be annoyed once again by the woman’s latest lecture.

Yet their silence affected both of them as if it were a delicate pact regarding their future. Kristóf could not tell what was inherently uneven in this silence. He was, instead, stuck on one word: trampled. The woman had trampled him, had trod heavily on him and then withdrawn. She simply withdrew. This hurt him, but he did not think it was unfair.

They were idling in the middle of the road again, for who knows how long. As if quietly signaling that they had to wait to make their turn in the night at last.

But Klára didn’t notice that nothing was or would be in her way to keep her from turning.

Kristóf was hesitantly motioning what to do, gesturing for her to turn.

And if they had reached the point where they could freely laugh at themselves and each other, there was no reason not to go on to Stefánia Boulevard so Kristóf could show her the other house with the big garden behind the pointed iron fence where his paternal grandparents had raised him. Their easy laughter grew irresponsible, which, more clearly expressed, meant they were hopelessly in love with someone. No matter how they tried to fight it. Protecting their independence from each other. Kristóf is in love with the giant and he cannot refuse to admit this. His mode of admitting it is not yet fully transparent, though it is slowly acquiring shape. And Klára states up front that she will keep Simon because she wants to, gives no explanation for this and won’t do so later. And yet they are progressing further and further into a metaphysical thicket. Where neither of them is on familiar ground because they must deal not with objects but with the essence and emblems of unknown feelings, historical rhymes, genetic assonances, and even more unfamiliar parallels and congruities. Although the building must look different because new tenants ransacked and divided it, sold off the iron fence as scrap metal, cut down the centuries-old trees to build temporary huts, pens, and lean-tos, the two of them did not get that far on Stefánia Boulevard on this stormy night.

Kristóf continued to tell his stories, to explain things, but with waning self-confidence, hinting that it might be best to say nothing of certain matters. He displayed awkwardness with all his talk; with his pig-headed persistence he showed, perhaps to the woman, perhaps to himself, his infantile clinging to various locales. Now he saw how empty they all were. The houses, the streets, the squares. And how futile his attempt to surround the woman with all those words. She avoided him, this woman kept going on her own much more objective way.

Perhaps she wasn’t in the least bit interested in so much abstraction, or he failed to present his story interestingly enough, which deeply shamed him.

As if he had failed to carry out an obligatory service.

This other story of his had little to do with history or with his own life story.

Or with words.

They did not look at each other, barely seeing more than a dark silhouette to their left or right, with the light of streetlamps flashing and fading above the car. Neither of them looked at their watches, were no longer concerned that they might be late or should be going somewhere; their commitments had faded away. Klára continued to handle the young man’s declarations with a certain innate caution. Or remained cautious because of his rebellious tendencies. She considered his vague urban-sociological theory as intellectual decoration, theatrical scenery with which Kristóf rushed to isolate both loud catastrophe and quiet tragedy. If only to spare her. This flattered her; she was moved by his courtesy but not appeased. She and Simon had banished from their life every form of courteous or ceremonious behavior, though she systematically continued to point out to Simon what rule of accepted behavior they happened to be breaking at any given moment. But now her former life seemed to be returning through the back door, a life more in accordance with her upbringing, based on the careful exchange of courtesies and the tactful transposition of brutality into something with acceptable tones. Simon had learned a lot about this, theoretically, in a course on behavioral history at the Moscow School of International Relations, but he acquired it negatively from Klára Vay. He learned from her firm denunciations how he should have behaved in given situations, what he should have done or should do. Klára Vay was not a very sensitive person and therefore minced no words; she could not afford to be sentimental. She had only contempt for everything that was weak, timid, or indirect; she struggled with her own intellect as well, she had to be clear-sighted at all times. Eventually she would begin her university studies and she was ready to do anything for that. She had had no formal education of any kind, though she had read a great deal; she was determined to fight her way through the history of thought, alone. She knew she was throwing her weight around and wouldn’t get far with her suggestion for systematization, but she had to keep on course and she could hardly expect more than that. She now and again tested her conceptual capacity and arrogantly disregarded her fiascos. Nothing interested her but finding a direct, practical, and easily understandable explanation, a formula that accepted catastrophe and, at least for a time, resisted erosion and tragedy.

And this formula, in all its elements, had to be beyond the personal.

Nobody could foresee a change in circumstances.

To find a place for herself, a form for her rebellion. So she would not remain in eternal illegality. Not to be vulnerable. She should not be allowed to sink. She would choose betrayal, destruction, and even more total devastation, whoredom, anything but the resigned muteness in which they had been living as the living dead.

The devil take the hindmost.

And no matter how serious her struggle proved to be, no matter how obsessed she had become with it and how calculating, she found it amusing that this young man from across the boulevard busied himself, so doggedly and enthusiastically, with her person — to which she herself, in her own well-considered interest, paid only moderate attention. He was following her, observing her, becoming her dog. She liked his crew cut, his humility, his gentleness, which at the same time she was ready to belittle or ridicule, his strong forehead; she liked looking at his boyishly soft lips, as though mapping out his dormant lovemaking capabilities and pleasure-producing physical attributes. She sensed correctly that the young man had no definable intentions or at least no conventional ones; he set no preconditions.

Anyway, attractive and beautiful people tend to consider loyal courting and admiration their due.

This admiration was hers; she deserved devotion and humility.

Although it struck her as strange that the young man’s courting lacked manly self-adoration and that he was not hesitant in his humility.

And she was looking for a partner in her rebellion whom she could initiate, narcotize, and dazzle, whom she could shape to her liking with her fingers, like putty, someone who would serve her and no one else.

Perhaps she was looking for a male being who, curiously, was not selfish, who was disciplined even when unbridled, who unlike other men was not too headstrong. So she could exclude Simon to some extent. She wanted independence; she had gone too far with Simon in their mutual dependence. To shake the young man out of his silent adulation — aside from everything else she had always longed for his lips — to make him stop talking and start doing something.

Yet she had given him no signs in this direction.

She deserved this much compensation: to get her hands on such an innocent, handsome boy, nice and slow. Thanks to her traditional upbringing and irregular behavior, she had missed out on the admiration and devotion that should have been hers. She regretted, painfully and urgently, not having had someone to reject. And precisely because she loves Simon, she isn’t going to pass up this opportunity. She loves no one else and she never will.

It is true that she looked at people in love with distrust; I’m a prude, she thought. She was repelled by their toying and dallying; when she saw them she turned away, pretending not to have seen them.

I’m intolerably prudish, she admonished herself, and I can thank that bigoted mother of mine for that too; she knew it, yet she found them disgusting, these dumb lovebirds.

She willingly gave up tenderness; she preferred unruliness, wildness.

What they had was not exactly love but, rather, a covenant or testament. She and Simon said to each other straight out that theirs was a new testament, why not, this was the real new testament, not Jesus Christ’s. Anyway, how can one love a snot-nosed boy like this, I’ll wind up wiping his nose. They will mate. And secretly she was excited about finding out whether he was Jewish or half-Jewish, it was all the same to her; all they had to do was go to bed and then the big truth would out. She finally wanted for herself one of these little doomed ones; this too was part of her rebellion. She had never been to bed with a Jew, and this interested her very much, this was more than rebellion against her upbringing. As though this act promised a hitherto denied quality that she’d become familiar with so she could distinguish it from other qualities; this act was still to be performed and not to be foresworn. Is there a palpable difference. Based on the experiences available to her, she did not think it was feasible to separate personality from race, since a person had no sensory means to do so. She was excited by the image of an unprotected cock, by its being circumcised, because their terrible reputation for lasciviousness lay in this anticipation. To take revenge on her parents, who with their Christian fussing around had embittered her entire love life, deliberately and well in advance. She wanted nothing of their life and still her mouth was stuffed with it; it made her spit all the time.

She could not move for all her inhibitions, therefore she made large gestures.

Hardly anyone noticed.

She also considered changing her name so as not to carry her parents’; they shouldn’t be right about everything all the time. Yet taking Simon’s name would have offended her independence, and in truth she found it ugly, common; she wouldn’t admit it, but there remained in her a proud aristocratic dislike of Simon’s rather ordinary name. It wasn’t in the Almanach de Gotha* and therefore did not exist.

Which was in every way adequate for the man’s proletarian pride.

She could have taken her mother’s name had she not felt a certain physical revulsion against her mother for her own joyless conception. She could never touch her mother, let alone carry her name. She was even repelled by her mother’s former beauty, though she could not ignore the hereditary path it traced in her, and by the fact that it was allegedly her mother’s little-girlish physical perfection that had caused Klára’s father to fall madly in love with her. Although Klára did not know exactly what governmental position her father had held or in what areas he had performed his delicate, highly confidential activities, she forgave him, blindly, for everything. She adored and worshipped him for his circumspection, calm, and wisdom. Whenever he came home for a few days after one of his secret missions, Chief Counselor Elemér Vay had played with the little girl, giving her rides on his knees for hours or shooting glass marbles with her on the living-room floor, as if he were her grandfather.

At the bottom of Klára’s memory, images of these occasions settled into patterns for happy hours ahead.

Even though she also had rather ominous presentiments about her father.

Once she was in school, on exceptionally happy days he would speak to her in German to quiz her on her French vocabulary, and they both enjoyed this immensely. She made excuses to herself, a little ashamed, for his having been taken by Arrow Cross men to the military prison in Sopronkőhida, outside Budapest, along with the elderly papal nuncio and Count Esterházy.*

On such sensitive historical terrain, concerning the question of how these men wound up in Sopronkőhida, it was advisable for her to move cautiously, if only because of Simon. She decided not to ask, not to explore; a few inadvertent or malicious remarks were enough to persuade her not to inquire further. On her admissions applications she wrote that although she and her family had been relocated, which was why she graduated from a Franciscan high school, not only was she a confirmed atheist, but her father had anti-German views and had carried out important activities in the resistance; before she was born, pro-German factions had forced him into retirement and the Arrow Cross had failed to execute him only for lack of time. Yet anxiety about her father persisted, as well as shame about her own exaggerations and distortions, shame that she felt forced to talk like this, to lie so much. She could not deny or ignore that during the war His Excellency the regent had reactivated her father’s career and entrusted him with special missions, because everybody in the family was very proud of this.

But if something deemed incriminating were revealed about her father, Simon would leave her; this too was very clear to her. Although among some quietly accumulating counterarguments was the fact that recently Simon had come very close to being offered a job in the diplomatic service; since it was hard to imagine a screening process that would not uncover her family background, perhaps it had already been done and did not conclude with a negative result.

For his intemperate hatred, Klára loved Simon even more, though she could imagine a hatred so intemperate that it might make him break up with her. In fact she could not go past a certain point with him, despite the hatred she harbored for her own family. The chief counselor’s old sports car, in which they were now headed toward Stefánia Boulevard, had weathered the Hungarian Nazi regime — and, after its collapse, the requisitioning of goods to pay reparations to Russia — in a garage in Börzsönyliget, hidden among bales of straw. Only after 1956 did they free it from the straw, using pitchforks. For years afterward, the car seats smelled of hot Hungarian summers, of larks and hayed fields. Before starting out in it for Vienna with their two grown daughters that year, wearing army boots and awful-looking trench coats, so that the girls could finally dance with their peers at the opera ball, they had to obtain a new license plate and papers for it. Were the girls to be stuck in Budapest, neither of them would get into any Hungarian university, and without that, their future would have been very bleak. In those days there were no special problems in obtaining the right papers, and nobody raised objections. After a few years of enforced silence, the old network was functioning again. On the last Tuesday of October, the ready-to-fight core members met for the first time in Lehr’s apartment. While the hoi polloi on Köztársaság Square were busy hanging people, shooting, storming the Communist Party headquarters looking for underground torture chambers and, with their own ears, hearing freedom fighters banging inside the fortified secret-police cells, the men in the Teréz Boulevard apartment, bright in the languid sunshine, were reactivating their secret society.

It took only a few days.

By the time they had the false papers and the phony license plate, the Russians, together with the city police of Győr, had sealed off the borders again. Now, sitting in the car together, Klára and Kristóf could not have known that when Kristóf fled home from the devastated square that very Tuesday to tell the speechless and incredulous elderly gentlemen what he had seen, virtually breaking in on them in his agitation, he had chosen Klára’s father’s face to focus on. As if this oldest pair of eyes having been the most skeptical were the safest, as if it was this gentleman especially whom Kristóf had to convince that he was not exaggerating or distorting anything, that charred stumps of bodies really were lying out among the burning books and documents, that people really were being hanged in the street.

It would please Klára to take a secret small revenge on her worshipped father by getting together with a Jew and thereby also inflict a nice wound on the young man. This too belonged to her rebellion; Kristóf himself had nothing to do with the passion with which she would touch him. Then she would really succeed in touching the Jew in him. No one should remain untouched by her universal pain and universal anxiety; this would be Klára’s only satisfaction.

Simon was the one; love was meant exclusively for Simon, not for Kristóf.

To see how much she could torment Kristóf and watch his torment — that is what Klára wanted, not his love.

And she saw clearly that he could be tormented.

Which Kristóf himself did not consider wholly unjustified, since his own father, killed by his comrades, had been a die-hard Stalinist; he did not forget that for a moment. It wasn’t enough for either an excuse or an explanation.

Kristóf and Klára turned their raw self-hatred, their historical perturbation and exasperation, on each other.

Oddly, the mutuality of this somewhat satisfied them.

If Kristóf did not want to lose moral credibility in his own eyes, and why would he want to, he could not object to Klára’s taking her revenge on him for the family insults she had suffered because of her father. Klára listened to Kristóf’s lamentable story with a certain empathy derived from her feelings about her father and from a vaguely delineated historical remorse. Nevertheless, she couldn’t deny that her concern for him was overshadowed by her gloating, raw and unforgiving.

Which, because of Simon, she had to deal with cautiously. She would protest whenever Simon tried to wipe off the alleged sins of his class on her, which she found extremely unfair, and would become sharply indignant.

Where does he get off.

At the top of her voice she would yell, you’re talking to me, not to my mother, not to my father.

But this was not their biggest problem.

In the darkness rhythmically illumined by streetlights, Kristóf could not get used to the woman’s freshly applied perfume. He liked the earlier one better; it had been fuller and more subdued. Also, he was unusually cold and could barely keep from shivering, which was humiliating, not very manly. And this was not only because the soles of his shoes were so thin, but also because their closeness had grown too intimate, hugely increasing his anxiety about the abandoned giant, who, although he was physically far from Budapest, surely was aware of what was going on. He had to be feeling what Kristóf felt and didn’t want to feel toward the woman. A sense of his presence made Kristóf breathe as if he were taking small samples of air into his lungs and then expelling them when he uttered his sudden, unexpected phrases. This behavior had nothing to do with his response to the giant’s unmistakable animal smell. As though he were saying to himself, Well, I’ll be, I can’t get to the bottom of this. The giant initially had no idea what to make of this attitude. Slowly he realized it, jostling among alien sensations, and only then comprehended it.

Indeed, they could not get to the bottom of anything; Klára, Kristóf, and Simon, coming together as they had from three contradictory social environments, either misinterpreted or plain misunderstood one another’s gestures. No two of the three of them could be together, on their own, without the third. This was hard for all of them to grasp. Yet the attitudes that Klára and Kristóf had each absorbed in their strict upbringing were alike in that neither of them felt free to understand certain things that it was more pleasant to misconstrue politely. Kristóf’s bottomless sexual subversion and Klára’s anarchic rebellion actively required them to find each other — now, however way they could, heedlessly.

Klára was on guard, though. She had read every work by Bakunin available in Hungarian and in Russian; she unashamedly used a dictionary when she needed one to understand what she was reading, and understand it well, and she did not hurry. She definitely wanted to be part of the conspiracy.*

And in the darkness Kristóf kept his nose alert and trained on her, inclined as he was to a more sensual and sensory conspiracy, excitedly working his nostrils to absorb everything more and more deeply whenever he pensively fell silent while telling his life story. And what made him pensive was the woman’s insane selfishness — probably the result of having been spoiled as a child — and her aristocratic narcissism, her intellectual affectations, which she balanced and interspersed with obscenities and vulgarities. Kristóf was more at home with sexual pornography; transpositions of anarchistic political pornography were alien to him. The perfume was sweet and heavy, as multicolored as the segments of an open fan, not at all anarchic, and his abdominal wall and his testicles hurt because of the relentless tension of the last few days. Klára could not have known that he was uncircumcised, which in this or similar cases is a disadvantage for the man, how could she know. Her being so spoiled, her directness and proximity, this was all very unusual, unfamiliar, and alarming, and she seemed to be attracted to him. At the same time he had to sense the pervasive proximity of something in her from which he was excluded and in which he could never be involved.

It was not a political movement that Klára imagined, once she acquired some knowledge about the anarchists; such a thing would not have occurred to her, and in the middle of this catastrophe they had to go deeper than that. She had imagined rather that she was preparing by philosophical means for a sensuous and sensory root-canal treatment. She had to get past the personal because she wanted to escape pain, and at the same time, avoiding individual pain, she wanted to share with others the idea of personal freedom so that she would not be bound by that either.

However difficult their life together proved to be, Simon profoundly bewitched Klára with his steadfast admiration, his veneration for her naked childlike body and the prodigious cascades of her hair in which he passionately immersed himself, so that afterward, with him spitting and retching from hairs stuck in the back of his throat, they both could laugh long and loud; laughing at the slyness of the body, as it were, at how some body parts and limbs resist physical pleasure. Although she made imaginative attempts at escaping pain, it never occurred to her that she might free herself of pleasure in the same way.

And it was in this sense that Kristóf had to feel, in their close proximity, the very solid presence of the other man.

This was the constant and traditional object of his sexual subversion, which by now he should have given up for Klára’s sake: the other man.

The unknown person whom he recognizes in his partner and whom, in the very moment of recognition, he disowns. And because of Klára too, the two of them could not be alone. And the third person scarcely ever left them alone for even a moment. Klára would not let him go, just as Kristóf could not let go of the giant or the giant of Kristóf, instead playing along with his mustached assistant as the fourth or fifth participant. Because of this other human being, Kristóf could enter this sort of relationship, neither comprehensible nor transparent yet ineluctable.

Simon undressed this woman as one would a child with a high temperature who has become helpless and must be put to bed promptly.

To get close as soon as possible to her body, in form still childlike; and a few moments of being left to themselves sufficed for this. To rummage around in her skirt a bit, undo the clamps of her garter belt, plant kisses on her forced-open thighs, gobble up the maddening smell of her undergrowth.

And this had nothing to do with their nonstop arguing, cursing, and even biting and hitting each other.

It was thirst and an unappeasable impatience for each other that drove them this far.

No two people can really understand each other; at best, one can admit that one doesn’t; but the two of them decided they would mutually understand each other, and that determination in fact stood in the way of their own sensibilities and powers of comprehension.

Occasionally their fatuous alliance was as if eagles were tearing at their livers; such mythological torments were no longer unimaginable. During one obscene moment, Klára decided she couldn’t be satisfied with a free-love arrangement because she realized she could not eliminate jealousy, it would kill her; the pain of jealousy cannot be dissolved or avoided, and they would destroy each other with it. It was love itself that had to be assassinated.

Only by tormenting each other, by mental and emotional penetrations that became permanent, could they assuage their passion for getting to know each other. They continually cheated on each other, which, according to the relevant mutually accepted agreement, they were supposed to acknowledge uncomplainingly. At given moments they did this well enough, accepting it and not speaking of the pain. They swallowed their mutual reproofs.

Which they forbade each other to use in blackmail.

But there always remained a moment that, with the urge to blackmail and the swallowed pain, stretched into infinity. What the other one said or did in this infinity could never be good enough, let alone perfect, because, despite everything, they both longed for compensation or satisfaction. For solace. They followed each other around with arias of curses or icy silence, they were tormented by their own imperfections and tormented each other with their objections; yet even so they could not do each other out of their love, whether unacknowledged or denied outright.

Their love remained stronger and more sensible than their sensible vows against jealousy.

If they had managed to redeem themselves from the joy of possessing, jealousy would not have been an inevitable torment; it would have been the only sensible solution.

And there was something else beyond this that wasn’t working between them; they did not know what.

Perhaps they thought that in love this was how things had to be. And if it couldn’t be otherwise, what was the point of worrying about what the other one was up to when they weren’t together.

That became the crux of the matter, the free time; may he, or she, use it as I do.

Still, they could not stop themselves with mere reason from suspecting that the other one was with someone else, doing something that the two of them, Klára and Simon, should be doing.

Each felt that being with a third person took something away from the two of them.

Both of them knew it couldn’t go on like this.

Klára wanted to save Simon at any cost from the dangers that lay in wait for him — moral decay, madness, and alcohol. That is why she wanted to commit an unprecedented, love-driven, murderous attack on her own love for him. To fall in love with another and different kind of man, any kind, with utter irresponsibility and lack of restraint, a man whom she could not chase away or avoid, and to do this not for her own joy but to help him, Simon, conquer the world.

Not with this immature boy, though, not with him.

Because in her great love she was fully convinced that although Simon was a clumsy blunderer, cold, rigid, fickle, and stubborn — these qualities were conspicuous in him even among men — he was, of the two of them, the more valuable for humankind, though without Klára he would perish. She could not leave him, or rather, she would have to save him even at the price of her own destruction, and she found this severe and utterly selfless thought flattering.

If she could have formulated for herself her own idea of a suitable candidate, she would have come up with a fantasy simulacrum of Simon with the same traits as those of the original. Who with his hard palms paid tribute to her marvelous skin, admiring it, stroking and smoothing it with infinite patience, whose palpable admiration never ceased, who watched, spied, looked at, and followed her closely, deep in admiration of her indescribably sensitive features, examining her sternly with a sober, somber look to gauge how he might render his admiration more effective, to see what more he could do with his hands and tongue, his lips and teeth, what his pace should be, and somehow ascertain whether his admiration was satisfying and authentic in all its elements and rhythms.

Which he still could not express fully because objects and body parts always set certain conditions. But fortunately something always happened that allowed him to show his unconditional efforts and to roll with them. To do whatever could be done, even if sometimes it might create an obstacle. He wanted her to feel even better. His efforts authenticated his awkward proletarian admiration at every moment, and then he could admire her even more. They’d move on, ever higher and ever farther, with a chance movement from which could follow verbally inexpressible self-adoration. He worshipped her as if she were sacrosanct. And it must be said that he was not servile, not Simon.

His devotion to and admiration for this chosen female body radiated back to him; the moment his passion arose it transformed him, which he needed, and he could look on himself as a hero.

To disregard physicality.

Klára did not reciprocate his admiration for her body with equivalent attention or passion. It did not occur to her to ask whether her body might not be the object of Simon’s worship. Or how she might look for an object of reciprocity in a man’s body if she had not already found it; frankly, she did not think she’d find anything or had to look for anything, or should serve him in any way.

Perhaps the process of male erection interested her, or anyway that’s what she showed some interest in. The way the rising blood level makes the otherwise impalpable affect of the other person perceptible. First, it tightens and then slowly pulls back the foreskin across the increasing glans penis to bare it and expose it to the outside world, to the point of possible injury.

The emblem of universal functioning in reference to a single individual.

I shall be the almighty outside world; let my inner world be his outside world.

And so on.

Perhaps the man’s pathological bashfulness and penchant for concealment hindered her in the free admiration of the erection process. Or perhaps her profound distrust of pathos, her own inexplicable disgust at the sight of any organic function, any throbbing or pulsing anywhere in the circulatory system. They also sensed that they most misunderstood each other in this area, genteel prudery not understanding proletarian prudery; this they understood well. Moreover, Simon’s glans penis was not alabaster, not pale red and not deep purple but flaming red, which is not rare among black-haired, white-skinned men.

It bloomed garishly above his body like a scarlet flower.

They would have liked to stay away from the terrain of their constant misunderstandings, but given their constant compulsion to have contact, they could not help getting things wrong all the time.

They anticipated fear, yet they flooded each other with pure goodness and willingness to conform — to the point where they did not know what they were afraid of, what frightened them so much; perhaps their fear was groundless.

As if an evil angel were forcing them to name what was bad in the other and pay no attention to what was good.

When emotional words slipped out inadvertently, Simon quickly retracted them — no, beat them back, superstitiously trying to protect their shared perfection. He was protecting her not from pathos but from rotten petit-bourgeois expressions, which he could not tolerate. He would have been happy to bite them in half, along with his tongue, filter them out or swallow them; he did not cosset her with words, he left that to his tongue and his hands, and that way he could adore himself even more immoderately for being so infinitely firm and manly.

Klára very much needed this strong cosseting, though at heart she did not appreciate that it referred to her body. But there was no word to express what made her happy, it also being the source of her unhappiness. Or the other way around. Why would her happiness, of all things, stop her from relinquishing her unhappiness. There were no common, useful expressions for this feeling, and the most frequently used ones disgusted her. Why call her sweet; she was not sweet, or darling. She was not an angel; she was everything but an angel, even as a little girl she had never wanted to be an enchanting fairy. She was nobody’s little squirrel or ladybug, and most definitely nobody’s better half.

It is possible that the man’s gaunt, lean, powerful, and almost pathologically bony body did not impress her. Or men’s ungainly bodies in general. She would cautiously check which sensation belonged to which particular body part. As if she were indifferent only to those parts of the body that aroused her and made her feel passion. But she did not consciously recognize this; it was as if she diverted her attention, as it were, from certain parts of the body. The man’s sharp critical intellect, his microscopically focused attention which enabled him to retain the smallest details, that was all right, as were his rough manners, swearing, vulnerability, and brutality, which one could not take very seriously, all of his cheap proletarian mentality, his prudery, garrulousness, and even occasional physical violence, which she endured with a certain spiritual enjoyment as part of her rebellion; but no less than these, his openness, bluntness, analytic power, and tactical sense deeply excited her. She had no objection to his indecent jockeying for position, his intrigues, his elbowing aside of competition; not only did these traits fail to blur the overall picture, but she positively liked the man’s fighting spirit. Even his fist excited her. Love was stronger than physical pain; it was also capable of evoking humiliation or, put another way, it showed her what life without humiliation might be like. They broke up several times because of his seriously beating her; she would not live with a man who beat her, but she could not manage without him. She was lost. The objects of the world stared senselessly at her.

She could go to bed with other men only when she had the chance, beforehand and afterward, to make love to Simon; and she had to know in advance that there was a before and there would be an afterward.

She increased and later released with him the tension of her experiences with others, because she was in love with him and not with the others.

As if ephemeral physical pain were the price of constancy.

But she did not take the mental humiliation concealed in their physical fights lying down, and she avenged it many times over. At such times the man justified himself by claiming she had provoked him simply so that she could avenge herself. He banished his sober or drunken rages by pummeling her. And she did love his fists, oh, how she loved them, she kept biting them; she especially loved his hands, adored the strong pads on the palms of his hands. She was not the only one Simon beat up; he roughed up others even worse, men, and it was good for Klára to know all the little details of these beatings. Where he’d let them have it, what the fuck he’d knocked them against, how noisily they rammed into a wall or door. She preferred this open free life with him; she definitely did not want the kind of life her wretched mother or the tamed females in her circle had had, complete with fastidious good manners and compulsive mimicry.

She had no desire to repeat that kind of life, ever.

If Simon hit her, she hit him back; without complaining, she went at him. If Simon, partly justified, laughed at this, she laughed also or cried in her anger and threw every object she could lay her hands on at him, or she broke the objects.

She had to take her life into her own hands, and, his eyes widening, the man enjoyed seeing how brave she was.

They could not have managed without the detailed physical pampering that covered every inch of her body.

Physical fights did not seem to be enough, though; they seemed, indeed, to increase their secretive silences.

Sometimes she would hit back with the first object that came to hand, without thinking where the blow would land, crash it into his face, tearing his skin. They might well have feared eventual police involvement, because with this sort of fighting they were bound to need medical help.

Simon had more reason to fear Klára than the other way around.

But regardless of who secretly initiated these fights, their unruliness became so childish that they didn’t have to fear each other or anything.

Simon could not count on Klára’s relieving his brutality with bouts of tenderness. He knew his way around her better than she did hers around him, and this particularly annoyed her. The man was always surprising her. Whereas Klára remained almost completely predictable for him. He did not let any manifestation of her life go by without commentary; that was his gratification.

He wanted to be there even when she was on the toilet.

You take me for a little girl, a baby.

They would fight at the door of the toilet because he kept going after her to let him in so they could have a conversation. But she thought this was an impossibility, even if a rather nice one. She wanted a few minutes of quiet in the fucking apartment.

Couldn’t we do it some other time. You want to have a conversation while I’m peeing.

She wanted a little rest from him.

Then Simon would plant himself by the door because, naturally, it wasn’t a conversation he wanted. He wanted to hear her little moans, wanted her little smells, her squeezes and tiny farts as the gas began to work or thrust the feces out of her.

Are you making poo, my dove, he asked from outside.

I’m taking a shit, you animal.

In the meantime she carefully pressed down the door handle because she also wanted to surprise the man with something, and in her excitement she let out a fart, just a short, sharp little fart, like a nun’s, but she kicked the toilet door at him, it banged into his stupid head.

That must have hurt him, but they laughed as they fought on, Simon yelling that that marquise was really doing it now, until Klára peed in her underpants, which she had just pulled back up into place.

Now I peed in my pants because of you, you hairy animal.

But Simon especially adored her for this; now finally the marquise had peed in her pants.

To say nothing of his cultic adulation, offered up individually, of her lips, teeth, and nipples, and the ecstatic admiration for the nacreous-pink crimps of her vagina. Of course he wanted to see how and where urine and feces issued from her. And once he had experienced something, he instantly fitted it into one of his idiotic global theories. Simon thought constantly and passionately about everything. They thought aloud to each other; every day brought at least one epochal discovery, each one increasing their hope that no unexplored area or secret thought would remain in either of them. Simon wanted to know everything about her, to be reassured of everything he already knew, yet he remained gravely bashful with his own body and bodily functions.

He would not show himself naked to anyone.

If he could, he would have hidden from Klára his body’s manifestations and their possible irregularities. And with good reason too, since he suffered from sluggish bowel movements and digestive disorders, but he would never mention these. He would have rather died of an intestinal obstruction than break wind in his wife’s presence. Deadly earnest, in full awareness of his responsibility, he would hold back as though their family happiness depended on it. Occasionally, he had to use his fingers to pry out the hard cork of his stool.

The harder he pushed, hissing with pain, the more the stool remained stuck.

During lovemaking, his shirt had to be torn off him because he resisted, protecting himself, and even with his shirt off he still kept on his everlasting undershirt, which he would never take off, night or day, for anything in the world. When his slightly lopsided but not unattractive chest was uncovered, he felt especially defenseless. He only let go of his shirt shortly before the last act when his mounting pleasure left him hopelessly unguarded.

And even then he would not part with his miserable underpants or idiotic undershirt.

Klára had no more days of grace for her big rebellion.

It slightly bothered her that Kristóf was deciding for her. Did not even hear what he asked or said; he made her nervous, definitely agitated. She was annoyed at being considered a silly country girl. She had a good mind to protest or to explain herself patiently.

Simon’s constant admiration increased her hunger and impatience. She should have left him a long time ago or together they should have immediately killed someone.

They had no other option, really.

Only a few days ago, she had had to throw Simon off her because he’d hurt her tongue; the dumb animal had bit it.

And not for the first time and not nearly by accident. In an instant, flavorful blood filled the hollow of her mouth, perhaps his too.

As she yelled, what the hell was he thinking of, and as Simon yelled back at the top of his voice, what the hell did you do to me again, you slut, she saw that their screaming had spattered blood all over his face and chest.

She could not believe her eyes.

She wouldn’t ever talk about such a thing to anyone but a mature, real man like Simon. But then why did he have to be such a rotten character.

True, although her childhood had been spent in senseless, forced wanderings, it hadn’t been as miserable as the childhood of this young man to whom she was now listening with a certain distaste. And she had become a country girl, the boy was right about that, even though she was born in Buda.

She and her family were lucky that as undesirable elements of society they had only been relocated, and even as relocated persons hadn’t been too badly off.

Yes, she is undoubtedly less familiar with Pest.

But he will never call her a slut again.

What d’you mean I’ll never call you a slut again.

You just won’t.

You shoved me off you, you slut, you rub my nose in the dirt, so why shouldn’t I call you a stinking high-class slut.

Your prole mother is a slut, you hear, you hairy bastard.

Great, now you’re calling my mother a slut. You’ve got the brains for that but you don’t even know when you’re humiliating someone.

I’m humiliating you, is that what you’re saying.

You’re a goddamn fucked-up slut.

You can’t even be humiliated.

You don’t even notice when you do. That’s the most humiliating thing about you people.

Don’t you-people me. I’m on my own, I’m telling you, I am not with my mother.

You people humiliate me several times a day.

How exactly do we do that, by not liking that you bit my tongue off.

Why should stinking sluts from Buda like you and your stinking egomaniac slut of a mother notice little things like humiliating people. You don’t even notice, period.

The man was simultaneously crying and screaming as he sat on the floor in front of the bed.

Your mother will also tell me, won’t she, where I should put my napkin ring, he screamed, pounding on the floor.

She would speak up about this much later — she thought about this in the dark car — but now she waded into her own life story at an entirely different place. And the man’s weeping never moved her, not for a second. If anything did, it was his entreaties, when he wanted her to forgive him and not move out. How could she not find him ridiculous when he lay there on the floor spattered with blood, screaming and crying, his undershirt pulled up to his armpits and his cock protruding from his ugly underpants, and whining about his napkin ring.

Why wouldn’t she laugh at him.

Two years ago you didn’t even know what a napkin ring was.

With which she humiliated him the more.

And now they were sitting here at the corner of Thököly Road, the faltering windshield wiper moving from side to side in front of them; she had forgotten to turn it off.

How in the name of fucking hell could you forget it, how can you be such a birdbrain.

And while talking to the young man, she remembered this about Simon, about how he had said these words; she watched the hollow clatter yet she would not turn off the wipers. Her lover would have had a fit of anger if he’d been sitting next to her. Why must a woman always forget everything, these birdbrained women. Every woman is a birdbrain. She felt a special gratification whenever Simon besmirched women in general by calling them sluts and idiots. With his weeping he tried to cover things up, but with his swearing and entreaties he exposed himself to her. That was the dumb prole’s speed; he couldn’t resist exposing his raw feelings.

It was so obvious he hadn’t been brought up properly; she tried to make him realize that, to keep emotions at the right temperature.

How could she not laugh at him, his ribs were sticking out and he looked stark naked with his continuous screaming, whether he was crying or raving.

If you fuck it up, who in hell will fix this fucking piece of junk for me.

No one.

It didn’t occur to them to get out of the car. They were doing all right just as they were. A lit-up streetcar clunked across the intersection. It was as though they had forgotten where they had planned to go or why Klára had stopped to change her clothes and borrow the mink coat from Andria Lüttwitz.

The wind was howling, cold rain was splashing, and in front of them the brightly lit yellow streetcar carried a few shivering passengers and a dozing conductor across the cold darkness.

She did not beat around the bush, cut right to the chase, to what hurt most, his greatest dread.

Now, at last, finally, she was pregnant.

The word hit Kristóf like a bludgeon.

Not that a single breath of Simon’s hadn’t been enough to make her pregnant, but now she was pregnant again.

Although with his other self Kristóf remained anxious for a while longer, he kept listening to the woman while mulling over his own memories.

She won’t be able to keep it.

He was even ready to go on with his story for a while, the one he had started, the one that had proved to be endless.

Sometimes it goes away in the sixth week. Sometimes she makes it to the third month but even then she can’t keep it. It’s just unbearable. She’s had at least four spontaneous abortions already.

Kristóf responded in a very deep voice, as if rumbling from far away.

What does she mean by at least four, doesn’t she know exactly what she’s talking about. And if she does, she should say how many.

Four times.

Then why does she say at least.

Kristóf should stop picking on her.

He is not picking on her.

If she were to become pregnant by someone else, she could probably keep the baby, but not Simon’s.

He didn’t understand what she was talking about; he didn’t want to understand. This statement brought the woman close to him, like a sister, with her amazingly unabashed indecency, but he did not want this, did not tolerate it, and did not desire it. She mesmerized him with her proximity, leaving nothing hidden between them. It would disgust him to make her pregnant, even if the situation was as she said. He’d do anything but that. And he did not want to know these things about her. What do I care, what business is this of mine, this is something between the two of you. He shuddered at the thought, wanted to back out, had a premonition, no, a realization that the woman had actually picked him out for this. He should protest because this would turn into a misunderstanding between them; but he kept silent. Waiting for further developments. Because his greediness was greater. To impregnate the woman, quickly and successfully, though he could not imagine anything more absurd. The most he wanted was to go to bed with her because she attracted him a bit, but now he’d happily give that up too. To hold her by the ass and yank her into himself, but nothing else, a little writhing together, and then to twitter happily with her in a huge sunny bed on a nice summer morning. But frankly, he gave up very quickly on this fancy, because, his excessive desires and colorful imagination notwithstanding, he had accumulated very painful and bitter experiences of himself. He always reached his climax very quickly, and a trait like that has no sunny mornings. His sensitivity became his nemesis; he could not control his sensitivity. He’d be done before they’d even start. In the end he didn’t exactly know what they had meant to start. Perhaps the sheer fact of penetration shocked him, the other body’s resistance, perhaps the rhythm of their common search for the proper position, the wildness of the search, the warmth of the place, its smoothness — or, sometimes, the absence of all these. He did not understand what it was. What was expected of him. If it hadn’t happened with Ilona that morning, and not in some other way, he’d never have learned what it was. Until then he had no idea what he could expect of himself. He was most ashamed — that after such a night he could put Ilona into such a situation, could create the illusion that they might have something to do with each other, and then do it.

And after that, what further vileness might he expect of himself.

Hearing Klára’s story, he quickly forgot the last word of his own infantile inner monologue, and in his mind he picked up the thread here, with Ilona.

There was no place to return to in the deplorably mendacious story of his life; this was the only pure spot, where the darkness was thickest, and he had no more reasonable questions.

It would have been futile to resist, he could not have deflected the other person’s story, and so for the first time in his life he was ready for anything.

It felt like being drawn into a whirlpool, Kristóf should believe her, and forgive her, but she simply must tell somebody about it, she can’t keep it inside any longer. If only she had a girlfriend, but she didn’t, not a single girlfriend. After a spontaneous abortion, the world was empty, as if true-blue British Darwinists had invented it. She loathes the whole business of girlfriends. Determinism takes over everything, and there’s nothing more disgusting or destructive.

Come on, get off it, what does determinism have to do with this, Kristóf snapped in the dark. Rattling off your priggish texts as though they could be of any help to you.

How should I help myself, then.

How should I know.

And for weeks after an abortion like that they can’t even think about having intercourse, at least that.

She had the nerve to use that expression, having intercourse, and again this rotten at least. It really annoyed him. Why such scorn for the world. Kristóf had to catch his breath because of this woman or because of his reverence for Creation.

Why is she using such words, what’s the good of such a fixed idea, she should tell him that.

No matter how much they’d want to, what fixed idea, the woman asked back innocently.

Doesn’t matter, why does she use such rude words.

What sort of words should she use, for the sake of that son-of-a-bitch fucked-up God, if Kristóf won’t hear her out. If he isn’t interested, just say so.

He’s interested, of course he is.

Then what do you want.

He’ll be quiet.

She’d lost count of how many times they’d scraped her out. Have they ever scraped you out, she yelled, and that made her mean, really mean.

It was beyond understanding how she could grant herself so much meanness.

One of her periods lasts into the next, and if Kristóf really wants to know, she can tell him that once she had an extrauterine pregnancy, and that’s why she said, earlier, at least four times. And if one day he has an extrauterine pregnancy, then he’ll understand what she’s talking about. And then she screamed at him, do you understand. One period lasts into the next. Impossible to know whether she’s bleeding because of the scraping or it’s her regular period.

Who knows what’s irregular, anyway.

If she doesn’t seep for two days, they’re very happy.

She barely manages to scrape Simon back from his dumb drinking sprees, she said it like that, scrape him back. Not to mention his stupid womanizing; to spoon him back. He leaves me there, in my blood, and goes off to his women, he still feels like it, and I’m supposed to be the understanding one. Their life became one big running amok; why am I saying became, that’s what it had been from the start. She can barely stand on her feet because of the scrapings, but that’s the only way they can reduce the bleeding. Kristóf may laugh. The hormone treatment stopped her menstruation, not a drop of blood came out of her body, but hair grew between her breasts, and a mustache and beard, she was tearing at them, rubbing resin on them, thinking she’d go out of her mind. And they can’t get to the bottom of it, they have no new ideas, sooner or later her womb will become cancerous, that’s how she said it, my womb will become cancerous, so it has to be scraped.

Then why talk about it so much, why don’t you shut your trap.

Kristóf was beside himself as he yelled, though he was pleading with her, against all his earlier vows; he wanted quiet and wanted the woman not to tell him about these things.

Why aren’t you happy that you’re pregnant at last. And let’s be quiet about it.

Yes, and I can keep standing at the counter all day, dreading whether I’m bleeding or not. And she’s aware that she shouldn’t be so scared. But she is immoderate in everything, in case Kristóf hadn’t yet noticed. What the hell does she need a baby for, what is this big fuss about a baby, she has no answer to this question either.

Why this fucking mushiness.

Don’t talk like that, please don’t.

If Kristóf is so smart, if he knows what she should do now and how she should talk, then let him answer the question. Or if she loses the child, why can’t she be happy about that, let it go if it has to go, it’s probably for the best.

But they wanted to have at least three children.

Have you gone mad, why are you telling me what the two of you want.

Then to whom should I tell it.

All right then, tell me.

Maybe it will be easier after the first one, people say it’s easier after the first one. She’s now exactly in her sixth week and very proud of it, and she’s hopeful again.

And she couldn’t even tell what hurts more.

She is so sensitive.

If Simon did not adore her so intensely, if their love and alliance had not meant more to him than his life — Kristóf should remember once and for all that Simon adores and worships her — then he wouldn’t rave and rant so desperately and probably wouldn’t have to drink and chase after women so much. And have pangs of conscience on top of everything.

He blackmails her with that too.

She doesn’t want even one from him, from such a fickle character, Kristóf should believe her.

Of course she understands him. Still, it hurts terribly.

This is the terrible, incomprehensible paradox in their relationship.

Kristóf did not know what a paradox was, though he had heard the word several times before.

When she bleeds for weeks on end, Simon becomes inhuman. Since they can’t do it — and they can’t, they tried a number of times — she could let him do it by himself, and sometimes she does, for a while. But she doesn’t feel anything then — someone plashing about in her blood, that’s all she feels, nothing more. It’s as if she’s slowly silting up, and why should she let this happen. And when she doesn’t, he goes to have intercourse with other women, gets angry and rebukes her for never but never understanding what’s going on in a man at times like that, and keeps throwing things around and swearing.

But she won’t tell all this to Kristóf, because she can’t humiliate herself so much with her story.

You’re a neurotic, selfish slut.

And maybe she was neurotic, if she couldn’t control her jealousy and couldn’t help Simon.

An indifferent beast, like your mother and your whole class and your entire son-of-a-bitch clan, egoist beasts, all of you.

I resent that. I am on my own.

You people don’t know what human warmth is, or self-sacrifice.

Then go fuck your own social class, you dumb animal, not me.

But that’s not even true, what am I saying, she corrected herself.

