Tranquility (15 page)

“Let's go then,” I said, after my eyes had had their fill.

“All right,” she said, after she looked into my eyes.

.   .   .

That's when I should have left Eszter, in the espresso bar, with all the cognac glasses on the table and her referral for a biopsy. “Can I throw this away?” the waitress asked, and I said no and put the referral away as if it had been mine. In a few days, we had the results and it turned out that the tumor in Eszter Fehér's uterus was benign. After a routine operation, her womb would be as serviceable as that of any healthy twenty-eight-year-old woman's, equally suitable for birth or abortion, depending on the quality of the woman's relationship to her partner.

I was waiting in the corridor, with two packs of cigarettes in my pocket,
because I didn't know how long it would take to remove a benign tumor, but I had the urge, after the first cigarette, to run into the operating room and make them stop immediately. At last, the door opened and Dr. Vidák reassured me that everything was just fine, but for at least a month, we must stay away from
that
, did I understand?

“I understand,” I said, and two days later I took Eszter home from the hospital to a thirty-two-square-meter tenement in the Ninth District, and carried her up the cat-smelling staircase to the fourth floor as one would a wife after she gave birth, even though that was the first time I set foot in her place.

Where are you going son?

I have to get bread, Mother.

We still have some, yesterday you came home after ten again. I had things to do, Mother.

I can't live like this, with you roaming around all the time.

All right, Mother, I'll try to get home sooner, I said, and then one night I redid two of the security chains so that using a small hook I could undo them from the outside, and after my mother fell asleep I snuck out of the apartment as out of a reformatory because I didn't want her to ask me where are you going son. I lay next to Eszter on a foam mattress, in the cloister silence of the tenement on Nap Street, and was grateful to Dr. Vidáki for having forbidden
that
. Instead of an in-depth analysis of
King Lear
, I suddenly began to talk about all the things I hadn't talked to anyone about for a decade. My stories were gushing out of me as water does out of roadside wells, even though Eszter wasn't quizzing me or urging me on; she only held me so tight that her pubic bones left a purple mark on my hip.

“I'd like to see your room,” Eszter said.

“You can't,” I said. “But it's nothing special anyway. I have a desk from some Russian play, a pretty good bed, also from a play, and a whole lot of books of which I've probably read about one-fifth.”

“Rug?”

“From
The Merchant of Venice
.”

“Chandelier?”

“From a Czech comedy, but I don't remember its title.”

“View?”

“The Museum Garden or the shutters.”

“I want to make love to you.”

“You can't, you're still sick,” I lied, as I had been for some days because I was afraid that afterward I'd be waiting for an opportune moment to escape, as I had waited in the cloakroom of the Kárpátia Restaurant, or in Kispest, or on a Hundertwasser-patterned sheet. I would have liked Dr. Vidáki's prohibition to last a lifetime. If only I could just lie here with my clothes on, on this 160 by 200 centimeter mattress and tell my tales until she can't even hear my voice. I didn't want anything except for her to press my hand against her body so that through the housedress I could feel the warmth of her loins. When her lips began to tremble, I knew she had not been hearing anything I said for quite some time. I stopped talking and watched her body writhing more and more desperately. I watched her spine tighten, like the spines of people whom doctors try to revive with electric shocks; like a violin string that would snap at the next touch. Her pleasure was as frighteningly beautiful as was the way she had stood in the wind, thirty meters above the blinding ice floes. I watched the face behind the disheveled black hair, the slowing panting of her chest; I watched as
she was gradually coming to. When her hand reached between my legs, I got hold of her wrist and lied that I had to go because my mother would be waking up. Well, go then, she said, and kissed my eyes.

.   .   .

“I'd like to see your mother,” she said.

“You can't,” I said. “But she's nothing special, anyway. When she is not Juliet or Laura Lenbach, she is exactly like me.”

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“I went to the library today and looked up a few of her cover photos.”

“You shouldn't be going outside.”

“I'm not your mother.”

“I know that.”

“Then kiss me,” she said.

“You're still sick,” I said.

“You're lying,” she said, and undid the belt of her robe and in fact that was the first time I saw her completely naked, when the black and white silk slipped off her shoulders. I wanted to escape but she sat on me the way God sat on the ruins of Nineveh. We stared into each other's eyes while she unbuttoned my shirt.

“Don't,” I said.

“Be quiet,” she said, her hair covered me, and I felt the tiny pit of the navel fill up with hot saliva. Her face thrust against my belly to bathe in the frothy pool, to smear her saliva on my skin before burning through me, and my loins felt her breath.

“Don't,” I said again, but her finger, covered with the dew of her own loins, clung to my mouth, and then penetrated my lips to paralyze me with
the flavor of the sea. It kept crawling forward on my tongue, to the throat and back, as slowly and irresistibly as below a single taste bud was crawling over the taut capillaries. I felt her lips gliding up and down the nerve endings of desire and I slowly began to leave memories behind. I was forgetting everything the way I had on Szabadság Bridge, and it wasn't just my locked desk drawer and Judit's letters I forged with my left hand, and Cleopatra running home in her glass-ruby bra that I was forgetting, I couldn't even remember whether it was dawn or late afternoon. And when I forgot how to breathe, and my spine tightened, then Eszter's lips also forgot their way back. Suddenly, I was at the very bottom of her improbably deep throat and in the next moment I could not feel the nails plowing my chest or hear my own screaming, I felt nothing but the pulsing of her throat as it swallowed all of last month's suppressed effusion, and the insane drumming of my heart inside my ribcage. Then both light and darkness vanished, God's watch in heaven stopped, as did Mother's prop alarm clock in hell.

