Her posture was as stiff as the back of the chair she was sitting on.
Grandmother was a tall, straight-backed woman, a dignified elderly lady, though today, as I backtrack in time, I confess I thought her much older than she actually was; she couldn't have been more than sixty at the time, almost twenty years younger than Grandfather, which I characteristically, having a child's concept of time, did not think such a large age difference then; I saw them both as equally ancient, resembling each other in their antiquity.
They were both lean, bony, and taciturn to the point of virtual muteness, and this, too, I saw as an inevitable, concomitant sign of old age, although they must have become taciturn for very different reasons and their separate silences did not have the same quality: Grandmother's implied a slight hurt, a constantly and emphatically communicated hurt, suggesting that she remained silent not because she had nothing to say but because she was deliberately depriving the world of her words, and would continue to deprive it, this was her way of punishing it, and I dreaded this punishment; I don't know what she was like in her youth, but in searching for the causes of her resentment, I had to conclude that she could not have coped with the fundamental changes that affected their way of life if she hadn't been able at least to flaunt her sense of having been wronged — the changes were simply too great for her — and as a young girl she had been much too pretty not to have believed that she'd be the world's pampered child until the day she died; for a few years after the war they used to be taken into town in a black Mercedes; always gleaming like a mirror and reminding me of a large comfortable coach, it was driven by a solemn-looking chauffeur, properly uniformed, his cap complete with ribboned visor, but of course they had to sell the car, and for years I covered my school texts and notebooks in now worthless stock certificates; once you removed the perforated coupons, the snow-white reverse side was ideally suited for this purpose; and then, unexpectedly, Grandfather closed his law office on Teréz Boulevard, as a consequence of which they had to let their maid go, and for a time after that Maria Stein moved into the maid's room until she, too, disappeared from our lives; finally, to complete the disaster, in the year when most private property was nationalized, Grandfather voluntarily, and without previously consulting Grandmother, surrendered all claims of ownership to their house; Grandmother was so unprepared for this, as Mother once laughingly told me, that when she found out, several weeks after the fact and quite by accident, she simply fainted — after all, the house had been her entire inheritance — and when they finally managed to revive her (it was Mother's older sister Klara who managed to slap some life into her) she imposed the worst possible punishment on both herself and the family: she refused to say another word to Grandfather, ever; what was most ludicrous about this was that Grandfather kept on talking to her, as if unwilling to acknowledge her silence; and in truth, her wounded feelings had to be taken seriously, because she wasn't born to be maid and nurse to three hopelessly ill and two mentally unhinged people — she was convinced that Father and I were not completely normal, and no doubt there was some truth in that; she was not cut out for such tasks, having neither the feeling nor the strength for them, even if she did carry out all her duties efficiently, conscientiously, with all the dignity of her wounded pride, while Grandfather's situation was just the opposite: he may have been silenced by his own inexhaustible patience and uncanny sense of humor; with him it wasn't a matter of wounded pride; more precisely, he did not consider himself the wounded party, it was just that he came to look upon the business of the world as so absurd, crazy, trivial, dull, and transparent that out of sheer consideration he didn't want to offend anyone with his opinions; to such an extent did he dismiss as not serious things others considered dead serious that he learned to hold back his natural responses in order to avoid dispute, and from that, I imagine, he suffered at least as much as Grandmother did from her wounded pride.
Bitter traces of his ironic smile hovered around his lips even during his attacks, as if behind the protection of his closed eyelids he were making fun of his own gasping and choking, considering the futile struggle his body was waging against him as a pitiful if unavoidable mistake: the body would not, still it would not, let happen what must inevitably happen.
Grandmother observed this struggle rather angrily, if only because his peculiar frivolous ways made him an exasperating patient; he would have liked to die but couldn't; therefore he didn't entrust himself to his nurse but, with a kind of ultimate wisdom, offered up his body and soul to the force his faith told him held sway over him, withdrawing from the merciful, worldly benevolence of treatment; he made human attempts to cure him look frivolous.
But from Grandmother's wounded vantage point this attitude must have seemed as though he was going through all this, this ungratefully long agony, all this fuss, only to annoy and offend her to the bitter end.
At the same time, as far as appearances were concerned, there was nothing shameful, awkward, or shabby in this struggle, in their tug-of-war; they both gave it its proper due.
I never saw my grandparents in scanty, slovenly, or even casual attire: they were always meticulously, impeccably dressed; although he never left the house, Grandfather shaved every morning, wore only white shirts with starched collars, silk cravats tied in big, bulky knots, crisply pressed, wide-bottomed trousers, and short beige corduroy housecoats; Grandmother washed dishes, cooked and cleaned in slightly elevated, morocco-leather house shoes, in narrow-waisted house robes that flared, bell-like, over her ankles; depending on the season and occasion, they were made of cotton, silk, soft wool, or dark rich velvet, and they graced her figure as exquisitely as evening gowns; she did not look at all ludicrous but, rather, stern and dignified, moving about cautiously, squeamishly touching the objects that had to be dusted, as if by accident, smoking one cigarette after another; she engaged help only for the strenuous chores like spring cleaning or doing the windows or waxing the floors; "I'll have a girl in for that," she liked to say at such times, just as she would "have" a taxi or streetcar take her, rather then "taking" a taxi or "getting on" a streetcar. She had Kálmán's mother do our laundry; once a week she came to pick up the dirty clothes, and returned them clean and pressed.
That night, in the short pause between two long whistling gasps, Grandfather said something like Air! Window! but we couldn't quite make out the words, so garbled were they by his convulsive breathing. And Grandmother did get up, but instead of opening the window she turned off the lamp over Grandfather's head and sat back in her chair.
It must have been around midnight.
We are not going to open the window for him, she said in the dark; I don't feel like mopping the floor in the middle of the night, and there's plenty of air in here, plenty.
Whenever I was with them she spoke to him as if she were speaking to me.
And then we went on waiting in the dark for his attack to subside, or for something to happen.
Despite the long night vigil, I awakened quite early the next morning.
It was a remarkable summer morning, quite remarkable: the rising mist of last night's storm made the sky a clear, downy blue, with not a single cloud; the wind was blowing in fierce gusts.
High, way up high, it blew, who could tell where, with an even boom, a ceaseless howl; in mighty swoops it ran through the trees, bending their crowns into itself, struck the bushes and lashed across the shimmering grass, shaking, rattling, and tearing apart things in its path; for the duration of this onslaught, the sounds of the whirling, colliding, rustling leaves, the sounds of cracking tree trunks and crashing, groaning branches harmonized with the howl on high, made everything terrestrial slide, vibrate, and flash because the wind jolted light and shadow from their natural positions, out of their plane, dislocated them, and while the wind could illuminate and rearrange things, it could not make a permanent new place for them in time, before the onslaught was over, and only the rumbling in the blue firmament remained, bringing nothing, fulfilling no expectation — as a thunderclap would in the wake of lightning — and with the next downward swoop it began all over again, unpredictably, again bringing neither clouds nor rain, neither bringing back the storm nor disturbing summer's tranquillity, being neither cool nor warm, the air clear, in fact becoming clearer and less humid, no swirling funnels to churn up the dust, one could even hear a woodpecker tapping; still, it was a storm, perhaps it was pure force, dry and empty.