Saying things like this about herself would be unjust, because Simon was always a drinker. He had been a drinker way before he had met her, and he drank because he was so much in love or he drank because they happened to be breaking up, he always had a reason to drink. He’s a pig, a boar, she doesn’t know what else to say about him, Simon is a prole wild boar from Angyalföld, she said, as if bragging proudly with her negative judgment, so she could at the same time berate him and love him, love him and worship him. Kristóf must see what a wonderful man this man is. There’s not one man in his family who isn’t a drinker. They all drink, the women too. And why shouldn’t they. She has nothing against drinking; otherwise, it would be impossible to put up with this rotten life and with what sober people thought was reasonable drinking. They drink like fish but, Kristóf must try to imagine this, they don’t drink together on holidays because they’d probably kill each other if they did, so they go drinking separately and then come home one by one, all of them drunk. Let those dumb proles drink themselves to death. She understands them. What’s not to understand here. Now and again she joins them and tosses down a few, right along with them. Only their mother doesn’t drink, she’s a pathologically sober woman, she doesn’t need alcohol, not even to keep her mind sober. For a long time she thought that their love would save Simon from this swamp, this family morass, these wild boars who enjoy grunting and wallowing in their own filth. Simon would gain so much from her that would help him relax, calm down. She’d bear children for him, lots of little girls and boys. Or at least three. She had no intention of fucking up her life with too many stupid births. That’s how she said it, fucking up. This dumb prole family immediately accepted her, she said with feeling, even though they were all, except for a few stray Hungarian Nazis, reds. She needed this, and they sensed her weakness, what with her hating her own mother, and her sister really getting on her nerves with her unbearable habits. Her older brother, well, she feels sorry for him. She has no family, she walked out on them, disowned them all, doesn’t need them. And they’re fairly numerous too, when they come together for Easter or New Year’s it’s like a big funereal show of waxworks, and not a single live being among them. And these stupid proles are all fanatic atheists. But she doesn’t deceive herself. Her mother-in-law disdains her instinctively, in her heart of hearts, in her guts. What she thinks about her is, what is this little high-class cunt doing putting on airs with her permanent bleeds and her affectations, knocking herself to the ground and fainting left and right, pretending to have migraines; she said it like that, high-class cunt.

And that’s what I am, what else could I be.

Where does she get off claiming I don’t have migraines.

And I’m supposed to cast off my real self for these stupid proletarians. I’m not going to change myself for them, I can’t.

But where do you get all this contempt for others, where do you get the courage for it, what do you get out of it.

I do have migraines, yes. One can have migraines even if these people have never heard the term.

Come on, what’s the point of your hatred.

What hatred, what contempt, I haven’t any kind of feeling. I don’t feel anything for anyone. That’s the absolute truth, my lover has desensitized me, that’s the naked truth, what else, and that lover is my love, so there we are.

She kept quiet for a long time, staring somberly before her, and then obsessively began again.

Compared with him you are a coward, you milksop, you I don’t even hate because I have nothing to do with you, you’re a stranger, someone I don’t even know, and that’s it.

She could not solve her life. She thought she could, thought she’d have enough strength for it. And her mother-in-law keeps giving her advice that, despite her best intentions, she cannot accept.

She simply cannot.

And very quietly, then ever more loudly, she kept obsessively repeating that she cannot accept.

Kristóf didn’t know what she was talking about, what would she not accept, and what did her mother-in-law advise her, but that was no longer interesting. With her gloved hands Klára grasped the steering wheel as if to shake it; she could not accept it, no, no, she could not.

Sooner or later she’ll start drinking too.

She cannot accept it and, yes, she is full of hatred. She doesn’t know what to do with their prole pieces of advice, she hates her miserable life and she’d be glad to blow it all up. If she had any dynamite. Simon would probably be better off with a strong woman, one of those clumsy, wide-hipped bitches. While she can’t even bring a child to full term, a real shame.

I am a dumb little high-class cunt.

Nevertheless she cannot accept it.

That man will kill her.

But even then she cannot accept it.

He has already killed her; because of him she has disowned her entire family.

She cannot accept it, but then why does she love him so much.

Kristóf grasped her hand and shoulder; he didn’t know exactly what he was grasping. To make her stop shaking the steering wheel so senselessly and so he wouldn’t have to be disgusted with her and her every word, or with his own self-hatred. With her body, her mentality, her bluntness, her commonness, with everything she had taken upon herself or forced on herself, with her words. She had soiled everything with her words; he detested her and the scent of the borrowed mink coat disgusted him.

He was not sorry for her.

At least she should stop shaking the steering wheel.

But Klára swept along, almost tearing herself away from Kristóf’s calming hands and arms.

She can’t accept it, she shouted in the darkness, while the windshield wipers kept slowly flapping back and forth.

Don’t you touch me, she shouted in the darkness, I won’t be responsible for myself if you dare to touch me, not one finger.

I can’t accept it, no, I cannot.

I don’t want your touch.

Oh, please don’t be so good to me, you, you goody-goody sensible little boy, you make me laugh.

His main task was not to protect the miserable creature from her hysterical eruption and its tectonic force, but to overcome his own shocked physical aversion. It was as if he were responding to the same thing with his own aversion, saying exactly the same thing. Not only don’t I want to make you pregnant, I don’t even want to touch you. Or he should get out of their filthy, cold car because he’d really had enough of her, and just leave. Although he couldn’t say where he’d go. And never see this shameless woman again. He seized her firmly to free her, he shook her to let the hysteric come to at last. She shouldn’t add to her troubles with this fit. Bumping against the steering wheel and dashboard, they struggled briefly in the narrow space. His fingers kept slipping on the mink coat, or rather the silk lining of the coat kept slipping on her dress, on her bare skin, it slipped backward, he couldn’t get a grip on it, could not find one; Andria Lüttwitz’s lousy mink coat slipped down, stripping her bare.

She swept the young man’s arms off her again, but she could neither know nor see how successfully.

Their desperation no longer had personal boundaries.

They grasped each other with both hands, to keep each other from being able to grab or put up a defense. Neither one could tell why or against what. Awkwardly they knocked against all sorts of sharp, blunt, and hard surfaces. While they clung to each other with incredible strength, pressing each other to the seat, their fingers keeping them from moving, a powerful sense of strength and grim hanging-on pervaded their skin, their bodies. One couldn’t tell which one was stronger. The mink coat slid off her shoulders and was caught between them, but finally it left her bare neck free, and in the light penetrating from the outside the radiant hills of her breasts in the black dress were revealed to him. With pure muscle power alone, they were getting nowhere. She yanked her head away from the kiss, even though Kristóf wanted nothing more than to avoid it, to avoid her lips, fragrant with the heavily applied lipstick.

Don’t you dare touch me, whispered the full, round, well-painted lips with their vertical grooves and the maddeningly white teeth in this mutual stupor of resistance. He wanted first to kiss her neck, despite the woman’s strong objection, though he didn’t know why. Suck it in, with its fragrance, then quickly if clumsily lick it clean, as if atoning for his aggressiveness; then senselessly, completely senselessly, nibble and bite all around this inviting, glistening part of her body; but he was also ready to stop at once since there was something extremely servile in him, childlike, beastly, something he did not feel or had no reason to feel for Klára, and it was impossible for him to do something that was not authentic and never would be. Then they bit at each other, painfully and awkwardly, as though they’d lost any inhibition about biting. And by now they were each in their proper place in the universe. Somehow they had to nibble their way across the other’s face, flitting to nose, chin, ears, eyebrows, and jaws, to pat and feel the elevations of the unknown celestial body. At the same time — almost unconsciously, a little ashamed and reluctant — they emitted all sorts of word remnants, incomprehensible to the other.

Until they found lips, which seemed never to have existed before, and then they were surprised to arrive so suddenly at the center of their mutual sensations.

It was too much.

Her lipstick was too flavorful for Kristóf.

The squeezing of their fingers did not let up.

On each other’s lips, having barely dipped into each other, they recoiled.

I’ll break in half, let me go, her whispering lips demanded.

Because of the steering wheel or gearshift or their own excitement, their bodies were wedged into impossible positions as they panted at each other. Now they didn’t know what to do with each other or with their reflexes, and therefore didn’t know what should come next; the obstacle may have been their own excitement. Yet their lips foolishly returned and opened into each other, alluringly and threateningly, which relieved the tension and the feeling that they were infinitely helpless and ridiculous.

But at least they shouldn’t let their tongues do as they pleased; they should retract them. They mustn’t lose their manners or concede their dignity; they must not easily surrender their independence. It would have been intolerable to get stuck to each other by tangled, stiffening tongues.

Their tightly gripped fingers could not let go, and that sealed their discomfort.

I lied to you.

Kristóf had to say this out loud, and he did, almost directly into her mouth, that he had lied.

What did you lie about; the temperature of the woman’s voice seemed to fall as she asked this.

I lied, but I don’t know how or why.

You’ll probably tell me.

I will, but frankly it really bothers me, it’s such a primitive lie, and that makes me such a lousy person. And now I have to tell you, please don’t be angry, I’m ashamed and I hate myself for it.

Come on, out with it, let’s have it, come on.

It’s not the School of Physical Education where I’m studying.

Klára said nothing, turned silent and stiffened.

What an ass you are, she said quietly a moment later, more calmly and contentedly than before.

I wanted to impress you.

I was wondering about that a little, because I heard from Terike that you were going to some teachers’ college.

I wanted to say something better than that, I admit it, to look stronger than I am, because I’m weak. I have no will of my own, believe me.

Laughable, she said, peacefully and contentedly, how laughable you are. All men are equally laughable, them and their wills.

I know, but I don’t even have a will.

And you’re laughable too, and how.

I know.

Why must every man be so laughable.

But women don’t lie less than men.

I don’t care about women, Klára answered, on the attack, thrusting her lips dangerously close to his. I am not a woman but myself, I am alone, just me, and don’t forget it.

Don’t threaten me, because I’m not afraid of him.

Look who’s getting on his high horse.

I can’t open myself more than this with you.

Your lies don’t surprise me, and I don’t care about them, you understand.

But it did move you a little, you must admit.

You can go ahead and lie again, don’t worry about it.

They hesitated about exchanging at least one little kiss before he replied. As if they were weighing what was more important, the kiss or the words.

I can promise you, if you want me to.

I’ll give you full autonomy in lying, if in nothing else.

They had a good laugh at this, which freed them briefly from the threatening urge to kiss, though their fingers did not loosen.

I’ll never go to bed with you, Klára continued, serious and calm because she’d decided to rely on words. Don’t get your hopes up about that.

I won’t.

You can still be a very good friend if you behave yourself, but in my book you’re a marked person, and that’s that.

I know. That’s why I told you about the lie.

Suddenly Klára felt a strong animosity to herself; it made her lips tremble. As she kept looking at this hapless young man. Once again she had managed to steer herself into an impossible situation. For her, men — except for Simon — meant nothing but impossible situations, concerning which her upbringing had provided no advice or suggestions.

Come on, what do you know, she asked impetuously.

I’m done with such things.

Come on, what kind of things are you done with.

I don’t want to go to bed with anyone anymore, I know that, and not with you either. I’m over that now. You definitely don’t have to be afraid of me.

You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Even if I don’t, that won’t change the situation much.

They were quiet, and neither of them could have said how they’d wound up here.

Once again she had managed to pick up a weakling, a little liar who strutted not his manhood but his vulnerability. How could she find a worthy partner besides Simon, why does she demand such impossibilities of herself. These aren’t men. All right, so she’d made a vague attempt, but she should admit defeat, end the effort quickly and retreat in a nice, orderly manner.

At the same time it also occurred to her that Kristóf might be right, even though he really didn’t know what he was talking about. What idiocy it is to consider the urge for intercourse as obligatory. Still, her annoyance and disappointment remained strong, though in the interest of an orderly retreat she should free herself of both.

Maybe, she said very quietly, feeling impelled to defend herself, I am too reserved and too sentimental, and that’s not a lucky combination, I admit.

The other one remained silent. I spoil everything, she added obligingly.

After this distancing sentence everything cooled back down to a normal temperature. Kristóf tried to analyze what she’d said but in his haste found only its emotional sources, not its sense. She wanted to avoid him, but how far at this point could her avoidance go. Their feet were cold and they were both shivering in the unheated car. Their fingers could loosen now and separate. It took a long time before each hand regained its independent existence within its own contours. Klára, with her involuntarily unleashed anger, tried to pull the mink coat back but couldn’t — an effort at least as unsuccessful as her distancing remark had been. Then, with the same anger and just to succeed at something, she turned off the windshield wipers.

We’ll have a vodka there, across the street, come on, stop moping. We’re not going to mope over a little thing like this, are we.

Who’s moping, Kristóf replied mulishly, and frankly it’s not such a little thing, but I wouldn’t mind having a vodka.

They smiled politely at each other, content with their little verbal gratifications and with finding their way back to familiar conversational tones.

I frightened you, didn’t I. I’m a raving lunatic, said Klára in a voice whose tone did not enforce the meaning of the words. I frightened you from the first moment, but at least I’ve managed to spit things out in front of someone and lighten the burden of my soul.

Kristóf made no reply; perhaps Klára did not even expect one.

She took the key from the ignition, found her silver-clasped chamois handbag — a handy little number studded with big colored pearls which her grandmother, dressed in white, must have carried at famous balls or soirées in her youth; they slammed the car doors behind them and were on their way. The stormy air and the spray lashing their faces not only felt good but were redeeming judgment itself. There is the wind, the rain, the darkness, the city, the storm; yes, the sober outside world may have changed a little, but there is a world nevertheless, and its darkness can exist independent of the darkness of the two of them.

It now shows the unknown features of its old familiar face, a face much more exciting than their own. Out here, out of the car, they felt a little bored with each other and with that whole impossible coexistence they’d left behind in the car along with their souls and their inner nature.

A small neon sign shone dimly on the other side of the wet road, the multicolored name of the place and a childish stylization of the sun; they had to go down two steps to the Sunshine. From the doorway a surprising sight greeted them. The city was empty and they hadn’t seen anyone on the streets, only broken branches and roof tiles, pieces of plaster and ripped-off gutters strewn everywhere, but here, behind the purple broadcloth curtains and purple windbreakers, the tiny bar was jammed with people, smoke, noise, and music. A drummer and a pianist were pounding on their instruments, the latter also cooing into a microphone.

Seeing the two of them enter, he moaned, and inserted into his English text, my dear fellow humans, may I have your attention please, he sang, dargije tovarishchi i druzyah, he added, interrupting the melody, two pieces of fresh meat have arrived at the market. Kristóf and Klára laughed along with the other customers and, embarrassed, tried to figure out whether this rudeness really did refer to them.

Who else could it have referred to.

They were being looked at and, having no choice, they showed themselves to their spectators, jostling among the indifferent strange bodies until they found a little space for themselves.

Establishments from the prewar world had stayed on in Pest for a long time. The downtown brasseries were Francophile places — until their characteristic sofas and mirrors were thrown out — while the bars were Anglophile pubs; one of these latter was called Old Boys.

Back at the beginning of the century, Budapest’s high society* had lived and played in this neighborhood; their tennis courts, riding trails, and clubs were just a stone’s throw away: the largest and most famous one, the Park Club, on Stefánia Boulevard, only a few steps away from the Old Boys. Anyone leaving a garden party at the Park Club after midnight under the influence could always press himself into this place. The Old Boys, with its black musicians, was considered very modern, sports-clubby, and fashionable. Since that time it had shed its name and changed its main purpose several times, though for nighttime functions it retained its sportive character. In the postwar-coalition days* it was still called the Old Boys, and became infamous in the black-market world until a nasty shooting incident caused it to be shut down for a few years. One could buy nylon stockings, chewing gum, jewelry, quite exceptional objets d’art, and Swiss watches there. Customers were shown the merchandise in the ladies’ toilet or under the table, and the staff obviously cooperated with the merchants.

As the Sunshine, it was one of the rare places in Budapest that managed to retain not only its interior furnishings but also its style and something of its erstwhile milieu. Its highly polished wainscoting had not been removed, even right after the siege, when the wood could have been used for heating; the long-legged easy chairs with their handsome little footrests and the long-legged small tables also remained. During the day it was annoyingly bright, and that along with the dubious public buying and selling made a most peculiar impression; but at night it was different, when the sconces with their wax-paper shades frugally emitted faint glows.

The sunken dance floor had room for only a few clinging couples, moving in the light of a pale-red spot hanging from the mirrored ceiling. Wrapped in smoke, the dancers swayed and hovered at the same level with the heads of guests seated at the bar and tables, and thus a feeling of improbability came over anyone coming down the stairs from the street-level entrance; the place looked crazy, with its warm lights and distorting mirrors. Kristóf and Klára found a place near the piano but not at a table, so they had to rest an elbow on the open instrument.

The piano was the only object in the entire place that received harsh white lighting.

They were not talking.

The older, bored-looking waitress amiably advised them — her voice drawing out the vowels — not to drink vodka today but gin fizzes.

Her typical Pest accent, slightly singsong, lent a sarcastic flavor to everything she said.

On account of today being a national holiday, they were handing out lemons at the central office.

All three of them had a good laugh at this — that the central office handed out anything, let alone lemons.

They had their own share of the piano’s white light, which exposed them to the other guests, exposed their shared giggles.

Where do you know her from, Kristóf asked after the waitress with her dyed blond hair left them.

I don’t really know, Klára replied, but maybe from somewhere.

Obviously she wasn’t telling the truth, and didn’t make anything of it.

Quietly they rebuked themselves for spoiling everything with every word — silence or even transparent prevarication was better. Every word acquired an offensive edge. Even though they were thinking of two different things and not blaming each other. And they could not talk about it, if only to keep from spoiling things even more. They kept looking at each other. No trace of fondness or love remained on their faces. Mirrorlike surface of motionless water. They both felt they’d behaved shockingly over the previous hours, their frivolity had been shocking, and there was no point in adding further shocks to the situation. They could not account for their behavior.

No wonder they had frightened each other senselessly and unforgivably. And mainly they had prattled and argued too much. They had made themselves vulnerable and had betrayed the one they loved.

Why had they become so common and shameless.

The people drinking and dancing around them had the impression that the couple in the piano’s spotlight were in the midst of a final breakup, trying to examine what their relationship had been in the past and getting a taste of how shocking it had been.

As they looked at each other impassively, accompanied by drums and piano, their emotional life was changing. In the windy outdoors they had experienced something of their freedom’s devastating power, but in here, under each other’s gaze, they were no longer people existing separately.

Their self-control was working perfectly well, no problem there, and nothing escaped their attention, yet they offered to each other, and to each other alone, some flavors and signs of their existence beyond their neutralized expressions and impassive features. No one could say Klára Vay wasn’t conspicuous — with her big hair, huge eyes, round and heavily painted lips, her mink coat now nonchalantly thrown off her shoulders and revealing a plunging neckline and blindingly white skin, her clinging, frighteningly short dress, immoderately high-heeled and pointed shoes, her shapely calves, little-girlish figure, strong hips and powerful thighs — her body’s anatomical contradictions or disharmony. As they came in, Kristóf had been very anxious about the challenge created by Klára’s appearance, and about people seeing him in the company of such a conspicuous phenomenon. He saw clearly and he felt on his skin that Klára’s beauty and unpardonable elegance made him look ridiculous.

Which turned him into a little prick.

Which in some laughable way he had to be proud of.

That such a dumb little prick’s been dealt such a woman. As if he had been her page, escort, and secret lover for years. Or might nurse realistic hopes of becoming her true lover one day.

At their very first appearance together in public Klára shouldn’t be allowed to see how moved and awed he was. That is why he looked about with a neutral, noncommittal gaze, so as not to reveal his desperate situation to these other people, the total fiasco and catastrophe that until now he had managed successfully to circumvent.

They both hit on the right expression.

They did not look shocking enough to hold curious eyes for very long; after a while inquiring eyes were duly averted. The two of them remained shocking and unbearable at most only to themselves. No one bothered to weigh the obvious age difference between them as a factor in the possible breakup. What people might have considered awful for the couple was that from now on they wouldn’t be able to get along without each other, and wouldn’t be able to account for this either. They weren’t holding hands, as if the glasses they each carried in one hand made this impossible; their coats hung off the backs of the high chairs. Their bodily stillness, or the complete absence of verbal communication, separated them from the dense human crowd around them. There might have been a chance to rescind or cancel some of the preceding events, but not in this present reality.

The ever-present moment was more powerful, and under its weight the significance of the stories they’d told each other was generously reduced.

As though the stories could be forgotten, had become ephemeral sound effects, tiny noises of history, nothing more.

As to the glasses, they really had no place to put them down. They stared at the innards of the piano, the hammers working on the wires and their own reflections in the black lacquer of the propped-up lid.

To look at anything but each other.

The first thing they noticed was Kristóf’s knee touching Klára’s, though he had neither moved nor wanted this to happen. He said, pardon me, and he was truly mortified by his rudeness. If only this was happening between them for the first time, but it was not the first time. The vacuum created between their knees when he quickly withdrew his sucked in their bodily sensations and consumed their physical reality — flesh, clothes, and all.

Their pitiful isolation ended. Or they were only following on each other’s bodily surfaces what had already occurred in their souls but what in good conscience they could not yet accept; but they could not have known that.

It seems probable that the soul is first, followed by physical sensation, and only then comes the decision.

After some time — how long they could not say, though this was not the first time that time had passed like this for them — Klára’s knee touched Kristóf’s knee, for which she hastily apologized. It was more as if her upbringing was speaking for her. Actually they could have laughed about this, but they didn’t. Sunk into a serious mutual muteness, they continued the assessing and weighing processes they had begun, on and in each other, occurring way beyond the realm of common sense. As if they were weighing the proportions of something that could not be seen with the naked eye or deflected with bare hands. It was not possible to get to the bottom of it, it was full of little surprises; pupils dilating, they were amazed.

They were also thinking about something far from what they observed in each other’s face, figure, or motionless limbs.

For a good long time observation and thinking proceeded on parallel tracks.

Perhaps twenty minutes went by before their arms, resting on the sharp rim of the piano, began to move and their fingers found their way back to where they could hook into one another. Which did not come close to making them happy. They had bestowed on each other their leaden fatigue and sadness, had given up their sense of independence, the kind of independence that until then Klára had not relinquished to anyone, not even to Simon.

Kristóf had given up his once before, but only for ten minutes, with Ilona. Those ten minutes stuck out in his life like a bone from a bad wound. The child had awakened on the bed in the maid’s room that summer morning, and they had triumphantly completed their act, the child’s countenance open and lively, since at the moment they had no choice, there could be no way back.

As if each of their fingers, separate from the other fingers, had several issues to deal with. So many restrained emotions and so many hitherto suppressed thoughts had found their way into what they now were feeling that they almost shouted with excitement and clapped each other’s palm. At this thoughtless juncture they noticed that the dancing couples had returned to their tables. And the two of them were no longer exposed at the edge of the blinding white light, because the musicians were taking a break and the spot had been turned off. And only now did the two fools notice that in the benevolent darkness, which they accepted as an unexpected gift, they had for some time come close together and were holding each other’s knee, their recently rejected knees; they noticed all this only in retrospect, as it were. Now they acknowledged that unaccountable things could occur in a split second, in the blink of an eye. Although they would have liked to inch their way up, higher on the thigh, toward the groin, these areas having a stronger attraction, and especially to feel knees clasping thighs mutually, but they weren’t appropriately determined about this. As reasonable, adult, and responsible persons equipped with prepared movements, they faced each other as if short-circuited somewhere between rough action and inner compulsion. Unaccountable inhibitions stood in their way. Not because strangers might see and curb their actions, but because their mutually gained new freedom and their lost independence were at stake.

And it could not evolve in small increments, secretly, in unguarded moments. Because they did not know what was supposed to happen since what was happening now was very different from many of their rational experiences.

And if the waitress had not very politely taken away their empty glasses, opaque with lemon and sugar, laughing rather too intimately and maternally, they would have continued for at least another forty minutes, sitting stiffly in front of other people, frozen at each other’s melting point, constrained and expectant.

That is when they realized that they each had another hand, and had had it all along, holding a long-empty glass.

This was not vacant time but time full of event, each moment filled to the brim.

Finally they grasped each other’s free hand. Only then did they notice how attentive the waitress had been, not only addressing Klára in the familiar form but also calling her by her rarely used nickname.

They could stay no longer; suddenly they had to leave as quickly as possible; out on the street they ran straight into the winds coming from two different directions, then found each other again, this time not only in great haste but also clinging to each other along the entire length of their bodies, shyly and sweetly.

And then, with their coats open, they ran again in different directions into the big, darkly blinding void.

By the time they drove into the deserted downtown area, their excited breathing had subsided.

They got out in front of a small mansion on Újvilág Street and stood under trees swaying in the wind, but even there they said nothing to each other. At moments their mutual silence seemed hostile and at other moments just the opposite, soaring and moving with the power of their mutual discoveries. In any case they seemed to be coddling each other in temporal terms, both of them wanting to prolong their time together.

Klára lifted out the wine and vodka bottles from behind the backseat, four in all, and handed them to Kristóf, but then she took back two of them for herself. By sharing the work in this way they seemed to go on fondling each other. That is how they went up to the second floor, carrying real bottles, immersed in the loveliness of their first mutual undertaking.

She walked ahead of Kristóf as if she knew her way around, but Kristóf watched only her calves and ankles and how she stepped up the worn-out stairs, one by one.

It wouldn’t have occurred to them to talk about anything in the dimly lit staircase.

Already on the first landing they could hear bits of music, thumping, the din and humming of people crammed into the apartment.

By the clock on the nearby Town Hall it was almost eleven. The clock would strike on the hour, and the old mechanism was preparing with loud clatters for the four strikes that would fill the narrow street, but here there was no day or night because the party had been in full swing for two days running and no one could tell how long it would go on.

People did not know where they were going, to whose party, they had only heard about their hosts. But that was the interesting and wonderful part of it — the anarchy. There were no rules anymore, and no rules meant no rules. When there are no units of measurement, there is no time either, and we can’t tell when the reckoning of time stopped. All they knew was that the ancient tailor whose trade sign had adorned the facade of the handsome little mansion since the late nineteenth century, who made splendid evening jackets, tailcoats, smoking jackets, and formal suits, and whose shop was now run, theoretically, by his grandson while he, darkly tanned and wrinkled, was shooting the breeze on the terraces and in the corridors of the Lukács Baths with old people who were in every way younger than he, that this tailor had a few days ago emptied his second-floor apartment and third-floor workshop, which — in return for his long and faithful service — his family had been allowed to retain as leased property, though they could not own them, since the Land Registry records showed that they’d been taken away from him. No one any longer needed the magnificent garments whose specialist he was, not even in the highest circles. He had made tailcoats and jackets for Mátyás Rákosi that required all his professional experience, but János Kádár, with his quite good build and carriage, bought his suits from the Red October Clothing Factory’s tailoring workshop, and other high-ranking functionaries followed the leader’s austere, plain example.* The old tailor could not imagine a world in which nobody was interested in shirtfronts, dickeys, cufflinks, silk vests, and the cut of lapels. And regarding the modern lines and fashionable new patterns, his family slowly lost their courage. The new tailors and assistants simply didn’t have a feeling for true tailoring. With the family’s exceptional connections, they managed to obtain emigrant visas to go at least as far as Vienna. Once there, they would see, perhaps there they could still make it, maybe their skills were still needed. Most of their objets d’art had been declared national property and been turned over to the state. They were allowed to take hardly anything with them; fortunately their money, kept in foreign currencies, along with the best of their jewelry, had been smuggled out of the country before the war.

Both Klára and Kristóf were used to going to completely unfamiliar places where people were celebrating a fiasco or solemnizing a devastation. Yet a few years earlier no one would have shown up uninvited anywhere. But these decorum issues had ended in Budapest. One could virtually name the hour when this had happened. It was not that no one now hewed to the old obligatory codes of behavior — some people did — but that it was impossible to know who would comply, when, or why somebody would not, or even what should be complied with.

A lean figure in a white shirt was lying on the steps, his torso reclining against the grating that surrounded the elevator shaft.

Hesitantly they stopped above him.

At the very same instant, amid noise and music, the tall wide door of the apartment upstairs opened, and along with thick clouds of smoke a loud group of people emerged, shouting back and forth.

Stop, how many times do I have to tell you.

Above their shoulders one could see that the apartment hallway was also full of people; the wonderful chaos was complete.

I’m afraid you’re dreaming.

Different kinds of music reached them simultaneously: somebody, in a whiny voice, was demanding love, a man’s voice on a tape recorder or record; and somebody deep in the apartment was pounding away on the piano with great conviction and screaming at the same time as if beside himself, or anyway it sounded as if the pianist and the screamer were the same person. People in the group streaming out the door were all talking at once, each taking great pleasure in speaking over the other voices. The group included young women and somewhat older men, all quite gentle, almost shy figures and all of them completely drunk. As they started down the stairs, they too stopped above the figure lying on the steps, held on to one another, swayed back and forth — which was not without danger because their hands and arms were filled with empty bottles — groping for support on the walls, banisters, and one another. They sobered up a bit in the drafty staircase and began to giggle at this other drunk stretched out on the steps, but what the fuck.

They not only appeared to be but were kindly souls, if a little too loud. They had banded together with the purpose of collecting all the empty bottles from between people’s feet, redeeming them, and, at the last moment before sobering up, buying more booze with the deposit money. If their hands hadn’t been full, they would have pulled up the figure lying on the steps and taken him back to the apartment. This would not have been empathy, goddamn it, but some kind of communal spirit, of sportsmanlike good will.

They all saw that this man was not only drunk but weeping, big dumb ass. One arm was wrapped around his head — maybe he had some injury — and he was pressing his face to the rusty grating of the elevator shaft, his back convulsing sporadically.

Well, let God put his cock where he wants to, but this guy sure has some big-ass grief.

Others fumbled awkwardly with their bottles, trying to put them down on the stairs, but in their inebriation they could not figure out which steps were closer or farther away, or they feared the stone paving was too hard for the glass, and the whole thing turned into an awful clanking and sniggering.

Hold it, Kristóf said quietly, I think I know this guy.

At the sight of his filled bottles, the ones above him on the staircase laughed loudly, cheered, and neighed that now they didn’t even have to go out because relief had arrived, looka here, damn it, they’re bringing vodka in huge bottles.

Klára fumbled with her bottles and, giggling along with the others, warned that she might at any second drop them both.

The pretty miss has nothing to worry about, they’ll be happy to help her.

When it comes to booze they’re willing to sacrifice the life of their friend.

They might sell their bosom buddy’s whore of a mother, but even Kristóf couldn’t do anything with this drunken animal.

A nasty piece of work, they laughed stridently, all of them together, they know him well.

A pale-faced small young woman at the top of the stairs spread her arms wide and, nobody knew why, yelled into the bare and echoing nocturnal staircase, her voice surprisingly loud, that she would kiss every ass, she’d do it willingly, there’s no ass she wouldn’t kiss and lick, but nobody should expect her to put a good face on it or be happy about it.

But people paid no attention, and acted as if they hadn’t heard her drunken nihilism. And the clinking noises increased as they quickly left their empty glasses all over the place.

Somebody kicked over a bottle, which set other bottles rolling, but none of them broke.

They left quickly with their booty and went back to the apartment with the wine and vodka; the clanking sound of their return echoed in the stairwell for a long time.

If not for Kristóf and Klára’s arrival, these people, at the risk of sobering up, would have marched across stormy Rákóczi Road all the way to Teréz Boulevard to get deposits on their empty bottles in the only food shop in Budapest that stayed open twenty-four hours a day.

Everything was all right — just as things unfolded in the simplest possible way in the following half hour.

By then, no one took the future seriously anymore.

The crowd in the big apartment readmitted the unknown company, along with Klára, and left the hallway door open behind them. And in a place like this, issues such as acquaintance or stranger or introduction or any other stupid formality simply didn’t exist.

Not because fellow feeling had suddenly become popular, but because everyone was equally indifferent to everyone else.

Simply shit on everything.

Fuck it, man. I shit on your filthy mug.

What makes you think I don’t shit on everybody.

To be exact, the magic moment had arrived late in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 1956, shortly before nightfall. The curfew was still very much in force, and because of piles of debris in the middle of Ferenc, József, Teréz, and Lipót boulevards waiting to be carted away, streetcars had not yet started running and there was only just enough room for buses and cars to get by. At some places collected debris was piled on sidewalks, at other places, where they had not even started to clear away the results of the bombing, bare beams, bathtubs, remnants of chandeliers and furniture were spilled and strewn everywhere, flowing and crashing into one another. The furnishings of collapsed apartments and burned-out businesses.

In theory, these streets and roads were supposed to be empty by eleven o’clock at night, because traffic halted at ten, superintendents were supposed to close and lock all main entrances by half past ten and check, no, report, on who came in at the last minute; during the night only the booted footsteps of police and special antiriot units could be heard.

Occasionally a shout — a solitary shot too.

But on that late afternoon the number of people in the streets kept increasing and they were vociferous. As if they had a common plan for everyone to head to the boulevards. It was cold and dry, the sky heavily overcast and public lighting sorely lacking. It was impossible to know where so many people were coming from in the rapidly descending darkness.

These people were not making demands or demonstrating against anything; they just climbed up on the dangerous piles of debris, and did so silently, not talking to one another or anyone. They drank; and those who were already drunk yelled at the top of their voices. To which the authorities could have no special objections, which is to say the yelling, which should have been quickly forbidden, was tacitly permitted because people were not yelling together; everyone was hooting or yelling for himself. Some brought their children’s toys with them, the ones that entrepreneurs started making anew only later on, and whistles, which could be found in families everywhere because there was no Young Pioneer* without a whistle and schoolchildren all had them hanging around their necks on red or blue strings; also paper trumpets, drums, baby rattles, clappers, small bells and cymbals, hissing paper snakes, rubber animals for bathtubs that whistled, quacked, or croaked when squeezed — anything that could make noise.

They did not even sing; there was no tune they could have danced to. And they did not congregate or assemble; after all, the alleged right of assembly had been suspended by order of the police, and any gathering of more than three persons was considered a conspiracy against the state.

They shouted into one another’s faces, showed one another their throats and fillings, whistled grinningly and tooted into one another’s ears, spun their clappers next to one another’s ears — and most of them were far from being preadolescent youths.

Silently they offered each other drinks, to make the other person drunk, turn him into an animal, the kind of animal I am.

The whistling at one another, the tooting and yelling at each other were only for themselves; they made the noise for themselves, not for someone else. While silence reigned in the farther reaches of Buda, in Pest the city was once again out on the street. But nothing happened; the light traffic petered out; no one expected or counted on anything, and the infernal noise people were making may have helped them suspend their fear, which is why they didn’t give a damn about the curfew. Everybody drank from everyone else’s bottle without even wiping off the bottle mouths. This was probably the first great dress rehearsal, the dress rehearsal of passive resistance. Well, what infection should they be worrying about. It was impossible to know where all that booze suddenly appeared from, cheap table wines and stinking home-distilled brandies.

This wasn’t a cheerful event; it was anything but pretty; it didn’t even try to flaunt its foulness. It became loudest at midnight, or rather, it just became louder, since no one had any wishes to make and they weren’t going to sing the national anthem. Long years had to pass before it occurred to people that one might want to wish somebody something good for the New Year. It wasn’t that this gloomy event was not forbidden, but that it would have been impossible to give orders to fire into the midst of so many drunken people.

And what if it was possible, so what, who gives a shit.

It was getting colder, well below freezing, and the number of people kept growing even after midnight; the noise as well as the crowd’s unbridled inner muteness steadily increased.

They were camping on top of ruins, lighting smelly little signal fires along the boulevards, using flammable parts of the debris. The snow, which had begun to fall around ten o’clock, became quite thick by midnight and was trampled into slippery slush by many shoes and boots. Snow remained at the peaks of ruins and on the charred guts of buildings and vehicles, and it shone brightly in the light of the fires.

Around two in the morning, the boulevards began to empty out, and slowly the snow could settle on the sidewalks, deadening the sounds of the few insistent shouters.

When dawn came, one could still hear some lone tooting in the distance.

Only during the following day, the first day of the New Year, did one have the impression that in the wake of all this there would follow only eternal night and deafened streets.

But all this happened long ago, and it might not even be true.

Kristóf crouched down on the stairs, close to the boy, who was a few years his senior but similar in build. He grasped his shoulders and shook them, told him to stand up, even threw in a few obligatory swearwords so they’d better understand each other’s bewildering, overflowing feelings; he kept shaking the boy gently, asking him what had happened, while his heart was jumping with joy at seeing him again.

What he wanted most to say was, my sweetest pal, if you only knew how much I’m in love.

It was a good thing Klára had disappeared upstairs in the throng, though he’d have a job finding her.

And he would have told his story on the spot, to give the other boy part of his happiness.

Because he loved him so.

Suddenly he couldn’t remember when and in what circumstances he had seen him last. But he did remember Podmaniczky Street, where the boy had been carrying his ammo box on his shoulder and the water had been turned on again.

But his friend would not let himself be handled, not then and not now, no, he pressed himself against the grating and Kristóf had to struggle with him.

It wasn’t the mere physical contact and not even the pleading but rather the earthly tenderness that convinced him; he broke into a loud, drunken sob, to which the staircase instantly responded with a drunken echo.

As though in reply, someone upstairs whose nerves could no longer endure the sobbing kicked or slammed the hallway door shut.

For God’s sake, tell me what’s happened to you.

Left me, his friend cried, then shouted the words: just up and left me.

Kristóf could not conceive of anyone leaving his friend — about whom he had heard nothing for many long years. This is one of those moments when, of all the things he could not anticipate and from which he felt shut out, what confronted him most clearly was his own naïveté, exposing him to senseless, blunt nothingness.

He recognized instantly that this was not some ordinary lovesickness, not one of the many kinds he was familiar with. The boy’s shirt was white, but his lovesickness stank of tobacco and alcohol. And in his drunken obstinacy he was strong enough to keep from being dragged away.

It was as if he were doing penance with the barbarity of his soul.

The alcohol level keeps him on the surface of pain, maintaining a sufficient degree of physical torment, that is why he has to stay here, that is why he is shouting so destructively.

Kristóf looked at him, amazed and fearful, yet he cradled the familiar shoulders and back on his knees with a certain restraint, since at any minute it might turn out he had made a mistake. The boy might turn around, or he would manage to turn him over, and it would be revealed that he was not Pisti whom he had met on Podmaniczky Street.

Now he was yelling down the elevator shaft that he had been deserted, bawling through the grating.

No matter how hard Kristóf looked, there was no part of the boy that he could have mixed up with someone else’s.

He’d seen him last in Wiesenbad on an ordinary summer morning when, just as he was, in shirt and pants, he’d been taken away from the place under the giant pine trees by a military vehicle with Russian license plates; he resisted and kept pointing to the third floor of the Wolkenstein house, indicating that he wanted to get his things, but he was expertly shoved into the car, with extra care taken not to injure his head; and only the crunching sound of pebbles, the silent peaks of the pines, and the sky with its clouds remained behind him.

Upstairs the boys found all their belongings on the stone floor of the dormitory, the mattresses overturned on the beds, only this boy’s locker was empty, they had taken away all his things along with him.

Left me forever, he shouted. I know it’s forever.

Then Kristóf called him by his name, he no longer had any doubts but wanted to be certain, and he did not feel like swearing anymore.

He would rather be exposed by his blind love.

Pisti, please, he said, pull yourself together, stop making so much noise.

It’s me, knocking on your door, he said, and he was indeed knocking on the boy’s back.

Give me some sensible explanation, what’s happened, who has left you.

And why on earth are you lying on the stairs here.

The drunken figure suddenly swerved, as if to throw his entire stiff body at Kristóf; he probably only now recognized Kristóf by his voice or by the knocking on his back, their old game.

He stared intently, could this really be Kristóf; the strain wrinkled his face.

My dear Pisti, please get up.

You listen to me now, buddy, said the other boy, his voice bullying and almost sober in its sternness, I am not your Pisti.

Kristóf could only stare at him; he said nothing.

And don’t you tell me again that I’m dear to you, he said slowly with a drunkard’s helplessness, and tried to sit up at the same time but only managed to lift his head off the step.

And you know that goddamn well yourself, don’t you, and if I let you have one upside your head, by Jesus, that’d be worse than God’s curse. You know that too, don’t you, little buddy.

He talked as if he had not forgotten that they still had a heavy account to settle.

In fact they had nothing to settle, not then and not now, except perhaps the terrible raw dread with which they had feared that Pisti would be tracked down before he had a chance to leave Wiesenbad.

Fuck it, man, I’m not your dear, I’m telling you, and remember that, goddamn it.

Kristóf, alarmed, could only think that Pisti suspected him of something.

You’re a big shit-head, you know, a ridiculous little fop, Pisti said contemptuously, which reassured Kristóf a bit because the boy could have called him a dirty Jew. A lousy craven shit, that’s what you are, little buddy, he shouted, I’m telling you right here and now, damn it, say it directly, right to your face, I’m not any kind of dear one for a shitty little fop like you.

Until now he must have been pressing his face hard on the grating so as not to throw up, but occasionally he just had to vomit and he did so now, into the elevator shaft.

And Kristóf was not interested in what the boy said in his drunkenness, not in the least.

But his heart trembled that Pisti might have thought he was the one who had betrayed him to the Russians, and in that case how could he clear his name now. If there existed one human being to whom he had never meant, not even in his thoughts, to do anything mean, dishonest, or immoral, it was this boy.

He had gone to several places in Budapest, had repeatedly returned to them over the years, whenever he had a new idea about where he might find him; he never stopped inquiring about him, but the possibility of betraying him or turning him in had never been in the cards, not even in his darkest hours. He had gone to Csepel many times to find at least the place near the old beach where Pisti’s grandmother lived. Every morning they climbed across the fence, at least in Wiesenbad, where they slept next to each other and sometimes told each other stories all night; at least that’s how he had told the story about his grandmother.

He found the poplars.

But no matter what Pisti suspected him of, Kristóf could not suddenly give up on him now.

All right, I admit, you’re not very dear or kind right now, and he laughed kindly into Pisti’s threatening, laughable face, while his naïve heart trembled at the terrible thought, but please get up.

As if he suspected himself of the kind of betrayal that Pisti, in his mind, might have already suspected of him.

Pisti wanted to say something, to answer, but he could hardly steady his heavy head on his neck. He had such a big head, a hard head. On his drenched face, imprinted with the pattern of the grating, and on his twisted nose there was mucus and pap of undigested food mixed with tears.

May the big black dog fuck you, buddy, that’s what should fuck you, pal, if you understand what I mean. He still had enough strength to drag this much out of his own dark malice.

Kristóf did not understand this, but with every word the disgusting sourness of the undigested contents of Pisti’s stomach hit him in the face.

His head was wobbling dangerously and Kristóf grabbed him by his shoulders to keep his head from knocking against the stone stairs. Even now the boy was still dear to him, together with his stench and his vomit stuck on the grating. He could not but rejoice and be cheerful about having found him, being able to see him again. He could not take seriously the possibility that now, in this condition, or during the time that had elapsed before, Pisti had come to suspect him. Because, in fact, Pisti had told him everything. And even if he took everything seriously, what of it, Pisti was here, not hanged as so many others had been. He failed to make him sit up; the obstinate animal would not sit up but flopped exhaustedly on the stone stairs.

Kristóf reached for his handkerchief to clean off some of the boy’s filth; he would take care of him.

He raised Pisti’s rather disgusting, smelly head by the chin, kneeling next to him on the steps.

Left me, whispered Pisti, sunk in his angelically drunken innocence, I don’t have a lover anymore.

Kristóf turned the head toward him a little to wipe off the muck, a move that Pisti could have felt as maternal.

Fucked me first, though, he whispered, blubbering and whimpering idiotically, did nothing with me except use me, goddamn it, he yelped, d’you understand, buddy, used me for nothing else, ever, fucked me and left me, that’s all.

Kristóf somehow heard this, this surprising confession. Which, according to language rules, he could understand only as meaning that another man had made use of Pisti, some selfish character; but still, it was as if he hadn’t heard it. As if he hadn’t heard it while wiping the dear one’s face with one of the immaculately white batiste handkerchiefs, rinsed, washed, gently starched, and ironed to perfection by Ilona.

Somehow he did not dare allow the things the drunken boy was talking about to reach his consciousness.

