Bori tells him about her life. “It’s not as interesting as yours,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“As a story.”
“No?”
They’re in bed. The window’s open and there’s the sound of individual voices, indistinct, from outside. He’s smoking a cigarette.
“No,” she says.
“Tell me about it,” he says.
“There isn’t much to tell.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” she says.
He asks her how long she’s worked at the wine cellar.
She tells him for about twenty years.
“I like it there,” she says, as if she feels she needs to explain it somehow, that she’s been there so long.
“Sure,” he says.
“They’re nice people.”
“They are.”
She says that the only interesting thing about her life is that she has a daughter who’s in her thirties now.
“Yeah?” he says, surprised.
She says that she was fifteen when her daughter was born. She put her up for adoption. She lives in Holland now. She’s spent most of her life there. Bori knows that because she contacted her about five years ago.
“She contacted you?” István says.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“On Facebook.”
“What did she say?”
“Just that she was my daughter, and that she wanted to meet me. The message was in English,” she says. “She doesn’t speak Hungarian.”
“Okay.”
“So she wrote in English. I had to use Google Translate.”
“How did you feel?” István asks.
“When I got the message?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Happy. And sad. I don’t know.”
“Why sad?”
“I don’t know.”
He stubs out his cigarette. He takes his time over it. “Did you meet her?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Where?”
“In Budapest.”
“And?”
“It was nice. It was nice to know that she’s okay.”
“Of course. Are you still in touch?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
When he takes her hand one day as they walk in the town she says, “Don’t do that.”
“Okay,” he says.
In fact he only did it because he thought she might want him to. He’s actually pleased that she doesn’t. He likes that about her, that she’s not the sort of person who wants to hold hands.
They sit down at a terrace and order drinks.
The terrace is on the edge of a paved open space surrounded by concrete buildings. Kids mess about on skateboards in the middle of the space, where there’s the sort of municipal sculpture that nobody ever particularly notices or thinks about.
The kids’ voices are still echoing around the space when they leave and walk to a kebab shop that they like nearby.
After that they go back to her place.
It feels quite ordinary and domestic now, to take the elevator up and let themselves into the apartment.
The affair, or whatever it is, lasts for about a year.
Then Bori ends it. She says that she doesn’t want her husband to find out, and she’s worried that if they don’t stop he eventually will.
“Okay,” István says.
She’s looking at him with a slightly worried expression.
“I understand,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It’s eight in the morning. She told him they needed to end it while they had coffee in the kitchen after spending the night together.
Now they’re in her narrow entrance hall. He’s putting on the ugly square-toed black shoes that he wears to work.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks him.
“Sure,” he says.
And in fact she’s the one with tears in her eyes.
He’s surprised to see them.
One of them slides down her face.
“Hey,” he says, wiping it away. “It’s okay.”
She nods.
“It’s okay,” he says again.
He works at Media Markt for many years.
At one point he turns down a promotion to deputy head of security.
“May I ask why?” the store manager says. It’s not the same store manager who originally offered him the job. He left years ago. The head of security from that era has moved on as well.
“I don’t know. It’s just not for me,” István says.
“I would tend to disagree,” the store manager says.
“Thank you.”
“So?”
István shakes his head.
“You’re definitely turning it down?” the manager asks. He looks slightly irritated, as if he just doesn’t understand. He’s at least twenty years younger than István.
“Yes,” István says.
“All right.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
He leaves the manager’s office and takes the escalator up to the roof to have a cigarette.
And then, about ten years after they move back to the town, his mother dies.
She just dies in her sleep.
That happens sometimes apparently.
When she isn’t up and about in the apartment when he emerges from his room in the morning, he has a feeling that something’s wrong and knocks on her door.
When there’s no answer, he looks in and sees her still lying on her bed and when he steps nearer it’s obvious that she isn’t alive.
He phones for an ambulance and while he waits for it he smokes the first cigarette that he’s smoked inside the apartment for years.
The funeral is in the town cemetery, not far from where they live.
It’s May. The chestnut trees are in flower.
A few of his mother’s old friends are there.
When it’s over he sits on a bench. The dry petals of chestnut flowers fall onto the path. They move on the asphalt with a papery sound, and when the wind stops they lie still. He watches them for a while. Then he stands up and walks back to the apartment. After that he lives alone.
More from the Author
About the Author
© JULIA PAPP
David Szalay is the author of Turbulence, London and the South-East, and All That Man Is. He’s been awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna.
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/David-Szalay
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