And when I lay down next to her on the soft divan, leaning over her and cautiously touching her shoulder, I was not motivated by tenderness or empathy — if anything, she disgusted me, I hated her, and feared she might go on like this forever; and though I knew all crying must come to an end sometime, its effect on me was so powerful, the sight and sound so immediate, that my former experiences failed to reassure me and I thought, Yes, she will go on like this, she won't stop, ever, whatever had been hidden and now surfaced accidentally will become permanent, and Szidónia will walk in and I'll be found out, and the neighbors will come trooping across the garden, because everybody could hear her, and they'll call a doctor, and her mother and father will come, and she'll still be carrying on in her red dress, and they'll find out that this dreadful thing was all because of me.
"Maja dear."
"Your mother's cunt, that's what's dear!"
"But what is it? Come, don't cry like this. What happened? I'm here. You know I understand. Everything. We promised, remember? You've said it yourself."
"Fuck your promise!" she said, and she rolled back toward the wall, pulling away impetuously, and I clambered after her, just to make her stop.
"I'm not going away, I only said that to get you scared, but I'm not, I promise. I'll stay right here. Come on, Maja, Maja! But you can go. If you want to, you can go. You know I always let you do what you want. Why don't you answer?" I whispered in her ear and tried to hug her, flatten myself against her, hoping that the calm of my body would somehow pass into hers.
But where was my superior manly calm by then! I was also trembling, my voice also shaking, and I didn't suspect that with faultless concentration she sensed everything and that I couldn't have given her greater satisfaction than this.
At the same time my alarmed tenderness instead of calming her frenzy oddly intensified it, and only at this point could I peer behind her madness and ascertain that, as frightful and uncontrolled as the spectacle seemed, there was plenty of sober and calculating sense left in her; I may have drawn her head close to me with a gesture disguised as one of caring attention, planning slyly to put my hand over her mouth so that no more of that sound should come out, but it was no use, we saw through each other, and she could accurately detect the deceit hidden in my gesture; her body tensed up, she flung me off her and began kicking and pummeling me, biting my fingers hard, as she kept on wailing and shrieking; her face was contorted, almost as if it had become a boy's face, hard, angular, and dirty from tear stains; and if at that moment my quaking fright had not been replaced by a bit of cunning, if I had responded to her blows and kicks with blows and kicks of my own, chances are she would have beaten me thoroughly, for though we never fought in earnest, she was probably stronger than I and, in any case, wilder and more reckless.
I didn't defend myself, I didn't even notice when she stopped screaming, what's more, I didn't try to hold her down, and I restrained myself — our relationship never had a more honest moment — I let her claw and bite and kick and scratch and tried to respond to her every move with the gentlest of touches, soft caresses and kisses that bounced off her, given the unevenness of the fight, just as her clumsy, broad-stroked, girlish punches missed me; still, I was the girl and she the boy, in this situation at least, in the way she glowered and bared her teeth and tensed her neck muscles; in the sudden silence that followed, only her loud panting, the groans of the mattress, and the thud of punches could be heard.
She tried to push me away, pressing her fist against my shoulder, off the divan, onto the floor, but when my hand clasped her naked thigh, it was as if her hate-filled resistance and raging fury had suddenly left, unexpectedly even to her, flowed out, evaporated from her limbs, and her body relaxed in an instant; as if seeing me for the first time in her life, she seemed genuinely surprised that I was so close to her and that she liked it; she opened her eyes wide again, no longer whitely insane but familiarly inquisitive.
She held her breath.
As though she was anxious not to let even her breath touch my mouth, not if we were this close, this hot.
The bare skin under my hand quivered a bit, as if she had just realized my hand was there.
And how could my hand have gotten there?
Then she burst into tears again.
As if the closeness and the warmth had brought on the tears, but now there was real pain behind them, a quiet, I'd even say wise, pain.
A pain that had no hope of finding relief in the heat of another outburst, and indeed never turned into a real cry comparable to the earlier one, but remained a quiet whimper.
Still, this voice touched me more deeply than the earlier voices, and I somehow caught it from her: a long-drawn-out whine did leave my throat though my cry could not burst forth but only choked me, because in my chest and in my thighs a firm and eager but also paralyzing force, preventing total yielding or weakening, was pushing, thrusting me toward her; if before I had assumed or suspected she was foisting a nonexistent, imaginary pain on her body, using it to deceive and distract me so that she could obtain my surrender, I now realized this assumption was unfounded, because something was causing her real pain — I was the cause of her pain, the fact that she loved me as well.
I edged closer to her, and rather than objecting to this she helped me by slipping her arm under my shoulder, gently hugging me to herself, and simply to return the gesture I let my hand slide up her thigh, my fingers slip under her panties.
And we lay there like this.
Her burning face on my shoulder.
We seemed to be lolling in some spacious, soft and slippery wetness where one doesn't know how time passes but it's of no importance anyway.
With my arms I was rocking her body as if wanting to rock both of us to sleep.
With my little sister, too, I used to lie like this, in a time beyond memory, under the desk, when I was experimenting with those pins and she, looking for a place to hide and finding it with me, screamed in pain and terror as she flung herself on me, as if by entrusting her pitiful, twisted, and by all appearances disgusting body to me, she was trying to say she'd understood my cruel games and was even grateful to me, since I was the only one who, through those games, had found a language she could use; that's how my sister and I kept rocking each other, half-sitting, half-lying on the cool parquet floor, until we fell asleep in each other's arms in the late-afternoon twilight.
"One day you'll realize you've been tormenting me for no good reason," she whispered later, her trembling lips almost touching my ear, "because you never believe me, but there's nobody I love as much as I love you, nobody."
She sounded like that other voice, out of that long-ago afternoon, straight out of the body of my little sister, a shrill but lilting voice, tickling my ears; it felt as though I was hugging my little sister's formless body, knowing it was slender Maja I was holding.
In the meantime, she kept buzzing and bubbling in my ear, gratefully, softly, unstoppably.
"Like yesterday, I told him he could bully all he wanted, you were my number-one love and not him, I told him straight out; I told him you were good and kind, and not mean like them, and I know he's doing it with me just so he could tell Krisztián about it, I told him he's definitely number two."
She stopped for a moment, as if she didn't dare come out with it, but then, like a whiff of hot air, assailed my ear: "But you are my baby, and I love to play with you so much! and you mustn't be mad when I pretend to be in love with him. He interests me in some ways, yes, but it's all a game, I'm only using him to tease you, but there's nobody, nobody I love as much as you, believe me, certainly not him, because he's a brute beast and not nice to me at all. Sometimes we could make believe you're my son. I often thought I'd like to have a little boy just like you; I can't imagine him any other way but as a sweet, kind, innocent, blond-haired little boy."