Even if they had, he would not have understood them. All his irregular experiences of long years notwithstanding, his heart and soul remained completely innocent. He believed he had to become familiar with the world and had little choice as to which parts of it he would know; and when he did come to know them, he thought no, this could not have happened to Pisti.

He must be misunderstanding or misinterpreting something, since his own experiences had been impossible.

And to stifle his shame, he swore loudly, blaspheming God, taunting him to fuck him.

What’s this circus for, he began to revile Pisti, as if becoming drunk with his own urge to swear, why is he such a drunken animal and why can’t he behave decently. Should be a little bit of a gentleman. He reached under Pisti’s armpits to lift him up, laughed at him, rebuked him, for the sake of God’s cunt, don’t let yourself go like that.

Come on, stand up already.

But the drunken boy, with a drunkard’s hideous delight, kept resisting, he will not get up, no, he won’t, he will stay where he is till the end of his life.

Well, I’ll be dipped, shouted Kristóf with no less delight, making the stairwell echo loudly again.

Who the hell is Kristóf to tell him what to do, Kristóf of all people. A little jism jockey like him telling him what to do, eh.

Hold me back, somebody.

Can’t you see, little buddy, what a filthy drunken animal I am, and if you don’t watch it I’ll start swearing at your mother in a minute.

Great, so that’s what you’ll do next.

Because he had told everything to Pisti.

Stop the acting, pal. The little boy would like to play good boy from the Red Cross. But fuck it, man, I will tell the whole fucking Red Cross who you are.

Right now, dumbbell, the question is, where did you leave your coat.

The truth is you’re a big jism jockey and not the genuine goody-goody you’d like to pretend you are. I checked you out, boy. I got your number. I’ll tell the Red Cross the truth about you, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

He felt like yanking him up, to avoid inflammation of the pelvis, sit up already, but the drunken boy tore himself away from Kristóf’s hands with such a fury that it seemed he might hit him.

Where in the hell would he get a coat, could somebody from the Red Cross have given him one.

But Kristóf would not let go of him, he did not want to.

He doesn’t have a coat, he shouted, in tears, doesn’t even deserve a coat from the Red Cross.

For a moment Kristóf let go of the shouting person, but only to give in to an even more impossible compulsion.

He took the drunken man’s head between his cool palms and wanted to say something nice, kind, touching and encouraging. That he loves him and his heart is full of love and he would be happy to give some of it to him because he has so much.

Or perhaps to say no more than one would say to a grumpy child.

But this did not come to pass, because Pisti yelled into Kristóf’s face, suffused with love and deep emotion, that never, never would he get up from here, he would not do him such a big favor as to stand up, let his cock stand up for him.

He made the stairwell echo infernally again. Actually he was just a sack chock-full of infernal stuff.

I know more about you, little pal, than you might think.

Kristóf watched, observed how these unknown, humiliating, and painful feelings were being shouted into his face, emotions of which he had known nothing. But now at last he was getting to know them and he couldn’t claim to be disinterested.

Then he let go of the dear one’s head, made rather funny and pitiful by all the shouting.

However, it showed many frightening and shameful aspects too.

Then drop dead on your own. I just ask you to go quietly, without waking up the whole neighborhood.

He was done with him, but he didn’t have the heart to leave him there in that condition.

Though it was futile to plead with him in that condition.

Pisti’s big head dropped down dumbly, as if he could not keep it on top of his neck, there above the steps. And Kristóf, straightening up, ready to follow Klára upstairs, unwilling to waste more time on this drunken idiot, felt dizzy.

He hadn’t eaten for God knows how long. He definitely had had no breakfast and probably no lunch either. He let himself flop against the disgusting wall of the staircase, making tiny scales of paint fall off, and waited either to collapse or for the dizziness to pass, he didn’t care one way or the other, it made no difference.

Nothing made a difference.

Vacillating between the giddiness rising from the cavity of his heart and his inexplicable devotion, he went on watching this repugnant stranger.

What is he clinging to if there is nothing to cling to. To his own feelings or to the strange being’s beauty; but was this beauty, of what quality was this beauty.

He had to close his eyes a bit, not to think continuously about something other than what he could see in front of him; he should rather forget his own thoughts.

By the time he opened his eyes, Pisti had slowly sat up and now he looked very surprised. As if he had managed to understand his friend’s thoughts but with a slight delay; of course he did. He propped up his torso with his bare arms resting on his spread knees and kept relatively steady. His head hung down, though, exhausted and reproving.

His unbuttoned white shirt glowed above the filthy gray steps.

Still, Kristóf wanted to tell him what happiness had come his way today, and brag a little about the great future of his love.

The way he saw it, Pisti’s forehead was already radiant, and he felt that Pisti was waiting for a radiant confession.

He would have told him his story to console him but, to their great luck, he didn’t find a single word to do it with. And he now remembered that this rotten Pisti had stolen those girls from him in Wiesenbad, two girls, one after the other, the ones whom he was too shy to approach, which Pisti had instantly sensed, even though the girls were in love with Kristóf. He gave them to Pisti willingly; let him take them in his stead. Somehow his weakness and timidity were in the air no matter how hard he fought against them. His heart ached a little for the girls because, after all, they loved him and not Pisti, one of them, Bärbel Mengel, boisterously, and the other, Ingrid somebody, penetratingly and bashfully. But now, in his dizziness, the erstwhile ache about the girls felt good, that these girls had gone with Pisti instead of him, with nary a thought.

It was very clear that real life consisted of substitutions.

Without them he would not have found Klára, without his timidity, it was clear as daylight.

And he was very grateful to this beastly Pisti for taking them away from him. He was very curious to know what had happened to them.

For a while longer he watched the phenomenon of Pisti’s radiant forehead, and then without a word he left his newly found old friend, did not want to see him, and started up the stairs.

When he walked into the apartment, the throng, sunk in smoke and noise, accepted him, him with his heavy heart. But even years and decades later he was unable to piece together all the things that did or didn’t happen that night.

It seemed to him that he didn’t spend the whole night in the apartment but, along with others, might have gone out on the street several times.

Standing in the wind without his coat on, this he remembered, as well as the bare storm-battered trees, and standing alone among the buildings, staring up at the dark sky.

Perhaps they went over to the Gourmand Restaurant to buy more drinks, or only to have one there, who knows. The bar at the Gourmand stayed open until four in the morning. They wanted him to pay; all right, he paid, but he didn’t remember what he paid for and whom he treated. It definitely was not a place for redeeming bottle deposits.

He took account of these things only in the early afternoon of the next day, when he finally managed to wake up and get dressed.

He was literally startled into wakefulness; he wanted to leave and find Klára, no matter where she was, and that’s when he saw he didn’t have a penny to his name.

Either the people at the party had robbed him or the bartender hadn’t given him his change.

But he did not remember how much he was supposed to pay or for what, or how he got back to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard.

He remembered wanting to wake up while he was still asleep, so he could get going, but he did not know where to look for her, where to begin looking.

One thing was sure: he was lying in his own bed with his own nausea, he could see he was stark naked and without a cover, and if he wanted to avoid vomiting on the bedding he should sit up.

He heard no sounds from the adjacent rooms, everything around him was silent.

The Gourmand, for example, with its rich white tablecloths and gigantic damask napkins, was one of the Francophile places in the city not only because of its furnishings but also because of its unusually short but exquisite menu.

When he had first walked into the unfamiliar apartment and stood lost among the many strangers, he imagined that the space must have been not a hallway but some sort of reception room back in the heyday of the tailoring firm. He had never seen anything like it in this his own native city. And Klára, with a happy smile on her face, was pushing her way out of an inner room and coming toward him, indicating that he should find a secure place to put the mink coat she had borrowed from Andria Lüttwitz, a place where she could also find it; after all, she couldn’t spend the whole evening wearing the coat.

Not a coat rack anywhere.

It was so surprising to see her, to meet her again as if for the first time, even though he already knew what that felt like. What he wouldn’t give for a feeling such as he had for her. He was happy because of her; she filled his entire view so completely that he was positively grateful to himself for it. That is how infinitely laughable his happiness was. And as they went looking for a safe place for the coat the crowd kept pressing them together. It was the kind of thing neither of them had counted on. There was a chance to make contact again; they touched and grabbed each other, felt and cautiously patted and squeezed each other, they kissed and pawed each other quite roughly; they were forced to press forward across each other, and they laughed loud and hard. As if they were supposed to deny all this to themselves. Even if with their every little move they were making progress in this bashfully guarded nothingness, which had neither temporal nor spatial dimensions and therefore remained unfamiliar to them.

They did everything quickly and briefly, making use of strange shoulders and backs, restraining themselves so that it would not occur in front of the others.

They did not know what.

Klára jabbed at the air above their heads, pointing in the direction they should follow.

Kristóf had to admit, she yelled, that it was really stupid to borrow this fucking mink coat.

He admits it, but it wasn’t he who suggested it.

What’s the point of admitting that she did it for him.

Why would she have done it for him.

All right, don’t believe me, but that’s your own stupidity.

Perhaps it was even before this that they reached the kitchen. Where people were spreading things on sandwiches while feeding each other on the remnants. A large, dark-skinned girl told them to go back into the room, they would get their sandwiches there. Without keeping some order, everybody would gobble up everything. Ravenously they devoured the remnants the girl pushed in front of them, investing their deflected energies in this activity. Under each other’s eyes they gobbled up everything — bits of cheese rind, heels of bread, ends of salami, carrots and lettuce, which this large dark girl kept handing them with a hearty laugh from the other side of the table. Then from a piece of waxed paper she fed them some skin and fat of ham. They both happened to like these tidbits a lot, and they begrudged each other the individual bites, taking them out of each other’s mouth. The game they played was that they would not only devour everything, but also cast covetous glances at the food in each other’s mouth, but since this happened to be what they really wanted, it was a little risky for a game. Their voracious hunger was real, the rest was a game for predators. They ate out of each other’s mouth, or at least asked for a little bit of the other’s food. They shared a pickle to go with the ham. To the dark girl’s great joy they kept taking bites of cucumber, inching all the way to each other’s mouth, juice dribbling down their necks. By that time they were barmy and drunk, but only on each other. And with each touch, with the half-chewed food being coaxed out of each other’s mouth, they deferred the impending kiss and touch, as if what had to happen would not happen at all, as if to signal that beyond their lighthearted lack of restraint complete unruliness was waiting for them. Or that at least they were trying to put it off, delay it with something else, or substitute for it with some charming little nastiness or offensive commonplace.

But this must have happened later, because in the kitchen Klára was no longer wearing her mink coat.

They must have forced their way back to their original place.

From the shabby antechamber opened another, more spacious room whose door, closed only minutes earlier, was now wide open. The room was located where in other Budapest apartments the kitchen or kitchen and maid’s room would be. Two clothes racks on wheels, once used by tailors to hang suits ready for fitting, had been left in this room. Not only were the hangers full of coats but many others were thrown haphazardly over them and over the top bars of the racks. In this spacious room opening to the courtyard there was also a large platform, and that too had a thick cover of coats. This is where people had thrown their coats when they came in and where they yanked them free as they left.

A single bulb on a short wire provided a very pitiful light.

It was terribly hot because of the crowd; in this room too everyone threw off their jackets or sweaters.

Out on the gallery, arriving and departing guests kicked the empty bottles, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. The bottles made a terrible racket as they rolled or bounced down the stairs until they banged against the wall on the first landing and shattered to pieces.

The entrance door was also being constantly slammed.

He saw all this while falling backward and pulling Klára with him.

He well remembered playing the infantile bottle-kicking game with these strangers. One of whom held him with his arm around his shoulder, while he had his arm around the stranger’s waist, and that is how they held each other up while passing the miserable bottles back and forth to each other with their feet.

Customers of the tailor shop must have stood on the high platform while trying on pencil-thin tailcoats.

While they plopped down on the coats, Klára’s hair became undone and instantly surrounded Kristóf’s face; still, they remained restrained. And the noise of breaking bottles coming from the galleries reminded him that perhaps he should return to the staircase, he couldn’t just leave Pisti there by himself. And no matter how often he looked at the window giving on the courtyard, he always thought, this is how it must have been darkened during the war, during the siege, and it had stayed like this, all the panes daubed with black paint. He did not understand how he could be thinking about something like this when he was so dangerously close to losing his self-control.

Later he probably did not think of anything.

When with some difficulty they stood up to compose themselves, they realized that other people were also lolling about on the coats.

He did not understand how the mind allows itself these parallel connections, it upset him, as if he considered his own way of thinking as dissolute or as if with his compulsive thinking he were questioning his feelings.

Fixing her hair and looking around while readjusting her pins, she saw people slouched on the coats around them behaving in a disgusting, shameless way; let’s get away from here, she whispered, but she was still wearing the mink coat that would be safest on the coat rack next to them.

To get a free hanger they simply took another coat off a hanger and threw it on the platform.

They went looking for a drink, could not find a glass anywhere, did not even see one. But people were more than willing to let them drink from their bottles. They stood in a window recess for a while, holding each other with interlocked knees and thighs; they shared a cigarette while standing like that. They passed the cigarette back and forth, taking the smoke from each other’s mouth. They were insanely careful with the demands of their chests and groins, not to go too far but not to leave each other either, and their bodies readily obeyed both commands.

They also danced, like lunatics, Elvis was singing, their dance turned increasingly vulgar, they deliberately tried to shed their humanity; the pianist in a distant room stopped banging his instrument so as not to compete with Elvis, who was becoming so frenetic that nobody could resist him.

And then they were panting, various odors of perspiration wafting everywhere, Klára looking for her hairpins again, but her extravagant coiffure was gone for good; they went looking for drinks again. But first some water, water; they found it in an empty bathroom, though someone was innocently asleep in the dry tub. At the sink they drank water from each other’s hands. Kristóf was so flushed and overheated that, losing all proportion, he not only slapped water on his own face but, yelping wildly, splashed water into Klára’s open, unprotected face.

Although she liked his buoyant attack, propelled as it was by sheer happiness, she protested hysterically, practically screeching objections.

I’m soaking wet now, my hair.

You’ve ruined my makeup.

How could you do that.

She looked at herself in the mirror, at the water from her face streaking her face powder, running down into her cleavage; she was desperate, and suddenly she looked horrible. Kristóf felt like crying when he saw what he had done.

Forgive me.

No, this can’t be forgiven.

Yes, it can, please forgive me.

After this they had to console themselves with each other’s body and mouth for so long that in the end they could barely extricate themselves from each other. Although in their private darkness thickened by silence, they heard the man in the tub waking up.

They did not spare each other’s tongue or saliva.

Get out, get out of here while I fix my face, but I won’t forgive you.

I’m watching, I want to watch you do it, I won’t get out.

Get out, don’t be a baby, and do it while I’m asking nicely.

I won’t leave you here with this guy.

If he gets fresh, I’ll throw hot water on him.

He waited for her outside the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

During that time, other people went in and he couldn’t stop them; they’d come out again while he stood there foolishly, a laughingstock, lost in this corridor busy with human needs that had to be satisfied. But it was good to be alone a little; people went into the bathroom and also to the adjacent toilet, he heard everything, and then they came out.

He stood there until he remembered that the bathroom had more than one door.

Klára had disappeared, and the tub was ominously empty, no, that can’t be, he thought, but he did not find her anywhere in the crowd. So she hadn’t forgiven him. That cannot be. But luckily he noticed the man, now in the company of other women, on whose account he had endured hell’s torments for so many long minutes.

And from then on he ceased his maniacal search for her.

He’ll punish her.

Why should he look for her, pant for her like a dog.

Instead, he wound up in the midst of a heated discussion among some people, and it didn’t matter about what. They were arguing about art, he only watched from the sideline or shouted his views; they were all drunk as skunks. Well, is Picasso really a fraud, leading everybody by the nose, or a truly great artist, a fucking great artist who loves to bluff, and you, daddy-o, wouldn’t know how to separate his world-class bluffs from his art.

Then define bluff.

Why should I, let some smartass give a definition.

You can’t even define what it’d be like when I send you back to your mother’s cunt, daddy-o.

In the arts, we can’t get anywhere without definitions.

But you still have to know, daddy-o, where you are inside your mother.

He became mixed up in this argument because he happened to recognize one of the participants as someone he knew from the Emmi Pikler children’s home on Rózsadomb. This boy was a few years older than he, and he recognized him immediately. Both of them were surprised that he was not mistaken. He hailed the other one by his old name. They had taken away this boy’s name too for a time; they had a good laugh about that now. After a while, though, he had to resume his search for Klára because he couldn’t stand being without her. Perhaps Klára had gone on to someplace else. People would sometimes just get up and leave parties like this. He was ready to run out on the street and chase after her. And then he found her, leaning against Simon’s shoulder and talking animatedly to some people. Which caught him unprepared. He was almost ready to turn around and go, to get away from here. The people she was talking to suited her well: a bright-blond, wildly gesticulating, heavily freckled fellow and a peaceful-looking round woman with a large pregnant belly. With his free arm, the boyish fellow was hugging his wife as if holding her up. Simon, addressing some other people, thundering across a quieter conversation, as it were, was explaining in his penetrating hoarse voice that everything was fine, there was no reason for anxiety, nobody should worry about the communist movement. Next week the French will skedaddle out of Algeria like a shot.

But what does that have to do with the communist movement.

Lots, he’d bet his life on it.

That much, eh.

Anybody refusing to leave willingly will be wiped out completely, he said, and took a long swig from the bottle in his hand. And Ágost can say anything he likes, but Hungarians will always be in conflict with the French. Even in the communist movement.

Maybe, but the French won’t even notice.

People were smiling at Simon’s claims, but he continued with his explanations, making himself out as quite invulnerable; he declared that everyone else was mistaken and he was the only one who was predicting events correctly. The people who’d thought they were right tried to rescue what could be rescued, but now there was no way back. Mendès-France was mistaken, Pascal Pia and de Gaulle too;* I’ll tell you how it is, he shouted.

The great mistake of the French is embedded in their religion, Catholicism, that’s how simple it is in history. They wanted to save those filthy little Arabs for the civilized world, you know. Only the generals thought about it clearly,† with iron and blood, how to preserve everything for at least another fifty years.

And he could also have told them they didn’t have that much time.

Life will be more awful for those who want to stay than it’s been for the stubborn British in India.

One doesn’t have to be a prophet to know that the French, with their incredible diplomatic skills, will declare their loss. It’s a matter of days, mark my word. He’s willing to bet that Louis Joxe‡ will make the announcement.

That’s how this whole bloody affair will end, but the real show will only start then.

And while Simon was holding forth in his loud and threatening way, flourishing his wine bottle, in front of him stood Ágost, Kristóf’s melancholic cousin, his arms folded comfortably so he could support his chin in one hand, looking very elegant and aesthetic in one of his well-cut tweed jackets and a cashmere turtleneck sweater, a dandy, with his straight black hair falling over his forehead and brow.

And Kristóf was there too, standing off to the side with his hatred, awkward and wounded, wearing Ágost’s hand-me-downs. Everything he had on had once belonged to Ágost, from the blue underpants to the blue socks, all in perfect condition, even the socks, because his cousin would never wear anything frayed or mended. And he liked blue in all its hues, so Kristóf had a chance to hate all things blue, even though he actually preferred blue to gray or black, to say nothing of brown.

You don’t have to be an oracle to see that now it’s the people’s turn, all oppressed peoples, you just watch, now they’ll be the ones to conquer the colonialists. That’s what the next fifty years will be all about. They’ll take everything back; he’s willing to bet his life on it. Sooner or later the war against the colonial powers and the communist movement will make contact, blend into each other, or just link up geographically, and then God have mercy on everyone because nothing will stand in the way of a world revolution.

The freckled boy stopped gesticulating; he gaped, and let go of his wife.

Everyone seemed deeply and seriously shocked, and they were mute about this drunken world revolution. What could anyone possibly say about such a hope. Kristóf watched them with disgust, just as Ágost kept looking at Simon with a certain revulsion, which was why he hadn’t noticed his cousin. Suddenly Kristóf wanted to turn away, maybe even leave the place. Because no matter how much he couldn’t abide Ágost, he had to admit that the quality of their attention when listening to a third person was very similar.

And if he stayed, he would come to loathe Ágost even more for that, or himself.

Just then Klára motioned to him with her hand raised before her lips.

The freckled boy spoke first; dreamily elongating his words, he said he was shocked.

Simon said that was exactly what he would have expected.

Klára moved a single finger.

But not the way you think, said the blond boy, whose eyelashes were also blond.

Klára’s one finger gesturing at him sufficed to make him endure all this. So that he could sidle away now, so that he wouldn’t have to see them or listen to Simon.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard so much Stalinist baloney.

I’m not going to argue with you, you’re a born Nazi.

Kristóf had no choice; he had to accept that the two of them were not alone and would not be.

The chandeliers had been left behind in these big, vacated rooms, one opening into the other, their ceilings not too high — his great-grandfather would have liked them — but most of the bulbs had either burned out or been removed from the sockets. Kristóf very soberly decided to get down to some serious drinking, even though he had had plenty of booze already. He had to step across bodies sitting or lolling on the bare parquet floor, leaning on or entangled in one another in the most peculiar positions. If he could have had his way, he would have cut them all down, to the last one, with a single saber, while screaming his head off. He discovered some acquaintances among the crowd, some of his college classmates, but he didn’t feel like chatting with them about exams or anything related to his studies. And just when he seemed to have succeeded in getting away unnoticed or half-unnoticed, three giggling, chattering women in another room pulled him down to the floor with them — to make the pretty boy drink their sour-cherry brandy.

And does he know how cherry brandy is made.

How would such a mama’s boy know something like that.

They learned how to make it from their grandmama in Perth Amboy, though they don’t come from there.

But mama’s boy must be from Perth Amboy.

They bared their teeth, they were vampires about to eat mama’s boy from Perth Amboy.

Unless mama’s boy from Perth Amboy was a bonny lad from Leningrad.

They devour every pretty boy they meet.

And they are especially nice to disheartened pretty boys.

He should know he’s dealing with three vampires from Vienna.

Which he will feel immediately.

Give him the damn brandy already.

But they didn’t, not yet, first they had to touch him and grab his arms and thighs, check his flesh. They cooed in his ears and bit him.

Wait, sweet boy.

Bend your little head nicely into Julika’s lap, and I’ll start sucking your blood right away.

But he must close his eyes.

It was cognac, some lousy Albanian cognac that had nothing to do with Grandmama or sour-cherry brandy. But they tickled him while he tried to swallow some. He put up with the tickling so he could drink; he wriggled about, completely lost in their hands and enjoying it immensely. When he swallowed, they reached between his legs, making him snort and swallow the wrong way, scream with joy, writhe and beg for more.

They were common and sweetly innocent. But by morning he did not even remember how and when he had broken free of them or they of him. But he did remember his friend, that he should find his friend.

Completely drunk, he tried to make his way out among the many bodies and again he noticed Klára among them. And he saw that she noticed him too. Goddamn it, she had to see this too. Her radiant face darkened a little, because he too was such a drunken animal, that’s clear now, but what the hell else could he be without her.

But now he too raised his hand before his lips and with a single finger motioned to her.

Klára pretended not to see him; now why in hell did she do that.

That can’t be; no way, this is not happening.

Just then, from behind, exquisitely fine female hands planted themselves on his eyes so he could not see; not to see anything, let there be darkness at least, let his life end now.

But he was so insane, so drunk, that in his agony he could think of nothing but Klára, only her. No one else. He could not imagine these were not her hands. No one else had such fine small hands.

Who is this woman, shouted the woman in the darkness, I am jealous of her.

Her fine fingers vibrated on his face; long fingernails dug gently into his flesh, into his lips, it hurt, which felt inexpressibly good, she could have tortured him more with those sharp nails.

Of course it wasn’t her but that stupid Gyöngyvér, who must have noticed what he’d been doing.

But this also meant that the old fascist was still alive, otherwise it wouldn’t have occurred to them to come to this place. And that brought them too close to each other, closer than they had ever been before. Not even when in the adjacent room Gyöngyvér was squealing for his benefit. They were both drunk too, but there was another reason: they both felt abandoned in every sense of the word. They grabbed each other’s hands, and dumb Gyöngyvér shouted into his ear, right in front of everyone, who is this woman, because she looks like a high-class lady and she won’t put up with high-class ladies in Kristóf’s company.

He told her he had to go because a friend was waiting for him outside, in the corridor, his best friend.

But he’ll be right back.

He should answer her question first, does he need these women, and he shouldn’t go anywhere, because she wants to tell him right away what’s happened.

She can tell him when he comes back.

No, she wants to tell him right now.

And not only did she not let go of his hands, holding them down between them, but with her groin she pushed against his genitals. With her pubic bone, she clung demandingly to Kristóf’s loins, and while they supported each other like this, they could do nothing else; she breathed her stupid words softly and slowly onto his face.

Luckily she was no longer screeching so loudly that Klára could hear her.

Somehow Kristóf let himself go; against his will he let himself be carried away by the tension that the ideal position of their loins had created for them.

Kristóf won’t believe this, but less than half an hour ago this lousy Ágost proposed marriage to her. That anybody could be so disgraceful. She had been drinking ever since, like a fish, but she wasn’t so drunk that she believed a single word of it.

He could feel on his back that Klára saw him yet he couldn’t get rid of Gyöngyvér. And then everything would be over. His drunken agony increased so much that he wanted to scream. And now he didn’t want to lose Gyöngyvér either. He wasn’t actually listening to what stupid Gyöngyvér was saying. The truth was, he felt an appetite for her loins, that was the honest truth. He had observed her before and felt that when he had, watching mostly her cunt, he was not mistaken. The way she ran all over the apartment in her short slip. Not to mention her squeals from the other room. So that he couldn’t sleep. Why not let her cunt scream a little for him. He wanted it to scream for him, he wanted her breath, and her long fingernails. These truly awful red nails with which she was digging into his clenched fists.

She laughed silently, her head thrust back dramatically.

But she’d rejected the proposal, that was the limit. That somebody should be such a louse. She chased him away, out of my sight, you animal, scram, back into the belly of your mother who spoiled you rotten. She did not say all this to him but she had chased him away. He’d missed the boat, he was too late. This Ágost thinks he can just do anything he feels like doing. For weeks he’d been torturing her. Now she’s completely drunk, but she wants to tell Kristóf quite soberly what she’s not yet told Ágost.

Go ahead then, tell me.

If he can hold his mouth, while he’s so drunk.

Why couldn’t he.

He should swear to it.

No, he won’t swear to it.

As they breathed these words into each other’s mouth along with the odor of alcohol and tobacco, and were simultaneously feeling that everything was in its best possible position even though they hadn’t wanted it but simply found it, Kristóf thought, the hell with Klára, let her go, who cares.

In two days, no more, she’s moving out. This she hasn’t told even that idiot Ágost. Now she should marry him, now, when she can’t even stay in the same room with him. But she will tell him this only at the last minute. Kristóf can’t imagine the things this pig has done to her, this monster. One day, she’ll tell Kristóf all about it. She is moving out. Today she’ll tell him, while they’re here, she’s just waiting for the right moment, when it would hurt him.

Once in his life something should hurt him.

As early as tonight, she will sleep in the maid’s room, together with Ilona.

How could she do that.

Ilona would sleep with her child and Gyöngyvér would sleep where the child usually sleeps, they had already arranged it. She is not a cruel or vengeful person, but Ágost had so debauched her that he now deserves the pain; he should hurt, feel the pain.

But where is she moving to.

She doesn’t know yet.

He was sure she did.

Kristóf did not understand himself, which at this moment meant that he did not understand Creation either; how could this be happening to him.

He would have liked to disappear in his shame, but he could not stop anything. With great zeal and vulgarity they thrust themselves against each other. They made contact on the suitable points of elevation for them to seem most promising to each other, while talking about something else.

Actually, what he really felt was contempt for this stupid broad who, head thrown back, was laughing as vindictively as an infuriated provincial prima donna. The contempt added something to his cheap thrill. He could not wholly deny it to himself.

He was toying with the thought that at the right moment he’d turn around, reject his contempt for her, and make a move for his own sake.

But not yet.

He won’t reject her yet but instead will continue to enjoy her a little longer.

He turned around, though, to see whether Klára could actually see him.

Kristóf shouldn’t be so cruel to her, should stop talking so harshly. And now he should tell her who the dame was he’d fallen for so hard.

Hearing this, Kristóf realized he must have convinced only himself that he had felt Klára’s eyes on his back.

Or Klára might have disappeared.

First Gyöngyvér should tell him who her next victim was.

It’s still a secret, laughed Gyöngyvér, the future will tell; and she became beautiful, as the chosen person seemed to appear in the mirror of her face.

She really wants to leave Ágost.

Or they’re just having fun with each other.

She had already drunk a toast to it, to this great decision, champagne, with her best girlfriends, so she could forget this whole fucking past year and everything about it.

It wasn’t even a year.

Forget it then; she already has, who gives a shit. Why don’t they go over to the next room and dance a little. She really feels like dancing because she wants to forget everything.

No, he won’t go with her.

But this is the most cheerful day of her life, so Kristóf shouldn’t be fucking around with her.

He’d still like to find his friend because, Gyöngyvér won’t believe this, his friend is sitting and crying all by himself on the stairs.

He managed to retrieve a hand from under Gyöngyvér’s fingernails, but then she grabbed his thighs, and he didn’t want to leave her splendid loins so fast, her cunt.

That’s all he could think of, though he wanted to leave.

Gyöngyvér should quickly tell him, before he had to go, what happened to the old man.

Nothing; what should have happened.

He tensed his thighs, to show a bit of protest, but he enjoyed the new situation even more. Giggling, Gyöngyvér was shrugging her shoulders.

She doesn’t care about Uncle István’s idiocy either; the old man’s now home free.

You can’t be serious.

She and Nínó had already designed Nínó’s mourning dress, in the taxicab, but nada, it was a false alarm. They were hoping he’d kicked the bucket at last. But they even had a conversation with him. His hand had to be guided a little, but he did sign the contract. The old fart wouldn’t give in easily.

You people can now sell his house, but even you can’t succeed in everything.

They had gone to eat and drink something in the Serbian restaurant, sitting there until late afternoon, planning to go back to the hospital but, Kristóf won’t believe this, Nínó got a little tipsy, smoked, and was very candid.

The two of them are best friends now. But if she stayed, if she took her seriously, if she were not to move out, Nínó would just humiliate her again. She’s willing to humiliate her in front of anyone. She does it even in front of Ilona. This whole thing has happened because of her. And then Ágost sent André to bug her, to convince her to stay. But she won’t. All she had to say to André was, listen, André, I will never be the wife of Ágost Lippay Lehr, do you understand, never.

If you like him so much, I said to André, why don’t you marry him.

Your leaving him will kill him.

Kristóf should imagine that André, that hairy monkey, had the nerve to tell her that she would kill Ágost. Go back to him then and tell him to go ahead, he can hang himself. But it’s best they don’t talk about this now, and Kristóf should shake a leg, it’s time to dance a little.

They took off together, but then, luckily, they lost each other. Perhaps they let go of each other while dancing. He didn’t mind this, he did not mind anything, he drank and wanted to leave at last because there was no point in hanging around without Klára.

Everything became boring and disgusting.

He felt, no, he knew he was lost without Klára, but he was so drunk that he couldn’t feel sorry for himself about this. And he had found out everything from Gyöngyvér; that was his great satisfaction for the evening. At least he wouldn’t have to see this dizzy dame at the dining table anymore. He managed to get out to the staircase, but he didn’t find that fucking Pisti.

At least other people let him drink; they kept bringing the booze in corked bottles from Városház Street, where the inn was open.

It was good kövidinka, cheap white wine.

Or he went over to the bar of the Gourmand with some other people so they wouldn’t have to drink that crappy kövidinka, let whoever had a taste for it drink it.

That is how he wound up in the middle of the street, asphalt below, sky above, and the stupid tree branches in between.

Then unexpectedly he found Pisti, just as they were coming back to the apartment from somewhere. With his head buried in coats, Pisti was asleep on that fucking platform. If only he didn’t have to look at this fucking platform. And then he lay down next to his friend, so he’d be in a good place too. When he awoke, his friend was looking at him but Kristóf did not know who the person was who was looking at him as a friend. But then who was his friend. And then they had a fairly intelligible conversation, they held on to each other and quietly talked about how it was with the girls in Wiesenbad, reminded each other of the time they had walked over to Wiesa or Annaberg, and does Kristóf remember that old dame, that nurse, Sister Klára or somebody.

To whose place they walked over one Saturday afternoon.

Because Sister Klára had invited them.

They slept at her place.

They woke early in the morning to the sound of church bells.

She was a nice woman, that Sister Klára, that’s for sure.

She gave them hot chocolate for breakfast.

She liked Hungarians because her son lived in Budapest.

Kristóf understood, through the drunken haze, that something had happened to Pisti that he didn’t want to talk about; instead, he kept talking of other things.

Yet no matter how drunk he was, Kristóf wanted to know what had happened.

One day he’ll tell him.

He had always wanted to tell Kristóf, not anybody else.

But he won’t now because he couldn’t bear it.

Kristóf knew this was no joke.

They held on to each other even more tightly, almost hugging.

They remained silent.

In this harsh silence, in which Kristóf sobered up a little, he asked his friend if he had been beaten up.

No, he had not been.

Still, he should tell him now what happened.

His friends, his best friends, had ruined him.

Kristóf of course wanted to know what friends.

He can’t tell him, he won’t tell him, but one day he will.

No you won’t.

But what kind of friends.

It doesn’t matter, damn it.

Why doesn’t it.

Why should anything matter; Kristóf wouldn’t understand anyway. Doesn’t understand a thing about why people are the way they are; my prick understands more.

Then it must have been those friends he had told him about on the train.

You’d better stop asking. Can it already, will you.

What’s important for me is to know that you’re sure I couldn’t have been the one.

Please, leave me alone right now; it’s not worth it.

What’s not worth it.

Nothing in this world is interesting enough to bother about, that’s what’s not worth it, but I never thought you ever did anything against me. Fuck it, man, you’re too little a boy for that.

So you want me to get the hell out of here, leave you alone.

Yes.

That is where he saw Pisti last, in his unbuttoned white shirt, among the coats, but he shouldn’t have gotten up and left him. And all the time he wanted to tell him, very openly and simply, that he loved him. To be precise, additional long years had to pass before unexpectedly they met again.

Then he learned many things he had failed to learn that night or at any time before.

They were well into the night when a grave silence enveloped the crowd.

The person at the piano kept banging away but then he too noticed that the silence around him had deepened. He could no longer pulverize it with felt hammers on wires. This person was a poet who happened to play the piano well, a rather soft-spoken poet who barely six years later, not too far from here, on a night very similar to this one, simply walked out the window of a sixth-floor studio apartment. In secret, he loved the wife of his best friend and had lured her away from him. Perhaps he was even more hopelessly in love with his best friend. If properly provided with drinks, which meant that his friends had to dish out his drinks in small dozes but continuously, and mainly choice whiskey, champagne, white Cuban rum, and the like, the poet could spend an entire night lost in his own thoughts and playing the piano without using any scores.

Then there was some whispering and movement in the rooms. The last pedaled sounds of the piano had not quite settled in the air when a loud male voice could be heard from the outside.

Echoing shouts from the staircase.

From which it was clear that the police were here and the gathering would be brutally dispersed.

Kristóf recognized the second voice, also loud, that followed the first, the second one speaking over the first; he could recognize Simon’s voice even from the depth of the innermost room.

Where he stopped, frozen in place.

No one moved; instead they listened, sunk into themselves or with their heads thrown back, knowing what they had to prepare for.

Where to escape.

Kristóf could not have known any more than this because only a few moments earlier he had fled from the bathroom.

Where for a while, no matter how drunk they were, he and Gyöngyvér very seriously and with the greatest devotion wanted to understand each other’s bodily intentions. But they failed abysmally, could not find what they were looking for. Soon they were only grappling, their half-naked limbs awkwardly entangled, because what was happening between them, who wanted what or what was not wanted and by whom, was barely comprehensible.

He literally had to tear himself away from her because he did not understand how he could have demeaned himself so much; how he could have done such a thing; what had his body still wanted from him when Gyöngyvér began to scream, don’t fuck me, please, I beg you, don’t fuck me, even though a moment earlier she had wanted it, and then she shoved him away unexpectedly.

He didn’t want it either.

Then how could she say such a thing.

Or maybe he did.

Then why not, after all.

Simon, in the outer room, with the ominous reassurance of the aggressive drunk, was demanding that the commander of these plainclothesmen and uniformed policemen be brought to him.

It also became clear that plainclothesmen had been mingling with the partying crowd for some time.

He did this just in time, and a good thing too, because the police were about to begin beating up people and chasing them out of the apartment.

Klára did not see what was happening but she heard it.

Two men grabbed Simon by his arms, one on each side, and a third one was poised to bring his nightstick down on Simon’s head when André Rott came rushing to his aid.

He whispered something into the ear of one of the policemen, who immediately lost confidence and stopped yelling. People around them heard only the word comrade and then once more comrade. The policeman with the nightstick let go of Simon’s arm. Although he didn’t want to; for him it would have been nice to see the well-aimed blow hit its target and to complete the cry of victory already on his lips. And the other two policemen quickly followed his example.

The nightstick-wielding policeman may have been the assigned leader of this operation, but the two others must also have heard what André said. They looked at each other as if they had made a big mistake. Everyone could see they were uncouth country policemen ordered up to the capital only on big holidays.

Now the two of them, Simon and André, very politely took hold of the policeman with the nightstick, one on each arm, very courteously, and, to the amazement of the crowd, steered him out of the apartment to talk about the necessary details in the stairwell.

Since all three policemen were strapping, strong men, the occurrence made visible the carefully disguised true hierarchy of force.

People made way for them willingly.

The plainclothesmen, however, stayed awkwardly within the apartment.

There, tension ran so high that the only reason people did not faint by the dozen was that the tension itself kept them afloat on the surface of their dread. And it couldn’t be released even if one knew the answers to harsh questions like who belongs to which side, who is with whom here or against whom. Maybe there were some murmurs in the innermost rooms, but they soon subsided because people could hear snatches of a loud altercation in the corridor.

Not even the people in the outer rooms could make out the words, but they felt their strength, their suppressed and infectious bluntness. Crisscrossing shouts quickly rose to a fever pitch. Received by deadly silence both inside the apartment and out. Then footsteps, shuffling, as though people might be fighting, after all, rumbling on the stairs. But nothing like this was happening. It may have been a projection of desperate imaginations.

André and Simon came back, furious, explaining the situation to each other, and in a little while the plainclothesmen left.

A few of them probably stayed.

These two continued to unload their words on each other in the midst of the drunken crowd as if this were the most natural thing in the world. They were evidently not satisfied with having saved the evening. They wanted to drink some more right away because they had to sober up from the excitement they had just experienced.

To which the others could hardly contribute since from the start they had been excluded from the company of these two.

The silence dissolved very slowly.

At best people could let them drink from their own bottles, the two heroes.

But some people just waited for a chance to leave as soon as they could.

This time they managed to squeak by.

In a little while one could hear more careful openings and closings of doors; nobody was slamming them. People left separately, anything but going together, each person alone, singly, cautiously, properly.

Those who stayed gathered strength to bear up decently, that’s what they told themselves, decently, though decency had nothing to do with it.

First they turned on the tape recorder; the poet stayed at the piano, his hands in his lap, but for a long time Elvis failed to make anyone move.

As if no one could return to the former lightheartedness in front of the others. There was also a feeling of shame that the earlier lightheartedness had been nothing but an illusion of guilelessness.

Not much time went by.

Kristóf was struggling with his own little misery; everything would be miserable, whether he stayed or left. Then suddenly he heard Klára screaming from somewhere. It couldn’t be anything else. All he had to do was reach the wide-open door. Could he be mistaken. Many people were there, standing or sitting on the floor, and he was not alone with his fear, for the distressed screams made others move too, or at least get up.

In the middle of the next room the crowd instantly thinned out.

Klára was there by herself; some people fled while others wanted to rush to help her or stood paralyzed; Kristóf did not immediately manage to break through the human ring made helpless by this double tension.

They all saw what was happening, a single look sufficed. But the improbability of the occurrence frightened some of them away and paralyzed others. It was not fear, indifference, or curiosity that worked so powerfully but modesty. Perhaps they shouldn’t see what they were seeing.

Empathy and willingness to help need time to overcome modesty.

Earlier, Klára had been among those who, defying the communal helplessness, had begun to dance. She was a rebel, after all. That’s how we’ll respond, we’ll dance. Finally she took her faith into her own hands. Now let’s dance and leave no stone standing.

Yes, Almighty, let’s see what the two of us can do together.

She was standing in the middle of the room as if frozen while waiting for a partner before taking her next dance step.

With her legs apart in the middle of the parquet floor inside the human ring and no longer screaming. As if she were listening intensely to something, to an inner voice. Her lips had parted and remained parted, her huge eyes opened wide onto the silent universe. Not only was blood dripping down her stockinged thighs — she must have started screaming when she noticed it — but in the next two pulsing thrusts, in front of everyone, blood clots came pouring out of her. Perhaps they could hear the clots plashing down, perhaps the sound could have been heard, but no one who heard it wanted to hear it.

Elvis continued to wail his melody to himself and then someone unplugged him.

Someone handed a kind of black wrap to Simon, who was moaning, moaning to keep himself from howling. He had elbowed his way to her from another room. What somebody handed to him was one of those big, soft, warm knitted shawls that peasant women put on their shoulders when going to church on cold Sunday mornings.

Still moaning, he quickly bundled her in it, covered her mute body, spoke to her, and held her so others could not see her face, she should not be defenseless, telling her she would be all right, he was already taking her, but how should he take her, he asked himself out loud.

As someone who usually does not deal in blood or loss of blood.

I’m a physician, someone said.

We’ll call an ambulance, shouted someone else.

Hold on, my sweet, if you can, hold on to my neck, my darling, and there won’t be any trouble, I will lift you up, I’ll carry you, where is your bag, where is the car key.

By then Kristóf was standing there too.

Go find her coat. Don’t call an ambulance, he shouted.

Several people followed them to help, the physician among them, he was the one who opened the door, and people in the stairway supported Simon’s arms, following him with physical contact, women and men ready to cushion his fall should he trip with his burden. But there was no need for help because he was taking her quickly and securely, as if carrying no weight at all.

In his nervousness Kristóf could not find it. Because he forgot he was looking not for a regular coat but a mink coat, he should be looking for the mink. And that was really his only task. Yet he could not find it, though he remembered where to look. Klára might catch cold because of his fecklessness. He shoved all the coats off the racks, but could not find the mink coat. Not on a hanger, not anywhere. Of course he found his own coat with no trouble, it just came to his hand, and he shoved it aside. Rummaging among the coats on the platform, he called to one of the vampire girls; she probably wasn’t from Vienna and she was now fearfully following his every movement; he told her what to look for. A long mink coat, that’s what she should look for.

While they were throwing coats about and people watched them in alarm, there passed a small segment of his life in which he was not certain he was a person. Or maybe he was a person who imagined himself in a situation like this, and then he would have to find a truly existing object in the realm of imagination.

The girl who loved to laugh was helping him, she too kept throwing coats in all directions, but they didn’t have much time.

As if he had lost his mind, he kept shouting to everyone, asking where else were there coats in the apartment and that everyone should look for it.

Let me get by.

The frightened and somewhat reduced crowd let him by, naturally, and tried to help, but he must have changed his mind because then he ran after Simon and Klára. Klára had been put in the backseat, bundled in the large shawl; her hair shone in the darkness.

Kristóf fell against the car, which was surrounded by people, and told Simon, who had been waiting for him, that he could not find it, couldn’t.

Then we’re leaving, Simon shouted, and you’ll find the coat.

The next day, when startled to wakefulness by his nausea, he realized he hadn’t found the coat.

He was still drunk and there was still no mink coat.

Or he’d gone mad and then, luckily, was only imagining this entire shocking idiocy. Even so, he should get dressed to look for Andria Lüttwitz’s mink coat and look for Klára.

