But now, because I didn't feel like listening to her crying anymore, I stuck my index finger into the mug and lifted out the skin.
This bit of silliness made her laugh; she plopped down next to me on the step and opened her mouth, indicating that she wanted it.
I dangled it like bait, even lowering it into her mouth, but when she was about to slurp it up with her lips and stuck-out tongue, I pulled it back; we repeated this stunt until she again made a face as if to cry, and then I let her have it along with my finger.
She sucked it off; to increase her pleasure, I put the nearly empty mug in her hand, and behind her back sneaked through the gate and ran off, so by the time she realized what had happened, she'd see nothing but the empty street.
Kálmán was standing on the trail.
This was the trail that led from their farm, above the cornfield, into the forest; he had a stick in his hand, pointing it at the ground, but seemed to be doing nothing else with it.
The wind was scraping through the deep-green corn leaves, making a shrill sound; the forest was booming.
What was he doing there, I asked him when, still panting, I reached him up on the hill, I had to scream almost to outshout the wind; but he said nothing, slowly turned his head toward me and stared at me as if he didn't exactly know who I was.
Right before his feet, in the middle of the trail, a dead mouse lay on its side, but Kálmán wasn't touching it with his stick.
I had no idea what was eating him; when I had quietly looked for him earlier in their yard — no shouting was allowed then, his parents and brothers were asleep — everything seemed fine; he'd already let out the geese and the chickens, the stable was empty, and in the pen the little piglets were busy suckling at the teats of the sow, sprawled peacefully on the floor.
When I stopped in to see how she was doing, she raised her head, gave me a long series of grunts; she recognized me, was happy to see me, and it was this silly feeling I wanted to share with Kálmán, that their sow loved me.
A little way off, his dog kept circling a bush, stuck its nose roughly into the layers of fallen leaves, scratching feverishly, and then ran around the bush some more until it hit a spot that must have promised some important and exciting find but that it couldn't get to, and began scratching and digging again.
And then, thinking I'd found a way to make him talk, I quickly squatted down on the trail, because I suddenly discovered that he must have been looking at the maggots toiling around the carcass of the mouse; his silence annoyed me, and maybe because of the wind, I don't exactly know why, I felt too energetic and excited to adjust my mood abruptly to his; at the same time I couldn't very well ask him what was bothering him, you didn't just come out and ask a thing like that.
I definitely couldn't, if only because whatever was bothering him was serious enough for him to ignore my helpfully inquisitive gesture; he pretended to be standing there by chance and even seemed embarrassed at having been looking at the dumb bugs; his posture, standing motionless, implied that I was mistaken to think he'd actually been doing something before I got there; he wasn't watching those insects at all, he had no intention of doing anything, none whatsoever, he was just hanging around, wanting to be alone, and he wasn't interested in anything; I might be an eager beaver, of course, but he didn't need me, I might as well buzz off, instead of pretending to be so interested in those bugs, he could see right through me; wasn't it enough that the wind was blowing like crazy and the sun was beating down so hard and his dog had gone nuts, so why didn't I just get the hell out of there?
But I didn't, which was a little humiliating, since staying there with this kind of rebuff and indifference made no sense, but I didn't budge.
And why was I there all the time, why did I keep coming around, anyway? but where should I have gone? and if I hadn't gone over to his house, wouldn't he have come to mine? because whenever I got stubborn and dug in my heels or got really offended, or my humiliation was too deep to get over with just a shrug of the shoulders, then he was sure to show up, grinning as if nothing had happened; and I also knew full well that he showed up not just because of me but somehow to prevent me from going to Maja, and the reverse of this, if not quite so emphatically, was also true: I kept going over to his house to see if he wasn't at Maja's.
This was the difference between us: he'd put up obstacles, hold inspections, divert and impede my actions; I merely checked things out, wanted to know what was happening, and if I didn't find him at home and his mother couldn't tell me where he was either, and after roaming the forest in the hope that his disappearance was only a mistake and I'd find him but didn't! then jealousy made my whole world turn a little black, not so much because of Maja as because of Krisztián.
Imagining that while I stood there alone, helpless and miserable, they were playing together, conveniently forgetting about me, making it clear I meant nothing to them.
But Kálmán couldn't have had any inkling of this.
Just as it never dawned on him that if he managed to elude my vigilance and slipped over to Maja's, my jealousy wouldn't be nearly so intense as his when I did the same, because it bothered me much less what he might have done with Maja; put more precisely, I wanted to know about it, but it gave me pleasure, painful pleasure to be sure, that in a relationship which didn't mean all that much to me he was my stand-in, and that when I was there I became his substitute — and I found this act of substitution immeasurably exciting.
It was as if in Kálmán and me Maja loved not two different individuals but a single one who couldn't be fully embodied in either one alone, and so when she talked to me, she was invariably addressing Kálmán as well, and when she was with him, she would also want to be with me a little; whether we liked it or not, we always had to endure the presence of the other, play the role of a stranger for her, a stranger who had become familiar because of these games yet whose strangeness prevented the longed-for consummation and fulfillment, because no matter how provocatively she may have been playing the whore, showing off with the superficial characteristics of one, Maja remained more like a yearned-for object of desire for both of us; and she couldn't be the real Maja either, not for him, not for me, not even for herself, because whatever she was looking for in him or in me, she could find only in the two of us together, yet she was also searching for a one and only, and because she couldn't find him she suffered, and aped Szidónia's unbridled licentiousness; in the process, she became a kind of symbol of femininity for us, which we felt we should measure up to with our budding masculinity — we couldn't have known then that it was precisely with these games of substitutions— experimenting on, learning from and about one another — that she would lead us to where we had to go; all in good time, nature bids us be patient, even if patience must be extracted from a would-be lover's passionate impatience.
I thought that in this confusing game I, and only I, could come out the winner, because even if something irrevocable happened between the two of them, something more than a kiss — and of course I also wished to have that "more" myself — even then, even beyond that, Maja and I shared a deeper, darker secret: our clandestine searches, and Kálmán couldn't possibly come between us, with his love or with anything else; there was nothing he could do that might disturb our very special relationship.
And even if that "more" did happen, I would have benefited from it somehow; Maja would have returned some of it to me.
Kálmán and I kept a hold on each other, cunningly and ardently we held on, wouldn't let go, and compared to this fierce embrace, which pervaded every moment of our lives and in the hours of jealousy seemed deadly, having touched each other's member seemed rather trivial, and if not trivial then only a consequence of our rivalry.