In the meantime, Livia's father put on his coat and went over to my house.
It must have been around midnight when I left the village and when Livia's father rang our bell.
With its legs spread wide apart, the dog stood barking away, in the middle of the street leading out of the village, which sloped slightly, while all around us the crisp outlines of silent hills were etched against the shimmering sky; I realized the dog had stopped following me, wouldn't snap at my legs anymore, and I was safe, I was all alone, incredibly happy to be able to breathe freely; as the barking turned into a long, soft whine behind me, I marched out of the village so jauntily that I even forgot how cold I was, and of course the excitement and the walking were warming me up a little.
At home they were waiting for the ambulance to take Mother to the hospital.
Livia's father was standing in the hallway, telling them what had happened, when the ambulance arrived; János went with Mother so Father could stay home and call the police.
Having lost track of time, I kept dragging myself along the silent road and didn't even realize that what I now wanted to hear, with all my young and immature being, was the sound of an approaching car, which first I thought I'd flag down and, whatever its destination, ask for a lift, but since I was afraid to do that, I got off the road, stepped into a ditch, into ankle-deep snow, and waited for it to pass.
It zoomed by and I thought they hadn't noticed me, but then I heard the screeching of brakes, of wheels, and the car spun around on the slippery road, banged against the shoulder that was slightly higher than the road, and, rebounding, slid into a stone marker; the engine stopped, the lights went out.
After the sounds of screeching, skidding, and banging, there was a split second of silence, then the two front doors flew open and two dark coats were running toward me.
I tripped and slid down the side of the ditch, and then started running on the frozen ground of a snowy meadow, spraining my ankle in the effort.
They grabbed me by my coat, near my neck.
You little motherfucker, you; almost wound up in that ditch because of you!
They twisted my arm behind my back; they both held on to me as, pushing and shoving, they dragged me to the car; I didn't protest.
They threw me on the back seat — bash your head in if you so much as move! — and had a hard time starting the car, so they kept up their swearing the whole way, but it was so nice and warm inside, my body tingled, and in this tingling softness and with the droning engine, the swearing slowly receded and I fell asleep.
It was getting light when we stopped in front of a big white building, they showed me the dent on the bumper — they're not gonna be the ones to pay for it, that's for sure, and they'll teach me not to fall asleep at a time like this.
They took me upstairs and locked me in a room.
There I tried to pull myself together; I wanted to think up a story I could tell, but I had to rest my head on the table.
For a while the table felt too hard, I tried to cushion it with my arm, but that was also too hard, and then it turned soft.
A key turned in the lock, I must have fallen asleep, after all; a woman in uniform stood in front of me, and behind her, out in the corridor, I saw my grandfather.
In the taxi, just as we made the turn from Istenhegyi Road to Adonisz Road and drove past the high fence of the restricted zone, he told me what had happened during the night; it was as if not a single night but several years had passed in the interim.
It was a bright morning, everything was melting and dripping in the sunlight.
Mother's bed was covered with a striped bedspread, as it had been years ago, before she got sick.
The way it was covered made it feel as though she no longer lived here.
And my feeling did not deceive me, for I never saw her again.
Description of a Theater Performance
Our poplar tree was holding on to its last leaves, which had to turn their deathly yellow before they could fall; they rustled in the breeze— too slight to disturb the arching branches, which merely trembled now and again — twirled and twisted on their short stems, bumping into one another.
It was sunny outside and the flickering, twisting spots of pale yellow made the distant sky even bluer; you could see deep into the mistless blue, as though eyes could distinguish between far and near and one weren't staring into a void that ended somewhere only because it wasn't infinitely transparent.
It was pleasantly warm in the room, the fire humming quietly in the white tile stove, and with our slightest move the smoke of our cigarettes sank and rose in thick, sluggish layers.
I was sitting at his desk in his comfortably wide armchair — he always let me have this special corner of his room — working on my notes, which really meant that while staring out the window through the softly curling layers of bluish smoke, I was trying to recall what had happened during rehearsals the day before, superimposing image on image.
There are gestures and words the meaning and motives behind which we comprehend all at once, and we also notice the minute irregularities that at the moment of occurrence may seem contingent and accidental, cracks and chasms of imperfections that separate the player from the play, the actor from his role, and that the actors, in accordance with the strict rules of their craft, would somehow like to bridge, as if to eliminate the sad truth that total fusion, total identification, does not exist, even if it is the ultimate desire of many a human endeavor.
Already while jotting down my notes, which I was doing rather mechanically, I had realized that the principle I was really interested in, if there was a principle, was to be found not in the obvious, logical unfolding of events, in describable gestures and meaningful words — although these were very very important, for they embody human events — but rather in the seemingly contingent gaps between the words and gestures, in these irregularities and imperfections.
He sat a little farther away, typing steadily, lifting his fingers from the keys just long enough to take a quick drag on his cigarette; he couldn't have been writing a poem, for the typing was too even and uninterrupted for that, perhaps it was a script for one of his radio programs, though this wasn't likely either, because I never saw him bring home notes or papers from the studio or take anything back with him from home; he moved empty-handed between the two main locations of his life, as if deliberately isolating one from the other; his legs stuck out from under the table, which must have made for discomfort in sitting, but this way the streak of sunlight slanting in from the tall window could warm his bare feet.
And when he felt I was staring out the window too long, he said, without looking up, that we ought to wash the windows.
His toes were long and as attractively articulated as his slender fingers; I liked pushing my fist gently into the arch of his foot and with my tongue touching each toe, feeling the sharp edge of each nail.
I never took notes right after a rehearsal; I waited until late in the evening or, if I managed to get up early, the next morning; to see more clearly the source of, and reason for, the effect a given scene had on me, to gain a better perspective on it, I had to free myself from the effect itself.
I didn't answer him, though the idea of a joint window cleaning did appeal to me.
This note-taking began as a kind of idle diversion, a solitary mental exercise which often filled me with guilt, especially when riding home in the crowded city train, jostled by grim throngs of commuters; I would often think I was enjoying the privileges of the intellectual elite and decide I simply had to stop playing the observer condemned to inaction and should at least try to profit from the bitter fact that for several years I'd been not an active participant in so-called historical events but rather their pathetic victim and in this sense a part of the faceless crowd— significant or insignificant, it hardly mattered which — an alien, self-hating element, maybe just a giant eye with no body to go with it; yet when this mental exercise became a regular routine it did have an effect on my daily life.