Actually, from the first moment of wakefulness he could not shake the thought that Pisti had stolen the coat.

Not because he had no coat, he probably did. And if a man with no coat steals, he wouldn’t steal a woman’s mink coat.

Pisti did this to him, but not because of the money.

He found Ágost’s room empty.

The bed was untouched, left the way Ilona nicely turns it down every night, folding the quilt back.

He knew where to find money.

He had done this on other occasions, did not even call it stealing but rather a satisfying revenge, and he was indeed content with this amount of revenge. He took back what was his due. These two, his aunt and Ágost, had systematically stolen his inheritance. He, on the other hand, had only helped himself to petty amounts until now. Now, however, he had not a penny to his name.

He had to leave.

Logically he should have called them at home; at least he should have tried. But this occurred to him only when he was already on Teréz Boulevard. In the meantime the storm had passed, everything seemed back to normal, and the sun was even out, as though for two days nothing had happened in the city.

Superintendents had already cleared away from the sidewalks the traces of damage caused by the storm, but the streets were still strewn with debris.

He found their telephone number under Klára’s name in the phone book, but no matter how many times he tried, and he spent a long time in the stinking telephone booth, no one answered. So he’d go to every hospital and clinic. He went first to the gynecological clinic on Üllői Road, but no patient by that name had been brought in during the night. They looked carefully in their register, very carefully. They suggested he try the clinic on Baross Street. She was not there either. They sent him from there to Bakáts Square. This was not close, but he walked, he knew the way. This turned out to be an error: it was not a hospital but strictly an obstetrics clinic, and even in emergencies they were reluctant to deal with abortions.

It was late afternoon by the time he arrived at this cheerful, pleasantly fragrant place.

Please believe it.

He does, but has no idea what to do next.

The female porter wanted to help him because theoretically it was very simple. There was no need for him to traipse around half the city.

She asked if he was a relative.

He said no.

Then she couldn’t help.

He asked her to, please.

The woman gave him a long and sympathetic look. She was interrupted by some inquiries, she had to make a phone call, she had to go out to the entrance to arrange something; these interruptions gave her a chance to think about the matter. When she returned and found him still waiting, without another word she called the central hospital bed registry. They told her that the previous night no patient by that name had been brought to any of the city’s hospitals or clinics.

But that’s not possible.

Calm down. Accept it.

He stayed for a while longer because he could not compose himself well enough to leave.

And then he asked this woman where, despite everything, he might keep looking.

Very cautiously, the woman asked him to tell her what had happened, was it a spontaneous abortion.

Yes, a spontaneous abortion.

And where was she taken from.

He told her, and while he spoke he saw on her face that this woman knew everything about them, she’s simply reading all of it off him, and that’s how people read other people, off each other’s face.

Was she taken in an ambulance.

No.

Then it’s harder, because she can’t ask the ambulance services, but she took a frayed notebook out of her desk drawer. She named all the places where he might still look. Kristóf went to the Rókus Hospital, and when he did not find her there either, he walked the streets aimlessly for a while, among people. He was walking into another person’s life; whether or not he finds her, from now on this will be his life. This new life of his has nothing to do with any of his former lives, with his birth or with his family or with anything. They had all become like strange objects. Because he would not venture outside his new life, not even with a single thought. Which was neither good nor bad, but after so much walking and absorbing so much of the streetscape, his legs began to grow tired.

He called again from a phone booth stinking of male urine, the phone rang, he held on for a long time, nobody answered.

He did not find her in the hospital on Szövetség Street either, and by now it was evening. From there, he should have gone to the hospital on Sándor Péterfy Street; he stood on Rákóczi Road, staring longingly at a slow-moving illuminated streetcar, thinking he could take it to the hospital. He could not give up the search yet he did not continue. He didn’t want to ruin his last chance of the evening by not finding her on Péterfy Street.

When he returned to the apartment on Teréz Boulevard, at first he thought that for some reason everyone had left the place and every object was frozen in place along with his family’s life.

He went to look for something to eat and found his entire family sitting silently around the large dining table under the baroque chandelier. They all looked at him as if they had just been talking about him. Their eyes were filled with reproach. They must have finished eating earlier, and it seemed unusual that Ilona had not cleared the table. Nínó sat at the head of the table, under the 1848 battle scene, Ágost on her right, with Gyöngyvér facing him. Beautiful Irén was also there with her grown daughters, Lilla and Viola, and at her side the little Bellardi boy, the most favored pupil; facing him glowed Irén’s utterly bald husband, and next to him were the relatives from Transylvania, Ildikó and Mária Lehr.

Even if Ilona had not been standing by the door, her eyes red and tear-stained, he would have known what had happened.

But Kristóf said nothing, not even hello, took his place at the empty chair at the far end of the table, opposite Nínó; he looked at each of them separately, these faces that, yes, were familiar from somewhere, poured himself some water and drank it.

When he put his empty glass back on the table, Nínó spoke.

I am not certain this interests you, Kristóf, she said sternly and solemnly, but at twenty minutes after three o’clock this afternoon your uncle István died in my arms.

Kristóf could not help thinking that Nínó should have left her arms out of it, along with the sentimental hogwash.

But she could leave out nothing, her lips trembled, she sobbed with pain because the pain was real, which immediately made Gyöngyvér cry too. Just then the phone rang in the living room — luckily, because Nínó’s stern solemnity affected him quite strongly, the sentimental hogwash with which she doused her listeners. It was possible that Nínó’s ridiculous behavior would have a stronger influence on him than the death of his uncle. But the ringing telephone was too distant a sound in the apartment for anyone to answer at this tense moment. While Nínó is rendering her account of the great man’s death and perhaps announcing Kristóf’s disinheritance.

They were all waiting for this great event.

You have probably only come for supper, Nínó continued at the head of the table, but we are mourning, if this doesn’t bother you while you sup.

The event was too recent for anyone to be wearing black yet.

Yes, Kristóf replied, and began spooning the soup put before him.

He was truly hungry.

In grave silence they watched him.

He asked Ilona for seconds.

Accompanied by their reproof, he ate a second portion of soup quickly.

Nínó had not been mistaken, after all, her insight into human nature stood on a firm basis.

It was a quite superb cream of mushroom soup, and while spooning it, Kristóf glanced at the little Bellardi boy, this most favored pupil, who in return was watching him rather slyly.

It was clear that this was the character with whom Gyöngyvér would move in.

Then it was Irén’s turn, and the others willingly followed suit; they all spoke quietly and politely of the great dead man.

But in fact, they were all waiting for the great moment.

Nínó kept very quiet, however, no longer feeling any pain.

And when the telephone rang again, Ágost went to answer it and in the name of the grieving family to accept the prompt condolences, whoever might be at the other end of the line. They knew this was to be expected, the phone would keep on ringing because the news had been announced on the radio. The others around the table sank back into reproachful silence, which is to say they pretended they had urgent remembering to do. Of course their silence was directed not only at Kristóf, heartless and ungrateful boy, but at death too, death which treats everyone so unfairly.

But how can anyone be so heartless.

And frankly, Nínó was at this moment rather curious to know who might be calling, because she had not yet heard from the prime minister, though he had informed them via his secretary that he would call personally.

Ágost stayed away for a long time.

The reproving silence did not touch Kristóf; he simply acknowledged it. Ilona cleared away his soup plate but then hesitated between taking the main dish from the platter on the table or serving Kristóf something hot from the kitchen. And nobody else handed him the platter on which lay, in the light of the baroque chandelier, the remnants of masterfully sliced stuffed beef, rare but crusty on the outside, surrounded by evenly cut potatoes sprinkled with parsley.

Ilona could slice any meat without the stuffing spilling out.

And when nothing happened, he stood up irreverently and pulled the platter toward his end of the table. He could have asked Viola for it, with half a smile. It was not enough that he was so heartless and now behaved so disrespectfully, but he also served himself while still standing up, helping himself to meat and potatoes much too generously. With his eyes he searched the table for the pickled vegetables. To go with this meat, according to custom, either pickled melon or pickled peppers stuffed with red cabbage should be served.

Nínó spoke again under the painting of the battle scene.

While you are looking for your cabbaged pepper, if you are at all interested in this information, the Hungarian Academy of Science is being draped in black in honor of your uncle.

She said this in a voice indicating that she needed all her mental strength to control herself, and she would control herself, for her mental strength was enormous; she was unable to say out loud that she wished never again to see her murdered kid brother’s son at her table. Even though this is what the others expected of her. That he should move out immediately. Growing somewhat hesitant, Kristóf sat back down. His hesitancy was due mainly to the conspicuous absence of cabbaged peppers, since eating this sort of meat usually began with a few bites of cabbaged peppers. No matter what his aunt might think of him, she too was capable of stuffing herself with things straight out of the jar. All right, so he started with the meat; it was fattier than it should have been, but it had been well cooked and had a good crunchy texture; he was stuffing himself, to get the meat inside himself as fast as he could and then do the same with the potatoes. But he had hardly put away a few mouthfuls, and the stuffing was as tasty as usual, when, thinking of his barely dead uncle, it occurred to him that he should have gone first to Buda.

Given Simon’s place of work, perhaps Klára had been taken to Kútvölgyi Hospital in Buda; how could he be so stupid as not to have thought of that. That’s where he should be looking. Involuntarily he swallowed the food in his mouth, wiped his lips, please excuse me, all of you, he said softly and properly, and then, to the others’ great amazement, he stood up from the table, nodded politely, almost amiably, and walked out.

That was the moment when Ilona would have brought him the pickled melon or the pickled pepper stuffed with red cabbage.

He crossed the empty rooms and picked up his coat; they could hear the front door close behind him.

They did not understand how Nínó could stand for this.

He took the steps down by threes; his great-grandfather also had not liked his steps too steep.

At Kútvölgyi Hospital, the porter refused to give him any information. He should come back tomorrow morning. Until then no one would tell him anything. It probably would help to get up to the ward and ask the nurse on night duty but the porter refused to allow that; he tried to give him some money, how dare you, shouted the porter.

The lobby was empty. For a while, he pondered which way to go, how to get around the burly man, but the porter was watching him no less attentively. He made one little move, and the man shoved him between the wings of the revolving door and then out to the street.

Shit on him, he’d look for the service entrance. He had to go around the building, climb across a fence, and then there were two such entrances, both closed with heavy metal doors.

Through one of these entrances he could get to the sixth floor.

This is where his dead uncle was too, somewhere inside this enormous building with its lit-up windows. But by then the old fascist had been taken down to the basement to be prepared for transportation. Kristóf stayed for a long time, leaning against the flue of the wheezing, puffing ventilating system; he tried to follow his uncle on his way.

But he did not find Klára on the gynecology ward in this hospital when he returned early the next morning.

In the meantime the sky became overcast again and March turned very wintry.

He got on the bus in front of the hospital and decided that no matter what, he would ring Andria Lüttwitz’s bell, she must know what had happened.

He did ring the bell, but he said not a word about the mink coat. They stood in the hallway where nothing had changed in the past decade and Andria Lüttwitz leaned on the same silver-handled cane. Klára was in the hospital on Üllői Road, after all, and it’s a good thing Kristóf showed up because, on top of everything else, Simon must go out of town early tomorrow morning. She can’t find Klára’s mother because she must have gone to Nagymaros. Kristóf went back to Üllői Road. Where everything started all over again. They did not let him in. He should come back tomorrow during visiting hours. The rear entrance was carefully guarded; a slovenly guard was stacking dishes full of leftovers. Kristóf took the streetcar to Újvilág Street, where perhaps somebody had found the mink coat in the meantime.

The house was wrapped in grave silence.

He rang the bell for a long time before a young man, about his own age, whom he must have interrupted in some engrossing activity, came to the door. Very reluctantly, he said he knew about the matter but nobody had found a mink coat.

Kristóf still wanted to come in.

The young man would not let him.

The next day, during visiting hours, he found a very pale and terribly weak Klára, a Klára whom he did not know but loved more insanely than ever, loved with bated breath. For a while, he sat politely on a chair by her bed, and then they held each other’s hands and stayed that way. Klára closed her eyes as if to doze off; he watched the wonderful vaulting of her eyelids, and when she started up from her sleep, they leaned against each other and cried, moaned, whimpered, and sniveled in the big ward, where seven other women lay in their beds in conditions similar to Klára’s. These women also had visitors, but Kristóf and Klára were so far away from them and everything was so stark, bare, and bleak that they did not reach them with their voices, pain, or looks.

He came at a good time, because she was going to be left alone for a while, she didn’t know for how long.

They could weep freely, nobody heard them, and if they did nobody cared. They were not very loud, anyway; they showed remarkable discipline with their pain.

Simon’s travels are strictly confidential, now he has gone to Brussels and Paris, but Kristóf must not know this.

From that moment on he took care of her. He came to visit her several times a day, bringing fruit, flowers, compote in a small bowl and delicious chicken soup from Andria; he took and washed her laundry so Klára would have a clean nightshirt every day; she had to change her underpants frequently too.

She washes and rinses them in the sink.

No.

When she had to get out of bed, she could hardly stand up. She couldn’t walk out into the corridor without holding on to something.

He found a way to get into the hospital outside visiting hours.

Klára waited for him.

It was a quiet happiness, but they were very happy with each other and because of each other.

And he did not say a word about the disappearance of Andria’s coat. He had a strategic plan about it.

Because of the mourning and the preparations for the funeral, the apartment on Teréz Boulevard was constantly filled with dissembling people. It was not simple to carry out his plan. One sunny morning the prime minister showed up with his secretary, Karakas, but luckily Kristóf happened not to be home. These dissembling people repelled him, they seemed to be light-years from the quiet, painful happiness he was sharing with Klára, and, since she had given him a key to take or return things she needed, he preferred to stay in Simon and Klára’s apartment in Dembinszky Street, sleep in their bed. When he had to go home for clean underwear, some clothes, or his notebooks — because he did go over to Buda to look in on some lectures at the teachers’ college — Ilona told him what had been happening or what could be expected to happen and when. Gyöngyvér will not move out after all, oh no, now everything has changed; they will be getting married just as soon as possible. They will do it in the greatest possible secrecy, avoiding all formalities, not to crush Nínó completely.

They will go on their honeymoon right after the funeral, which is something she, Ilona, doesn’t understand, what’s their hurry, she doesn’t understand that either. But something has really changed between them; all day long they bill and coo, behave as if nobody had died in the house.

They’ll simply go over to the district council office, Hansi and André will be the witnesses, then they’ll go out to eat somewhere; not only is she, Ilona, forbidden to cook anything, but she’s not even to know about this.

She begs Kristóf too not to know anything.

One doesn’t do something like this to one’s dead father or mourning mother, she doesn’t understand it.

She does not understand them, simply does not.

Andria Lüttwitz picked her words carefully when he dropped in on her. It’s clear that Klára will have to stay in the hospital for at least ten days. Such a tremendous loss of blood.

When they bring her home, though, Andria would like to see her mink coat again. Kristóf shouldn’t misunderstand her, not because she needs it, she no longer goes around in such coats, no rush either, there’s no need to hurry, Kristóf shouldn’t trouble himself too much.

The elderly woman’s shyness was touching, and Kristóf was furious that Pisti had done this to him and to Andria.

Andria waited anxiously for Kristóf’s response and, looking for his goodwill, added, when I die it’ll be hers, anyway, because I’ll leave everything to her.

Even if he knew where to look for Pisti, he didn’t have the courage to squeal on him.

No matter how weak Klára still was, Kristóf had to tell her about it.

The coat had not reached her consciousness or she did not care, which made Kristóf’s situation easier. Klára fell asleep, Klára woke up, Kristóf fed her, gave her something to drink, holding her by the elbow, he took her to the toilet; he was on good terms with the nurses, who were curious to know who this handsome young man was, who was not her husband, who had so suddenly disappeared.

First he went to see his uncle in the apartment on Damjanich Street, where he had not been for years. To find out whether it was possible to purchase a mink coat in Budapest, preferably a full-length one, new or used, any kind.

The real question was how much would one spend for it.

Kristóf was very interested in this question.

It would depend, of course, on the quality of the animal, and for whom the coat was to be made, if I am not offending you with my questions.

Actually, Kristóf enjoyed talking about this as dispassionately as if they were real merchants. He did not yet want to say more to his uncle. He wanted to figure out whether his plan could work. This is where he learned from Irén that he had to move out of the Teréz Boulevard apartment because he had irrevocably offended Nínó. He didn’t care; how could he have offended her. And he did not even believe it, because he knew Nínó better. Then he looked up in the telephone book whether that certain photographer, István Stefanek, still existed on Köztársaság Square.

He had to do it before the front gates were locked, so that neither Balter nor old Mr. Pálóczky, helpless since his wife’s death, would see him. He figured he’d do it on the eve of the funeral. The body was indeed lying in state in the lobby of the academy, on a splendid catafalque surrounded by huge clusters of floor standards, and the next day it would be taken from there to be buried.

The widow with her son and brand-new daughter-in-law had not yet come home from their audience with the president of the academy.

He chatted for a while with Ilona, and when he was left to himself in the passageway used as the dining hall, he simply took the painting of the 1848 battle scene off the wall. In his room, he wrapped it in an immaculate lightly starched sheet but, before tying it carefully with string, he had to admit to himself that this would not be enough. He took another painting off the wall of his own room, packed it along with the first one, and left the apartment unnoticed. He chose these pictures because they were not so large that he couldn’t take them by taxi and he guessed that their value would cover the cost of a mink coat.

He made the phone call the next morning, but he was so terribly excited that he had to start several times; he could hardly swallow, let alone speak.

Mrs. Stefanek picked up the phone and put on her husband immediately.

He did it exactly as his grandmother usually did, as dispassionately and briefly, whenever they ran short of money.

What would you say about a small Egry, Kristóf asked.

About what, asked the photographer crossly.

What I just said, about an early Egry.

The quick-thinking photographer had to restrain his astonishment.

And what would you say about an 1850 Neudorfer.

The photographer mumbled something to the effect that he would have to see.

He could come over with the paintings.

Gyöngyvér related almost everything to Ilona, who in turn passed it on to Kristóf on the day of the funeral. They would go to the Rhodopes for their honeymoon; they’ll fly to Sofia and from there they’ll be taken by car to a beautiful house in the mountains, where Ágost’s Bulgarian friends had invited him earlier. Ágost is crazy about mountains. Ever since being recalled from Bern, he doesn’t know how he has survived in this bleak Hungarian wilderness. They might even encounter snow.

Gyöngyvér has never been in the high mountains or in an airplane; true, she hasn’t seen the sea either.

But Ilona did not understand why they were doing it, why they had to do it like this.

However risky Kristóf’s undertaking was, his timing turned out to be good. On the day of the funeral no one noticed that two paintings were missing. Afterward Kristóf himself forgot the whole thing. Empathy for his aunt overwhelmed him — not because of the death but because he understood, from the proportions of the dignified ceremony and the sight of the assembled mourners, how dependent his aunt and uncle had been on each other and what burdens the two of them had carried on their shoulders together, no matter how ridiculous he had thought them.

The young couple left the following morning.

Which for long days literally paralyzed Mrs. Lehr; shocked, she seemed physically to become one with her black garments.

That her own son should do this to her.

She swallowed the secret wedding; she didn’t have time not to because she had to maintain her dignity until the funeral.

She even liked the idea that at the funeral her son did not have to hide his mistress.

But to leave for their honeymoon the next day, well, that was too much.

Kristóf could not let her be alone, even if he had to keep running to the hospital. Mrs. Lehr forgot that she had wanted to kick him out of her apartment. Luckily for her, her memory could retain Geerte van Groot, because she had no one else left, literally not a single human being.

She did not even say good-bye to her son and daughter-in-law.

André Rott drove them to Ferihegy Airport.

Kristóf stole money again from Ágost’s drawer, so he could take a cab to Klára.

Gyöngyvér was about to raise her voice in the almost empty waiting room of the airport and complain that until now Athens had not been part of the itinerary, and what was this new plan anyway.

Think of what I told you last night, in detail, before we went to bed. I hope you can still remember.

Ágost spoke so quietly and pitilessly that she immediately fell silent.

If you want me to, I can repeat it for you.

She concluded from various circumstances at the Athens airport that they would not actually be visiting the Greek capital, because they were going to continue to either Tel Aviv or Istanbul. In her brand-new cream-colored two-piece suit, with a pillbox hat of the same bouclé fabric, she was now keeping her peace with the discipline of an appointed diplomat’s wife. It was as if she were hearing Margit Huber’s ringing encouragement, not so timidly, Gyöngyvér, sustain, sustain. Don’t control your breathing, that happens by itself, with your abdominal wall. Cheerfully she asked no questions and, carefully nurturing her smile, did not comment on the surprising developments, regardless of what might happen.

She did everything the way Margit Huber would have done.

Ágost could be very satisfied with her.

She saw great benefits in her newly gained self-discipline.

They sat on a comfortable leather couch in the waiting room at the airport for about ten minutes, no more. They hardly spoke because Ágost had to look through his freshly bought newspapers. He took off a glove to stroke the fine leather of the couch. The airport was bustling; objects, mysterious people, and their even more mysterious actions arrested Gyöngyvér’s attention. Occasionally something was announced in a number of languages of which she barely understood anything, but she could not truly listen because of her excitement.

She did not quite register when Ágost put down the newspapers and stood up.

Excuse me, he said with peremptory sternness, and this made Gyöngyvér look up and pay attention. He took off across the large hall with his briefcase.

He could have left it on the couch, but the stupid man even took his overcoat with him.

For the first time in her life, Gyöngyvér was left all alone in the echoing waiting area of an airport. Had she not always been left alone, she probably would not have reacted so vehemently; primal fear would not have awakened in her with such force. She wanted to call after him that she too needed to pee and would like to go along. But it was clear that she had to stay put and keep smiling, if only because of their luggage. Don’t be anxious, Gyöngyvér, remember, the job is to sustain, sustain, and she sustained. This helped a little. Ágost did everything with such apparent assurance, was so maddeningly at home everywhere, that she had to leave things to him.

At least she could see where to go when she’d have to. She was terrified that someone might speak to her and she would not understand.

She could still see, and she never forgot, that Ágost, in his hazel nut-brown millepoint traveling suit, at the far end of this white marble hall divided by pilasters, walked at a very leisurely pace down the marble steps. That is when, and in this way, she saw him for the last time. Later, though, she told the Greek security people interrogating her that, quite inexplicably, he had taken with him not only his briefcase but also his sand-colored Burberry coat.

The basement washroom she found at the bottom of those steps had no other exit, at least she could not find one when an hour later, having lost her patience and already in tears, she managed to entrust the luggage to somebody.

It wasn’t even his briefcase.

What briefcase.

A very nice, brown leather case, she thought it was brand new, she thought it was calfskin, which, along with their other luggage Ágost had taken out of the trunk of his friend’s car at Ferihegy Airport.

What friend.

Now she was confused, uncertain whether to reveal the friend’s name.

Had she seen the briefcase before.

Was she familiar with the contents of the briefcase.

She knew she didn’t have to answer these questions, she should not have mentioned the briefcase at all, or anything else for that matter, because they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, as Ágost had explained in detail the previous evening, but by now it was very late.

It was the same car, André Rott’s, in which one summer morning, after having awakened so happily in the maid’s room of the Pozsonyi Road apartment, they had driven to the Tisza.

As they say, they were as happy as larks that long-ago morning.

She saw that the security men were hooked on the briefcase like fish on the bait.

They jotted down André Rott’s name, but she corrected them, saying she had made a mistake earlier, his real name was András Rott.

As a very suspicious-looking interpreter translated it, she had not seen her husband with that briefcase before and its contents were unknown to her.

Gyöngyvér was living proof that the Hungarian government, in accordance with an agreement, wanted the Eichmann papers delivered to the court in Jerusalem.

Her confession was calculated into the game.

The disappearance of the embassy’s chief counselor on the way to his post was duly recorded, and this official record included the missing person’s overcoat and briefcase.




A Fecund Apricot Tree


He was free at last.

And if he had thought about anything specific during the last happy weeks, anything related both to his everyday activities and to his entire life, then it was this condensed sentence, only four quietly jubilant words, which kept repeating: I’m free at last.

He said this to himself several times a day, hundreds of times a week, without becoming bored with the feeling that could be expressed in these words or with the ultimately empty words themselves.

Silence reigned over the landscape, stillness and peace pervaded the lovely sunshine-filled early summer.

With those four words, which he had heard so many times from released prisoners, he had to reassure himself about the correctness of his feeling, which he had never voiced to himself nor said out loud. In a peaceful state, noisy with the rush of blood, work-induced heavy breathing, and the buzzing of bees, he returned without realizing it to the time of that feeling, which he thought had been lost forever.

Memory first gave him signals when he moved; the movements led him back to knowing how to hold his tools, spade, hoe, and scythe. Then his muscles reminded him how to manage his movements. He returned here, to the past with its out-of-the-way groves, abandoned fields, and empty pastures, vineyards overrun by weeds, and decaying orchards where the normal silence of nature reigned; peace. He wished to reconquer this abandoned landscape with his labor, except that what he had forgotten most during the lapsed time in his life was how to manage his energies sensibly.

A while later, when the remembered movements led his muscles back to the forgotten times, for brief moments his childhood summers flickered up and glowed. An unknown bird would screech. He would look out from behind a grapevine as if peering out from behind the shaded leaves of the erstwhile bower into the wild blue, and he seemed to hear the voice of his long-dead mother calling him. He did not know to what place she was calling him. The blue of the enamel bucket, its familiar clinking, the water, some of which always splashed on his dusty feet — that’s what he remembered, such cloudless summers, the blue enamel bucket.

And the sweetly hovering dust, the sound of cowbells coming closer, together with the approaching twilight, his feet stamping in the dirt.

Now too, time went by, day after day, week after week, without the tiniest cloud in the sky, and it seemed as if all those long-ago summers had also been cruelly and eternally blue. Had he not felt free, had not the river, misty in the cool nights, produced a little dew on the blades of grass each dawn, he would have found these signs threatening, ominous, terrifying.

And they were indeed ominous.

It made a difference how much each planted thing yielded, because he wanted to be sure that what he raised would last through the winter. The threat of a protracted drought hovered over the incandescent landscape. He was free at last. But he could not but remember the long, oppressive, and dizzying spells of privation from his childhood.

When it made a big difference how many of them sat down at the table.

For all he knew, doomsday might be near.

He did not expect rain either.

He rarely saw anyone, did not long for anyone’s company.

Did not think about whether he was cheerful or sad; he was now in the process of forgetting thoughts that were indispensable for the awareness of happiness, just as earlier he had forgotten his youth and childhood. Still, he did sense something of his happiness; after all, he kept telling himself he was free at last. As a person who has reached his destination; his calling was answered by his being free. At last, he kept telling himself, he was free. As if he had served out a long sentence. Perhaps he kept repeating this because he was coming close to a state in which he would neither long for nor insist on anything.

Being bitten by horseflies was the only thing that upset him during these weeks.

And a horsefly bite is indeed very unpleasant.

A horsefly always appears out of the blinding blueness, it circles unnoticed above the deliciously sweating skin, slyly picks its spot, lands gently, and even if you shoo it away, it finds another unprotected spot where it will bite you, ejecting its saliva into the living tissue. If the attack occurred in the middle of the day, there were at least two, sometimes three horseflies coming at him in formation, one to divert his attention while the other two bit him elsewhere. The bite is painful; a hard lump swells under the skin, turns tight and itchy, burns and tingles in the flesh. And if at times like this he turned and bent over his nicely thriving plants more obstinately and restlessly than usual, as though denying that something might be bothering him so much, it was because in his own way he was trying to find an infallible method for outfoxing the horseflies, so to speak.

But he should have realized that horseflies are infallible.

He remembered the horses and the silky-hair-covered bony knot on the tails of cattle, the swishing and slapping sound of their swatting at pests.

After all, he reasoned, a horsefly was not as lighthearted and cunning a creature as the common housefly, but in comparison rather sluggish and clumsy. In the instant it bites you it’s easy to whack it, and it’s no small satisfaction when its dust-gray body cracks under your palm.

But by then it’s too late; its secretion is already spreading and working under the skin.

Whenever the horseflies’ hour arrived, his entire body became covered with gooseflesh because of the awful unrest; he was annoyed, he fumed and grumbled; why wasn’t man more resourceful than a horsefly, being so much smarter. He should be more inventive in that crucial fraction of a second. Why wait for the moment of the bite, why not act beforehand, why does his skin signal him only afterward, he complained. As if with only a little adjustment of Creation everything would be perfect.

Anyway, I’ll kill it, he kept repeating to himself, although in his new life he found these repeated little murders rather disturbing. But his attentiveness, practicality, and circumspection must have had a predetermined sequence, an order with its own definite conditions and boundaries. Despite his struggle and experimentation, despite his belief in the superiority of the human mind, he could not in his own animal state anticipate the moment of the horseflies. He would flail, slap, strike out, dodge, become annoyed, rack his brain, endure the bites, flee, at times rave — not so much at the ancient enemy as at his own human helplessness.

There is nothing more profound, more secretive, and more abominable than hatred conceived in solitude.

He was pensioned off on the last day of February, and after the party given in his honor he did not return to his home in Budapest, the family house on the shore of the Rákos creek he had built with his own hands over ten long years. By then the little wooden house on the other side of the river was ready, fully furnished. He had prepared well in advance for a quiet retirement. He had put away enough money for it too, which no one knew anything about. They had a good time at the Kőkapu, the famous little inn in Vác by the triumphal arch built to honor a visit from Empress Maria Theresa. A traditional haunt of lawyers, prison guards, and released prisoners. He sat at the place of honor, smiling benevolently; no one could have noticed anything exceptional about him. He waited patiently until dawn, though from midnight on he made sure he was gradually sobering up. He knew this was his last drinking binge with the boys. He liked their company; he belonged to them and to no one else in the entire world.

As he sobered up he felt his heart would break when he left them.

He took the first ferry across the icy river.

The ferrymen knew him well; he had been coming and going, spending his days off here for the last two years.

His mates, still tipsy, whooped and shouted farewell from the receding shore of Vác. By then he felt nothing for them.

Only later, in a coldly composed letter, did he inform his family of his final decision. He could hardly write; his emotions, more than anything else, drew the letters from his fingers. Let them wait for him, have the police look for him. But the family would be glad he’d disappeared. They might squander his pension just as they had squandered his salary, but he was going to live here alone and did not want them to visit. He wanted to keep at least his remaining years clean. He had had enough of his wife and son, he no longer needed to know about their deeds or misdeeds — enough of the loud words, fights, and treacherous family intrigues that had filled his life. This is what he wrote, brutally, with his awkward words and ugly penmanship, but there was nothing false in what he put down on paper. Spring was cold that year, windy, overcast, and stormy; he kept warm by the fire in the iron stove. The change did not displease his wife; in fact she was a little sorry the man had turned up at all. She waited a long time before answering his letter. She would have felt happier if he had disappeared without a trace. In a few lines she let him know that his crippled younger brother was dying in the urology ward of Szent János Hospital and in the meantime his irresponsible daughters had been slowly selling everything of any value from the nicely furnished super’s apartment on Teréz Boulevard. They couldn’t wait for their miserable father’s death. And since that apartment was a service apartment, what else would it be, they’d probably have to move out of it, and she worried that they might, being relatives, after all, want to move in with her.

She wouldn’t let them, not the girls and not their unreliable mother.

This was followed by a single sentence, red-hot with anger.

She prays to the Lord Jesus and Mary every night that Balter should not regret his decision.

The woman wrote with nice round letters, like a schoolgirl, being proud to this day that in elementary school her teacher had always held up her handwriting as the example to be followed.

Far from regretting his decision, Balter was surprised to feel that every day spent in freedom made his life more meaningful. A life perfect in all its aspects, in a way he could hitherto not have imagined. Then slowly, gradually, he shed every piece of clothing as regularly as day followed day, as the land slowly grew warmer and later very hot. First he put aside the green quilted jacket, then the shirt, later the wide blue work pants, on a particularly hot afternoon the white undershirt, and finally he kicked off his blue twill shorts that were the same color as his bucket.

He was fifty-seven years old, slept without clothes, and naked stepped out of the house into the blue mornings. His nudity was no more surprising than that of a gracefully aging wild animal.

Just as his body had become indifferent to him, others had to become indifferent to it too.

Strangers’ eyes could see him only from a great distance, anyway.

He could thank fate for his hulking, indolently muscular body.

First the gendarmes kept an eye on him, but then everything turned out differently. His tread was slow and heavy, which might have been the reason no one thought of becoming familiar with him or calling him by his first name.

A man of long strides and slow wits.

His name was Balter. More precisely, that is how people referred to him, Balter did this or Balter did that. His relatives did the same; even his wife had called him Balter for thirty years, as if they enjoyed having the family name be so corporeal and weighty. His only son, who took after him in both build and features and who, to Balter’s great sorrow, also bore his first name, Gyula, got mixed up in very bad company when he was still a child, no matter how much and how often Balter had beaten him. The son led a life that Balter could not follow, neither with his common sense nor with his imagination; he only guessed at what was happening around him, even though his job made him familiar with the inner lives of men.

They had no secrets from him; he knew what they were capable of doing.

Horseflies appear in the middle of July, when the apricots begin to ripen. No matter how many mean things he had committed in his life, how much he had cheated or stolen to supplement his salary and put some money aside secretly for himself, he had never been cruel or tyrannical. Because of the damned horseflies, he first put his wide work pants back on and then his shirt; the flies robbed him of his hard-earned freedom. Frankly he had quite a few things to regret and, strictly speaking, many men would have good reason to beat him up. No matter how much he blustered and flailed about. Several men had indeed threatened him when they got out. To preserve the freedom of his days, putting on his pants and shirt was an inadequate precaution; his neck and profusely perspiring face, so tasty for horseflies, remained bare.

Again, he had to give up more of his freshly gained freedom, again to comply silently with his circumstances and to bargain with them.

When the sun reached its zenith, he put his tools aside and retreated into the shade, where horseflies were reluctant to follow. Still, after several days of senseless battle against the pests, his retreat did not regain for him the peace and quiet he had so joyfully enjoyed before the arrival of the horseflies. To endure again, to wait, to tolerate. This made him wonder whether his miserable younger brother was still alive, but it did not occur to him to take the train on the other side of the river, from the station built in honor of the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph. If his brother was no longer alive, well, so be it.

He did not think so highly of human life that he wished it on anyone.

He kept sitting in the breezy shade of the apricot tree, his head hanging between his drawn-up knees, and he felt a prisoner in his clothes.

That was his greatest worry.

But at least new bites were not irritating his flesh, nothing burned or itched, his skin was no longer tight over the subsiding berry-size lumps.

He could never evaluate what he thought or what he did not know, and he never attributed importance to things he didn’t think about. He tried not to think about his dying kid brother; true, he had never given him much thought. And he definitely did not think about how he had beaten his son and his wife, about the sound of a nose breaking, about flesh being pummeled, about how much hair remained in his hands. This did not mean that he was unable to think about things as flexibly as anyone else, or that in other cases he had not suffered in the absence of certain thoughts. He was not a talkative man, though rather taciturn, not wanting to seem more stupid than he was. But whatever kind of man he was, he could not have had practice in following thoughts woven in solitude and or in finding his way in the thicket of missing thoughts. He no longer thought about the released prisoners’ four-word magic sentence, for he was anything but free, though he did not notice this, since the objects of freedom were still with him: his bucket, his house, his work-induced heavy breathing, the sky’s cloudless blue, his tools, summer’s warmth, his money in the bank, a few pieces of jewelry in a small box hidden under the floor, and his footprint in the dust.

Actually, he began to suffer from the absence of the disappeared words, the four words that had given meaning and rhythm to the passing days, nothing else.

Suffering became quiet and persistent, like the touch of a blunt blade, for it would have been senseless to say the situation was as it was because of horseflies, because of his miserable kid brother, or because the thought of death hovered so close by. The memory of prisoners in his charge kept coming back to him. Sometimes when they went berserk he hit them with his cudgel wherever he could, true, yet he had been one of the friendlier guards, one of those who maintained secret little business connections with the prisoners. He had all sorts of confused desires, though his long-term plans were reasonable enough. For example, he longed for cold beer. He envisioned a very young girl approaching, though he saw very well that the path was as empty as ever.

He dreamed of the hairless lips of a young girl’s vagina.

There was a woman in the village who offered to cook for him so that he, being a man, could have warm meals, but he rejected this indecent offer.

By summer’s end he wanted to reach the stage where he could grow strawberries and raspberries to sell on his small property, as nearly everyone else in the nearby villages did with their household acreage.

For this he first had to dig a well.

A pox on it, maybe he’d get dressed properly and go to the capital to visit his crippled kid brother and especially his brother’s big sluttish daughters who, though they don’t know it, are probably his, their uncle’s, by-blows.

If words won’t do the job, he’ll beat the shit out of them.

Four stakes marked the borders of his garden, but he owned the entire abandoned landscape with his gaze. He stood at the center of an enormous flat plate strewn with lowland groves, willow plantations, uncultivated or barely cultivated fruit orchards and vineyards; beyond the gigantic branches of the invisible river, mountains bulged on the rim of the plate. As if the big wide world started beyond that point, where so many baffling things happened, though none of them had anything to do with him except the expected selling price of strawberries and raspberries. He tried to force all his pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and feelings to the rim of this plate. He did not drink beer. He turned on the radio only on Sunday morning when Gypsies played sweetly plaintive Hungarian melodies.

His visions and images came and dwindled, to be replaced by new ones. The persistently quiet suffering drew myriad little grooves on the old feelings.

He did everything as he had done before and he forgot everything according to his sensibilities, but he began to fear his own emptiness, which he had not noticed before; he especially dreaded the unavoidable, dull suffering.

As if feelings were calling his attention only to things of which he had no definite memories.

Perhaps it was better that he didn’t.

Namely, he was scared that his son or one of the released prisoners might surprise him here.

His own son will kill him.

During the spring days when he was still going about naked, such a thing had not occurred to him; he would not have thought about his son or the prisoners or anyone. When in the afternoons he fastened to his bicycle his two flat plastic containers and went to the public well in the nearest village for drinking water, he carefully locked up the house and hid the key under a stone. The stone often reminded him of his crippled kid brother, whom he used to beat throughout their childhood, and he thought he could use this stone to beat his own son to death. It felt good to beat his brother, he’d longed to do it; after all, their mother wanted it that way. That he should not have to live his miserable life. He understood his mother’s wish that somehow, gradually, he should beat his brother to death.

Only their helpless grandmother tried to protect the cripple, slipping bread crusts to him on the sly, since the others gave him hardly anything to eat.

Every time he came back with the water, he had the impression that in his absence someone had been prowling around the house. And the woman spied on him at the well, showing up with her water cans the minute he arrived. Anger directed at someone specific drew another furrow in his face. And the same thing was repeated when at twilight, as was his custom, he walked to the river to wash up.

He looked for tracks in the silt but found none. Or staying among the willows he watched his property, expecting to notice someone lurking.

He took long twilight shadows for human figures.

These experiences ruined his mood; his quiet rejoicing died away completely because of his fear. His hearing and vision became keener, however. If, having grown weary in the heat of an early summer afternoon, he sensed a brief shadow flitting past above the landscape, he knew without raising his face that it was the golden oriole heading home. Still, he shuddered. All the other similar sounds, shadows, and stirrings repeated themselves with the same regularity; only snaps he could not anticipate made his heart skip a beat.

And he kept seeing over and over how he had thrown the cripple into the freshly forked pig manure.

Better drown in the manure, he can’t work, anyway.

Watch what you’re saying, Teréz, don’t tempt God like that.

You watch it, you shut your stinking mouth or else I’ll sit on it.

You put him out naked in the frost. The Virgin Mary watched over him and saved his miserable life.

Then let your Virgin Mary give him bread.

Once she was merciful to you too.

The ferry receded in the fortieth minute of every hour; in the twentieth minute it approached. With ceaseless buzzing the bees kept busy, with ceaseless jolts and creaks the tipcarts used in the distant stone quarry moved above Dunabogdány. Maybe he’s dead, he thought — he hoped — about his miserable brother, and can speak to me only from afar. At half past ten in the morning, two explosions shook the air, and this was repeated at four in the afternoon. All night long, dump trucks carried stones from the quarry, and when they hurled their load into the bottom of the empty barges, he thought of hell. If he felt some mysterious trembling approach from the bowels of the earth, within half an hour it would turn into the puffing of a tugboat, the loud rumble of its engine; its slow movement occasionally brought with it snatches of radio music in the air. There were also stray noises, a jingling from close by, say, unconnected to any movement; the faint rumbling of a cart, the squeaking of a wheel’s hub, or the noise of shouting, even though no one and nothing seemed to be moving anywhere. Nocturnal singing of some drunk or perhaps that of an approaching or receding ghost, which awakened the village dogs one after the other and they could no longer find rest, howling desperately behind the decaying fences. The steady chirping of crickets. The drawn-out mewling of cats, the persistent music of frogs, the grasshoppers scraping their long legs in the dry grass, the short pops of their takeoffs.

The wider branch of the Danube also brought sounds from the far shore.

So vividly that he seemed to hear, at the appropriate times, the opening of the cells or, in the evening, the reverberation of their closing.

He accompanied them all, from door to door, on the checkered floor of the long circular gallery.

Five months had gone by and he had no reason to regret his decision. He prepared the soil for growing strawberries and raspberries; he hired a well digger. Since he was beginning to learn for the first time in his life what it was like to feel, another furrow grew deep among his feelings. This meant, approximately, that his amorphous dead mother whispered to him, telling him what he should do. After close to thirty years of silence, his mother now spoke as a guardian spirit, from which he concluded that this guardian spirit had always been standing by him because it had no other place. Neither of them had any other place. Even if they had put away his miserable kid brother, they wouldn’t have done anything bad. As if he were saying, laughing hard, in that case I wouldn’t have been fucking around with his wife. In retrospect he regretted not having had that lecherous woman in his life. It seemed that his brother had to stay alive if only for this reason. He had a better time with her than with his own wife. Considering one’s entire life one deserves this much. This was the thought that strengthened him in his final verdict against his wife. Sometimes she tried, made an effort, and sometimes she didn’t, but what could be done if they had no understanding between them.

And that, after all, is painful for a man too.

At the same time another thought made him equally uncertain. Ever since his hearing had sharpened, this other thought also deepened the bluntly aching furrows in the place of silenced memories. As if he had not chosen the right place for himself. As if throughout a lifetime his wife had been doing with his son what his own mother had done with him. That is how his fate caught up with him. He did not regret his decision, he tried not to regret anything; the prices of strawberries and blueberries will be good, but now he heard sounds of the last thirty years coming too close. His fate had him in a double bind. The distance that had seemed, from the other side of the river, looking out from behind the high prison walls, infinitely far and unreachable seemed but a stone’s throw away when looked at under an open sky. From the other shore freedom had seemed different from what it seemed to be here. For ten years he had been preparing for retirement, he’d bought this abandoned fruit orchard in the Tótfalu area seven years ago, it took two years to build his house on his days off, and the more he insisted to himself that he hadn’t erred, that he couldn’t have made an enormous mistake, the stronger his doubts became. He now received what his kid brother and father had received from the mutual protective alliance forged between him and his mother. Still, the unpleasant feelings had a pleasant side. He could not help hearing those insinuating snatches of sound from which he at last had freed himself.

And this was no small gratification.

When at dusk he went to wash up in the river and while he stood in the water up to his ankles, soaping his body, his eyes gazed longer and longer at the towering prison walls on the far shore.

It happened on one of these quiet summer days that another human being appeared in the landscape, congenial even in its isolation.

This man had very vague notions about where he was coming from and no notion whatsoever about where he was going.

Where he had come from must have been a bad place, since moving in itself, being on the move, was good for him. He possessed abstract and refined notions such as those whose lack Balter was beginning to realize in himself but did not know what to do with because he had no experience in abstraction. The further this other man moved from the palpably bad, the more he showered himself, in his heart and mind, with inexplicable good — until everything turned out to be good for him and none of the bad remained. He had crossed over on the other branch of the river, on the Visegrád side, so the ferrymen had not brought him here.

