A mouth ready to whistle, sing hauntingly, or chatter endlessly, and full cheeks framed by a mass of springy brown curls all added to her cheerful, carefree, and unself-conscious demeanor; she turned around and without relaxing her narrow shoulders still raised in a shrug headed for the door, but then unexpectedly changed course and, instead of walking out, threw herself on the bed.
It wasn't a real bed but a kind of divan that doubled as a bed where during the day a heavy Persian throw rug covered the bedclothes; it was soft and warm, her motionless body fairly sank in it, clad in the maroon, flower-patterned dress she had filched for the afternoon from her mother's closet, which was in fact a tiny sunlit room with built-in white floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, all filled with pleasant-smelling dresses, one of our favorite places for rummaging and exploration; her bare legs, dangling helplessly from the divan, almost glowed in this stuffy dim room, and what made the sight even more inviting was that her skirt rode up to her thighs, and as she lay there, hiding her head in the protective embrace of her arms, she began to cry, making her shoulders, back, and even gently curving backside shake and quiver.
Her tears didn't move me much, I was familiar with every possible variant of these crying sessions: the simple whimpers, the even, inconsolable sniffling, and the furiously rising huge outbursts that she invariably carried to unbearably ugly, sloppy, snotty crescendos of bawling, followed by slow, talkative denouements, quiet shivers, stifled tremors of exhaustion that made her body spongy-soft and relaxed until, without noticeable transition, she found her way back to her usual self, which was, if possible, even stronger and more confident — and fully satisfied.
This familiarity with her crying styles didn't mean of course that I could deny her my sympathy, for I knew she was capable of crying even when I wasn't looking; she had given detailed accounts of her solitary crying sessions often enough, lacing them with a healthy dose of self-mockery, including the candidly revealing admission that crying, an unabashed and self-indulgent flaunting of pain, was no small pleasure, and what's more, she liked to cry in Livia's company, too, finding her a similarly sympathetic, gentle, somewhat more objective provider of solace than I; still, something about her crying was directed only at me, some playful, exaggerated quality made to order, as it were, a theatricality prompted by my presence; her cries were part and parcel of our mutual dishonesty, an important element in the elaborate system of lies and pretenses that nevertheless had to be enacted with the utmost care and conviction, the very fraudulent games which we played in the guise of total honesty and openness; it was as if with these cries she was trying out, in front of me and for me, the part of the weak, helpless, easily injured, refined woman she would one day become, although in reality she was cold and hard, calculatingly cruel and shrewd, and while in beauty no match for Hédi, she acted so very tough and aggressive, so stubbornly possessive of everything and everyone, that she seemed to dominate us even more than Hédi did with her beauty, although that, too, was a charade, as she must have known I knew; she was rehearsing a role, and those flounced and frilly dresses and silky fabrics for which we both had developed a deep liking were the appropriately feminine, external supports for the role, and stealing them added a further element of excitement to her clandestine acts of transformation, because she wanted to be exactly like her mother; I started toward the divan with the most confident steps, for in my assigned role I had to be strong, calm, understanding, a trifle brutal even, in short, absolutely masculine, a role promising so many playful pleasures that, however false it was, I had no problem assuming it.
And perhaps it was this deliberate readiness for falsity that made me different from other boys.
I was so much in tune with the source of her femininity, I had the impression I was just playing at being a boy, and my playacting might be exposed at any time.
As if there was no dividing line between my maleness and my femaleness.
It seemed to me it wasn't I who did this or that, I wasn't the one who acted, but only chose between two pre-prepared patterns of action inside me, one for boys and one for girls, and since I was a boy, I chose the male pattern, naturally, but could just as easily have chosen the other one: I could now ask her, for example, in a rough, no-nonsense voice, what in God's name was the matter with her, though I knew perfectly well what the matter was, and if she didn't answer I could demand even more forcefully that she stop the hysterics, tell her sarcastically that her idiotic bawling and hollering was a sheer waste of time, or I could start swearing and make as though her crying annoyed the hell out of me, which it didn't; or I could switch, take the part of a girl friend and tell her that if she still wanted to see her darling Kálmán, that disgusting fat slob— and that was what she wanted to do, wasn't it? — though I had no idea what she could see in him, his name was enough to make me puke, but if she still wanted to see him, she'd better mind her lovely face and not mess it up with all that disgusting blubbering, because then he wouldn't like her nearly as much as she would like him to; all the while Maja, trusting herself to the undulating waves in the opening movement of her crying, seemed to be waiting for just these harsh words, the precise content of the rudeness hardly mattering, just needing symbolic slaps to prove to herself that she was indeed weak, as I needed to swear to prove I was strong, and as soon as she got these bracing slaps, she released the pent-up energies of a well-practiced performance, turned on her side, lowered her arms, and, switching to deep-throated bawling, finally showed me her face, so contorted by tears and screaming that it deserved some real sympathy.
As if there was a degree of falsity where the false began to appear genuine.
"What do you all want from me? Why are you screaming? What do you want? Why? Everybody, everybody keeps tormenting me!" she screamed, her scream turning into a howl that sounded quite real, giving me a perversely wonderful pleasure since her howling had to do with both Kálmán and me: it was her wavering and vacillating between the two of us that was real, though for me it still remained a game I could observe from the outside; but now, rolling back on her stomach, she buried her head in her arms again and began her rise, this time without the slightest inhibition, into regions of higher, truer, more real sobbing; I stood over her, fascinated and mesmerized, as she manipulated, slowly, gradually, with finesse, what may have seemed like a game a moment ago into a passion of suffering, and though her body at first resisted, having no real cause for suffering, and refused to cooperate, now it did, and the clever maneuver worked: sunk deep in the soft bed, she was suffering, she was trembling and writhing, this was no longer just a game; yet still I made no move, still tried to preserve the calm air of a confident male, did not reach out toward her, didn't touch her or comfort her, though the sight truly shocked me, because she kept tearing and biting the blanket and, like an epileptic, jerking and tossing her head while her legs dangled lifelessly over the edge of the bed, and she seemed to be having an attack, trapped in the unrelieved tension between total self-revelation and total self-defense; and my fear, dread, and shocked immobility hiding behind benevolent indifference were more than justified, because I was the one who wanted this to happen, I had provoked it with my words, teased the secret madness out of her so that I could feel my power over her, vanquish, in her body, that other boy within me who was too tenderly and cruelly familiar to make me truly jealous — it was all for me, then, only for me, but that voice! the shrill sobs swelling into screams seemed to be issuing not from a single source but from two different voices, as if behind the pitiful bawling, broken by the rhythmic writhing of her body, there was another, shrieking voice that grew piercingly, unrelentingly, thinner and reedier; it was unbearable, and I felt everything about to crumble and slip out of my control.