You don’t have a cleaning woman again, I presume, said Izabella, as if to express indignation.
Not only that, but the beast with her smelly flesh left me without a word of good-bye, grumbled Mária, and, finding no appropriate glasses in the cabinets, she began rummaging in the sink, full of dirty dishes. So don’t aggravate me with this too, now.
A good two weeks have gone by since then, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s rather dangerous in such heat.
She hadn’t before, but now she knew where to look for the glasses. Still, because of her anger, the task was beyond her strength. Though evidently she had worked herself artificially into this state, there appeared no way out of it, and she did not quite understand this. She was playing a role for the others’ benefit, which helped a bit to protect her from them. At such times, one appears to oneself as a stranger within oneself.
She must break through herself.
They’re here, of course they’re here, rotten little things, on the bottom, she kept exclaiming, to help control herself, where else would they be, but she could restrain her outburst only with another one. Why in the name of heaven and hell haven’t I moved out of this damn apartment.
I don’t myself understand it.
The two women still in the doorway said nothing; this new turn of events silenced them. Because they both knew there was someone else besides them in the apartment, a woman much younger than they. She either lay in bed or, wrapped in a blanket, sat on the terrace, living an unchanging vegetative existence. The door of her room was closed most of the time, and if there was a reason why after the war Mária Szapáry could not move from the apartment, it was this sick woman or, as others referred to her, her sick girlfriend.
They came here every evening so Mária wouldn’t have to leave the young woman alone.
The dirty dishes in the sink clattered and slid about under her hands. Bella started to make a move to help her but then changed her mind.
Maybe because of Elisa, Margit Huber started to say, cautiously yet emphatically, in a different voice; she knew she was going too far with this tentative comment.
Perhaps it would cause a change in her condition. I mean a negative change, if I may say.
She had barely spoken when Mária Szapáry was ready with a withering look. But that couldn’t stop her, so Margit Huber quieted down only gradually. Two such rotten women. Daring to stick their noses into her most jealously guarded secrets.
In fact, she had no guarded secrets from them. At most there were certain things they never talked about, and their mutual silence had its own strict logic and a well-founded moral base.
I’m going to burst.
The meaning of so many things in this world is simply incomprehensible, and very little can be comprehended with the help of knowledge.
She was raving, but not without method, which dictated the clatter and clinking of dishes under her hands, enamel knocking against metal, glass against china. She continued to carry on in a small, almost shrunken voice, which of course could be construed as a seal of their friendship, and she finally found two tall glasses. She could never have let herself do anything like this in front of other people. She knew she was being unjust, but with whom else might she be unjust. The glasses had dried shreds of lemon on their opaque sides, lemon pits embedded in ossified sugar on the bottoms. She had to permit this injustice in order to feel the pain of what hurt so much and of what she could never really share with anyone ever. In her lucid moments, she was very grateful. That they were here, around her, these increasingly vulnerable women, still like little girls in their pain. One after the other, she fished out the two glasses with one hand and, remembering exactly where the third one was in the pile, supported the raised dishes with her other hand.
Elisa has no condition, please understand that once and for all, she muttered. She never had and will not have a condition. Condition, ha. And there can be no change in her condition either. Besides, she’s the last person who gives me trouble or any reason to worry.
I don’t understand how an innocent question can be so misunderstood.
Unless it’s done intentionally.
Only you two give me anything to worry about. Or the simple fact that I haven’t moved out of this rotten apartment. Why can’t I get free. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand this infernal noise.
Why am I still here.
Rotten would have been a valid and justified word to describe other parts of Budapest, but not the clean, well-landscaped, and relatively well maintained Újlipótváros. And the adjective was inappropriate even if one hadn’t forgotten the terrible things that happened in Szent István Park and on the Újpest docks in the winter of 1944. Or how they unloaded frozen bodies from the bed of a truck at the same place in November 1956, yes, at the very same place. And it wasn’t the noise, not by a long shot. And moved out means out of the country, and the apartment means, perhaps, this miserable world. And her anger is her way of asking where would she go.
At this moment, Margit Huber finally understood that Mária was tormented by a compassion that had grown to gigantic proportions. As soon as she understood this, she knew instantly how to respond. Although first she once again had to overcome her stifling jealousy of Irma and, mainly, Elisa. She was always having to overcome it. Mária hadn’t had two children who were murdered. This burden she does not bear. She wasn’t taken away, but only watched helplessly when others were. The burden had been not intended for her. She hadn’t had a cerebral hemorrhage in her youth, needed no medical care, and therefore she cannot count on anybody’s compassion.
Of course, what she said out loud was not what she was thinking. If only because her jealousy was the least important element in the situation.
For eight years she had worked as a vocal coach at the Berlin Opera and then for twenty at the Budapest Opera House. She had firm notions about the inner logic of hysterical outbursts of temper; about how, with the help of her own smile, she might guide the singers in her charge along the path of first taming and eventually controlling their emotions. Only with maniacal repetition can they uncover the dark depths of their fears, and when there is no way back from a repetition, one must pounce. They explicitly expect, wish, and demand that she go with them; they want to pull her in, entangle her nerves in their own, and with the strength of their frenzy pull her down to the depths with them. She’d smile, though she felt no sympathy for them. In this, she was helped by the fact that people instinctively want to be free of the little pains that others cause, and she helped herself with the unbroken armor of her smile. She rarely came close to succeeding, but when she did, she was able to explode her hysteria, which filled her with bursts of satisfaction and gave her smile added meaning.
But the professional, technical means of arresting and utilizing hysteria were for her almost more important. The connections between dramatic strength and breathing, their effects, credibility, proportions, expressive techniques — these means that were exclusively her and the singers’ domain.
Later, these studied components could be consulted as a professionally developed collection of paradigms.
When she stopped, lowered and condensed the column of air inside her, it changed the posture of her impressive body.
Among themselves, her friends referred to her as Brünhilde or Krimhilde, expressing their adverse admiration for her, their yearning fear. They had become inseparable friends on Veres Pálné Street, at the most venerable girls’ school in Budapest, famed for its liberalism; and they also knew Erna Demén from this school. Where in classes of fifty, poor girls and rich, middle-class and aristocrat, German and Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish, all studied together; already then they admired Margit, in whom lurked a strange, large-bodied woman blessed with an enormous smile. In summer, her blondness turned literally to whiteness, but the sun did not harm her skin, and the girls had much to delight in when looking at her.