A few people saw him walk slowly across the bridge at Tótfalu.

He did not have to engage anyone in conversation. He couldn’t have, anyway, because he thought exclusively according to the most ethical standards.

If someone had stopped him and told him to turn on his heels and go back where he came from and be quick about it or else he’d be in big trouble, at most the threatening tone might have frightened him. This is how he interpreted for himself what he did not understand in this world, putting things into his own language after some delay. There was nothing wrong with his organs of hearing or speech; as a child, he was just like all the other children. He became the victim of an adolescent shock and since then had neither heard nor spoken, and instead of seeing people’s faces he saw only vague spots. He did not look anyone in the eye. Ever since that incident, the condensed sense of any one moment of his life, good or bad, could almost completely replace the condensed sense of any other moment, good or bad; in one respect, then, he was occupying himself with the same kind of ethical issue that philosophers — always touchy about their concepts — have worried about ever since Aristotle.

Chaos could set in, however, when he happened to linger in the murky waters of the bad or in the very mud of the worst, because to remind him then of the good with nice words was futile. While in the thicket of good he could still almost remember the bad, but if he did not behave himself and was administered additional doses of bad, even with the kindest medical intentions he disappeared completely.

This is how he thought about things.

In his exterior, by the way, there was nothing conspicuous.

His slight build, acquired before the adolescent shock, a hesitant good-natured smile on his lips, large, badly scratched, and infected pimples on his forehead, scabs on top of scabs ready to bleed at any time, and the shirt of his brand-new dark-blue workman’s clothes buttoned to his neck made him seem much younger than his years. Heavy black stubble covered his face; still, he could be taken for a pale apprentice sent to the store for a couple of rolls and half a liter of milk.

He had been on the road for three days.

He’d escaped from an asylum in the Buda area and had been peacefully making his way across the mountains. He first stole something to eat in Pilisszenkereszt and then in Pilisszentlászló. At Leányfalu there was an ice-cream vendor, and he came off the mountain to the highway that ran like a ribbon along the foot of the mountain, but he couldn’t get his hands on any ice cream.

The vendor was hawking his merchandise on the steep, badly paved streets. His wagon bounced on the cobblestones as he worked to keep it steady, and he never left it unguarded, not even for a second.

Now the road was leading him through this miserable little village, stifled in the midday heat, where neither trees nor bushes could grow tall, not around the houses and not in the gardens. There wasn’t any shade anywhere. Only in the churchyards or on the priest’s and parson’s quiet properties could one see some old linden trees. Dogs lying in the shade of whitewashed walls or gates did not bark at him, because his feet made little sound. He wore loosely laced much-too-large ankle boots that flapped a bit, and no socks.

He had filched the boots and the new workman’s clothes the day before in Leányfalu from an open and unattended trailer for workers while the road-building Gypsies were having a beer in the nearby roadside kitchen with Bizsók, their older, Hungarian work manager. In exchange he left behind the clothes he had on, just as he pulled them off his body; he had stolen those the day before from a weekend mountain lodge he had broken into, where later the astonished owners found his old pair of pants, ripped at the seat and around the knees, a pair of bad-smelling white sneakers, and a striped pajama jacket with the oval emblem, reminiscent of a bloodstain, of the health institution from which he had escaped.

Hens were pecking in the open ditch running in front of the houses, and when he stopped at a roadside morello tree to eat some of the overripe fruit, a rooster began to crow in the bare yard.

He probably would not have moved on until he had eaten all the fruit he could reach or until some indignant person ran out from behind the picket fence, under repair, to protest his stealing the sour cherries. But people in the general store across the street noticed him and, somewhat puzzled, acknowledged that in the midday heat a stranger had appeared in their village. And then, before they could make any comment, a medium-size truck whizzed by at breakneck speed, tarps flapping wildly, a cloud of dust in its wake exuding the smell of freshly baked bread.

The bread’s here, Mariska, shouted an older man toward the darkened house behind the picket fence, and the women in the store were saying the same thing.

It did come, after all.

Didn’t I tell you it would. You see.

Every day, the arrival of the bread was regarded as exceptional since on some days no bread came at all or the amount delivered was much less than was needed. The villagers had to be on the lookout. Ever since they had handed over their land and animals to the cooperative farm, they hadn’t baked at home. They received grain from the cooperative according to work units performed, but for miles around not a single mill remained where they might have ground their meager stores of grain into flour; eventually they dismantled the brick ovens in their homes too.

The truck slowed down and then in a wide arc backed up to the store’s open door.

Without a word the stranger followed the scent of the bread.

That day there was no midday ringing of bells.

No wonder then that Balter, who had been cooling himself under his fecund apricot tree while waiting for the midday bell, felt an unjustified restlessness in the silence.

This day remained in the village’s history as the day on which it should have been midday at any moment but midday never arrived.

Ever since horseflies had forced him to retreat, he had no need for a watch, because this hour was the culmination of Balter’s day.

The horseflies signaled that the sun was at its zenith.

He took cover from them in the shade, taking his time, carefully removing his perspiration-soaked shirt and hanging it on a sunny branch. Sat down on the bare sand and let mild shady breezes slowly evaporate the moisture from his skin. It felt good to stretch his limbs, tired from the morning’s work, and give them a little longer to rest. His eyes closed from time to time, he could easily doze off. His eyes emerged again from under his heavy eyelids only when he saw or felt something that ultimately he could not have seen or felt.

On this day, for example, midday did not happen.

Which he would have to understand somehow if he wanted to accept it. When he was working, he met with the more pleasant or more unpleasant half of the same recurring thoughts: he was either happy or anxious, struggling with his doubts or praising his circumstances. But in the hours of idleness, sensations and notions signaled their existence with no pleasant or unpleasant sides. They simply existed, like a mirage among existing things, though one’s hand could grasp neither the crank of a well nor a church bell rope that appeared in a mirage. He felt his mother’s hands resting on his shoulders; heard the thick soup sloshing in the multilayered food container, which in his imagination the slender girl-child brought to him every noon, a girl who probably did not exist in the real world.

The monotonous buzzing of bees became painfully beautiful radio music in his ears; cool foam from the top of a beer bottle spilled on the ground.

And once he was at peace with the sensations and images, there was no point in doing more either for or against them.

That day, way past the time when the first strike of the bell should have sounded, he slowly raised his head, which he had lowered between his spread knees. He began to wait for the sound that, deceiving his senses, remained absent. Perhaps it had come but he’d slept through it. Actually, he should have also heard all the bells from the cathedral town on the other side of the river.

At any rate, judging by the light, he figured it had to be at least an hour past noon.

Nothing was happening in the motionless heat.

He was waiting for a nonexistent ringing of bells. Settled in his ears were old sound-memories of the bell in Jászberény.

And then the thought positively pounced on him: he must have gone mad a long time ago. He waited patiently for the thought or sensation to pass, but waiting did not change the insane condition. Light made time disappear in itself, and that was the reason nothing could happen around him that would return his stolen property.

Or perhaps an atomic bomb had been dropped somewhere after all, as they had promised it would be, and he was the only one left alive for miles around, all alone. In his fear he should get up. Everyone had perished; no living thing was left except him.

In the meantime his shirt had dried on the branch, from which he had to conclude that some amount of real time must have passed. He looked up into the foliage as if expecting a message there. Then his wife must have perished in some bad way, and it felt good to acknowledge that. His kid brother must have gone with her; at least no one could blame him for their miserable lives.

He saw nothing unusual in the foliage. But the sky above was incandescent.

This apricot tree stood at the center not only of his garden but also of his heart and thoughts.

Ten years earlier, when after a wedding feast that had stretched into dawn he took leave of his friends and went roaming aimlessly in the unfamiliar fields, he picked out not a site for the coming years but this gigantic apricot tree. Or one should say that between him and the apricot tree it was the tree that decided their common fate. Innocently, he urinated on the tree trunk, looking up involuntarily at its branches heavy with fruit. Stuffed with rich food, drunk on cheap drink, his voice surfaced to say that he should live here. And the unclaimed apricot tree dryly confirmed, yes, you’ll live here with me, you have no other place.

The tree stood at the center of a flat bare landscape; more precisely, it gave meaning to the wide-open nothingness staring at the sky. He had never experienced anything like this in his life. No apricot tree grows this big. He didn’t have to do work on it, because he never found even a single little dry branch or worm-eaten holes in the trunk or worms in its fruit. It raised its enormous, healthily dense, and proportionately arranged crown above the flat world. Reddish veins ran along the stalks of its shiny waxen leaves. It gripped the loose soil with roots as thick as a man’s arm, because in its youth it very prudently had allowed the dominant wind in the area to tilt it a bit. It seemed to have acquired its circumstances with its shape. It was the sole survivor of a former fruit orchard. Every two years it had an abundant crop of juicy, richly colored, aromatic, tasty fruit.

Now he was standing under his apricot tree, holding in his hand the elusive proof of measured time: his dry shirt.

A little later he saw two bicycling figures approach.

Because in the meantime the pastor had come home from his mission in the cathedral town across the river, and been told by the puzzled yet malicious ferrymen that there had been no noonday bell. They were godless, all of them, and if they could do nothing else they swore terribly in front of their pastor. And he waited in vain for his grandson, first by the window in his cool office and much later at the gate; the boy didn’t come home on the street but turned up much later from the direction of the gardens. When he heard behind his back the dull thud of feet on the long brick-paved veranda, at least he no longer had to struggle with a fear that perhaps the boy had drowned in the river.

He was puffing like a child.

With the momentum of his inexplicable anger, the pastor swiveled around and Dávid received a powerful slap on the face.

Barefoot, wearing only his small red bathing trunks, the very shy, daydreaming teenager stood before him, shirt in hand. He was at the age when boys begin to grow as if they were being stretched and their voices deepen but they are completely unaware of the maturing processes in their bodies. From running, his thin naked body was thickly covered with dust in which his perspiration drew stripes.

He’d run more than two kilometers in the scorching sun. In his head, throbbing with the pulsing blood, the heat, the thumping of his feet, and fear, he had thoroughly prepared to account for his time, but this he hadn’t expected. He’d known that his negligence would not go unpunished, and he also knew that his grandfather would be back from the city at half past one. But the slap caught him unprepared. He had truly hoped that his grandfather would not be told of his negligence. He had to make his carefully prepared explanation credible, and therefore he could not pay much attention to the sudden physical or mental pain.

The effort to ignore it distorted his features, but his eyes, filled with real tears, remained attentive. And, waving his blue-striped shirt, he said, winded and weeping, that a man had wanted to take this away from him.

What man wanted to take it from you, what did he want to take from you, shouted the pastor, famed equally for his great physical strength and for his gentleness.

His voice reverberated down the street.

How could he miss the boy’s cunning look.

It seemed he not only had to avenge the already committed negligence but might also be catching his grandson on the verge of telling a terrible lie, committing a deadly sin.

Dávid had never heard such sounds escaping from his grandfather. In his alarm he wanted to add something to his explanation, but anger at his grandfather blocked his words.

How dare he hit him.

If Melinda had been here, he wouldn’t have dared. But at the moment his much older sister was visiting in an old villa in Leányfalu, working on her dissertation out on the villa’s lovely wood-framed veranda. Without Melinda he had no support. His mumbled words turned into hiccups, but he managed to squeeze out that he had no idea who the strange man was except that he was completely naked.

The pastor did not intend to restrain his raging anger. He regretted neither his loud outburst nor the slap. Let everyone on the street see it and hear it. He owed this much to his prestige in the village.

The negligence is unforgivable; it cannot remain unpunished.

But the words, coming out twisted because of the crying and hiccupping, made him lose confidence.

What naked man, the pastor groaned.

A hot rush of blood in his eyes darkened the yard, shaded by chestnut and linden trees.

Where is he, he groaned.

If someone had told him, trembling and devastated, that his grandson had drowned in the river, then his faith in the boy’s innocence would have poured balm on his immense pain, and he would have accepted God’s will. But the way things were, he had to take himself into the worst thicket of horrors. Had to be careful what to ask and how loudly to ask it. The sun beat down mercilessly on the back of his thick neck and a single careless step might pull his heavy body into the bog.

The village had to be compensated, but it did not have to know everything.

The prison guard from Vác came to mind first; many people talked about this man because he shopped in the general store and took his water from the common well, but he had not yet met him or seen him walking about naked, not even from far away.

If he had not been blinded by anger, he would have sensed the nature of the problem immediately, because Dávid would never show himself naked in front of anyone, not even in the greatest heat. He yanked the boy to him with both hands. He wanted to know everything. Peremptorily, shaking the boy’s bare shoulders, he asked what the man had done to him.

Dávid sobbed, leaning against his grandfather’s chest.

He tried to make it understood that he was sobbing, trembling, and reproachful because of the mercilessness of that slap. But in fact his helplessness was weeping behind the deceit.

He didn’t do anything, he sobbed.

And where did you leave your pants, asked the pastor, his voice growing thin as his impatience mounted.

He took away my pants, cried the boy. He wanted to take away my shirt.

As if the boy’s smudgy tears were dissolving his light body on the pastor’s chest.

The innocence of this reply gave the pastor some relief, yet fighting his conciliatory urge he thrust his grandson away, but without letting go of him.

Why would he take away your pants, how could anybody take away your pants, he shouted.

The boy stopped bawling, he was hiccupping. From his grandfather’s point of view he indeed had to consider himself an incorrigible recidivist many times over, so it was important to muster everything he could to dispel all possible suspicion. From his incoherent answer his grandfather understood only that he had been to the big pit.

He admits having gone into the water and having swum to the other side. From there he saw the man taking his pants away.

He ran after him, managed to get the shirt out of his hand but failed to retrieve the pants.

Gone were his nice summer pants.

At this, the pastor released his grandson from his strong grip and with large steps took off for the shed.

What the villagers called the big pit was a long-abandoned sand mine. More than a hundred years earlier Gypsies had made adobe here every summer. They soon ran out of the material necessary for adobe. Under the layer of clay was an enormous amount of brimstone-yellow sand glittering with quartz; people came to take it away by the wagonload, even from faraway villages. They gave up sand mining only when they reached, about four meters down, a water-permeable layer of gravel in direct contact with the riverbed. The gravel was peculiarly granulated, like rare pearls. And the shovels turned over rather curious things in it. Shards of pottery burned black, sooty bellies, ears, and beaks of cooking vessels with small legs. Worn-down thin blades of crudely forged iron tools and human bones turned spongy or polished to a marble smoothness: split pelvises, skulls smashed in with battle-axes, and fractured shinbones.

The first heavy snowfall put an end to a shameful treasure hunt.

Older people still recall the spring when, where the pit had been, they found a lovely round little pond with translucently motionless water.

Now not even children went to swim in it because nobody could forget that there was a cemetery under the water. And strangers had no way of knowing that behind the clusters of trees this pond lay concealed. What was under the water was a treacherously destroyed military camp of the early Avar era.* Ice-cold ghosts populated the area; the pond became the home of ringed snakes, water spiders, and frogs. His grandfather did not believe in ghosts but he forbade Dávid to go into the water there alone. No one who lives on the shore of this mighty river should forget that water is strong and always unpredictable. Silver-leafed and gray-trunked poplars, willows slowly dripping their sap, and thick growth of shrubs surrounded the pond and barely let the light graze its mirrorlike surface. That day, Dávid was at the pond when he should have been at the belfry to ring the bell. Here the trees had spread their branches so generously that the surface of the pond could not be seen even from the church tower, so he believed that his peculiar feeling was safely concealed and for the first time in his life he forgot about ringing the bell. He did not forget the place itself and the hearsay connected with it, not to mention the relevant proscriptions. Almost every year he spent his vacation months with his grandfather. Once, when still a small child, amid terrible shuddering, he had swum across the pond all by himself on a dare and a bet.

He won a popgun, which in the end he did not get.

He did not take the fears of the local boys very seriously, but despite all the prohibitions he too was a little afraid of ghosts. This summer he rarely did things together with the boys. He preferred the dark, cool, and spacious rooms of the parsonage, where he read romantic English novels, replete with screeching wind in old fireplaces, abandoned dusty rooms, and haunting ghosts in whose company he roamed by himself, dreaming of his future life, or together with them looked for isolated places by the river whence he could observe the bathers and rowers who sometimes camped on the island for weeks and lived their own mysterious lives before his eyes.

He sentenced himself to sheer observance; he tried to renounce everything that might be considered amusement or was beyond a strictly objective survey of the world. He was curious to learn what the minimal activity was that he needed to exist. His impression was that the smaller the area of contact with his surroundings, the smaller his food intake, and the less love spent on others, the more clearly he would see his own intentions, would not lose his way, and could hope to find more meaning in his actions in the dim world of instincts and in the pitiless chaos churned up by adults.

His grandfather noticed in all this only that the otherwise lively and talkative boy now fell silent for days, the once voracious child hardly touched his food, sat daydreaming with a book in his hands, listened to inspiring parables with a blank expression of incomprehension, evaded questions showing concern about him, or simply lied. The grandfather could not have known that the boy’s monastic vows, made to himself, were dictating and determining this changed behavior.

He was silent not because he had something to hide but because he had vowed not to speak. He picked at his food not because he had no appetite but because he was testing his self-control. He was daydreaming not because he was uninterested in the continuing chapters in his grandfather’s devotional history but because he was timing the duration of his ability to keep his mind on a single topic.

He failed with his most delicate vows.

He decided not to let his thoughts flit about unbridled. He also decided not to go to the pond ever again since he already knew everything there was to know about it; but a compelling force was still at work contrary to his vows, and no matter how carefully he listened for it he could not catch it; undetected, it laid him low. Indeed, he knew everything in advance that was worth knowing of the joy and sorrow of sheer existence, but he considered his knowledge as straying, because he had no idea that everyone had the same experiences.

There is no human being without a functioning presentiment. He wanted to overcome his penchant for this sort of special knowledge and experience, but for that he would first have had to ascertain the falseness of his experiences and the incorrectness of his knowledge. He found no finer tools than those already at his disposal. The greater ascetic authority he acquired over himself, the greater his awareness became that this was still not adequate knowledge or experience. The rectitude of presentiment can be checked only over time; one has to look back on it from the distance of decades.

He began resorting to trickery and double-dealing, and not only with his grandfather but with himself too.

He wanted to reach the point of having no wishes, since they color all exact knowledge, and thus he could not imagine what the world would be like without him.

He wanted at all cost to keep from going to the pond; and if he did go, he had to do so as if it had no significance, with no continuation or consequence. The deep, slightly inclining former wagon trail led him into the dense thicket. Uninitiated eyes could detect no road here. The hard clumps of grass covering the erstwhile wheel tracks never sprouted into bushes or nettles. A forward-moving body brushed open the loosely bent shrub branches, which would then close gently behind it.

He met with his death and with rebirth.

He would hide for good from all human eyes; nothing would reach him. With these words did the unavoidable feeling address him. If he succeeded in withdrawing himself from the world, he would see what he’d become.

Everything was part of this single feeling: the touch of every branch bending aside and closing behind him, the soft squelching of his steps, the silence made vaporous by the midday heat, the alarmed screeching and awkward flight of pheasants startled from their cool hiding place, the gooseflesh gently invading his skin, and the blind certainty with which his feet led his eyes to the sight of the calm water revealing itself to him. And his feeling was not changeable, depending on what happened; he reached it differently on each occasion.

He entered a place, he arrived at a place whither he never need return.

A sense of mortality addressed him with words like these. He could not want anything else or anything more, because the peculiarity of his feeling was that no compulsion or wish could touch him.

The poplars tilted up their leaves with their silver undersides, the rich undergrowth under the willows dripped their sap, saplings reached for the light, dwarf elders, sharp grass of tussock, bulrush, meaty-leaved saltbush, and emerald-green moss completely covered the pebbly soil all the way to the edge of the small pond. That the pond’s seemingly motionless surface still moved somewhat could be measured on the narrow strip of sand that with its brimstone-yellow edge encircled the water. It was as if the water were breathing; its inhalations and exhalations, rising and falling, left telltale wet traces, though it was impossible to know if it was secret waves or a flood tide.

Of course he lied to his grandfather; he had not swum across the pond that day, he had simply walked around it on the wet sand. He had to protect his feelings from every strange opinion. This was a pagan ritual into which he could not initiate his grandfather, who officially and passionately persecuted all superstition and paganism. Out of necessity Dávid gave himself up so he could keep the main thing a secret.

It began when he slipped out of his shirt, kicked off his sandals, and then took off his pants and laid them on the green. But he did not take off his bathing trunks or underpants. He had to be very precise when stepping on the wet gray sand; he allowed neither his heels nor his toes to touch the dry yellow sand or to slip into the water. His soles could sink only deep enough to leave a discernable trace in the wet sand. From time to time he looked back. Moving this way he circled the pond, and by the time he stepped out of his masterfully calculated last footprint, the outline of the first one had faded almost to invisibility. Now he had to step into this one so the wet sand would not drink or swallow forever his former steps. He stepped exactly, precisely, into his own footsteps; this peculiar passion, to continue his way around the pond in his own fading footprints, was so powerful that he may never have missed a step.

And when he returned for the third time, the once-reinforced traces had not faded as much as they had the first time. As the number of completed rounds increased, the deeper the traces of the eternal metamorphosis became, though they always lost some sharpness in their outline.

This was no game. The story behind it was no more than the story of a mathematical problem solved with numbers.

He paid attention to nothing except making sure his steps precisely covered his previous steps. That is how the glowing imperfection of every step on the wet sand became permanent.

There was a direct connection between the depth of his footprints and his own imperfection.

He worked himself up to a ritual concentration, seeking nothing in the world except the most perfectly matching footprints, satisfying his need for perfection by nothing but flashes of light gliding on the water, the dense thicket, and the swishing of the giant trees’ green wall, everything he caught with his peripheral vision. He had to place his feet in the previous footprints with increasing decisiveness because with every step he was approaching the bottom of the sand. When he reached silt, the silt always spilled into the hollows where water had been forced out by pressure, between the empty footprints and his toes.

From then on he destroyed something with every step. First his steps made the upper rim of the footprints cave in; later, the entire sand wall of the print collapsed too.

He could not stop or in any way give up this ritual undertaking.

It turned into a cold, pure intoxication that removed from his consciousness the image of beginning or end.

His feet were squelching in tiny muddy puddles.

Earlier he had taken off his pants so that no possible traces of muddy silt on them would betray his secret activity. He would have felt his sense of honor violated if he’d voluntarily stepped out of the circle. The pleasure was so pervasive that even the sight of the muck pressing up between his toes, its smooth matter, and the stench rising from the gray bog, which nauseated him, was part of his peculiar feeling, as was the gentle grazing of the wet sand’s surface with his first steps. He did not quicken his stride, but the silt welling up between his toes made his steps grow heavy. Slowing down held the threat of having to return to the outside world.

The closer he got to a sense of finality, the more unsatisfactorily his feet carried him.

Until, hurling himself onto dry grassy sand, he collapsed.

He always made sure he fell on his side, not to leave traces in the sand of his eternal defeat.

That is the sum of a young body’s share of sobering lessons. He rolled onto his back, lolling on the green with outstretched arms, his temples and his heart beating to an upset rhythm.

He could not hope to go higher or lower than this. He could not tell how much time had elapsed. It was impossible to imagine what would happen to him or where he had come from.

It must have been around noon, because for some time his hearing registered the combined sounds of the cathedral bells coming from the other side of the great river. He could not have said who had suffered defeat as the result of his victory or what sort of defeat had cast a shadow on his victory. He did not want to die, neither his body nor his mind had sufficient reasons for it; still, he did not manage to die. He did not want to return; having been reborn, he had no good reason to traipse back on the old dirt road; still, he was alive.

His sadness was stronger than his other feelings, but that is what made the feeling so uplifting.

He kept closing and opening his eyes.

How beautiful the blue of the sky.

He had been engaged to death ever since his birth, which he knew well because his mother had passed away during it, her heart had simply given out.

How could he understand that he need not feel guilty about his birth.

He filled the distant emptiness of beauty with the original darkness of his consciousness.

While his breathing did not subside, this darkness was filled with velvety red and sharply vibrating yellow images. If he wanted to be free of them he could open his eyes on the motionless blue sky, and then nothing bothered him, he was free, truly free.

He was too busy with these special feelings to notice the approaching noise.

When he first heard it far off, he assumed an animal was making it. It ceased for a long time and then recurred without sounding any closer.

By the time he raised his head, he wouldn’t have had time to jump up and disappear into the thicket unnoticed.

A strange young man was standing under the trees on the other side of the water, where Dávid had taken off his pants, shirt, and sandals. It was most peculiar that the stranger had not noticed him or his clothes. He had a whole loaf of bread under his arm; he was deeply engrossed in munching on it. Before he swallowed one mouthful, he bent down like a bird reaching under its wing with its beak and tore out the next bite with his teeth. He did this eagerly, but chewed very collectedly, his eyes roaming all the time. But he didn’t see what he was looking at. He did not notice the boy watching him from the other side. Mixing his saliva with the bread was good, swallowing was good, grinding his jaws was good, ripping the bread felt good on his teeth, the mildly salty taste was good, the crunching and the gentle fragrance were good, and every good had a shining picture.

These pictures probably blinded him. And because he so passionately strove for the good, paying no particular attention to the circumstances, his petty thievery did not cause him any moral problems. Bad was something that prevented the existence of good. The taste of sour cherries was good but the smell of bread instantly wiped away the shining pictures of this good and the picture of fragrance emanating from the tarp-covered truck became the good. He did not compare one good with the other; he did not brood over things or weigh them.

Bread was transported from the bakery in the neighboring village in airy crates. The loaves were regulation-size, pale brown and plump; knives liked to crack their crispy crust. The driver would push the high-piled crates to the edge of the truck bed and his assistant would carry them on his shoulder into the store. A large loaf cost six forints. The assistant called in sick that day, but everyone knew he had to go to Kisoroszi to hoe corn at his stern mother-in-law’s place.

That is why the truck was unguarded for a few minutes. When the driver jumped out of his vehicle, shipping bills in hand, and flung the tarp up to reach the crates, he barely glanced at the approaching youngster. While the driver was busy with the papers in the store, the youngster had no difficulty in taking a loaf out of the nearest crate. He did not move on right away; standing by the truck, he kept sniffing the pointy ends of the bread. Where should he bite into it, here or there. Where should one bite first if the bread offers two tempting ends at the same time. Finally, he did not take a bite but carefully put the loaf under his arm and took off.

And the rather delayed shouts reached him only when he was already walking slowly along the empty road.

Neither the elderly presbyter mending his fence, Jani Rácz, nor the women looking out of the store could have confused him with anyone. After all, they’d seen him eating somebody else’s sour cherries off the tree and already had wanted to shout at him then. They tarried because he was wearing the same kind of worker’s clothes that the driver’s assistant wore and even reached for the loaf with the same movement. He lifted it out as a person well within his rights, about whose pure intentions there could be no doubt. The presbyter did not believe his old eyes, as he said. He put down the hammer and seemed to be taking out of his mouth the nails he’d been holding between his lips, and then he opened his mouth wide with amazement.

It occurred to the women that the driver might have been assigned a new assistant, at least some of them claimed that later. Sometimes one thinks contrary to one’s knowledge or sensory experience. The first sound came from the old presbyter. He didn’t think it was necessary to take off after the thief, but inaction offended his sense of justice. Then the women, interrupting one another, shouted thief and swarmed out of the store. The presbyter dashed to the street, brandishing his hammer, as if to knock the thief dead on the spot, and, pointing the hammer to the other side of the street, yelled that somebody had stolen some bread. It would hurt his prestige to repeat himself. A person of consequence cannot run after a thief in plain sight of the villagers just because of a few sour cherries and a loaf of bread. As he related later, in the inn near the bridge, at the sight of such impudence he felt his feet rooted to the ground. Meanwhile the chaos in and in front of the general store grew to such proportions that it was as if, God knows, the women had been witnessing a major crime.

The baldheaded little driver, in his rakish cap with a too-small visor, did not understand what the women wanted of him.

What should he do now.

He grinned at them, showing his healthy white teeth.

At this time, Balter was sitting under the apricot tree with his head hung between his knees.

Dávid was rounding the pond for the second time.

When the driver caught on, he ran out of the store along with the shouting women, but by then the thief not only was far away but, because he sensed something bad in the shouts, had finally broken into a run, taking his bread with him.

The main square led to the end of the village, which was bare, not a forest, not an orchard, not a bush anywhere; he could not disappear into empty pasture. He made the choice a pursued animal would make: he jumped into the roadside ditch and made his way thence to a lower-lying dirt road.

The driver could have either run after him or, jumping into the truck, caught up with him on the dirt road, producing enormous clouds of dust, probably. He waved dismissively with the shipping bills in his hand. Later, by way of explanation, he said he didn’t have time for things like that; he had to deliver fresh bread to six stores in four villages within two hours.

That is how a moment in which many other things might have been decided came to an end.

Later Dávid did not dare move, even though there was nothing frightening about the stranger. He saw him as both gentle and wild.

Yet he felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong. As if people were saying, well, well, you’re up to something terribly bad and are rotten to the core. It was as if he discovered in the fugitive’s face the pitiful guilelessness of his own life thus far.

That is when, at Vác, the pastor stepped onto the ferry ready to depart.

And Dávid was frightened not so much by the possibility that the stranger might have observed him but by his being the one doing the watching and observing of an unsuspecting stranger. He wanted to shout something, a friendly greeting. As is usual in such cases, no sound issued from his throat.

And that reminded him of his negligence, the bell-ringing.

Thanks to his objectivity, by the way, he was the only one not taken in by the fugitive’s appearance. Twenty-five years old, he later told the police without thinking, and he was off by only a few months.

He jumped up to run away; perhaps the stranger wouldn’t notice him doing that. The food stopped moving in his mouth and, as if he had come upon tastier loot, he stepped with his booted feet on Dávid’s clothes. In the bubble in which the good ruled exclusively, something happened that the adolescent boy, upset by his own negligence, could not comprehend. The fugitive put the loaf with its chewed-off end on the ground, plopped down next to it, tugging and yanking at his ankle boots until he’d pulled them off his feet, and then threw both of them into the water. What Dávid understood from the nature of these movements was that the fugitive was struggling not with his boots but with the devil and wanted to be free of it, and he tried to explain this to the police officers. The first boot had barely filled with water when the second one followed, and they both sank at about the same time.

According to the records the young man was a patient incapable of controlling or taking care of himself. If, using drugs, they tried to make him see reason, he became aware only of the bad. This was not his first escape. When he was taken back to the institution, things would still be bad but no one would have trouble with him for a long time, and thus he managed each time to allay suspicion. He hardly ever talked or made a sound, and he did not hear many sounds either; he either sat or lay on his bed. If they did not tie him down, he might spend an entire day getting dressed and undressed. Whenever he could, he stole other people’s clothes to put on instead of his own. And to keep other inmates from beating him up for his thievery, the attendants preferred to tie him up. When unable to get dressed and undressed, he felt as if he were crouching at the bottom of a deep pit. The pit was narrow; he could not stretch out his arms in it. Up above the sun did not shine, the wind did not blow, no snow fell, and there was no rain in the world, but it was somewhat lighter than down here at the bottom of the pit.

Water dripped from the thick clay walls. Frogs, worms, and all sorts of reptiles lived with him at the wet bottom of the pit. An impassive observer might claim that he was wearing his institutional pajamas, but he had to protect his skin from the slippery creatures; his skin hurt, it hurt everywhere, and he also had to be sure that none of these creatures managed to nestle in some part of his body. He made movements as if only the instinct of self-defense had left any memories in his mind. Still, sometimes snakes, spiders, or lizards crawled into his ears or through his nostrils into his brain. They penetrated his mouth and his rectum, and then, he felt, they multiplied. The attendants did not help; he asked them in vain, pleading with them quietly. If very rarely he managed to cough up, vomit, blow out, or evacuate the evil vermin, right away they crawled back in somewhere else.

And when the situation became untenable, when so much bad could not exist without a tiny bit of good, then the desire to be naked, so necessary for his body’s defense, endowed his limbs with a power whose strength was at least as terrible as the pain of his defenseless nakedness had been.

At such times either they trapped him and pumped him with a bigger dose of sedative than usual, or he managed to climb out of the slippery pit unnoticed and leave unnoticed.

If someone had observed Dávid repeatedly circling the pond, keeping to his ever-deepening and quickly fading footprints, in the end raising squelching clumps of clay with his feet to the point of exhaustion, that person could not have said to what temptation the boy was surrendering himself. We can know so little about one another. And Dávid could not have said why the stranger had thrown his boots into the water, why, jumping up from his sitting position, he seemed to be compelled to shed his skin, why he tore off his blue worker’s shirt, why he shoved his pants down to his ankles, why he hopped around, stumbling like that, why he stepped out of them, and then why, once he was naked, the vehement resistance in him subsided.

Underneath the blindingly pale skin, his bare frame showed clearly, pivoting on its joints.

The sight made Dávid forget his negligence; his fear, his aggressive mood, his self-accusation and anger all got stuck in his throat like a piece of bread gone the wrong way. The stranger crouched, keeping his knees together, and, wobbling as he sought his balance, first pulled to himself his worker’s shirt and then his pants. He did this with movements as engrossingly slow and thoughtful as those of a person intent on smoothing out his clothes and laying them on the back of a chair before going to bed. First he fixed the pants. Laying them out before him, he pulled out and straightened the legs. Then he laid the shirt on top of the pants and patted it, and then, not moving from his place, he reached back behind him with one thin arm, scooped up the bread, and rolled it into the clothes. With the bundle in his hand, he stood up.

He could not have been blind, and if he wasn’t he surely saw Dávid on the far shore of the water.

He heaved the bundle over his head, the way we get ready to heave a heavy stone. At the end of a second preparatory swing, he hurled it with all the might of his tense body.

A big dull splash followed, and Dávid involuntarily cried out.

They were about twenty-five meters from each other. At Dávid’s shout, which might even have preceded the splash, their eyes met for the first time. Like two heavy oil stains seeking each other, neither surprise nor excitement disturbed the way their glances blended. The bundle popped to the surface, and while in each other’s attentive eyes they were paying attention to the attentiveness, the shirt and pants floated apart, scattering quickly bursting bubbles around them.

Shirt and pants peeled off each other and lazily, with slow-moving tentacles, sank again.

The bread stayed on the surface for a time.

Even later Dávid could not describe to his grandfather every detail of this strange series of events. With his words, he rearranged the story’s chronology to create the impression that he had neglected ringing the church bell because of a heated battle for the pants and shirt, and therefore that slapping his face had been unfair. With this bold lie he was protecting his secret, which he could not reveal because he had no words with which to share it. And while he hurried behind his agitated grandfather on the shady brick pavement that encircled the house, his grandfather’s blind anger filled him with new and ominous feelings. About the old man being after some sort of bloody revenge, when it was Dávid’s lies that had befogged his judgment.

They both longed for a scapegoat and each of them found one.

He knew exactly what his grandfather wanted to do: to get on his bicycle and, disregarding the spasms of his kidney trouble, ride out to the fields.

There to catch that lunatic by the ear and, if necessary, with a single blow to render him harmless, or to turn him over to the police and take back the pants.

He would never again dare return to that place, which, judging by what had been done to him, was obviously cursed.

But he figured incorrectly, because the pastor was thinking not about the tramp, of whose existence he could not know, but about the retired prison guard who, according to the villagers, spent his days walking around naked on his land.

As it turned out, he did not believe them.

Grandpapa, he whimpered in his agony, in a whiny child’s voice he hadn’t used in years, it’s just a lunatic, he whined as they hurried along the sidewalk.

He wanted to arrest the flow of events — though he also longed for revenge — so that he wouldn’t have to divulge his pagan secrets or admit to lies.

He threw in his own boots and his clothes too, believe me, and probably that’s why he needed my pants. With words like this he tried to get out of his story. He is a madman, believe me, Grandpa, he even threw his bread in the water, he escaped from somewhere.

Mention of the bread caught his grandfather’s attention.

One must be truly a madman or criminal to throw away bread, he thought, but his thick, muscular back did not respond even when he crossed the high threshold of the shed door; reason could not assuage his agitation so quickly. Grabbing the bicycle by its handlebars and seat, with a single motion he lifted it out of the clutter of tools and turned around with it; spades and hoes, shovels and pickaxes thudded and knocked together in the wake of his violent movement.

Dávid stood in the bright opening of the door; the pastor’s wire-rimmed glasses flashed at him sternly from the dimness inside.

Where are your shoes, he asked the boy because he needed time to divert himself from his original goal.

Dávid looked down at his bare feet as if only now discovering the missing sandals; with this, he too meant to gain time, to thwart his grandfather’s revenge.

He didn’t take them. They’re still there.

Which shoes did you have on, the pastor asked sternly.

I wore my sandals today, the boy hastened with the answer.

The pastor rebuked himself unsparingly. Which increased his agitation instead of lessening it. Anyone who at the sight or sound of the slightest trouble lets his mind jump to the most extreme conclusion must face his own criminal character. Nature had endowed the pastor with enormous physical strength, which forced him to be careful with his temper, not to lose it, to nip it in the bud. This habit was not, in the end, alien to his gentle disposition, but it filled him with complacency, and thus did his moral precaution lead him toward the greatest danger lying in wait for him: arrogance. When he yielded to the temptation of complacency, as he frequently did, he committed the mortal sin of arrogance.

He seemed more like a shy man than a stupid one.

With the benefit of his long spiritual experience, he reproached himself most severely; he prayed fervently. But a single remark offending decency, or cursing or swearing or an obscene gesture, sufficed to upset the fastidiously guarded equilibrium of his conscience.

And everyone sensed that something was not right with his conscience; the village too made him feel it. They openly laughed at him when he stood before them, red in the face, having a temper tantrum, driven to the edge of his self-control.

He readily used his physical strength to help people; he rushed to their aid with self-sacrificing zeal, as if to alleviate his shame by doing something, as if to conceal some physical flaw. It was not that these people along the Danube were unfamiliar with the concept of self-sacrifice, but rather that they saw through the trick; the pastor wanted to redeem mercy with caritas. Behind his back they told one another that he behaved like a Catholic. The transgressions of his youth seemed to be presiding over his present efforts. He still desired the woman in Vésztő, whose temptation, so long ago, in his days as an assistant minister, he had been unable to resist. He carried luggage, heavy sacks of anything, he uprooted stubborn stumps with a pickaxe, he moved the bulkiest beams; the peasants took advantage of his gentle humility, at times abused him. And because of his willingness to serve them they did not like him.

One prefers to disdain a person one abuses. They watched him, observed him, spied on him, hoping to figure out what the pastor wanted to achieve with his behavior.

The Christians who live in these parts have never even heard of monastic humility.

Ever since his wife died, and that was more than four years ago, no day passed without his being tortured by the old feeling about that woman from Vésztő. He could not be rid of the scent of that woman’s strong body. He felt as if he were losing the meaning of his life’s entire work, even though he had been truly self-restrained since his wife’s death; he had exiled all selfishness and considered his life as a service to others. No agitation and no hope could shift the heavy apathy that settled oppressively on his heart at times like this and remained there for hours, sometimes days or weeks. What could he do, what could he give, what could he offer as sacrifice, if with the labor of his entire life he had not overcome his most sinful desires. He did not argue with the Lord. One receives God’s mercy or forgiveness not as a reward for one’s deeds. His doubts about Calvinist doctrines of faith and predestination were not based on theological considerations. Rather, he had practical problems with his own life: how to lead others to the point where at least they would not stand in the way of mercy with their evil deeds; how to lead young souls to the command of love when his own body searched for nothing but the physical desires of others.

All right, he has been restraining his body’s desires since then, if one can put it that way.

However, a young soul recognizes no obligations regarding others except those that please that young person’s body.

But doesn’t a young soul follow the divine plan when it satisfies its urges.

He became aware of his naïveté after his wife’s death, when he was past his fiftieth year. Her death took away the faith that had served him steadfastly for decades. He willingly reconciled himself to this, yet he still faced the question, from where would he draw the strength necessary for his calling if not from his faith. He was on his own with his physical urges and no person to attach them to. The practical mind has no general ideas for a man past fifty, so he could serve only himself, whom else, with his remnants of the procreative instinct — and it wasn’t even the instinct of procreation; and he in the name of the Lord Jesus should have been serving the Almighty. His service was, at best, empty fervor turned into self-interest, which stupid people liked to see and which they counted on so as to get something for nothing again. Because of his good deeds people around him became like wild beasts on the lookout for prey. Nothing interested them except their profit; go on, call the pastor, he’ll take care of it. He’ll pull it out, cut it down, uproot it. That pastor is strong as an animal; all you have to do is tell him. The possibility of even the smallest profit made them feverish; what else could be torn or ripped from what. They rolled their eyes frenetically in their eternal, insatiable pleasure. And these characteristics of his, which he recognized in other people, reminded him again of that insane woman of Vésztő with whom, as a young man engaged to be married, he had cheated on his bride.

He saw their disgusting greediness, yet he could not help following them like a calf. He could not do otherwise; he went on serving them.

Since then he knew, from experience, that sin gave much more pleasure than perspicacity or even moral purity.

He was spared a public scandal and his secret was preserved in the village, albeit at the cost of the terrible tragedy: from the moment the crazy woman and her husband drowned in the Tisza in their wagon, along with the horses, he could not free himself from the tormenting thought and agonizing self-accusation that he had caused the fatal accident. Burdened with these thoughts he successfully repelled all temptation, which was not so difficult since the water had taken from him his only beloved woman, the one from Vésztő.

He knew he should not try, but he wanted to understand the divine plan. Or at least he was curious to learn it as a theological guide for life. Ultimately he had been the one who forced, who convinced the woman to undertake that final journey. He had not done so with criminal intent; he wanted to save the little waif from her. He had discovered by accident what she had been doing with the foundling. It was not he the woman loved, he thought; she did not love anyone, she was insane. He came to think that desire burned so brightly in her because she was possessed by the devil. And he too was taken in by the devil. With his own eyes he had had to witness the woman torturing the little foundling with the same passion that she made love to him.

He was making love to a man-eating monster.

If he could not free himself, he wanted to free at least that miserable child; and lo, the fishermen did save her, fished her out of the Tisza. Years later he was still trying to figure out how his and the woman’s sin fitted into the plan of divine providence, and he could not understand it. This meant unceasing struggle for him, and he was unable to forget. His wife’s death had permanently done away with the sources of a naïve religious worldview in him. His body was continuously tortured by the absence of his wife’s body, even though he had never found the insane passion with her that he had with the woman from Vésztő.

At best he would have a few hours’ relief; they both learned a little from each other about what it was like to love a siblinglike being.

He began to have serious doubts about the hereafter; in addition, he was especially tormented by what he had to demand of his body in the name of his vocation or in remaining faithful to what he missed so much.

If only because of his son’s terrible death, he could not have Creation allowing atheists and Communists to be right and materialism to enjoy such primacy. He could not believe there was no hereafter, that there would be no final judgment, that there was no kind of mercy.

He was pursued by extreme anxiety when he returned from the Catholic town on the other side of the river and, after a half-hour walk, with his long strides gained the village’s miserable main square, mute in the heat. He was sweating in his black suit; his prostate, his bladder, and his kidneys were killing him. After all, a pastor can’t just stop by the roadside ditch to relieve himself; anyway, he couldn’t urinate quickly and amply anymore. He really should have stopped often at the edge of the empty road. And if he did not urinate at least a bit, the persistent urge remained in his urethra and bladder, and after a while his kidneys began to burn and shooting pains pierced his back. His bladder tightened unbearably, which in turn produced an urge to defecate.

It was hard to take so much physical punishment all at once.

The women on the steps of the general store, standing there with loaves in hand, were still analyzing the recent event in fine detail, but the delivery truck had long since sped away and the presbyter was back at his place behind the fence.