I came to at the taste of my sperm. She kissed my own spermatozoa into my mouth like a string of real pearls. “I love you,” she said, and by the time her fingers made their way from my lips to my testicles I was indeed capable of doing what only a short while earlier a month's accumulated desire would not let me do. My hand found the downward path along the spine's grooves, and then lowered itself into the cauldron below the last vertebra, to pave the way for me between her labia. “Does it hurt?” I asked, but I could no longer create words out of the sounds I was making. Each sound separately, panting and breathless, was fleeing from the loosened net of consciousness. Her tongue crawled across the arch of my palate and wiggled its way into the crevice between the lips and the gums and her saliva dripped down my throat. But when I reached the very depths
of her body, by the time I felt the insane fluttering of her heart from the inside, she no longer had strength to continue kissing. And I had to think of Mother's prop-room alarm clock because I didn't want it to stop yet. I wanted to stay here until the end of time, entangled in the deranged net of consciousness, with the taste of her sweat-soaked nipples in my mouth, but I wasn't allowed. A thousand hands grasped my arm and pressed the pad of my finger on the ember of her clitoris, and the next moment I felt how the muscles thrust against my body began to pulse, that Eszter, sobbing, dug her fingers into my ribs, and perhaps I also felt as she swooned and toppled over me.

.   .   .

Now is the time I should let down roots, I thought, like oaks do, she thought, more like cedars that live longer, I thought, I love you, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I only thought, she thought, that'd be the end of you, I thought, I don't care, she thought, can't go on living like this, I thought, that's the way I want to live, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I won't be quiet she thought, I'll get her a live-in nurse, I thought, then you'd never see me again, she thought, I know, I thought, I was only thinking, I thought, if you are lying next to me don't even dare think about that, she thought, don't be angry, I thought, I am not angry, she thought, then hug me, I thought, but I am hugging you, she thought, I want to stay here, I thought, I know, she thought, fixed in one place like an oak tree, I thought, or a cedar tree that lives longer, she thought, with roots that grasp and clutch you, I thought, then grasp me clutch me, she thought, your hip is turning blue as it is, I thought, I don't care, she thought, I love you, I thought, then this is the way we'll live, she thought, it's impossible to live like this, I thought, it's the only way life's worth living, she thought, I fear for you, I thought,
no reason for that, she thought, I can imagine, I thought, it's dawning, she thought, you've been quiet for a month for nothing, I thought, you have to go, she thought, you are more afraid than I am, I thought, that's not true, she thought, but it is, I thought, you really have to go, she'll be waking up now, she thought, I know, I thought, then go, she thought and kissed pleasure's sweat off my forehead.

.   .   .

Where have you been son?

I had things to do, Mother.

I had pains around my heart.

I'm sorry, Mother.

You won't be here even when I kick the bucket.

Let me call a doctor, Mother.

Don't call anybody; I've taken some medicine.

That's all right then, Mother, I said, though I knew that except for vitamin pills and Valerian drops there was no medicine in the apartment, that we were even out of aspirin, but I couldn't get myself to say that I didn't believe in any of these pains around her heart. Yet when I was only ten, I didn't hesitate to walk into her room at night and tell them to finish their rehearsal and ask Effenbach to make himself scarce because I wanted to go to sleep, because Judit and I had to get up at seven.

“And you're not even an actor, only a shitty journalist,” I said to Effenbach, and to this day I don't understand why I had to apologize for this, Mother, because he was really nothing but a shitty journalist; a phony critic who churned out his hackneyed articles at the state's request. “A humanely profound work”; now how can I forget something like that, Mother?
Les Misérables
, as a humanly profound work; I remember those words better
than the multiplication table; nevertheless, at the reception following the premiere I finally went up to this vermin because you wanted me to.

.   .   .

“I'd like to apologize for what I said the other day,” I said.

“Never mind, I've already forgotten about it,” he said.

“I haven't,” I said.

“Look, you're a big boy already, almost a grown man. You should know that I am not hurting your mommy.”

“Of course,” I said.

“What she and I do when . . . well, would you like some apple juice?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“If she yells, it's not because somebody is hurting her but because she is very happy. You probably yell with joy when Santa Claus brings you a nice present.”

“A-ha,” I said.

“I see you understand me. Well, as I was saying, beautiful ladies, like your mother, well, the happier they are the louder they yell.”

“Yes, that's what you were saying,” I said.

“Of course, you are absolutely right about me not being an actor, but sometimes one doesn't want to admit what makes him happy because the other person might misunderstand, and then one says something that's not quite accurate . . . sure you don't want some apple juice?”

“I'm sure,” I said. “No problem, Mother also likes it better that Judit and I think you two are rehearsing.”

“Likes it better than what?”

“Better, for example, than me coming into the room to say stop fucking.”

“Holy shit, what a kid! I see I can talk to you man to man, can't I?

“Yes, let's talk man to man then,” I said. “I don't want you to be fucking my mother.”

“That doesn't seem to me to be an apology.”

“It was your idea we talk man to man.”

“Aren't you just a little bit insolent?”

“No,” I said. “I just happen to dislike snot-faces like you who bring marzipans when they come to fuck. I positively hate marzipans.”

“Now please go back to your mommy before I beat the shit out of you,” he said, and I would have gone on, telling him I had no problem killing him, for example, but luckily comrade Sárossy, the director, showed up to clink glasses with comrade Effenbach, the critic, and Judit pulled me away from the two of them.