The suffering pastor could hardly wait to get home. He had to acknowledge his grandson’s negligence as having been his own mistake, and he was in no mood to discuss it with anyone.

His shame and the accumulated poison in his body created bizarre images in his mind.

He had walked down the middle of the road, which definitely testified to openness of character, but the moment he noticed the little crowd of people in front of the store he stepped onto the sidewalk and walked more rapidly in the shade of the morello trees. Let the villagers see that even without them he knew how to deal with such negligence. He greeted them, smiling at each one, and the women returned his greeting as usual, readily, distrustfully, joylessly.

In his heart he despised them for their joylessness.

Every morning he tried to awaken cheerfully, but during the last quarter-century these obdurate pagans on the Danube had rarely reciprocated his smile or laugh. It was impossible to budge them from their gloom even with a word of love.

Luckily he managed this time to avoid talking to them, but he had hardly taken a few steps in the shade when he literally tripped over the presbyter, still busy loosening pickets on his decaying fence.

He asked the presbyter whether he had seen his grandson Dávid.

The thickset, large-eyed, and always rather grubby little man had enough troubles of his own. Why should he keep an eye on the pastor’s shitty grandson too. He had to replace the whole fence, but where would he get new cross-pieces for it, and as if he hadn’t even heard the pastor, he told him about his problem.

Imagine, he shouted, with the nail-ridden piece of wood in his hand poking in the direction of the general store, your reverence won’t believe it, that rotten tramp stole bread right in front of our eyes.

His grandson had stolen bread, no. The pastor’s jaw dropped on hearing this.

And before that, he stole from my cherry trees, what kind of a world do we live in, wasn’t ashamed to steal from us in broad daylight.

Every trace of a smile disappeared from around the pastor’s eyes and he simply watched the words emerging from the presbyter’s toothless mouth.

That is what made the presbyter understand what the pastor had asked him before.

And he quickly answered that no, he hadn’t, how could he have seen Dávid.

Then who stole the bread, asked the pastor, staring at the presbyter even more incredulously.

Some tramp, a pox on him, the presbyter continued to rave. How did he get the nerve, to eat sour cherries off his tree right in front of him. He can’t stomach it.

They stared into each other’s eyes.

Well, your reverence, that’s what we’ve come to, I’m telling you, this is the kind of world we live in.

The ferrymen told me he didn’t ring the bell, the pastor continued hesitantly.

The presbyter knitted his shaggy old-mannish brows.

You say he didn’t ring the bell, he shouted stupidly, but why wouldn’t he, he mumbled very slowly and haltingly, drawing out his words along with his sluggish thoughts, trying to backpedal a bit.

Bells were ringing in his ears, but he could not decide if it had been at noon the day before when he had heard them last.

The pastor’s experience was that the brains of people on the Danube were even slower than those of people on the Tisza.

Could it have been at dawn, he mumbled to himself. His effort to remember took longer than the pastor’s bladder could endure.

Well then, God be with you, he muttered so he could at last be on his way.

Nevertheless, a mere half hour later they were riding their bicycles together out of the village.

The dirt road would take them a little away from Balter’s property, yet Balter thought they were headed toward his place. They jumped off their bicycles, hastily threw them to the side, and walked in his direction, agitated and threatening.

The moment he saw them he meant to put on his shirt, which would have been the decent thing to do, but he didn’t. As if he had lost his presence of mind. The first thing that came into his head was that his wife had died.

During hot summer days, the dry sand along the Danube draws out a person’s steps, and anyone walking in that sand seems to be making progress more slowly than he actually is, rising and sinking a bit. Here come the messengers, Balter thought anxiously, counting heavily on news of his wife’s death.

Then he’d move back to town to escape the damned horseflies.

He had witnessed many deaths and concluded that death behaved unpredictably even when it came about as a result of human violence. If, for example, a tube is shoved down someone’s throat or someone is beaten mercilessly, the people doing such things must count on the person’s possible death, though it’s not inevitable, since artificial feeding and even the bloodiest beating can be survived, depending on the victim. And yet death can appear with a single jolt. Or after the very first blow, even though no one intended it. He had witnessed it so many times, from close up and from far away, that when he saw the messengers he could only think that here it was again.

For decades he had wanted nothing but his wife’s speedy death.

The two men were approaching quickly on the marshy footpath that led straight to the apricot tree. Balter, holding his shirt in his hand, did not move for several moments. A large-bodied bespectacled man was in front, in a white shirt and black pants rolled up above his ankles; in build and age he resembled Balter, and he almost covered up the little man galloping behind him. The little man wore a black hat in the heat and kept waving a picket in rhythm with his hastening steps. When they came within hearing distance, still treading on the soft sand, they both shouted greetings, which Balter acknowledged but, because of the surprised waiting, was not in a position to return.

Seeing him mute and motionless, the two men slowed and, after a few involuntary steps, halted, uncertain.

Shouting from his spot, the larger man asked whether Balter had seen a tramp in the area.

Balter felt that a very long time passed before he understood the question, and he could signal only with a shaking of the head that no, he had not.

But this apparently long time did not remain empty; a great many things happened during it.

The bespectacled man’s wild look settled mainly on Balter’s pants. First, he looked over the lower parts, then, a bit embarrassed, his eyes glided past the groin area and up to Balter’s deep chest, as if to gauge its size and strength should he have to fight the man. As if Balter were the tramp they were looking for so hard. Or as if a similar, even more impossible assumption were making the air vibrate around them. Suspicion and blame: these two were suspecting him of something. Given their physical attributes and age, a fight between them would not have been uninteresting. The pastor’s wrath restrained by his moral stance, and the jailer’s cool competence based on much experience; the pastor’s short temper and his strength refined by spirituality, and the jailer’s raw strength and inexperience in spirituality — these made for measurable differences that rendered the outcome unpredictable. And they weren’t in it alone, face-to-face; there was the third unpredictable man too.

Realizing this, Balter’s eyes moved to the picket the smaller man was holding in his hand.

Balter’s realization could not have escaped the pastor’s attention.

The pastor’s suspicion and urge to find blame persisted, but there also arose in him a vehement wish to revoke them. He had no means to do this but by staying at a respectable distance and repeating his question, this time more gently, whether Balter really hadn’t seen anyone suspicious around.

He got no answer this time either.

One can’t engage in complicated explanations when shouting, anyway. He continued to gesticulate and yell as if trying to make himself understood by a retarded person. Which once again fired up his words.

It was impossible not to hear his disdain for slow-witted people.

There was a boy here earlier, in bathing trunks. That’s his grandson. And this tramp must have gone by here too. So why does he say he hasn’t seen either of them, he shouldn’t go on saying that.

Balter shook his head to indicate he had not, and kept looking at the picket.

Two nails were sticking out from one end of it.

How could he not see someone prowling about. Why wouldn’t he help.

Even if he asks the same thing three times, the answer is still no. I didn’t see anybody, I’m telling you.

Well then, you’d better take good care of yourself, the pastor shouted, and keep your eyes peeled, though it was not clear whether Balter should be wary of the two men or of the tramp they were looking for.

They turned around, plodding back on the sand again for a good distance, and picked up their bicycles practically on the run.

Balter slowly lowered his shoulders, which made him feel the shirt in his hand; slowly he put it on. He watched indignantly as the two men were swallowed up by the low-lying dirt road.

When they disappeared he looked furtively around his garden and took off for his house. As if expecting that the sight of well-tended plants would reassure him that it was nothing, everything was all right, peace still reigned.

In this peaceful state, noisy with the rushing of blood and the buzzing of bees, he saw that the cabbages were nicely acquiring their round shape and the potato stems were beginning to dry in their evenly filled rows. Tied to their stakes, heavy green tomatoes in tight, darkly fragrant bunches were getting ready to turn red in a few days; looking at it all, he felt an aversion bordering on disgust. His plot of land had a very good exposure, the soil was favorable because it rested mainly on former tideland, and the barren sand hills, which the low-lying dirt road sliced in half, blocked the wild winds, absorbed the fire of the sunshine, and after sundown poured out the accumulated heat. He had to grab something quickly, anything. He went about his business as he did on any other day.

But he was seized by an urge to escape. To lock up his house and vanish in the fields. The air was coming to life; a merciless struggle was taking place in the heart of his peace.

He could no longer find his bearings.

All right, his wife hadn’t died, but his senses hadn’t tricked him completely. Somebody had been lurking for weeks. Tramp, they call his son now. And if they only knew what sort of scoundrel he really was. At the same time he couldn’t wholly disregard his supposition regarding his damn wife’s sudden death.

Why can’t he evict her from his heart; why can’t he forget her forever.

His dead mother was also shouting into his thoughts, though she was usually soft-spoken.

He grabbed a round wicker basket that he had filled with string beans early that morning. The midday heat and nervous fever conspiring against him had accomplished their mission. The beans were particularly beautiful, long, butter-yellow, and tender. The richness of his garden was due partly to the high level of the groundwater and partly to the basin behind the sand dunes, chiseled to barrenness, which filled with thick vapor all night long and sometimes even in the morning.

There were several varieties of harmful pests, but nothing ever dried out, not even in the worst heat waves. He took the basket inside and dropped it on the floor.

The house, built of planed wood, had two small areas, one room and a kitchen; a small alcove opened from the kitchen, no larger than a closet, which he used as a pantry. He tore open the pantry door. Of course, he found no one behind it. Empty bottles and jars of preserved fruit lined the shelves, strawberry, currant, and gooseberry; he was particularly proud of these. In the stifling dimness the cellophane covers on the jars were tight as drums.

This was about the time he usually prepared his lunch; and he wanted to put up the string beans for winter while they were still fresh.

He could not find his small knife.

Military order reigned in his new house. Everything was bare and cheerless. As if a putrid belch had come up into his mouth from a queasy stomach, he cursed the disorder and filth he found here but blamed not himself but a third person for everything, including the missing knife he could not find. He saw the furniture and other objects as dusty, downright grimy.

They stole my little knife, he said to himself. He saw that the fingers of his strong hands were filthy; crescent moons of thick dirt sat under each nail.

Everyone but he would have seen these objects as clean, if a bit worn. He had collected them from various places over many years.

The small knife he was looking for now, for example, he had stolen from his own house in Budapest.

To free himself of the humiliation, he tore the shirt off his body.

But he no longer wished for calm and he did not think he had gone mad either.

The sound of his every movement was as if somebody or something else had produced it. A prowling wild beast or the murderer spying on him. He tore open the door to the room, and its dusty emptiness hit him like a blow. There was the strictly made-up bed; a draft ruffled the faded linen curtain on the sunny window.

He threw his pants on the bed; they landed with the legs spread.

His mother cried out in his ears.

This is not right for you, my son.

In his drenched apron, leaning against the wooden washtub, he held the scrub brush in his hand, puffy from lye; not right for you, not right for you, son. Of course it wasn’t right for him, but how in hell would his mother know what was right for him.

He chucked his underpants in the pile of clothes to be washed. He earnestly sought his lost calm in his nakedness, but for that he should have removed the weight of his body from his soul.

You really think, Mother, that you will tell me what’s right for me.

And when he finally got the big knife in his hand, because the damned little one hadn’t turned up, he gripped it as if he were getting ready to kill. He never wanted to keep animals, to avoid the need to kill them. He had seen too much human blood not to dread the sight of killing. He faced the simple task of cleaning and chopping the string beans, but what occurred to him was that he had never beaten a prisoner of his own free will. He was not quite clear about whose question he was answering this way, nor could he deny that at times he had had no choice but to dish out a few necessary blows. Why on earth did he have to excuse himself now, and to whom. Rebellious prisoners would bang on the cell doors or kick them with the tips or metal heels of their boots; others would make a racket on the ribs of radiators.

Of course he had to dish out some blows; how could he avoid it.

On the Visegrád shore, tipcarts at the distant mine were creaking, making their usual steady noise.

It was late afternoon; the heat let up a little.

They will creak all night; they will keep on creaking in the eternity of sin. And all those fantasies, sensations, visions, and desires that during the past months had settled into fine grooves or drawn furrows on the rim of his receding consciousness, were now hatching, returning, reviving, and cunningly going on the attack. In the parched heat’s heavy vapor and reddish trembling dust, the sun was preparing to take its leave, far beyond the distant mountains. One could still not say, though, that he had thought over his oppressive life, or perhaps his sins, or anything else. He was hurt and afraid, inkling gave birth to memory, memory begat images, and he was being helplessly tossed about among them.

In the meantime the wax beans, locked in liter jars and wrapped in cloth, were now properly steaming in a large pot on the stove. But his feverish activity had not eased his nervous tension. His naked body was becoming sweaty and stained, and when he thought about going to bathe soon, he did not mean cooling off his body. Later, he took soap, found a clean shirt, unhooked a towel, and threw it over his shoulder along with a clean shirt and pants. He turned off the gas stove, giving the tap to the container an extra twist. He walked out of the house, carefully locked the door, and was about to hide the key at its usual place, under the large stone with which his son would one day bash his head in if he weren’t careful, when he was violently shaken by a mute shadow he detected at the edge of his vision; he shuddered, and on his back and chest the muscles froze into veritable knots.

The pastor was standing motionless under the apricot tree.

When he had come by earlier, he’d shouted good evening very respectfully and then had stopped when he heard dull, harmless noises filtering from the little house. He did not intend to surprise the other man.

Now, he quickly, almost stuttering, begged Balter’s pardon.

But meanwhile his eyes roved over the other man’s naked body, from his neck to his loins, and more thoroughly than they had at midday.

What in God’s name are you looking for, shouted a surprised Balter, what do you want on my property again.

Of course he meant not his property but his uncovered loins, by which men measure each other’s abilities.

All the pastor could do was not look at Balter’s naked body; he looked straight into his eyes.

Which only deepened the embarrassing feeling in both men of male defenselessness and vulnerability. Because it is forbidden to look at what arouses their curiosity.

It was especially painful for the pastor that because of his careless glances their conversation had begun with blasphemous swearing.

He really did not mean to catch him by surprise, the pastor said quietly, please forgive his coming back uninvited, but frankly, he could not rest because of his crude way of talking earlier that day.

He would like to apologize.

Frankly, that is the reason he came back.

Balter did not care for this kind of weakness, that a person should have to apologize for having used abusive language, and therefore he did not believe the pastor. He just looked hard at him, wondering what he really wanted.

You don’t say, he replied roughly, so you’d be that famously strong priest, he said aggressively, though more softly than before.

The pastor responded with the shy smile of a truly strong person, you’ve got it, that’s me.

Now, don’t go thinking I scare easy.

Frankly I don’t.

I already saw at noon, don’t you worry, that you were just a priest or something, Balter continued.

I am a pastor, the other man corrected him quietly.

I’m not blind, I see what I see, but don’t worry, I’m not interested in your business. You can be a priest for all I care. I’m not interested in God anyway.

His voice, the hard edge of his words, kept him from being at one with what his face was projecting.

People also say about you that you like chopping wood better than preaching, and they like you better that way, with the axe.

His smile now was the kind a pleasant memory produces.

But then what do you do with that son-of-a-bitch God of yours.

Suddenly the afternoon’s nightmare ended for him. He felt that with his involuntary smile he was back in his element, and so he continued what he had started.

Don’t for a minute think I’m scared of any kind of god or priest or parson. You can bet your ass on that. For all I care you could be Miklós Toldi* or Hercules himself, you’d better believe it.

I gladly believe it, I assure you, the pastor responded, and despite Balter’s nakedness he stepped closer. But the other man’s every word had hurt him. I don’t want to lie, but looking at you, I don’t think I’m a match for your physical strength.

This created a long silence between the two of them.

Balter wasn’t sure whether the pastor was mocking him. Those three phrases—gladly believe it, looking at you, and physical strength—affected him as if they had been blows. As if they were foreign words. He suspected the learned man was dressing him down for his ignorance, was making fun of him, had nothing but contempt for him. And the pastor weighed the likelihood that Balter might try to hit him, given how close they were, but he feared not for himself, only for his glasses.

The glasses were new; the lenses had to be made to order, specially, by the optician.

Nonetheless, with his wide smiling blue eyes behind those glasses he charmed the other man.

If one lives for a long time without feeling any physical and spiritual friendship, even the germs of feeling tend to petrify.

At that moment, unexpectedly even for himself, Balter slipped the key under the stone.

I always put it here when I leave the house, he said quickly, as if he didn’t himself know why he was giving away his most precious secret. Since you’ve seen it anyway I might as well tell you, he said by way of explanation. Anyway, it’s better to have someone else know about it, one never knows what might happen.

He put the soap down on the step, hung his shirt and towel on the door handle, and then with leisurely motions slipped his legs into his pants. The leisureliness was part of his fraternal feeling.

As a young man he had had a friend, and the two of them would have jumped into fire for each other; in the army too he had had a bosom buddy. But not since then.

He had to pull hard on his leather belt because he’d lost a lot of weight over the past few months.

He goes down to the river to bathe every night, he said as he buttoned up, and looked again at the pastor, withdrawn behind his indulgent, shy smile.

If you don’t think it impertinent, frankly I’d like to go with you.

The suggestion hit Balter like another real blow. He looked at the pastor; was he mocking him. Gentlemen say things like that to ladies, I’d like to go with you. With a certain leisureliness and sluggishness, he weighed whether to hit the man.

Above the sizzling landscape the cloudless evening sky was flaming red.

You know, at this hour in the evening, the pastor explained, when it’s not so hot anymore, frankly I usually go for a walk anyway.

They started out under the flaming sky, walking side by side for a while on the footpath.

So, did they find the tramp they were looking for so hard.

It’s better that they didn’t. You see, cried the pastor bluntly, one has to admit, frankly, that the good Lord has once again made things turn out more wisely.

The way he saw it, the authorities would have fixed the scoundrel’s wagon for sure if they had found him.

The two men’s voices sounded identical in the flaming air. No voice should rise above the silence of the landscape, neither of them should hurt the other.

By the grace of Jesus Christ they steered clear of the sin of hitting anyone, the pastor told Balter warmly, as if he were initiating him into jealously guarded secrets of Creation. Because he realized they both had much base feeling in them, he didn’t deny it, and wouldn’t care to lie. Frankly, they had wanted to retrieve his grandson’s pants and the miserable creature had stolen bread from the store too. Whether one likes it or not, there’s a murderous instinct in man.

Many damned scoundrels roam all over the world, answered Balter in his own way, very courteously. I should know, you can believe me. I’ve got experience in things like this.

The pastor really didn’t want to upset their fresh understanding, but it was hard to relinquish his missionary intentions.

Without Providence, we are all ignorant children, little children. In our great ignorance we are all sinners.

With cautious glances they measured the effect of their words on each other.

Balter had put up with party seminars and propaganda meetings more easily than with such missionary texts; at political rallies he had listened repeatedly to the theory that only a few more years of hard work were needed to lay the final foundations of socialism. With patience, perseverance, and mainly great vigilance, because the enemy, both without and within, lurked everywhere. He did not believe a word of it, and he knew what the game was really all about. If they put a communist and a fascist in the same cell, and they did, what the hell did they talk about. But the pastor’s words filled him with some primeval passion.

A dead furrow led them across the abandoned orchard where Balter had not had time to fix the devastation.

He did not believe in any kind of providence, and if it was spoken about in such unctuous tones, he preferred to take revenge by swearing. At the mention of communism or fascism he shrugged his shoulders, but the orchard interested him more than providence. What he thought was, a plague and a pox on your comrades, not me, but if things stay as they are and the old lords can’t come back, that’s all right with me too.

Everyone has a mother, that’s what I say, a baron also shits.

When they reached the boundary of Balter’s fertile land near the shore, clearly marked by stakes, they had to continue in single file through a thicket, its soil soft with silt, until they reached the willows by the river.

Balter went in front, the pastor walked behind him.

The pungent vapors of decaying plants pervaded the air.

The water level had dropped to the deep part of the riverbed during these dry months.

The shore was steep.

As if showing off the splendors of his property, Balter led the pastor to a lovely glade in the willows where, standing side by side, they could watch the landscape reveal the powerful sweep of the river and the bare line of the far shore in the reddish vapor of twilight.

So that’s where you used to work, I heard in the village, the pastor said after a long time.

There it lay, at the northern edge of the small cathedral town of many churches, a shape alien to the landscape and to the water, the old block of the baroque penal institution, with its pointed watchtowers and thick brick walls.

No matter where one looked, one couldn’t help seeing those walls; to live close to them and twice a week to preach the word of God there and give testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ — there was no greater ordeal in the pastor’s life.

For thirty years I served there, that’s right, Balter replied quietly, almost bashfully, as if he had heard the dread in the pastor’s voice. He laughed a little. I began under the rule of His Excellency the regent, if you know who I mean, your reverence, then I served our father Rákosi and I swore allegiance to Kádár too.*

I have been doing my service for thirty years also, said the pastor. His tone was more resigned than it had been before.

The other man mustn’t sense too much of the immeasurable difference between the two. Maybe a little. But the pastor thought it wouldn’t be right to miss a chance to testify to his own long service, if only in a modest way. As things were, the distance between them had grown too wide. Because of the testimony he had to give to Christ, the desire for merciless revenge only deepened in the pastor.

And so as not to emphasize the various enormous distances between them while they stood so closely together, he didn’t look at the other man for a long time.

No matter how true it was that he had devoted his vocation to following Christ, he had to take his bloody revenge on someone. He could not avoid the feeling and the compulsion stemming from it.

It was January when I got married, Balter related with charming innocence, I took my oath of service in February, and in February of this year I completed my service. Believe me, it was enough.

We moved here in the month of July from the Tisza, which is where I had my first position — ten years at Tiszavésztő, if you know where that is. That’s how I’ve been spending my service, said the pastor indulgently.

Despite his good intentions the different nature of their services could not be equalized. Or perhaps it could have been if he had eked out of himself a little more goodwill, but then what would he have done about the fate of his only son and his own dark hatred. At best they were equal in age and in the unstoppable rhythm of mortality, which they both had to face.

Still, their long silence did not become unpleasant, since they both were interested more in the intention of what they said than in its literal meaning.

Whatever happened to them before now, they were both on the way out of their lives.

And now I am free, Balter said cautiously.

Which had roughly the effect it would have had if he were a small child who for the first time said something dreadfully indecent out loud. But coming from an old man, the statement had a certain irony. And in the ensuing silence the pastor heard well the sigh escaping from the other man’s heavy body, and then the silence that led to the next sentence.

They were hard years, to be sure, who had it easy. Thus did the pastor go around the problematical subject. Frankly, we shall all make our accounting before the just Lord.

How many things one has to live through during one’s service, replied Balter, equally indulgent. One could go on talking about it until tomorrow morning, but he fell silent quickly, as if he had given himself away with his own unguarded words.

He had much to be silent about. Before he left his job, he had had to reconfirm both his verbal and written oaths to keep his silence.

People say you are alone, is your dear wife no longer alive, if I may ask frankly, said the pastor deliberately but cautiously, as if at the moment when the other opened up he wanted to reach even further into the darkness. But in fact he was thinking about his own fate.

If you only knew how much my old lady is still alive and living her own life, if I may put it that way, Balter replied. It’s not the kind of life you’d understand, he said, and his voice reverberated with a hatred for educated people that he’d accumulated over many decades and which felt at this moment just like the hatred he felt for his wife and son.

Though my wife wasn’t a regular whore, no worry about that.

It was probably his surprise at opening up like this that made his reply come out so coarsely.

I must say, though, to be frank with you, she wasn’t much better. So why shouldn’t she live her own life, he added with an unpleasantly grating laugh. I couldn’t care less.

That is how, at that moment, the ignominy of the two men’s fate became entwined.

They glanced at each other in their mutual shame, as if they had no way to avoid this common ignominy. They could not have been more different; nothing bound them together but their age; and they saw nothing in each other’s eyes but that they were both men.

The first word was lacking.

In the pastor, the lack of a daily dose of good had become so acute that he could make no room for more evil. He asked no more questions, didn’t want to turn more of the man’s evil on himself. When he heard Balter’s indecent laugh, apathy settled into his heart, the most dangerous kind of apathy.

Balter suspected rigid rejection and hard moral judgment behind the spectacles. What more could he expect from such a powerful man. His superiority shrank, now consisting only of the fact that his wife was indeed alive. He could have done nothing with the other man except, in anger about his own fate, knock him out.

Yet the other man’s mute sorrow pierced his self-esteem as a pin would a balloon.

He almost cried out in the evening silence.

My wife waited for me, sir, ambushed me with a sack, and my only son beat me until I was bloody. If you want to know how they did it, I’ll be happy to tell you. With the poker. They broke four of my ribs, he cried, and seeing the effect of his words on the pastor’s face, he added something that sounded truly strange.

If I don’t get killed, I’ll have to kill my potential killer.

The water carried his voice on its whirling surface, and from the reddish shore of Vác an echo returned it.

It could not be determined whether he was referring to his wife or his son. They went on trying to gauge in each other’s eyes what might happen next.

Not for anything in the world would he tell the pastor more serious things about his son, though he had much to tell.

The water was lapping the sand gently in front of them, and if the two men did not go at each other it was because of the heart-numbing apathy that had somewhat tamed the pastor’s murderous impulse. Bats flew over their heads and the screeching of nocturnal birds was heard from among the willows. When the pastor finally spoke again, only the Creator might have known what nonsense he was going to come up with.

It’s been four full years since my poor dear wife, my sweet little Emmi, my one and only died. This was his dulled, pained response, and he almost broke down in the middle of it; while he struggled for words and for air with his trembling lips, he had the feeling that with every word he should bow to the ground.

He wanted to throw light on the other man’s fate with his own.

The disgrace of the uttered words instantly disgraced his dead.

His dull cry of pain had no echo.

Even after so many decades, he could not predict what a man locked hermetically in his will and physical strength might do with his feelings. Neither of them failed to notice that in the interval of their struggle with these blind emotions, the searchlights on the prison watchtowers had been turned on. The beams bore through the twilight; the harsh light spread and stretched out over the water.

Reflected light fell on Balter’s eyes and on the pastor’s glasses.

My dear son, my only one, like a common criminal, like a dog, he continued, crying out in his pain even more dully, they threw him into an unmarked grave, you must know who they were, I don’t know anything, nothing, they shot him or hanged him.

Without tearing himself away from Balter’s shining face, he jerked his head toward the other shore.

It’s true. Not where you worked but in the terrible prison on Kozma Street,* at least that’s what one supposes. This much I had to tell you.

He managed to unload this portion of his rage and then retrieve some of it with his explanation.

Balter had to take his eyes off the tormented man, though his professional curiosity was immediately aroused to know during which political wave the death sentence might have been issued. He had little doubt it had to do with 1956. To place the case correctly in the chronology, all he had to do was to look at the pastor and gauge the quality of his agitation with his sense organs. He could endure his own defeat only if he unilaterally relinquished their fellowship, which until a moment ago he had strongly expected the pastor would do. War criminals and relatives of Arrow Cross men behaved humbly; they could not afford such outbursts. And the debased and humiliated relatives of communists lacked anger and hatred, and they never gave up their rebellious, haughty conviction in the rectitude of their cause. Balter yanked his shirt and towel off his shoulder and slapped them down on the cracked silt; before the other man could try to stop him he undid his belt and shed his pants in a single vehement movement.

As if denying his decency, he stepped out of his pants and started for the thin stream at the center of the riverbed. As if with this majestic gesture he was telling the pastor that their audience had ended.

Before he could comprehend the other man’s nakedness, offered up as prey, the pastor quickly turned aside and without a word began to walk away. Not to see the other man’s genitals again; he did not wish himself so great a humiliation. And when he was certain he could see nothing of the man but his shadow in the light hovering on the water, he stopped and very loudly called back.

May God bless you, then.

Hearing his words echo from the other shore, from the episcopal see and from the heavy reddish brick walls of the prison, he knew his request for a blessing was in fact a curse.

By then Balter was in the water up to his knees, slapping some on his chest and shoulder before dipping his whole body in.

Driven once more by the zeal of correction, the pastor began.

May the Lord watch over you, guide your every step. That is what I shall ask him to do.

Again his voice came back to him as a threat; his apology to the other man was in vain, and in vain would he pray for the immense mercy of forgiveness.

There is no forgiveness.

The first ripe apricot fell off the tree in the middle of Balter’s garden just after midnight. It fell from somewhere near the top of the tree, hitting and grazing branches in its fall, and the first thud, which awakened Balter, was quickly followed by others.

Dávid slept peacefully that night, though he usually tossed, talked, and shouted in his sleep, or even walked around the dark rooms of the parsonage as if he were awake. His older sister and grandfather had to be on the lookout, though in the one-story house he could not harm himself as he might in the apartment in Budapest, where he also sleepwalked.

But in the morning Balter did not find fallen apricots under the tree. He stared at the ground dumbfounded. Of course, in the shade of the wide-crowned tree and on this sandy rise grass grew very sparsely. He kept looking but did not find any fruit under the outermost branches either. He hadn’t bothered to separate the sounds and sights of his dreams from those of his wakefulness, or perhaps to look for some connection between them. He quickly deflected his thoughts from this issue; some animal must have taken them, he said to himself, he only dreamed of hearing them fall; and he went about his business.

But he knew of no animal that would take or eat ripe apricots.

At noon, when the horseflies arrived and he was cooling himself under the tree, as was his wont, another few ripe apricots fell to the ground.

As some sort of last warning.

He looked at their soft flesh against the sandy-gray ground, but did not touch them. Later, after the last ring of the midday bells, he stood up to put on his shirt. But he couldn’t find it on the sunny branch where he had hung it a short hour earlier. He was amazed. He looked at the empty branch for a long time, then went into the house but did not find the shirt there either.

As if the landscape, dizzy with the midday heat, denied every answer dictated by common sense.

Of course, eventually he’d have to assess what was happening to him here.

He sat on his only chair in the room and forgot about his lunch. If I can’t find it now, he excused himself, I’ll find it later. A weak breeze barely moved the air. The wind couldn’t have carried away my faded old shirt, the earth couldn’t have swallowed it. That was the sum of his assessment. Anxiety and fear, which at other times might have quickly weakened him, did not recur today. Today he was not confronted with an imaginary danger; for the first time destiny had sent palpable signs to him. Now he was sure that apricots had fallen from the tree during the night, no matter how often he tried to defend his memory by calling it a dream. Nor did he doubt that he had spread his wet shirt out on the same sun-beaten branch today as always. In response to these ominous signs, he entrusted himself to his own calm nature; he seemed to know exactly what to expect of those signs.

The pastor’s appearance the evening before was part of the world’s order being cleansed.

For the end of his life he was left by himself; he had nobody and no longer could have anybody. Everyone was at a different place in their lives. When he’d dipped his body into the water last evening every illusion and pain had ended. For him life had no individual condition beyond its historical conditions, and he couldn’t think about mystical or metaphysical conditions. All that sort of thing was the business of women or priests. He had served whom he served, retired, and remained as alone as he had been all his life. He and that pastor had nothing in common; anyway, he disliked priests no matter what kind. No one had anything to do with anyone. He was glad he didn’t even want a mistress for himself anymore.

Just as, at the beginning of his life, he’d thought he’d have something to do with every woman, with any woman at any time.

At most he’ll have to get used to ghosts from his previous life still coming back to tease him.

He continued to trust his steadfast strength. All his life he looked down on men who from birth did not have real physical strength. He didn’t know what to do with men like that.

Images replaced memories; apparitions warning of danger stepped out of the images. These belonged among the inexplicable things a man didn’t bother with. His dead mother held one end of a chain made of these signals; he sat at the other end, content with his mental peace, his big limbs relaxed. His conversation with the pastor had warned him that at the worst someone might appear around his house at any time to take revenge on him. The prowling tramp could be none other than his own son. Just as his mother had sent the young female with his lunch, the woman who would have gladly cooked and washed for him, but whom he hadn’t wanted.

His thoughts about these secret connections were suddenly validated in the air by the unexpected tolling of the church bell.

The fiendishly unexpected sound shook his body, and his muscles jerked, just like the previous evening when he’d noticed the pastor’s motionless shadow under the apricot tree.

It must be close to two o’clock by now.

He was ashamed of a reaction like that; he was no fragile little woman.

The small bell was ringing in the village. The tolling let everyone know that someone had departed from the world of the living.

Even as a child he hadn’t understood why churchmen did not ring the bell the moment they first learned of a death or when they saw it with their own eyes because they’d been at the deathbed.

But they always waited with the bell until the full hour.

Hearing the knell, he stood up; he laughed in joy.

Though he couldn’t have said what gave him joy or why he laughed.

He was no longer free, but he had nothing to do with anyone, not with the dead either. The life and death of unknown people meant nothing. For the sake of his fellow workers he’d always had to pretend a little that life and death meant something to him. He did not go out of his house; with his restless soul he assessed the landscape. He was agitated because he no longer had to do anything for anyone’s sake. Nothing stirred anywhere, but he could not let himself be taken in by illusions that others had created. After the last death knell, he heard no unusual sounds. With his sharp gaze, he looked up and down the footpaths and between the more distant flower beds and vegetable patches. He saw trodden clumps, pressed-down blades of grass, traces of careful footprints. They could have been old, or new, or even the stranger’s. He had two rakes; the one with the finer tines would serve his purpose better. I’ll have my lunch in the evening, he said to himself as if no longer bound by the body’s or time’s simpler needs. From the four stakes marking his boundaries, he would progress toward the house with the rake. If I don’t finish it today, I will tomorrow. He was taking no chances, not because he considered either the size or impossibility of the job, but because he was thinking of the footprints he would obliterate. Occasionally the rake was caught in a clump of grass or cut too deep with its tines. He carefully smoothed over the indentations that might help with the deception. He wanted to see his situation as clearly as possible, and he had no other method for it but this one.

He spent some time under the tree; ignoring the heat and horseflies, he carefully worked around the fallen apricots, which flies and ants had meanwhile chewed and nibbled at.

Still, in the bubble of thick silence, he was not completely satisfied. Something he could not name was bothering him. Until he realized that he had to mark the place where each apricot fell.

He drew circles around them.

By the time he finished raking the entire area, much sooner than he had hoped, it was a red twilight again. He reached back from the threshold to sweep away his last footprint. Not an inch of his land remained without the fine traces of the rake. Thick silence sat over the landscape. He wolfed down some bread, scallions, and dry salami, but he found no drinking water in any of the cans.

He decided not to go to the village for water. But listening to the booming in his ear of dangerously thickening blood, he was not alone in his thirsty vigil that night.

From the willows, he heard the tawny owl, whose sound is like someone dripping water on the surface of motionless water.

Occasionally a ripe apricot fell to the ground.

He could not keep an eye on everything from the door of his house or from the window of his small room. Because of the grapevines and the larger plum and morello trees, he could not see the lower-lying areas. Darkness made his ears the keepers of his attention.

A little later the moon’s pale-yellow waning crescent rose, but it only increased the chaotic picture before his eyes. He could not see into the depths of the long shadows. By midnight the air cooled off and mist covered most things, though the starry sky remained clear and the moon glowed blue in it. He took a firefly for an approaching lamp.

Nothing else happened during that beautiful night.

He had had enough experience in keeping awake.

Some prisoners screamed in their sleep; a good guard could not relax his vigilance, because this was when their charges would go for the pitcher, which meant to be fucked in the ass, or possibly get killed.

On this thirsty night, he remembered for the first time the first night of his marriage.

But he did not keep his mind on it and failed to notice the direction in which his thoughts were straying. As if he had found the source of his life’s bitterness. He looked at what the two of them were doing to each other, but before he could become fully absorbed in his terrible shame, he had to think of his desirable sister-in-law, of course. When for the first time they were finally alone in the kitchen of the super’s apartment on the mezzanine floor on Teréz Boulevard. Because of the heavy downpour he did not have to worry about anyone.

At the very same time, Dávid was lying on his stomach under a light blanket, knees pulled up, and had just opened his eyes in his dark room. Through cracks in the closed shutters, cold light entered in loose stripes. He saw a high, plowed autumn field in the wrinkled rug. He was listening to the rhythmic airy music of crickets and to the tipcarts’ hollow creaking in the distant quarry.

The cavernous easy chair stood in the middle of the freshly plowed meadow.

Protruding from beneath the shadows of his clothes strewn on the chair, the arching armrest was like a raised fist of a hand bent at the wrist. He knew he was seeing the armrest, yet he seemed to feel the eyes of the invisible human figure sitting in the chair.

A shudder glided across the surface of his skin but he could not move.

A man’s resting arm was attached to the apparition’s fist, and a strong shoulder to the arm. Dávid raised his pelvis a little to ease the pressure on his bladder. He should go to the toilet. But in this condition he could not entrust the sight of his body to the eyes of the ghostly figure.

The first thing that occurred to Balter was that the woman was undressing by the chair, which had been kicked aside. While, in fact, he was trying to figure out which of his moves he should change on this most painful wedding night to keep from ruining his marriage forever.

He began to ruminate on this, for the first time in his life, yet what he was seeing was his sister-in-law taking off her bloomers and later letting her skirt down. Which Balter thought was heartrending, and in his brain the blood simply stopped moving; he nearly lost his self-control. This wily woman was curving her back so as to offer the least surface of her skin to the yellowish light. Only then did she lift over her head the pink satin slip glittering wildly in the light. Her big firm ass slipped out from under it, followed by her undulating spine.

As though the big slut was struggling with her meager feminine modesty.

He also remembered the bones sticking out of the half-eaten aspic on the plates.

Gyula, stop gobbling up Imre’s aspic.

She was yakking too as she took off her clothes, as if she had been his mistress for twenty years.

But I will, dearest Aranka, I won’t leave a single mouthful for Imre, you can be sure.

She didn’t wear a garter belt but elastic stockings, the kind old women wore.

All I’m saying is leave him a plateful, that’s all.

Not only will I leave nothing for him, I’ll chew, look, everything off the tiniest little bones too.

The woman stuck two fingers under the elastic while with showy bashfulness she pressed her thighs together.

You’re doing that so I can’t see your pussy, eh, Balter yelled at her from the table, his mouth full. But he continued to chew and to tear off more bread.

The woman did not reply but with her hands and arms kept stroking her long curly pubic hair to keep him from seeing her pussy, which he wanted to see so badly his brain nearly exploded with his boiling blood.

Then for the sake of your mother’s ass, at least eat it properly, with the marinated onion. You shouldn’t leave him any of that either.

Balter was panting as he inhaled her powerful smell pervading the kitchen.

I’ll take a look at yours, don’t you worry, I will, for the sake of your mother’s good goddamn lord, he yelled at her, and his body kept swelling from the urge to take his revenge. I’ll surely fuck this one, he thought.

Meanwhile, though, he did not leave the aspic tray.

They both had been drunk for quite a while and he wanted to sober up a bit so he could fuck her with a cool head.

Then he asked her was she ashamed, seeing how she kept hiding her thighs.

Or maybe he asked her that before.

He remembered that in response to his question the woman shook her freshly curled dyed blond mane as a horse would when breaking into a full gallop. She looked back at him sharply, her teeth flashing as she laughed, and then slapped her foot on the chair, which made the ample flesh of her thigh tremble. Leaning on the chair with all the weight of her compact body, as though not caring about the man at all, she rolled the elastic stocking down to her ankle. The movement meant, who the hell would feel ashamed in front of you. The moment she reached her ankle, her breasts with their swollen nipples swung forward from under her arms and the enormous apple of her bottom opened.

The silence became thick indeed and remained so for the rest of the night.

At least there were some cells from which a heavier silence emanated, where they were preparing to do something or were already doing it, though not every activity was to be noticed. No prison guard strictly observed all the house regulations in every case. After all, one has one’s own interests; a prison guard is also a human being, isn’t he. Let them do it, it won’t make him either poorer or richer. At other times he didn’t let them do it, or maybe he knew in advance whom they were going to kill and he let them, or whom they would screw in the ass, and he didn’t interfere.

At most, he would look surprised in the morning when his relief found a dead body.

He always sensed things correctly, even though he didn’t always know exactly what.

As to the nature of a silence, Balter could not be fooled.

As it was, the tramp had been sitting in Balter’s tree since four in the afternoon, not too high up, and he too was thirsty but no longer could get away unnoticed. His animal-like attention made the silence tense, which Balter recognized with the concentration of an experienced but helpless man. He had already been sitting there when Balter carefully marked his fallen apricots under the tree.

But Dávid decided to act: he rolled onto his side and, preparatory to getting up, stuck his foot out cautiously from under the light summer blanket. After all, the armchair filled with human shadows did not seem hostile. He wanted to anneal himself to his false feeling or expose the feeling as false.

He had to put his courage to the test in the middle of the night. He will not grow up to be a real man unless he passes the test.

He let the chair alone for now; let it hover on top of the furrows in the cold light.

But Balter’s hearing could not reconcile itself with the dense silence, with its personal characteristics, as it were, because he was counting on flitting and crackling sounds, on footfalls and familiar rhythms, on his son’s huge build, large beefy nose, and grinning face sporting a Hungarian mustache.

He was familiar with the logic and mental state of crime but not that of insanity.

That night, Dávid was visited by his dead father.

There was no image to match Balter’s feelings. And the same thing happened to Dávid that night. His experiences and expectations did not match the reality of the apparition. With his breathing, he whimpered audibly into the impossibility of his feelings. At which point he could not separate his desire from his dread, and this was the happiness necessary for confirmation. He could still hear his own breathing. The shadows in the armchair did not move. He was able to straighten up in front of it, a move that instantly emptied the chair, however.

It was not empty because no one had been in it before.

Rather, it became empty as if only now something was missing from it. The peculiar quality of this emptiness, like a blow to his body, annihilated his hope and, by the same measure, increased his fear.

He had to flee from the accursed room, which had once been his father’s nursery.

And Balter’s apricot fell when the tramp shifted.

Then he also remembered he had to get started, couldn’t stay with Imre’s aspic and let the greasy food sober him up. He remembered sliding his arm down the woman’s downy neck to take a heavy breast into his hand and weigh it while his other hand slid into the crack of her ass and then farther to the front. He had no time to waste, had to pull the woman’s hot cunt onto his stiff cock. He took into his mouth the muscular curve that takes the neckline to the shoulder and nibbled on it. Meanwhile she was pulling her stockings off her feet, in which there was a little indecent resistance. He knew her cunt would be sopping wet and hot but did not yet dare dip his fingers in it.

Instead he let go of the tasty mouthful and whispered into her ear, come to me, for the sake of your mother’s good goddamn lord, come here, I’ll give it to you.

But the woman shook her head in protest, which Balter could not see but he felt resistance in her body.

Stop fucking around with your pants, damn it. I want you to do it this way, the woman said soberly and from a great distance.

The forgotten sensation of having to do it this way hit his brain like a nightstick blow to the skull. Like the blows that, even if not of his own will, he had dealt to other people’s heads. If fate gives one enough time, one learns how to remember. Defenselessly he received the inappropriate image. What he saw was a rubber nightstick though it was his cock that became erect by remembering; involuntarily he buried his face in his hands. Not to see what he could not possibly feel any more strongly. He stayed like that for a long time. There was nothing to be done about it; the enjoyment of the horrible image sought refuge in his loins. And Dávid stopped in the doorway of the adjacent room. This was the pastor’s office. This was where the learned pastor held his Bible studies, from which the local youth had been staying away of late, and where during the winter prayer week members of the thinned-out congregation gathered. Although the pastor thought he had put his heart and soul into his job, nobody was interested, not even the ones who showed up. A few old benches stood along the walls, an ancient creaky harmonium, and the old rosewood writing table that, with the matching bookcase, had allegedly been brought here from the legacy of the pastor’s maternal great-grandmother Duchess Odescalchi of Braccano, Italy, and of which he was very proud. Holding his arms defensively before him, in the darkness slightly illuminated with stripes of blue moonlight, Dávid was hurrying on his way to the exit when his grandfather spoke up behind him, asking where he was going at such an hour.

To take a leak, Dávid replied.

Why are you going outside, the pastor asked quietly from near the harmonium. Why aren’t you going to the toilet as you’re supposed to.

The boy did not answer these questions; he felt for the key and turned it in the lock. He could not say to his grandfather that he had met his father and was now following him on his otherworldly travels.

When he stepped outside and carefully closed the door with its trembling glass panes behind him, he was not disappointed. The shadow that had disappeared from the armchair was not leading him on, but it stayed behind him and followed him. He had no doubt: it could only be he. He had not even been a schoolchild when they’d executed his father, and the family knew nothing about it. He did not dare reach into the fly of his pajama pants, how could he do that in front of someone. Even when they found out they did not talk of it; they had not been allowed to know the charges against him. The wound was open in all of them; the pain remained.

Dávid did not know that one could urinate in the presence of one’s father without hesitation, that some boys very proudly urinate together with their fathers, making awareness of their manhood all the stronger.

He’s your father, you stupid boy.

At this invitation, he took a long deep breath of air filled with the mist coming off the river and, feeling quite relieved after urinating for a good long time, walked slowly back into the shadows. His feet took him along the lukewarm brick pavement that led to the shed, but he did not stop there. The light carried and guided him, as well as a secure feeling that his unknown father was with him. Until he turned onto the footpath leading out of the parsonage garden onto the low-lying, molehill-ridden pasture at the edge of the village.

He could not continue on, because realizing where his feet might take him turned him into an immovable knot. He had vowed several times that he would never again go to the pond. He remembered this vow, as if seeing the madman waiting for him there, making him come. Dávid did the simplest thing in the world; he dropped to his knees, pressed his forehead to the ground, and with both arms protected his head from the moonlight and his imagination.

Actually, the madman wasn’t waiting for anybody. Wearing Balter’s shirt and Dávid’s pants, he was perched on a forked branch of the apricot tree. He sat on one of the large crotches and thrust his feet up against another. Now and again he reached out for an apricot to quench his thirst, and then a number of other apricots would fall to the ground. He was quite comfortable; he could even support his back. He followed Balter’s every tactical move with great interest, and watched as he sat, sunk into himself, his face buried in his hands.

They both felt on the nape of their necks the lunatic hooked face of the quarter-moon.

It was not a delusional feeling; this is how the figure stood before Dávid, wearing the stolen pants, challenging him.

To go on, to go out to the pond where the madman was waiting for him.

Never, he kept repeating to himself, as if speaking to the moonlight and, via the moonlight, to his dead father. As if wanting to convince his father that everything would be all right and he would not yield to temptation. He had rattled the man’s madness when their glances had slid into each other’s and, like two oil stains, blended into one. It was so good to speak in his own language that the shirt in his hand hadn’t mattered at all. He did not protest; his mouth simply stayed open in astonishment when the shirt disappeared from his hand and then, along with it, the mate of his own watchful countenance. Dávid ran away with it. When the noise of running had died away, silence ruled in the thicket. He stared at his extended hand, his face grew pensive, almost somber, and then he started toward the water as if looking for his lost mate. Dávid’s pants were too tight and too short on him. He waded into the peaceful water up to the top of his thighs and still he was looking at his empty hands. On his pimply face appeared that certain smile indicating that he knew what he had to do.

Using both hands at once, he disturbed the peace of the water’s surface.

He found the most reliable trace, yet he did not get to what he was looking for. Once the surface was smooth again, he repeated the movement; water and the palms of his hands splashed noisily.

He stared stiffly at his strongly arched hands and with tilted head listened to the sounds. His excited nerves were searching for a comparison, but there is no comparison without memory. As when one feels that something is about to pop into one’s mind, except that with this feeling one cannot comprehend one’s mind because the direct connection between feelings and mind has been severed.

Movement and the sound of movement became the comparison of his inability to remember.

He had discovered in the other human being something that he could not otherwise have realized in himself.

Excitedly he was looking for it between the good and the bad; the unceasing slaps of his palms on the water, speeded by impatience, threw him back to where he would have hastened if he could have remembered. He repeated the movement until the urge to urinate deflected his attention. Although the fly of his pants was open, like a wedge-shaped hole, he did not reach into it until he stopped urinating and the stain on the pants touched the water. Perhaps his hand was led by aggressive angels. He watched the urine stain on his thighs reach the water and then he took out his weenie, shrunk to the size of a child’s. Those angels, like humans, were pushing and pulling the foreskin on it, which made the member’s little hollows fill with blood. It kept growing. They flashed across his mind the lights of another world to make him not worry about what he had lost or could not find. They took away from the dimness of this world as much as they gave from the light of the other world.

Thus did they take away from him what Dávid had left in him of the secret madness of his countenance. For the sake of total forgetting, they even returned a little bit of his memories.

He caught sight of himself crawling along the edge of a deep ditch. At the bottom of the ditch lay a kitchen alarm clock, still ticking, but while with his ten fingers he scraped decaying fallen leaves to cover it up, it slowly stopped.

Nobody should see what he had done to the alarm clock, nobody should hear of his sin.

I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to, he shouted as his foster father beat him with his belt, beating him bloody. His foster mother followed with screams, but not because she wanted to protect him. His foster father’s belt buckle hit his thighs, waist, and back; the man hit anything he could reach.

And he kept scraping the decaying leaves, unto his sin, until it grew dark with the lunatic brightness.

An ambulance took him away in the middle of the night while, his lips turned blue, he was still thrashing about and shouting, frothy saliva flying, I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to do it.

Mighty was the struggle the angels put up for him and with him, and it tired him so much he could barely drag his dripping limbs to the shore.

They were lurching, staggering with him, tugging at him; their eyes were frightened by the indifferent sunshine. They tottered into the thicket, helplessly going around in circles with him, until they found a comfortable place under a bush where they would put him to sleep.

That is why his pursuer could find his abandoned sandals on the empty shore.

While they were shouting back and forth, hunting for footprints, finding fresh ones, he slept sweetly in his hiding place.

This is how it happened; all of this did happen. While the pastor found that no matter how much he had thought about all this, Creation’s logic would remain hidden from him. An uncomfortable time had gone by since Dávid went outside without a word. The pastor sat in the dark for hours, praying, and now it felt good to rest his thoughts on Dávid’s disobedience.

If they find the tramp, they might kill him.

His prayers led him nowhere.

What a mean, useless child, he thought. Didn’t I tell him to urinate inside the house. Now I must go looking for him.

What he could be grateful for to his God was that they found only some footprints and could not kill him.

When he had returned home the evening before, greatly agitated by his defeat and having found no prayer with which to calm his primitive hatred, he decided that, citing illnesses, he would ask his bishop to let him retire. Why in the world does that good-for-nothing kid want to piss outside all the time. There will be no problem, the bishop never thought much of the pastor’s temperament or service. Varró was a man of great learning, the bishop admitted, but he preferred to use brawn rather than brain; that was the sum of his opinion. But he mentioned this only to his secretary. He did this on purpose because the secretary worked for the state security services and the bishop knew it.

If he carefully conveyed information to them through the secretary, in time he received a correct and practical response.

Varró kept his mouth shut, the bishop could be pleased about that, but he bluntly refused to cooperate with state officials, behavior that the bishop had both approved privately and several times taken exception to publicly. Because of the pastor’s executed son, the bishop had had to face the music at the ministry of religion.

A week later, in the presence of the bishop, the secretary was ruminating over the abstract doctrinal question whether a Christian, having to choose between ecclesiastical solidarity and national interest, shouldn’t give preference to the latter.

The bishop replied without batting an eye that for a man belonging to any of the reformed churches, the two interests could not be in conflict.

This silent battle had been going on for years.

Finally state officials tried stealthily to have the village presbyters turn against the pastor and send him away on some pretext.

The physician’s wife and the secretary of the local party council were called in several times for so-called conversations, which is to say the two were taken, in a car with government license plates, to a secret-service apartment in Szentendre. The physician’s wife had a nervous breakdown, she did not stop crying and kept asking why, but why. The bishop would not stand for such strong-arm tactics in his diocese. He was also a member of the secret society then trying, under the guise of willing cooperation and tactical accommodation, to alleviate some of the damage caused by the Russian regime.

Thus he had to make some very sensitive concessions in order to gain some indulgence from government authorities in Varró’s case.

Varró knew very little of this, except that from then on his bishop was even more annoyed with him. He took it amiss when in 1957 the pastor’s son was hanged and not even given a proper grave. Because of his attitude, Varró assumed that the bishop sided with the government officials after all or perhaps worked directly for them, that that was the true state of affairs.

And he could not deny that he revived the idea of his own retirement after hearing the lamentable life story of the retired prison guard. But what tranquillity would he find in retirement, having failed to find any in his life. The only correct deed of his life would be to give up his calling, because then he’d cease deluding himself or others about being able to serve them honorably.

Just as his bishop wanted to be rid of him, it was good for him too to be free of himself.

Yet the way he thought about these matters differed greatly from the bishop’s thinking. Because the bishop kept the church’s interest, which is to say its principle of utility, in the forefront of his mind, for him the borders between tactical accommodation and forced cooperation were blurred. Varró, however, did not believe that what was useful or unavoidable was necessarily moral, and this pagan thought positively tortured him. The only deed that might please God, he imagined, would be if once, just once, he could convey to one other soul his own true feelings. And by this he meant the sheer human readiness for faith, which had appeared in him on an overcast day under the mighty sky when he was a small child and had accompanied him ever since. Faith justified truth; faith was also the test of true feelings, not the other way around. Until he could conjure up at least the necessity of faith for another human being, he could not retire; without that he would find no rest.

By retiring, he would only be doing a favor to his bishop or to some bigwig officials, which for him was the same thing.

So what was he to do, then. He did not delude himself into imagining that he was at some sort of turning point in his life. He had long known that the living agony always seeks a timely handle, and that is when it begins to eat away at faith.

Tension of the mind could be increased to the extreme, and that is how thinking considered to have some utility deflected his attention from his agony.

In certain cases he did not use his mind, precisely because he did not want to think about the world the way his bishop did.

Because he saw with alarm what his prayers were like. He did profit from them, the profit was personal, nothing else. With prayer he diverted his attention from his exhausted thinking and found himself ever farther from the agony that never ceased.

What could take him farther from the mercy of suffering, the only balm of the wretched, if not the cunning double-dealing of the life force.

He stood up to see about his grandson. Given the chaos of his soul, it was always a relief to see the innocence in the boy’s face. Even though he knew that at the boy’s age innocence was mainly illusory.

He looked for him everywhere and kept returning to the entrance to his office.

The tipcarts at the distant mine kept moving with their even creaking, and he knew the men working them were prisoners.

He did not want to shout. He stopped at the end of the brick walk, from there he only watched, did not want to disturb the boy or step on the dewy grass, he waited for him.

Softly he called his name.

The boy’s pajama-covered back moved under the moonlight, and he straightened up; slowly they walked toward each other.

The pastor remembered exactly what repulsive effect the overripe odor of adult bodies had had on him when he was a child. He worried about the boy; he would have preferred to know of his every step, though he knew he could not protect him from all the dangers lurking around him. He did not touch his grandchild carelessly. The slap the day before and the hug the day before that were the results of exhausted feelings.

He asked the boy why he’d once again refused to be obedient.

Alternating between complaints and excuses, Dávid deflected the rebuke; it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it if he’d had another bad dream.

Seriously, almost with scientific interest, they looked at the glossed-over feelings in each other’s eyes, visible in the bluish glow of the darkness. The pastor wanted to see the bad dreams. And Dávid well remembered the exhortation about what he should and shouldn’t do if he wanted to have pleasant dreams. He did not do the forbidden things anymore. He had some mild pangs because of them. Now they let it go at this; they knew their duties and without a word, walking side by side, returned to the office.

The pastor closed the glass-paned door but did not turn the key in the lock.

I didn’t have any bad dreams, said the pastor quietly and hesitantly, but frankly I couldn’t sleep either.

Dávid stopped near the door. His grandfather did not usually talk about himself. In the warm stuffy darkness he could smell the old furniture.

Sit down, please, said the pastor, with barely perceptible embarrassment. You must know there are some sleepless nights in everyone’s life.

It felt good to say this, though he did not think the confession was quite proper. It was as if in the guise of honesty, he was bragging about his weakness.

Then, with slow steps, they pleasantly cracked the sensitive silence taking shape between them.

The darkness told Dávid that this situation was real; this time there would be no scolding. Relieved, he groped for a bench, and as he lowered himself to it he felt gratitude to the night. The pastor sat at the harmonium, automatically pulling the stool close to the instrument. Under his foot the worn pedal of the bellows creaked and the harmonium’s innards began to groan and rattle. This beginning, meant to be playful, struggled with an insistent clattering until the aged instrument found its proper breath in the familiar melody of the psalm.

It was an unassuming little melody, moving in a limited range. It never ended, only returned to its starting point. After the third repetition, the pastor shouted in a terrifying voice.

They kill widows and orphans, he sang.

He did not trust his powerful sonorous bass to the arc of sounds summoned from the old mechanism, he did not fight the unpleasant noises, he gave voice to the darkness. At the same time his hands continued the tune, ignoring his shout. When he raked the tune through the lousy pipes of his instrument for the seventh time, his voice thundered with the shards splintered from the melody.

Suffers everything in silence, in silence.

With loud shouts, he informed his God that he suffered everything in silence.

And while the pastor thus sang out his most sensitive theological worries for his grandson to hear, Balter, sitting on his chair, quietly fell asleep in the doorway of his house.

Whatever had been written in advance, whatever had to happen, happened only on the following night.

In his sleep he plopped into the lap of that young girl whom he did not remember but who kept coming back to him from his childhood. The ice-cold light of the moon no longer tormented him. Carefully it went away from the back of his neck, leaving him alone with the weight of the young girl’s head. He was awakened by the creaking of the tipcarts at the distant mine, though he did not know when or where. Prisoners doing work outside the prison were brought over around this time in a special transport. He lay on the floor where he had fallen from his chair in his sleep. He seemed to hear the stamping of their feet at the ferry. The shifts at the Dunabogdány quarry were changed once a week but, straining his memory as he lay there, Balter could not remember what day it was.

He recalled only that the change happened on Tuesday nights.

It was dawning out there in the threat-filled deep-gray landscape.

They herded them across the island, then across the bridge, and then up the mountain.

During the entire day ahead of him, he must find an answer to the question of how the footprints could go from the trunk of the apricot tree to the low-lying dirt road when there were no footprints leading to the apricot tree. Naturally he could find no explanation.

When the police officers told him later, he nodded, smiling gently at his own stupidity.

When he reached the dirt road, he could still make out the contours of the footprints, but after a few steps they disappeared, dissolved in the sand, and he stood there foolishly before the mystery.

He placed his foot in the tramp’s last footprint and stared stiffly as he saw a perfect match.

He preferred to continue being thirsty than to venture farther from his house. He listened long into the silence of early dawn with the birds waking; would he hear the prisoners marching from the direction of the paved road. As he walked he pulled the rake across his every footprint.

He preserved only the footprints leading from the trunk of the apricot tree to the dirt road, signs left by the son who was planning to kill him. It also occurred to him that perhaps a prisoner thirsting for revenge had been prowling around him.

He drank from the water he had used two days earlier to steam the string beans. The jars, wrapped in newspaper and old clothes, were still standing in the big dishwashing pot; some of them stayed there for good.

Shortly after the midday bell he left the house after all and followed his son’s footprints. He knew these tracks well and hoped to discover new ones farther off. He felt like crying when he thought of the many occasions he had taken the little toes of his kicking baby son into his mouth.

He hid the rake in the thick prickly blackthorns by the side of the dirt road.

Perhaps chance led him this way, perhaps predestination; at any rate he wound up at the pond. He had heard about it but had never seen it before for himself. The picket lay there, the one he had seen once before in the presbyter’s hand. Two nails were sticking out of it. It was an old piece of rain-beaten wood with brand-new nails. He thought about that for a long time, could not decide whether to touch it. As if he had to decide to what power he should entrust himself. He could not comprehend what sort of connection the pastor and the presbyter could have had with his son. Even though the picket lay there as clear proof of this close connection.

Then he decided to go for sure; he took the picket with him.

A few days later, when the unforeseen events were reconstructed, the presbyter could corroborate Balter’s confession. He was the one, indeed, who had forgotten the picket and left it there when he found Dávid’s sandals at the edge of the thicket. Later this corroborating evidence gained decisive significance. Because if the old piece of wood had not belonged to the presbyter and Balter could have quickly hammered the two nails into it, then not only the intent of his deed would have become provable but also its particular cruelty.

The presbyter had already removed the old pickets of his fence when he realized he might not have enough new pickets. He had to replace the old bent nails on the old pickets with new ones. To make sure they wouldn’t be loose in the old holes, he hammered one in a little higher and the other a little lower than the old holes. Experts found his testimony truthful. The pastor had called to him just as he was about to refit the picket, but he took it along with him because without a weapon one never knew what might happen in an encounter with a tramp.

No, he would not have hit him with it, because of the nails.

Balter gave his account of everything without hesitation.

He caused some difficulty with his behavior only when he had to relate the immediate circumstances of the deed.

It’s lucky the culprit was not my son, he repeated gently, smiling with great satisfaction, very lucky, that is my great luck.

They attributed his words to his inevitable confusion.

At the time when the offense was committed, fallen apricots almost completely covered the ground, and more kept falling. The investigating policemen picked up undamaged apricots a few times and ate them.

Balter did not deny the deed; therefore his hazy details or gratuitous smiles did not hinder the investigation in the least. The police dutifully contacted Budapest and let their colleagues in the Zugló precinct see what they could find in the Balters’ apartment in Turul Street, but for a long time they had no response. Not only the new uneven spots on the ground and the abundant bloodstains smeared everywhere, but also the trampled thick pulp of apricots were sufficient evidence of a struggle between the two men.

To re-create the events of that night they had to rely on marks that could be mapped exactly. Based on the injuries caused at different times, the coroner estimated that the perpetrator dragged the body into his house about four hours after the death. Balter confirmed this. Outside it was getting light all right, that’s for sure, he said, smiling gently.

But it was still night inside his house.

He did not light the kerosene lamp, he explained; instead he ate everything edible he could find in the dark. That means you had to step over the body several times, the policemen noted. That’s right, he agreed, he did not deny that he went to the pantry for food and then back to the table because that is where he ate his meals. First he ate what had been left over from the string beans seasoned with garlic, but he did not want to lie, he was still hungry. He went to the pantry again. He had one and a half dry Csaba sausages, which he ate with three scallions but without bread. He went to the pantry a third time, he does not want to lie, and put away a full packet of sweet biscuits while standing there.

Then you must have been looking at the body, man, while you ate, said the policemen, because you were standing right above it.

He doesn’t want to lie, he replied, smiling gently, that’s right, that’s how it happened. At the kitchen table he also polished off three cubes of processed cheese. He ate them sitting down, the way he ate the sausage. He peeled the skin off the sausage, because he can’t eat anything with the skin on, not even sausages.

The empty saucepan with the spoon in it was still there on the stove, next to the dishwashing pot. On the table tops of scallions, bits of sausage skin, the large knife, the biscuits’ torn, empty cellophane wrap, shreds of tinfoil torn off the cubes of processed cheese.

But to the question what he had been doing between 11:30 in the evening and 3:30 in the morning, Balter could not give an acceptable answer.

Maybe I fell asleep, he said with his gentle uncertain smile.

During those hours, of course, it became lighter in the house, still warm from the previous day’s heat, where, the policemen assumed, Balter had to smell the odor emanating from the torn flesh.

He smelled it; he did, for sure.

At dawn he took off his clothes.

He did not put his soiled pants and shirt with the rest of his laundry but on the kitchen chair, properly folded and rolled into a package. He took a few bottles out of the dishwashing pot and dipped his towel into the water from which he had been drinking, very economically, for two days. A little bit was still left at the bottom. He squeezed out the towel, not to waste any, and that’s how he washed off the stains from his hands, face, and neck.

He would not say bloodstains.

Those stains came off easily enough; sweet apricot is much harder to wash off, because it is sweet and sticky as honey. He had to dip and squeeze out the towel several times.

But you saw, man, didn’t you, that everything was becoming bloody.

He did; he doesn’t want to lie.

The bloodstained towel had dried in the meantime; they found bloody water in the dishwashing pot.

Truth was, he didn’t pay much attention to that because he was in a hurry. He washed off most of it, wanted to catch the first ferry. It leaves at 4:40 unless someone requests a special trip.

He would not have wanted to wake up the ferrymen for a special trip.

He put on the same white shirt, the same dark suit in which he had taken leave of his mates on the Vác shore to take the first ferry in this direction.

He carefully locked the house with the body inside.

The sleepy ferrymen noticed nothing unusual about him.

On the far side, at the end of the landing dock, a young woman waited for them that summer dawn. She had a medium-size suitcase in her hand. Halfway across, the navigator had already noticed that little Melinda was coming home. With irrepressible joy he passed the news to the ticket taker. Until the side of the ferryboat bumped against the landing dock, the two men wondered why she was arriving at such an unusual time. They could see that she maintained her smile, though she seemed a bit sleepy. The ticket taker did not tie up the ferry and the navigator did not even shut off the engine, rather they both began to shout to her, asking her to get on board, they’d take her across on a special trip.

Balter the murderer stepped off the boat without saying good-bye, and the lovely girl got on, laughing. The special trip across the river carried Dávid’s sister, who had thought out well in advance what she would say to the ferrymen and to her grandfather, and how she would satisfy her kid brother’s curiosity.

Balter broke out in a sweat, but nothing happened during the early morning crossing, and the ferrymen certainly did not ask him anything. Later, shrugging their shoulders, they said they had figured he’d been called in to his former workplace. He probably could use a supplement to his pension. As soon as he stepped off the ferry, he removed his jacket and with a youthful motion threw it over his shoulder. He walked up the paved shore like that. There was no one on the street that led him back to the prison.

The single opening in the endless, ancient, three-story-high stone wall was a small steel door. For security reasons, the former driveway had been walled off sometime in the 1950s, but the nicely carved baroque frame of the main gate was left in the wall. He would have thought it improper to show up with the jacket over his shoulder. He put it on at the personnel entrance before he rang the bell. Shortly, an eye appeared in the peephole and the door opened invitingly.

The prison guards, his former pals, received Balter with frenzied enthusiasm. Their riotous shouting lured more of them out of the building and into the guardroom; they all touched him, patted him on the back, laughing, bantering, and he naturally did not respond. The men found nothing unusual about this since they had never known him to be talkative. They pushed him onto a chair, and he, seeing the joy of so many strong men, smiled gently.

Suddenly he remembered something he found funny enough to tell as a little joke.

Is that female rat still coming around, he asked them.

He turned very quietly to them with this question, which magnified its effect. They marveled at him, as at some sage who sooner or later will touch on the main point. This was an offhand remark made among guards, convicts serving severe sentences, and newly arrived prisoners.

Of course they didn’t talk about it in regular conversations. Real men don’t talk about matters of the heart. Only a few words, whispered through clenched teeth, and the terrifying thought would begin to take root in the minds of new prisoners.

Don’t take it hard, partner, thus the old boys to newly arrived ones, at least we have rats here.

This was a team game that sometimes even a rat could not avoid. The prison guards with their dogs were meant to catch rats alive, or they’d help in the hunt, which is no mean entertainment and — the most important thing — not without danger.

It was something they had to do, anyway, when the rats grew too numerous in the food depot or came over en masse in the drainpipes from the bishop’s palace, helped by a high water level.

Once we had a braggart here who could take it for twenty years. He didn’t want to go for the pitcher, you see, but he did get to like one of them good-looking females.

You won’t believe it, goddamn it, but there’s always a meek one among them who gets hooked on it.

All you’ve got to tell a newly arrived convict in the dark is that if she comes just shove it in and let her have it.

Sleep eventually overcomes the terrible dreams on those first nights, and when that happens, in with the rat under the cover.

When the guffawing died down, all he said was that he killed him.

They could not stop their wild laughter right away since they did not know this new version of the prank. But they did know that Balter and his wife had been living in a murderous relationship all their lives, in other words that they had a bad marriage.

Now they saw the strange yellow mud that was stuck to his shoes, saw that his suit hung loosely on his frighteningly scraggy body.

All he wanted from them was to call the warden.

They remained quiet, no one dared do this since none of them saw any reason for or sense in doing it.

Once in a while one lets his wife have a good one, or even beats her up. The next day, or a week later, they make up with a lot of tears and promises, and that’s when women screw best.

While they were thinking about this, they had to notice the hitherto unfamiliar smile on Balter’s suspiciously dirty and unshaven face; until then they had seen that kind of gentleness only on the faces of strangers.

He reached into his pocket for his house key and put it on the table. The telephone was right there on the guardroom table, but it did not occur to anyone to take steps while Balter was sitting there.

They were quiet, looking at him, afraid even to light up. After a while it became impossible not to believe he had killed somebody.

But a long time passed before one of them finally left the room.

From that moment on he answered all their questions from behind his kindly smile.

When the guard came back and stopped by the door, prepared to take him to the warden, Balter readily followed him.




The Lover of Her Beauty


The expensive things strewn on the floor, the brand-new work clothes missing from the hook, and the fine yellow leather shoes kicked to where the stinking ankle boots used to be caused no small headache for the Gypsies. Never in their lives had they seen such yellow leather shoes.

How did they get here; who made Tuba’s work boots disappear.

Nevertheless they went back to work.

Although not everything was in perfect order they could not stop. If only because the tar was melting, boiling, bubbling in the cauldron, and they were being paid by area of repairs completed.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky; the big machine was puffing.

Usually they did not talk while working, but their silence now became bitter and agitated. They were also affected by the beer they’d drunk at the nearby roadside food stall, as if at a friendly celebration, in the company of their Hungarian foreman, an older man named Bizsók.

The work team had five members.

A kid named Jakab stoked the fire of the machine; he also handled the cauldron’s feeder. He was a tall, puny young man, still an adolescent. The stubble above his overly thick lips and on his round, childlike chin was more like fuzz; on his well-shaped shiny skull one could see that it was no barber who had sheared him so mercilessly. One fine early morning he’d awakened to find his limbs tied to the bed while a pair of scissors went snipping around his head. In vain he shouted and implored them to let him go; in vain he yanked at the straps as hard as he could, which was not very hard, or hurled terrible curses at the men. They told him, stop jumping around unless you want scabs on your pretty mug. They lathered his head and shaved it smooth.

He let them work the razor; he was afraid, trembling, he endured it, sniveling; not very manly of him, but he cried.

Now his large dark eyes were again filling with so many glistening tears that he could barely see what he had to do. Two men pushed their metal wheelbarrows under the feeder. The iron sizzled and sputtered as the boiling tar flowed into the barrow, the hub creaked and grated under the hot weight.

The two men with the wheelbarrows were brothers, both of them mature men with families; they resembled each other too — skinny, hairless, black, and small. Muscles hardened into knots kept their backs curved even when they were not wheeling their barrows. They wore cotton work pants, long faded from too much light and too much washing, asbestos gloves on their hands, and wood-soled clogs on their feet. One was László, the other Imre, but nobody called them by their first names. If somebody asked for Téglás, everyone knew the caller was referring to Imre, the younger brother, since the older one hardly ever said anything and one could not talk to him as to a human being. But Imre talked a lot, quickly and enthusiastically, so there was no point in addressing the other brother, not even by his family name. He acted as if he were mute, yet he enjoyed laughing at things and one could tell from the roguish squints in his eyes that he knew what was what. As small children they had slept by their father’s side, curled into each other. As part of the world’s natural order the smaller boy nestles into the lap of the bigger one. The smallest boy was always pressed closest to the father, clinging to the large body with his tiny hands, and the other boys, in order of birth, curled into one another. Their mother and sisters were available to the boys only in the light of day; this was the strict moral code. But where was the mud-walled, sod-lined shanty, half dug into the ground, with its handsome, carefully built little oven and the always spick-and-span cooking plate. How many years ago did their parents die. Nevertheless the strict law of birth succession still ruled the boys’ relationships. Death too they could imagine only as they did the red-hot, empty cooking plate when there was nothing to cook.

Whatever laughing László did, crackbrained Imre did as well; he couldn’t help it. But if Imre, head and arms flying in all directions, began to pour out all those superfluous words, László would accompany the many sentences with the lazy nod of an experienced man. The truth of the younger brother was reinforced by the prestige of the older. Bizsók also noticed that the older brother never questioned the younger one’s word when they were around Hungarians; at most he’d busy himself with something else.

Perhaps it was only that eternally valid difference in the depths of their souls that made their furrowed faces slightly different.

In a state of constant readiness, his eyes wide, Imre concentrated on what the right thing was to say, while the older Téglás brother knew what they should do.

They ran as they pushed the wheelbarrows heavy with the hot molten material, and then they emptied them with a single quick lift, neatly tipping them over; sizzling and sputtering, the tar oozing out in front of Tuba, who with wide leisurely strokes of his very heavy leveling blade smoothed out any lumps in the hot mass, kneeling then squatting then kneeling again. He worked with incredible elegance and absolute inner discipline. The fifth man on the team, Bizsók, was both their mechanic and their supervisor. Sometimes he would check with his level and other instruments on a half-finished job when it was still possible to make corrections if need be, but the judgment of Tuba’s eyes seldom disappointed him. This Bizsók was the oldest and, by the nature of things, most consequential member of the team. The Gypsies idolized him for his fairness, though they had his weak points pegged as well. Sometimes among themselves they would contemptuously call him dumb peasant. Because it was not his work, not even his nice family, but his apple orchard that meant everything to him. He’d hardly have gotten home from work after a long train ride when he’d head straight for his orchard; he never stopped working. The Gypsies considered him a wastrel, a man who’d wasted his life for the sake of unpredictable profits. If the road construction company, which covered half the country, hadn’t urgently needed every skilled hand it could get, and if Bizsók hadn’t had the sense of duty he had, he could have retired, but as an old-fashioned man he considered the world’s anonymous needs as a law governing his personal life.

He kept at both his job and his apple orchard for the same reason, though he couldn’t have expressed in words what his compulsion was.

And the Gypsies certainly couldn’t have told him what to do differently.

Since both his grown sons had built their own houses, many different jobs awaited him, and him alone, in his enormous bountiful orchard. Occasionally he even helped his foster daughter, though because of her foreign blood he was a little afraid of her. Bizsók was rational and somewhat reserved, a man whose circumstances had taught him sensible husbandry, so he created order for himself out of whatever was at his disposal. He came from one of the most deprived areas of the Alföld, but he’d never thought of himself as poor among the truly poor. He couldn’t, in any case, because a man in a Tiszahát-region village with two threshing machines to his name was considered a rich man in those days. He had inherited one machine from his father before the war, the other he received when he came home from a POW camp, from the bequest of a Jewish thresher who had perished in the war. It did not take long before both machines were taken away from him, and thereafter he had lived away from his family.

He left because he couldn’t swallow the insult of being ordered about at the collective farm’s machine and tractor station by his former day laborers, the very men who’d been responsible for taking his expensive threshing machines away from him.

Sitting in the high saddle of the steamroller, his arms resting on the steering wheel, he watched his men from behind his thick glasses. These round spectacles were surely a peculiar old item. The ravages of time had turned the translucent frame yellow, and it seemed to have become organically fused with the dark, sunburned cushions of his fleshy face. A battery may run down, an axle may wear out, the cohesive tension in the molecules of artificial materials may diminish, but he had a hard time giving up his longing for eternity even when it concerned only a pair of glasses. Not for himself, not for his family, but on the roads and in his apple orchard he worked for eternity, or at least against mortality.

For years this reasonable and experienced man had been conducting a quiet battle against the natural fate of his glasses. He could not have cherished his own life more; as a soldier and a prisoner of war he’d learned not to value life too much, but he treated his glasses with a circumspect caution bordering on madness that he never accorded himself or others.

The best place for his glasses was on the wide bridge of his slightly flattened nose, where he could nourish its material, in the perishing cold of winter and in the heat of summer, with the warmth of his skin and the fine grease of his perspiring pores. He never removed his glasses unnecessarily. Not even when walking from the cold air into a warm place, which fogged up the lenses. He owned something he could protect only by touching it as rarely as possible. He was content with his fate too, as long as he didn’t think about it.

István Bizsók was the full name of the man with the glasses.

The road builders hauled two gray trailers with them to their jobs; they never built a new road, only repaired existing ones, doing their share to keep the old highways in working order. Among themselves they called one trailer the office because under the barred window was a small table covered with wrapping paper on which Bizsók kept drawings of road sections to be repaired, plans and accounts relating to the expected materials to be used, warehouse receipt-books, work logs, workers’ time sheets, a ruler, a few pencils, and an eraser, but nothing else. Empty pay envelopes were kept in the drawer, which had a working lock. Next to the door stood the stove on which they cooked supper in the fall and early spring months or on rainy summer days.

In the dim far end of the trailer Bizsók had his bed, which was considered comfortable. The second trailer served as quarters for the four Gypsies.

Sometimes they set up the two trailers perpendicularly to each other, creating a small courtyard, and sometimes they had the trailers parallel and facing, making a small street for their communal life.

They picked carefully the locations where they settled. What sorts of folk lived in the area, were their dogs wild, what was close to them, what was farther away. Gypsies from the Alföld traditionally did not consider peasants as human and they feared them as they did wild animals. But Tuba came from Transdanubia, from the boundary region on the shores of the Mura river, and things were different with him; he also behaved differently with Hungarians. He knew ethnic Croatians, Serbs, and Slavs, and he claimed they were even wilder and crueler than Hungarians. Because a Hungarian, when he’s alone, is a coward, but these others are wild even when they have no help from anywhere. Bizsók had to be on guard to see that the locals did not blame the Gypsies when something went missing. They had to know the directions the wind blew, where there was water, where the nearest well was. For some time now he had been relying on Tuba’s judgment to answer these questions. János Tuba was the first Gypsy to be hired on this work team; other Gypsies then joined up as Hungarian workers slowly left the company. Later, Bizsók brought in the Téglás brothers and in turn they brought their hapless sister’s son, poor little Jakab, who had been with them for only a few weeks.

Hungarians did not work at such hard and ill-paid jobs.

When Tuba joined the team, he had scarcely been older than Jakab was now. The other men hadn’t wanted a Gypsy on their team for anything in the world, but because of his appearance and behavior they just swallowed hard. They did not even discuss among themselves whether they should say no to Bizsók’s choice. As things turned out, Bizsók made an effort to get to know these Gypsies, but he did not really succeed. And he couldn’t even be absolutely sure that his foster daughter, Gyöngyvér Mózes, for whom, at his wife’s urging, he might buy an apartment in Budapest, was not a Gypsy herself. She sang nicely, and it was probably her blood that drove her into the arms of so many different men. Even if she did not bring every one of them home with her. They had found out, or heard, that Ágost Lippay was no longer with her; he’d run away from her while they were abroad somewhere, and now she was with some poet who had helped her to get radio work. In time, Bizsók realized that every Gypsy was different.

But he did not know what to do with this realization of his.

Actually he should have; after all, he had been together with Gypsies in the POW camp. Whether or not she was a Gypsy, he balked at buying the apartment, yet he could not say no to this little woman.

The Gypsies had customs he did not comprehend but instinctively felt it was best not to pry into.

They had heard Gyöngyvér sing on the radio twice, on Sunday mornings, old folk songs, accompanied on original instruments. She bent and stretched her voice and made it tremble. Bizsók did not like it at all.

He liked Vera Jákó more; she sang regular Hungarian songs.

And then there was this Jakab whom the others had sheared bald for some reason.

Bizsók heard what they were doing, saw that the boy’s curls were gone, but he did not interfere.

They’re young, that’s the time for foolishness.

When the giant Tuba joined them one summer, in the great heat Bizsók ordered the men to park the two trailers in the shade of a gigantic, solitary tree. Tuba had just mustered out of the army, along with a friend who was with him and who also was a well-built strapping lad, probably not a Gypsy.

And he said that before the army he had never worked anywhere.

Which made a big impression on the others. Bizsók did not like to remember this.

And how excited this calm boy, this János Tuba, became when he said, right in front of the others, that lightning might easily hit that big tree. He flouted Bizsók’s authority not with opposition but with excitement. If they didn’t steer clear of trees like this, then the lightning wouldn’t steer clear of them. And he turned his dark frowning face away not only from the men but also from the gigantic, solitary tree. He moved among them with his head bent as if his prediction might come true at any moment, as indeed it did two days later.

They never talked of these events among themselves, not then or later. But Bizsók could not forget the centuries-old giant tree splitting in half right before their eyes. How with a frightful clap the brilliant light struck among them, and its flame, sizzling and whimpering with living sap, burst up to the sky raging in the darkness.

And who could tell what Tuba remembered or forgot or what he was thinking about all the time.

The man fascinated everyone, not just with his size and behavior but mainly with his beauty.

What anyone could see with his own eyes was, oddly, the thing everyone chose to keep quiet about. Perhaps it was better that way. Beauty is not something worth talking about with anyone. Bizsók had the reputation of a man who loved fairness and equality. Then why would he concern himself with another man’s looks. Everybody should do his job properly, that was all that counted. Some people believed he was a member of some sect in the Alföld, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Anabaptists. It was rumored that Anabaptists had to immerse themselves, one after the other and stark naked, in the waters of the Tisza or the Túr, at midnight, while other members provided light with tar torches. Of course, the compelling characteristic of a good reputation is that it binds to the person concerned even if that person hasn’t the slightest inclination to be fair, say, or even if the notion of equality goes contrary to his personal interests.

Bizsók treated others with unusual consideration, so his men counted on his considerateness and wouldn’t have allowed him to be inconsiderate.

It was also rumored that men and women did this contemptible obscene thing together in the Tisza and the Túr. And they took young girls there too.

They too could feast their eyes on my old man’s balls.

Bizsók knew that no matter what people believed or said, there was no one who knew more about old machines and motors than he did. Maybe as much as he, but not more. Since there wasn’t a whit of show-off in him, he remained modest about his knowledge. Whenever he became absorbed in his work and the irrelevant sounds receded from him, in the pleasant giddiness of work he caught himself feeling on his hand and on the nape of his neck the weight of his father’s stern regard. He did everything as his father taught him, perhaps the way his father had learned from his father, stealthily watching him work. But he could not hide from his father the new techniques he developed using his own common sense. He had to introduce these methods in defiance of the paternal surveillance, as it were.

Or perhaps it wasn’t that he felt something but that suddenly his neck began to itch and he had to turn around.

These moments became even more peculiar if it turned out a live person was observing him.

In Tuba’s silently observant huge eyes, Bizsók discovered his own hungry childhood face. Whereupon he reverted to being the unpleasant but reliable father, the eternal master who keeps on teaching his sons. He had never bothered with his sons as much as he did with Tuba. And though he wouldn’t officially give his name to his foster daughter for anything in the world, and would have preferred to pay for only half of her apartment, no more, yet he loved her more than he did his boys. Passion is not something a man can will; at most he can be on the lookout for it and make sure it won’t engulf him.

In everything that required extraordinary physical strength, inventiveness, or quick-wittedness, this young man was better.

For example, nobody could light a fire out in the open more adroitly than he. The wind could be blowing, rain falling, no matter how wet the firewood was, his fires burned clear and smokeless. He knew which wind carried rain, how the shade would shift, what the arc of the birds’ flight meant, which well had stale water, and, when necessary, what could be made out of what.

He was also the first to find common ground for trust with strangers, even though everyone was averse to Jews and Gypsies.

Or they’d hardly have arrived at a new place when he’d be bringing to his fellow workers a capful of mushrooms, wild strawberries, and pigeon eggs, and rolling them out for the others.

Bizsók did everything to keep the men from seeing how deeply this touched him.

During the last months, when on quiet evenings, having stared at the dying fire’s random flames for long minutes under the majestic night sky and the stars spread over them, and then amid groans and yawns and cracking of numbed joints they turned in, Bizsók closed his trailer door feeling he had failed to take care of something important.

Perhaps because in his family he had taken care of almost everything.

The fire’s heat and light fed a feeling of closeness among them, but this could be sensed only when the fire died and it became dark and cold and they missed the closeness.

Neither here nor anywhere else did they have a home.

As he listened to the sound of thumping feet, various thuds and seemingly endless murmurs and rummaging about, Bizsók contentedly acknowledged that their place was too small for the Gypsies. His contentment had to do with his privileged position, and perhaps there is no just man who doesn’t find his enjoyable privileges flattering.

Somehow he had to consider himself to be a little above the others.

To do this, he sometimes considered himself better because he was their supervisor and mechanic, sometimes because he was older, sometimes because he was Hungarian, and sometimes because, to his great good luck, he was not a Catholic.

They were all lonely here, so much so that they couldn’t accustom themselves to other people anymore, couldn’t share their loneliness with others. But they were also used to the fact that in their loneliness they lived in close proximity to their fellow workers’ loneliness. Although he enjoyed his small rightful privileges very much, with passing years Bizsók began to miss, especially in the night hours, the special silent attention of another person. As he locked himself in his trailer every night, he’d sometimes think that tomorrow he’d take care of this too. To spell it out, what he meant was that he should make up for what he’d missed or neglected. First thing tomorrow morning he’d move this other man’s bed into his trailer. He was thinking not of Tuba, not of sharing his privileges, but of Tuba’s bed.

He had already picked out a place for the bed.

We’d be much more comfortable like this, he would say bashfully on that imagined tomorrow morning.

The Gypsies shouldn’t be so cramped.

When talking to himself, he addressed Tuba as if he were not a Gypsy. In the mornings the dangerous proposition would lurk in the back of his mind because, ever since Jakab had started working with them, the day began very rambunctiously in the other trailer. Luckily, by afternoon he’d forget what he had wanted and didn’t remember it until going to bed again. What he envied was not their rambunctiousness but something indefinable. Actually, he could have said it out loud, for now there was no other Hungarian on the team from whom he’d have to hide his generosity and love of humankind.

He imagined the festive moment; they would all be together. He imagined the deep silence that would follow his words. But it was precisely the image of this pampered silence that kept him from finding an appropriate occasion for the needed words.

They knew everything about each other, or almost everything.

Behind János Tuba stood his dead grandfather who had raised him until he was twelve. Everything he knew he knew from him — his concentration, the broad arcs of his movements; he learned his ease and dignity from him too. His grandfather had neither land nor house; there was nothing anyone could take from him. No one had given him anything for free, either, but he had a fine axe, a good gouging hoe, and a few homemade curved and straight-blade knives. From early spring until the first snowfall the two of them roamed the villages along the Mura. Tuba very seldom saw the inside of a school when his grandfather was alive. If gendarmes turned violent or county officials threatened his grandfather with fines, they stayed outside a little longer than their work required. When there was nothing left of a tree felled in autumn and his grandfather could make nothing further from the shavings, they had to move on. For a long time he had no idea what it was like to play; his childhood passed without a friend who might have initiated him into secrets or knowledge other than his grandfather’s.

At school he observed the Hungarian children with great concern, watching what sort of things they did among themselves, because he understood neither their enjoyments nor their meanness nor their little business deals.

Not only was he unfamiliar with their feelings but he didn’t understand the words Hungarians used to try to restrain their freely rambling desires and fickle attractions. He and his grandfather slept under the open sky. He didn’t know why his grandfather had been cast out by his own people or why the two of them had to live beyond the boundaries of their own tribe. They spent every winter on the mountain in Rátka, in a remote, well-concealed hut his grandfather had built. They could see from the house the great bend in the frozen-over Mura, with the willows. Border guards would interrogate his grandfather when they were looking for fugitives, and they’d shout and swear; once they took him away because they thought he was lying. But other people could not see the hut, not from any angle, unless they spotted smoke rising from its chimney. They came off the mountain only when it began to thaw, when at night the ice cracked and popped in the river.

They could be content because in every village people waited for them impatiently.

They could find lodging in any house.

Uncle Tuba this and Uncle Tuba that, you know how much we love you, an’ the little boy’ll feel better with our young ’uns; with words like these, the peasants would coax the grandfather.

You don’t have to worry about food, the woman is cooking for nine anyway.

It was most difficult in the autumn because that was when his grandfather had to bargain hard with the peasants.

When life had gone to sleep in the trees, old Tuba’s raw material, a peasant would go with them to pick out the right poplar, willow, chestnut, or linden in his woods or at the edge of his hayfield. Of course the obstinate peasant wanted to trick the Gypsy, which made him act foolishly, as if deliberately setting out to get the worst deal for himself. The peasant would never let old Tuba cut down a tree that he had singled out as a good one — and from which, when spring came, Tuba could carve for the peasant a scalding tub for plucking chickens, a washbasin, baking peels, a tray, and spoons for lard. Or the peasant would cut it down himself and by springtime would have used it all up for firewood, stupid peasant. They started with the larger pieces, the scalding tub and washbasin; from the interior of such bowl-like pieces they lifted, very smartly and economically, wood for the smaller items, so that in the end only shavings remained. The peasant needed everything that could be carved from his tree, just as the carvers could not have survived for more than two weeks without the grandfather’s labor. But a variety of profound irritations and annoyances lurked in this necessary and strict exchange.

You won’t cut down that tree of mine, you filthy Gypsy, damn your mother’s dear God Almighty.

And when after all the unnecessary jabber they finally came to terms, the stupid peasant always wanted to have more things carved from his tree than there was wood for. He’d roll his eyes and watch from a distance to see if the old man and boy were not cheating him. Or he’d ask for something that old Tuba would not carve from a tree for all the money in the world.

That’s a peasant for you, doesn’t even know the value or nature of his own tree.

Of course there was always more in a tree than what the peasant could imagine in that hard noggin of his. But they didn’t let him know that, let him be content thinking he’d managed to trick the Gypsy again. The Gypsy can’t help it if he has more brains than the cunning peasant, who always wants more and who always loses everything.

The extra objects disappeared for a while under ashes or shavings and turned up later in faraway markets and fairs.

They could have made even more money on each tree if they’d had a horse and wagon, so Grandpapa Tuba daydreamed; necessity made him more honest than he could reasonably be expected to be.

They were given food and shelter, this and that, some produce, some secondhand clothes, but to survive the winter they needed a little money as well. The old man did not want much — to carve out no more than a few extra spoons, well, maybe a bowl or washbasin. The peasant who could outwit him had not yet been born, and if he had been, old Tuba and his grandson would give his house a wide berth.

Because they kept their eyes and ears open at all times, they saw that there were peasants whom even other peasants avoided; no Gypsy either would have anything to do with such people.

There were threatening beings in the familiar world, some of them more powerful than Gypsies, and every evening the grandfather would tell his grandson a story about one of their deeds. Souls and ghosts would appear from the dark woods and move toward the fire, but they could be friends of neither fire nor light. When the tale ended, the grandfather threw a few more shavings on the fire, making it smoke a little, letting the wild animals prowling around them smell it, and the ghosts gently withdrew into the night filled with bloody secrets.

They could hear the village dogs yelping one after the other as the ghosts passed by, and they kept barking for a long time after to keep the ghosts from returning.

Every successive day brought back the light again.

In the memories of older people in the area, the boy and his grandfather are preserved as two figures in tattered clothes who reappear every spring looking haggard and pitifully thin as they turn into the muddy yards. At that time of year the plump peasant gleams with the extra weight he has put on during his idle winter. If a dog barked angrily, they would stop outside the fence or hedgerow. They never walked side by side; the boy either lagged behind or walked in front of his grandfather, and when they talked while walking they shouted. And they never wound up side by side, as if there weren’t space for that, or as if neither of them needed help or encouragement from the other. The old man wasn’t tall, but the dignity of his bearing heightened his figure in the peasants’ eyes. The women would have liked to touch and hold the little boy, for his beauty moved them, but he radiated only refusal.

For a long time Tuba seemed untouchable; later he seldom longed for physical contact with anyone.

The old man carried a large sack on his left shoulder; he also carried his axe on the left so he had one hand free. He parted his thick gray hair in the middle; according to an ancient law, no barber’s scissors could touch it. And if the masters or the gendarmes were to do that to a Gypsy, as sometimes they did — and the old man imprinted this possibility deep in the little boy’s mind — no greater shame could befall him in his entire bitter life. The way he’d avoided this shame, his grandfather told him, was that when they had wanted him in the army, he took out another birth certificate in the priest’s office in Korpavár. One had to claim to be a few years older or younger when filling out forms so as not to be taken away.

The priest always found somebody in his book with a convenient birth date.

And ever since then he and his children have been going around with this false name. When he went to see the priest in Korpavár, the real Tuba had been dead a long time.

And his grandfather was four years older than it said in his papers.

According to ancient custom, two tight plaits of hair called kader in Romany framed his nicely furrowed, stern face; he allowed no emotion to move a single muscle of his face because that would offend his forebears.

By the way, this sack on his shoulder was the big sack with which peasants frightened misbehaving brats. The Gypsy will cut you in two, put you in his sack, and take you away. He carried the sack as his ancestor had done. The strutting foolish peasant believes he is cussing you, but in his language too, cigány, Gypsy, means human being.

And he feels good when he says, hey, cigány, this or that. For us it’s like he’s not saying anything.

Grandfather Tuba remembered old events as he had heard about them from the stories of his own grandfather; if he could not remember something he rounded off the story by giving his own version. János Tuba told stories the same way to his fellow workers, saw the old fire his grandfather had built in place of the fire around which the road workers sat, and while he filled in the missing pieces from his own experiences he saw his grandfather squatting in the slow-moving veils of smoke, scraping the dying embers with his stick.

When Bizsók was with them, János Tuba skipped over certain things on purpose, so as not to initiate a Hungarian into important knowledge; or he might stretch some facts in other parts of the story.

But among themselves none of these men liked talking about himself or about real events of his life.

And the evenings were not too long either.

After work they had to wash up, and even though they neither washed nor mended their clothes — they took their clothes home and left these chores to their women — they always found things that had to be put in order. While one cleaned the trailer, another would cook. The Gypsies ate what they had cooked together, but Bizsók ate separately. Occasionally they would all go out for a spritzer or, more rarely, a beer, and Bizsók would go with them if only because he didn’t like their being on their own. Four Gypsies appearing in the inn of a strange village was something fearsome; in some places it was not even advisable to go in. Sometimes one of them would want to be alone and would stay back while the others went out. Winding up in the midst of strangers’ lives increased their sense of belonging together; Bizsók looked somewhat askance at this but, as their supervisor, realized that these experiences gave them material to talk about. And since he also had to forge his team into a socialist work brigade, after such an outing he could enter in his log that the brigade members had practiced socializing in their communal life after work.

Tuba was more likely to go out on his own or more frequently to stay back in the trailer.

Bizsók did not like this much.

Sometimes Tuba’s army buddy would show up; the men would find them together when coming back to the trailers, the mustached Hungarian who’d come with Tuba when he joined the team. He always arrived as if materializing out of the ground, and he disappeared in the same imperceptible way. Bizsók had nothing to say about that. He liked that someone had such a loyal friend. They were similar in build too. He always vanished without a word and returned without saying anything; the men could not ask a person like that where he had been or what he had been doing. At most they could tease him, and he could respond in kind. They all noticed that during the days after his friend’s appear-disappear visit, Tuba himself would vanish. But not always. This was impossible to predict, just as it was impossible to comprehend how the mustached man from Budapest always found them no matter where they happened to be working. Bizsók was puzzled, but he neither said nor asked anything. Still, he was left with a tiny ache that reminded him of something he preferred to forget. And he did not like the way the man with the mustache grinned constantly. But over his long years of work, he realized, having thought a lot about it, that the grinning friend had come with Tuba the first time so that the Gypsy would not be alone when he applied for work. Bizsók liked this in Tuba’s friend, with whom he never spoke and whose last name he had a hard time remembering.

He barely remembered the man’s first name, Gyula, because he wanted to cast it out of his memory, and that is when the name would reappear unexpectedly.

Whatever the men did, whether together or separately, they were all very careful, more so than with anything else, not to touch another man’s life, not with words or looks. This basic rule was not to be broken by anyone. Once, the day after such a violation, Bizsók told the malefactor to return his work permit; the man left immediately. Everyone knew what had happened, but in the closeness of their lives they could preserve their self-respect in the future only if no one talked about another man’s private affairs. Of course, there are unguarded movements or words with potential consequences, inadvertently open or meaningful looks that one remembers later. An error may slip into one’s interpretation that may darken another man’s face or brighten it.

Bizsók did not understand many things, but the three other Gypsies could not understand how it was that Tuba could disappear and miss two workdays with impunity. Bizsók would have fired any of the others for such a violation.

At noon, when they came back from having a couple of beers and discovered the strange items in the trailer, a similarly inexplicable thing happened, but this time among the Gypsies.

Tuba slapped Jakab on the face, hard.

And at the same time the older Téglás brother lowered his eyes; if he had not, all the emotions that goodwill and sufferance were curbing would have flared up in the darkness of those eyes. Bizsók grunted loudly. Imre Téglás began to shout and flail his arms.

He stopped instantly because his brother obviously wanted something else.

In the machine was the molten material for at least another sixteen rounds with the wheelbarrows, the tarry mix that had to be poured out at the right places before Bizsók could start with the steamroller. He kept watching his men from behind his thick glasses, but he was at a loss as to what to do.

As though his leniency with Tuba had now come to avenge itself.

Jakab threw himself, screaming and crying, on the floor of the hot trailer, not because the slap had been hard but in desperation. He denied having stolen these expensive, strange items. He kept banging his shaven head with his fist, and if they hadn’t stopped him he would have banged his head against the trailer wall.

He yelled and argued in Hungarian and in Romany, as the good Lord was his witness it wasn’t him, what did He want from him, it wasn’t he who stole, somebody else had stolen his new work clothes.

Actually nobody had accused him of anything.

But how did that expensive pair of pants wind up on the clothes rack, and that fine high-class shirt, pale-blue oxford, and where had those welted, barely used old English box* shoes come from, now under the racks, one neatly side by side with the other, that is what they all asked themselves.

And how indeed could the boy’s brand-new work clothes have disappeared at the same time, clothes he had never worn and which he so treasured he’d rather wear his uncle’s old things.

And what happened to Tuba’s rubber-soled protective boots.

It was clear to Bizsók that if he went to the local gendarmes and reported the case to the company, he’d lose three of his men in one fell swoop. Judging by the Téglás brothers’ behavior, he could expect nothing from them. But if he did not report anything, what would they do with the new shoes and expensive clothes, which could only have come from one of the vacation homes in the area, where many old-fashioned gentlemen lived. He was angry at Tuba for his arbitrariness. But the anger bursting from the other man gave him a good feeling. As if Tuba had done for him what he, Bizsók, would never do.

Not even in disciplining his own sons had he ever resorted to beating, for which he had been repeatedly reproached, and he had always been ashamed of this characteristic of his, which could be construed as a personal flaw.

Bizsók had been given back his life as a present, and therefore he was averse to bullying and violence. When trouble occurred his soul would not move; he only watched what was happening around him the more closely. He was a stout man, in height just short of what is usually called medium-tall. He wore his hair in a crew cut and he had discovered it had turned gray only when, released from captivity, he looked at a mirror for the first time in years.

He had arrived home for harvesttime; it was midday. Perhaps nobody noticed him, the village was silent, he did not find the key in the usual place. Telling this story to his men one time as they sat around the fire, he said he had not even looked at anything around the house; he washed his face and drank some water from the well and sat down on a bench on the porch. He probably didn’t fall asleep; he felt neither fatigue nor hunger, but it seemed to him that twilight followed noon almost immediately.

Then he heard women’s voices approaching on the road and a frightened child stared at him, as did a cow trudging in through the open gate.

The child ran back out and began shouting that an old beggar was sitting on their porch.

The source of laughter is not always gaiety; that is how his listeners laughed.

First he wanted to know why the key wasn’t in its place.

The others knew that his wife was a very beautiful woman and they understood that he had a distrustful and jealous nature. He always expected the worst, though until now he had shown no signs of this. The woman reached up and took the key out of a crack between the wall and the doorpost, where he could not have found it; he could only widen his eyes in astonishment. The woman opened the door, they went inside, and she immediately squatted down before the stove as she had always done.

She looked back at him from there.

But from that point he did not go on with the story for the others.

It was as if he had walked into a strange place; he hesitated. For two whole years he had not seen this person to whom he now returned, not even in his dreams.

In the morning she made dumplings rich in shortening, as if she knew exactly what he wanted.

He did tell this part to the Gypsies but kept quiet about how the two of them had finally embraced. Yet in the light of the fire, the others could easily discern on his dreamy countenance what he was bashfully holding back from them.

His face showed that night with her as he saw it through the fire.

The next day he could swing the scythe only about three times, if that, before he became so dizzy he had to lie down.

And he did not tell them that the woman poured cold water on her kerchief and rubbed his heart and wiped his forehead with it. Even in the shade he kept breaking out in waves of cold sweat.

What was to be done, he weighed only forty-seven kilos, doctors had weighed him, he told the Gypsies by way of explanation. In that condition he was hardly fit for harvesting.

In his sleep angry waves of the sea occasionally hurled themselves at him, right under his eyes.

He saw the golden brilliance of the sea before him, the ways that insistent dry winds ruffled wheat fields under an infinite sky and with their whirlpools beat down and twirled the ears of grain.

At other times the sky was dark, and sand was churned into the dully glittering waves. He had froth between his teeth. This is how the afternoon when he had first seen the sea below Husum returned to him in his sleep.

They had surrendered below Husum, in the sand dunes. Dense sharp sleet slashed their faces, and in the sudden silence the victors’ triumphant shouts carried a long way. They were rounded up like trapped animals. The fools who still tried to run away or hide somewhere were shot on the spot.

The wind instantly obliterated all footprints.

The morning when in the other trailer they sheared Jakab’s head, Bizsók was startled to wakefulness very early. A person who remembers, or whose dreams compel him not to forget, does not analyze the past. To avoid having to be grateful for the miserable life that, in his dreams, often ended in death, he got up right away. To keep the thought of being helpless to make changes from wandering about too much. He took off the top of his striped pajamas and stepped out into the open as if uninterested in what sort of day was waiting for him.

The sky was growing lighter under a gentle mist.

He put his clean enamel washbowl on the step of the trailer and poured water into it from a pitcher. In the morning, he did not use soap, only bent over the bowl and splashed some water on himself. First on his face and neck, then on his armpits and arms, a little on his back too and on his hairy chest, but these latter areas he tried to dampen without letting the water drip on his pants. He dried himself, threw the dirty water under the trailer, and stood the washbowl on the step so it could dry properly in the sun.

The empty pitcher stayed on the step; it was the boy’s job to bring fresh water.

He locked the door again. The stifling night air sat heavily in the space; hardly any light filtered through the small window. While getting dressed he could see almost nothing without his glasses. He wore his wide work pants no longer than a week but changed his underwear and shirt every other day. The shirts were all checked gingham, differing only in their colors, about as much as sun-bleached black might differ from faded blue or dull gray from washed-out brown.

János Tuba wore the same kind of shirt except he preferred to work half naked.

The bulging lenses stared at him in the dimness, because he always laid down his glasses the same way in the evening, with the temples folded in. It was autumn by the time he regained his health somewhat, and spring when he realized that although his body was strong enough, his vision had not cleared up. Since then he’d had to change his lenses twice for stronger ones; the optician was none too pleased the second time.

Where was that grumbling optician by now.

Bizsók traveled home every two weeks; from the railroad station he had to cross the marketplace on foot to the bus station, and he could stop at the optician’s place on his way. There the two young women who waited on customers wore short white smocks made of some translucent material, and they both had their hair set in a tower of layers. All the new frames were too expensive for him and not to his taste either.

His loyalty was not to his old, obviously worthless glasses but to something else he couldn’t have named.

Every morning he pulled open the drawer in the little table and took out the chamois from next to the empty payroll envelopes. His life had no more absorbing and fulfilling moments than this. He guarded his dreams with his deliberate awakening, and his dreams guarded his past. He was alert, because the fatigued material demanded caution, but he did not need to think. The act he performed was simple, but it was done among past events. Every morning he held brittle fate in his hands.

First he folded out the temples, making sure the brads were still all right. It was not a big problem if a brad became loose or fell off, since at home he had a very small hammer — he had no idea how he had got it, only watchmakers and jewelers used such an instrument, but there it was, he had it. With this hammer he was reassured about the brads. But a temple broke once, and an even more difficult situation arose when the frame around one lens cracked and then snapped.

He smeared hot tar on the uneven surface of the fracture, and when it set, he wound a thread dipped in tar around the temple, and on top of that a length of copper wire hardly thicker than the thread. The broken frame was harder to repair. With a glowing-hot steel pin, he burned holes in the plastic. It took even longer to manufacture a clip small enough to fit into the holes and hold fast on both sides.

Between two fingers he held the bridge of the glasses tight, very tight; otherwise, if he tried to do it in a gingerly way, he’d have more trouble. While cleaning the lenses with the chamois and being careful not to let the need for cleanliness become stronger than what the frame could bear, he was actually preoccupied with what was no longer humanly possible to comprehend in the inner nature of things, even though they were not a secret to anyone.

The sense of treacherously prowling dangers compels everyone to moderate their behavior, even though immoderate behavior can sometimes turn out well.

Twenty-seven men of their regiment remained in the infinite, vanishing dunes where they had been surrounded for two days. They had no place to retreat, only to the sea, and while the threat to life compelled some to surrender, it urged others to hold on and find a way to slip out of the trap. These were the last minutes of the war for them, why should they die now. At the same time they had to keep an eye on each other; and they went at each other, hissing and yelling; there was nothing left in them but endless swearing. They were careful that none of them would lose his sanity or endanger the life of a comrade. There was no place where one of them could go alone, and together with the others in this dangerous group, it also no longer made sense to venture into unfamiliar areas. They knew the sea was out there somewhere, they even felt its presence, but none of them knew what he felt about it.

A sergeant kept their spirits up. He was literally intoxicated by his heroic conduct during the hopeless battles of the previous days and by the weight of his duty to command and lead other men on the road between life and death. Fervega was the sergeant’s name. As far as he was concerned, he said, his face weary, anybody could go wherever he wanted to, but anybody staying with him must obey him. Until then they’d thought of him as a rather meek man; perhaps they had failed to notice it was restrained blind anger that made him look so drowsy, and not the lack of sleep that tortured and exhausted them all. They had nothing to eat and, more important, no potable water. And they knew they wouldn’t find any here. They did not know where they were. They had a page torn from a German school atlas but no means of orientation. They were very close to the sea in this incredibly wide, flat terrain that gave them no protection, but none of them had ever seen the sea and had no idea what feature of the terrain signaled the proximity of water. Nevertheless, first they had to leave the highway and then a dirt road, even though it was the only familiar feature of the terrain. Sergeant Fervega was a precision-instrument maker in civilian life, a man with able hands, the rest were rough-mannered peasant boys, and there was one Gypsy among them.

They must have come very close to the sea several times, but they could not distinguish the rhythmic lapping of the waves from the strong booming and whimpering wind.

Their inexperienced eyes saw ridges of desolate dunes on the horizon. They were walking in a wakeful dream.

Yet after a while Fervega realized that when they managed to go inland the wind, which held them in its grip and blustered with all its might in their ears, weakened and became more musical, as it were, and grew stronger when they came close to the water again. And something similar must have been happening with their vision. Where the water was close there was no longer any sky and no longer distinguishable clouds; it was difficult to separate visions and illusions from these unfamiliar phenomena. Still, Fervega thought it was better not to go right up to the sea with this handful of men, if only because he knew nothing of the nature of the shore or the water; but, equally, it was better if they didn’t move too far from the sea either, since it was more dangerous inland.

Eventually they would surely find some human settlement, which they should first observe from a safe distance. It would be advantageous to approach from the direction of the water. Ever since they’d been driven across the Hungarian border, following retreating German troops, they had the feeling that no matter where they wound up, even if at the edge of the map, there’d be no end to this damned Germany; they’d never get out of it.

Some of them cried whenever they stopped, even for a moment; the others had to turn away from them.

Fervega did not want them to stop.

After a spell of walking, they saw a black stone building on the desolate horizon under low-flying black clouds. As they kept walking, they saw it was a solitary building far from any human settlement. It was reminiscent of a granary on some estate, or a cathedral nave. They approached in a spread-out-chain formation, alternately ducking and straightening up, hoping to find a well, and a fire so they could at least dry themselves. Near the building, where the movement of the air seemed to change, they thought they heard disconnected snatches of the hum of voices or some church melody. It reminded some of them of a beehive buzzing or the drone of a distant marketplace.

But at least the building had a well, as they saw from a little closer up.

All this happened in the afternoon of the previous day. Fervega only motioned to them; they knew what to do in order to gain the well.

Letting out an enormous roar, Fervega kicked in the building’s arched, hewn and carved oak door, which was barely closed anyway; Bizsók, with his weapon at the ready, stood to the right of the sergeant, while the others surrounded the building on all sides. The building had no other opening from which someone could attack them. A man trying to quench his thirst was defenseless. Except maybe high up, from the windows with their broken panes. The building must have burned from the inside for a while, but the flames had not reached the windowpanes. If they wanted to drink, they first had to take over the place. Bizsók and Fervega each fired a round and heard the impact of the bullets. At first they could see nothing beyond the swinging door. They saw their own dread in the darkness and felt an ominous heat that commanded them to halt. Inside, there was only the light that came in through rips and cracks in the seriously damaged roof.

It was getting dark.

A terrible stench hit them unexpectedly, assailing their noses with warmth, but they comprehended only much later with their minds what they felt and saw then. Which was accompanied by many terrible independent little sounds. Rattling in the throat, frenzied laments that sounded not like crying but like some sort of lullaby, a persistent whimpering farther off and shouting at the border of consciousness.

In this long split second, they became truly defenseless; anyone could have killed them.

They were standing in the buzzing beehive of a singing traumatic fever.

They did not go in, but they could see that these wrecks were Germans. A single glance was enough. On the bare brick floor lay the most seriously wounded evacuees of a field hospital, left to their fate. Some lay on stretchers among the dead, just where their escaping carriers had freed themselves of their burdens.

The water in the well tasted of carrion.

He personally would shoot anyone who dared to drink of it, the sergeant whispered menacingly, planting himself by the bucket of bad water.

They didn’t have much time for discussion because they discovered that behind the building and not very far off was a road. And on it now appeared enemy tanks; the road could not have been more than five hundred meters away. So the building could serve them only as a temporary hiding place; under cover of night they might be able to move on. While they stood by the well talking about this, at the same time keeping an eye on the moving enemy tanks, through the oak door left wide open slid a human clump, blackened by mud and excrement. Both his legs had been amputated at the knees and the bandages were soaked bloody or black. He kept turning on his stomach and then on his back, the only way he could inch forward, like a caterpillar.

They stood there, with thirst and unfinished sentences in their mouths, watching him. When his trunk flipped onto its back, it remained motionless. As if he wanted to sit up; he was alive.

Beyond the distant artillery fire twilight was reddening the sky darkened by clouds, but the muzzle fire of the guns no longer sounded. Seagulls were screeching above. Anticipating the eating of live human flesh. The men wanted to turn away but didn’t know where to look. The sergeant gave a resounding order; they must dredge the well.

The sense of this not even the passively distant sky could see. Ever since they had set out in search of an escape route, starving, thirsty, drenched, and weeping, the sergeant had let not one minute pass without issuing a command.

Then with long strides he started toward the wounded man and, while somebody finally, reluctantly, began to carry out that last command which made so little sense, he reached under the German’s shoulders and dragged him back to the wall of the building. The wounded man kept shouting in pain; his head flopped back; his blind features stared into the sergeant’s face. Still, Fervega saw that the man expected something from him that no one else did. Maybe he wanted water, maybe he was begging for death in the foreign language that could still struggle up from his dried throat to his sore-ridden lips.

They were all from the Alföld, they did not understand a single word in any foreign language.

Someone near Bizsók growled, then mumbled, if you’re not going to do it, I’ll shoot him, Fervega.

But Fervega did not reply; with his eyes on the tanks on the road, he said, those can’t be anybody but either the British or the Americans.

Give the order, said the former hoarsely.

This made those soldiers stop who until now had been checking the well with a long rod for a possible corpse or carrion.

The well was not very deep, and they told Fervega they weren’t finding anything with this kind of search.

The wounded man leaning against the wall was silent but alive.

By the time it was dark, one of the men could be lowered into the well to dig out the muddy bottom with his combat shovel under the beam of a flashlight. Nobody asked how long it would be before fresh water would bubble up.

By the time it was dark, another three soldiers and the sergeant had carried the dead bodies out from among the dying in the building.

The sergeant spared Bizsók this job. Before the darkness became too deep he sent Bizsók with two men on a scouting mission. These men had not parted company in the last few days; they slept in the warmth of one another’s bodies.

In the reflected light of the distant heavy guns, the barren terrain appeared to them in quick successive flashes. Which filled the darkness with the illusion of a mute landscape.

Now this one, now another one tripped on solitary clumps of grass.

Bizsók was in front. He was bothered by the thought that they might never find their way back to the others. And if they did, what possible news would they have but that they hadn’t seen anything in the dark. The wind hurled sharp grains of sand and fine mist in their faces. Pauses in the squalls were filled with the booming of distant armies on the move. But no matter how close they came, the moving troops were not visible. Fighting units have to move slowly, with dim lights; tanks were rumbling. Panting, the three men groped their way forward in the noise but could not reach those dimmed lights.

Then Bizsók realized he would never see a road or any dimmed lights because what lay ahead was the sea.

In the dim flash of the muzzle fire he could see only another infinite stretch of barren terrain, no matter how fiercely he stared ahead. Or was it fog. By now the wind was whipping at them from all directions, and as it blew through their clothes, water dripped down their faces. He bent low because he felt a change under his feet; water was seeping from the wet sand in his hand. It threw froth on his face and body. What they could not see was raging right before them.

He smeared wet sand over his face. His mates could not see his weakness.

Small noises could be heard from the other trailer that morning, followed by muffled words, hitherto unheard-of thumping sounds, stamping of feet and the din of hurried activity.

A tension-filled silence ensued.

He did not eavesdrop but simply listened to the quality of the silence. He put the chamois back in the drawer and with ceremonious fussiness placed his glasses on his nose.

They decided that one of them would stay at the spot where they reached the sea. If he sensed no danger, every few minutes he would give two dim signals with his flashlight. They called the flashlight cat’s-eyes because it had no batteries; it worked with a hand-pressure-operated dynamo until its fine little carbon brushes wore out. That is how the other two reassured themselves that they could find their way back to their comrade. And they proceeded northward along the shore in the direction of where they assumed the town of Husum to be. The wind was blowing in their eyes from that quarter. Bizsók learned much later, in the Hamburg POW camp, that they should have gone in the opposite direction.

When they turned around the first time they could still see it; when they turned around the second time they could no longer make out the pale blinking of the cat’s-eyes in the darkness filled with the sound of roaring waves.

Every morning his story ended differently, and the next morning it continued in yet another way. Once he had the spectacles on his nose, the sharpened sight of his surroundings made the feelings guarded by his dreams vanish. Before going to make his bed in strict military fashion, he lingered for a few seconds by the small table. He did not clasp his hands and his lips did not move, but he was praying. Always the same thing, the Lord’s Prayer. He prayed that he might see Fervega again. The Lord’s Prayer suited him because he didn’t have to pay attention to the sequence of words; while reciting them he could think of things he was forbidden to think about. At times the prayer carried him across great distances; the words were free to meditate on themselves.

Now he would turn to the Father as a faithful son, now he himself would be the Father who had to take care of the son. His feeling had nothing to do with gratitude. With his prayer he neither asked nor expressed gratitude for anything; perhaps, rather, he gave something. That is how he offered himself up to whatever was yet to come.

But never again could he fill the space that had been emptied. There was no fairness or equality in the name of which he could drag another man’s bed in there.

When they finally fell into captivity, the British first took them to a small town called Pfeilen. There was a tall Hungarian among the British, one András Rott, a dark-haired young man who was able to talk to them.

He consoled them; boys, relax, everything will be all right.

He saw a sign of his aging in what he missed so terribly. On that summer morning, guaranteed to turn into a scorcher, he forgot the Lord’s Prayer. The cloudless clear sky had not promised relief for weeks. Heaven, where the Father was supposed to dwell, had no outer form, and it did not have the color of the sky either. It could not be blue, and dark clouds could not move across it with the wind. When he uttered that word, heaven, he saw the kind of sky Catholics paint on the ceilings of their churches. At other times he saw nothing, but the lack did not bother him, because he had no doubt the word spoke of an invisible beauty. But now the word in his mouth turned into something he had to spit out immediately. It reminded him most of the sand with the smell of algae and shells he had just wiped off his lips. As if some unequivocal whispering in his ear were saying that, contrary to what he had thought until now, there is more than one heaven and the number of Fathers is countless.

But he could not contemplate things like this, could not even imagine them.

The tension-filled silence in the other trailer that alerted Bizsók also awakened Tuba. He lay on his stomach, his head sunk on a pillow. He was not a man who scared easily, yet a spasm coursed through his softly resting body, first making his skin realize that something extraordinary was happening, and only then making him open his eyes, alarmed. He saw what he saw, which made his entire body become covered in goose bumps, but his muscles were still asleep in the warmth under his blanket.

There was more light in this trailer than in the other one, its small window gave on the water, the mirror of the river water hurled up on the ceiling the light it received from the sun rising in the vaporous mist.

Dark spots trembled in the light, the ethereal shadows of poplars.




Notes


*March 15, Hungary’s National Day, memorializes the revolution of 1848, which in Hungary began on March 15 with insurrections in Budapest.




*On October 23, 1956, many thousands of unarmed civilians and a few thousand lightly armed revolutionaries rose up in Budapest to protest against Hungary’s tyrannical Communist regime. As the demonstrations continued, four divisions of Soviet troops went to the capital at the request of the threatened regime and took up positions guarding government buildings and important intersections. They were met with vehement resistance, which continued until October 28, when a cease-fire was arranged. Political prisoners were freed, radio stations and newspapers liberated, and a newly installed multiparty government under Imre Nagy announced on November 1 that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance led by the USSR. Thirteen more divisions of Soviet troops and armored columns then arrived to put a stop to these revolutionary actions, which ended on November 4, though civilian resistance continued for some time. More than 2,500 Hungarians died in the uprising.




*When the Communist Party gained full control of the postwar Hungarian government in 1949 it nationalized many enterprises.




*W. Averell Harriman, American ambassador in Moscow in 1943–46, wrote a report on the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which he had attended, for President Harry S. Truman, in which he warned of future competition between the West and the Soviet Union. In late 1945 President Truman asked the journalist Mark Ethridge to report on conditions in Soviet-dominated Bulgaria and Romania, where he found widespread suppression of dissent and lack of basic freedoms.




*The noted painter Walter Leistikow (1865–1908) was, in 1898, one of the founders of the Berlin Secession.




*The Arrow Cross Party, founded in 1935, was a pro-Nazi national socialist party, which led Hungary’s so-called Government of National Unity from October 1944 until March 1945. The ÁVH, the State Protection Authority, was Hungary’s secret police force from 1945 to 1956, closely aligned with the Soviet Union’s secret police force; it had its own reputation for brutality, however.




*In September 1944, the Soviet Army invaded Hungary and in late December began its siege of Budapest, then held by combined German and Hungarian forces. The siege, marked by heavy artillery bombardment and street-by-street tank and infantry battles that were among the most ferocious of the war, lasted until February 13, 1945, when the remaining defenders surrendered, by which time more than 80 percent of Budapest’s buildings and all of its bridges were destroyed or damaged.




*The Felvidék comprises the upland, hilly territories north of the Tisza and Danube rivers, until 1918 part of Hungary but now in Slovakia.




*They are speaking of The Good Soldier Švejk an unfinished satirical novel about the Austro-Hungarian army by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, published in the 1920s.




*Mór Jókai (1825–1904) was the author of countless novels, of which this was one (translated into English and published as Poor Plutocrats [1899]).




*Count Pál Teleki, a controversial diplomat and geographer who became prime minister of Hungary for the second time in February 1939, committed suicide in April 1941. Hitler was then insisting that Hungary assist Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia, a nation with which Teleki had concluded a nonaggression pact only five months before. Teleki regarded as treasonous Hungary’s subsequent agreement to let Germany transport troops across its territory.




*Margit Island is named after Hungary’s most venerated saint; the ruins of a medieval monastery named in her honor are in the center of the island, which is now a park with many features and attractions.




*Admiral Miklós Horthy was regent of the kingdom of Hungary from 1920 until 1944. Jean Marais was a French film actor. Béla Kun was the controversial Communist politician who briefly led a revolutionary Hungarian republic in 1919.




*The Gendarmerie, Csendőrség, was responsible for public safety and the maintenance of law and order in Hungary’s rural districts, from its formation in 1881 until its dissolution at the end of the Second World War. A basically military organization with strong-arm methods of law enforcement, it was responsible for untold atrocities.




*After August 1944, when all political parties in Hungary were dissolved, the Arrow Cross — with assistance from Germany, which had occupied Hungary since March — continued to operate underground. It secretly prepared a coup d’état against the government of Admiral Horthy, and on October 15, when Horthy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the war, it seized power. The Arrow Cross government’s regime of terror especially affected the Jews still remaining in Hungary, mostly in Budapest, where battalions raided the buildings to which Jews had been consigned, destroyed homes, and killed many Jewish partisans; in an especially infamous action, they took several hundred Jews to the bridges across the Danube and shot them there, letting their bodies be borne away by the river waters.




*The nineteenth-century castle in the village of Tiszadob had belonged to the family of the famous “Red Countess,” Katinka Andrássy, widely considered one of the most beautiful and accomplished women in Europe, and married to Count Mihaly Karolyi, who was briefly president of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Hungary in 1918. The very wealthy Andrássys divided and distributed much of their land among the peasants, for which other aristocrats ostracized and shunned them. An active supporter of her husband’s Socialist politics, the countess went with him into exile when Bela Kun and his supporters seized power in 1919, returning to Hungary from England only in 1946, when some of her family property in Budapest was restored to her — but not Tiszadob, which the Communist regime had turned into a children’s home. The Karolyis left Hungary again in 1948 and died in exile.




*The March Youth were the planners, initiators, and leaders of the March 15, 1848, revolution in Hungary against Austria, a remarkable group, nearly all of them young men, from the elite of Hungarian literature, enlightenment, and politics; prominent among them was Sándor Petőfi, the revered young poet who fell on the battlefield in 1849.




*Alfréd Hajós, 1878–1955, a champion swimmer and architect who specialized in sports buildings, designed the swimming complex built on Margit Island in 1930.




*In the Battle of Mohács, fought near the town on August 29, 1526, forces of the kingdom of Hungary were defeated by forces of the Ottoman Empire led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. This Ottoman victory led to the partition of Hungary for several centuries among the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria, and the principality of Transylvania.




*With the Treaty of Trianon, signed in June 1920 by the Allied powers and Hungary, Hungary had lost about 70 percent of its former territory and all access to the Black Sea. In the late 1920s the British press lord Viscount Rothermere made a passionate cause out of his support for the restoration of territory to Hungary, making speeches in the House of Lords and publishing articles in the newspapers he owned.




*Beginning in November 1938, Hungary, allied with Germany, significantly expanded its borders, aiming to rectify the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Trianon. After the Munich conference, it regained a strip of southern Slovakia and western Subcarpathia (Felvidék), and in March 1939, after Germany’s invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, it annexed the remaining part of Subcarpathia (Kárpátalja, now part of Ukraine).




*The Volksbund, an organization of ethnic Germans in Hungary, sympathetic to the policies of the Third Reich, was founded in 1938 and by 1940 was directly controlled by the German government. Active in Hungarian politics throughout the war, it was disbanded only in 1945.




*The Treaty of Trianon stipulated that no railway could be built in Hungary with more than one track. At the time railways were of real strategic importance both economically and militarily.




*A shoyhet is a butcher licensed to perform the ritual kosher slaughter of animals for food. Hazeer is meat from a pig.




*Emmerich Kálmán (1882–1953) was the Jewish Hungarian-born composer of many popular Viennese operettas, including Countess Maritza.




*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived in Weimar from 1775 until his death in 1832; the hills nearby with their beech forest (Buchenwald) were a favorite retreat for him. He was often joined in his walks there by his friend the writer and poet Johann Peter Eckermann. When part of this beech forest was cleared in 1937 for what was to become the Buchenwald concentration camp, Goethe’s oak was left standing. (It was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1944, but the stump remains.)




*A novella by Thomas Mann, published in 1903.




*A Dutch furniture designer and architect who was famous for his chairs.




*Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus before Nazi pressure forced its closure in 1933, had reluctantly left Germany for the United States in 1937.




*Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939.




*Magda Purgly was the wife of the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy; Archduke Frederick of Lorraine, a Habsburg cousin of Emperor Francis Joseph, had been commander in chief of the Austrian army in 1914–18.




*The regions of the Great Hungarian Plain.




*A law of May 29, 1938, restricted the proportion of Jews holding jobs in the government, professions, industry, and commerce to 20 percent.




*Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics for many years prior to 1933, and considered an authority on racial characteristics and “hygiene,” he also did research in German West Africa and on Gypsies.




*Germany’s provisional government after the revolution in 1918 appointed General Lüttwitz commander in chief of the Reichswehr, and in this capacity he directed the Freikorps and Studentenkorps in their suppression of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919. (A year later, he and Wolfgang Kapp attempted a putsch against the new Weimar Republic; after its quick failure, Lüttwitz fled to Budapest, returning to Germany only in 1925.)




*The actress Emmy Göhring was Heinrich Göhring’s second wife.




*Arno Breker’s public sculptures made on commission from the German government were mostly destroyed after 1945.




*The Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner was an important SS commander. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Third Reich’s military intelligence service. (He participated in many resistance activities and was in contact with British intelligence, however, and in April 1945 the Nazis executed him.)




*Joseph Mengele, a physician and SS officer, did extensive research during the war using prisoners at Auschwitz and Birkenau as subjects; at Auschwitz, as the officer responsible for selecting which Jews would die and which would be chosen as living subjects for his research, he became known as the Angel of Death. Adolf Butenandt, a Nobel Prize — winning chemist, was head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin.




*Another German physician who performed medical research trials and sterilizations on inmates of the Nazi death camps.




*In 1937 the Gestapo had arrested Martin Niemöller, Lutheran pastor of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem; in 1938, after one trial, he was rearrested and sent to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen and later to Dachau; he was not freed until his liberation by American troops in April 1945.




*Hitler’s companion and, eventually, wife. She never appeared in public with him and the German people knew nothing of her until after her death: she along with Hitler committed suicide in 1945 in the Berlin bunker where he lived and worked.




*Milton Bradley, a famous American inventor of board games, also specialized in studying the effects of color and pigmentation in humans.




*In the summer of 1942, the Hungarian Second Army, having joined German Panzers in their advance toward Stalingrad, suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Russian city of Voronezh, on the Don river.




*Wolfram Sievers, a physician who joined the National Socialist party in 1929 and the SS in 1935, directed a group founded by Himmler to study the origins of the Aryan “race” and in 1943 became head of the Institute for Military Scientific Research, which performed many experiments on living and dead concentration-camp inmates. At the postwar Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, he was found guilty on three counts of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1948.




*Beginning in April 1944, German and allied Hungarian forces deported Jews from Hungary’s provinces; in June, the authorities ordered the Jews in Budapest, by late July virtually the only Jews remaining in the country, into several thousand designated buildings scattered around the city and marked with yellow Stars of David. The Soviet army liberated Budapest in January 1945.




*The postwar Communist government of Hungary established People’s Tribunals to which many Hungarians were brought, charged with having collaborated with the Nazis, found guilty, and imprisoned or executed during 1945–49.




*Emmi Pikler was a well-known pediatrician who put new theories of infant education into practice at the orphanage she ran in Budapest, where she also helped to hide Jews.




*Brain softening: encephalomalacia or cerebromalacia. Dr. Lehr is in the psychiatric ward instead of the neurology ward because he is a VIP, and under Hungary’s dictatorship of the time, VIPs were given the extra privacy and protection that psychiatric wards afforded: they were closed wards, and visitors had to ring a bell to gain entrance, which was granted only to close family members.




*János Kádár was a leader in the Hungarian Communist Party who had joined Prime Minister Imre Nagy in the anti-Soviet revolutionary actions of October 1956, but by November 2 had formed a new government with Soviet support; he remained in office until 1988.




*Two key figures in the Hungarian government of 1949–53 were Defense Minister Mihály Farkas, a longtime Stalinist, and his son Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Farkas, who held a high position in the ÁVH and was widely known as a torturer.




*In May 1960 Israeli secret agents had captured the well-known Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem to face fifteen charges of committing war crimes against humanity and against the Jewish people, and of being a member of organizations that had been deemed criminal at the Nuremberg trials of 1946; the charges included his actions during the summer months of 1944, when he was in Budapest directing the expulsion of many thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His trial began on April 2, 1961, and ended with his conviction on all counts; he was executed in 1962.




*Klara is echoing the first lines of a famous Sándor Petőfi poem of 1846, which begins: “There is only one thought I dread / Among pillows to die in bed…”




*A reference work listing all the members of Europe’s royalty and nobility, published regularly in the Thuringian town of Gotha from 1764 until the Second World War.




*The Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross, which seized power as a so-called Government of National Unity in the last months of the Second World War, used the notorious Sopronkőhida military prison, outside Budapest, to incarcerate men it considered its foes.




*Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) was a celebrated Russian anarchist and theorist of revolution, who favored the idea of revolutionary conspiracy.




*In English in the original.




*Hungary’s postwar government had Communists in key positions and was in essence directed by the Soviet Union. When in 1947 the center-right Smallholders Party won an election, the Russians forbade it to form a government, but the Smallholders organized a short-lived coalition government including Communists, Social Democrats, and the left-wing National Peasant Party.




*Mátyás Rákosi, general secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party, was de facto leader of Hungary for most of 1949–56. János Kádár was prime minister from November 1956 until 1988.




*The Young Pioneers organization, founded in the Soviet Union in 1922 and emulated in many Communist-dominated countries, was a government-run, doctrinaire imitation of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.




*The writer and scholar Pascal Pia, who served in the French resistance during the Second World War and edited the underground journal Combat, favored an independent Algerian republic. Pierre Mendès-France, foreign minister and prime minister in two governments of France’s postwar Fourth Republic, was well known for his anticolonialist views; he opposed the continuation of French rule in Algeria and opposed General Charles de Gaulle’s seizure of power in May 1958, when a mounting crisis over Algeria brought about the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the creation of a Fifth Republic, of which de Gaulle became first president.




†Though a majority of the French voted in favor of Algeria’s self-determination in a referendum of January 8, 1961, a group of army officers opposed France’s efforts to negotiate a peace with the Provisional Government of Free Algeria and threatened the government of Michel Debré with a coup against it, claiming that its policies were treasonous Communist ones. Soon (in April 1961), French army generals did indeed attempt a putsch; it was put down by President de Gaulle, who appealed to French soldiers not to obey the insurrectionary officers and to support the government.




‡France’s minister for Algerian affairs in 1960–62, Joxe negotiated Algeria’s independence and the end to the Algerian war in 1962.




*The Avars, a nomadic people of Mongol Central Asian origin, were active in the Danube basin by the sixth or seventh century A.D. Horsemen-warriors dominated their highly structured, hierarchical society.




*A fourteenth-century nobleman, celebrated as a legendary hero in Hungarian folklore.




*Balter means that he began working at the prison when Miklós Horthy was regent of Hungary, that is, at some point between 1920 and 1944, then continued under the postwar Communist regimes.




*An infamous medium- and maximum-security prison in Budapest.




*In English in the original.