And that she’d rather not be.
Which may have been easy to say, but its consequences were unbearable, and then her mind began the cycle all over again, like a squirrel in a cage.
The wheeled armchair was there but out of reach, that is to say unreachable but close enough to annoy the sick woman greatly. She must have made unsuccessful attempts with her cane somehow to yank it closer. The chair was a beautiful museum piece, from Steindl’s famous early nineteenth-century carpentry workshop, now in rather poor condition.
Varga had attached a tip-up footrest to it.
I don’t know, replied Elisa, I don’t know, she kept repeating, though this time very differently, the yells sounding at once satisfied, almost cheerful, and also irritated. She was making her voice bend, rock, and sway in an unusual way but very sensitively and understandably. Which meant, on the one hand, that Mária understood and with satisfaction acknowledged Elisa’s response as splendid, and, on the other hand, that many things were still to be clarified.
There, Mária said, as you see, there’s not a problem in the world. I broke the dishes from Urbino, every last piece, but that’s all it was, not an air raid. We threw them all out. I cut my finger a little.
That made Elisa stare at her, frightened and at a loss.
And Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, felt it was not nice to lead Elisa astray and the time had come to intervene.
Sometimes Elisa’s face showed that she did not know what to do with what she had heard, or that she could sort out even the simplest things only very slowly if at all. Her reflexes had recovered almost completely after her cerebral hemorrhage, she followed every movement with her eyes, lazily but accurately, and it seemed that she comprehended everything immediately. She remembered and could be reminded at any time of events in the distant past. But some parts of her brain had been irreparably damaged. Mária’s experience had taught her that there were no longer reliable passages between certain brain areas, or that direct communication between them had ceased completely. Elisa could probably locate the areas that still communicated, this was visible on her face, but she could not make the other connections. It was interesting to watch her facial features when she tried; at such times she appeared to be searching more than suffering. Or, as if it were possible to make the missing contact via a different approach, one could see in her heightened attention that she was trying out different detours and hoping to reach her goal. Something was missing, something was not functioning, but obviously she had no conscious reflex to deal with this lack. And once she realized she could not find her way between two or more things, she became quite oafish. On such occasions, her back had to be tapped and her face gently slapped. Which returned fatigued calm to her face, though she seemed to have forgotten what it was she’d been trying to find.
In addition, something else shut down, heavily and ominously.
Empty space in a transparent system.
Futile effort exhausted and disheartened her; for half a day or sometimes for days, her face remained gloomy.
Now, at Irma Arnót’s unexpected appearance, she gave a start and roared like an animal, stretched out her arms like a child offering itself to its mother, please hug me. This gave the impression that the connection between fear and joy was unreasonably strong; the waiting time necessarily attached to every emotion had ceased to exist.
At the same moment something happened that unexpectedly distracted Irma. Roused by the animal-like roar, Elisa’s huge, long-haired, flaming red Persian tomcat plopped down to the floor from the divan’s bentwood back and, as if fleeing from mortal danger, padded off on his fuzzy paws, flitting between the furniture legs until he reached the open terrace door. Using the large oak bucket of a richly branched ceiling-high ficus as protection, he looked back at Irma with a glance of fright mixed with wonder, and then vanished in the dark outside.
When something like this happened, the cat would jump up on the handrail of the terrace, from there to the flat rooftop and the elevator shaft. From there he would slink to other elevator shafts and even steal brazenly into strange apartments; through distant stairwells he would make it to the street, into the world of automobiles, streetcars, strange smells, dogs, and pissed-on trees, moving along his dangerous routes; and the women always feared that he might never come back.
Elisa’s movement was particularly poignant because to give someone a hug, she had to use her good arm to lift the paralyzed one.
Her tone of voice and the play of her features also changed completely.
She says, I haven’t seen you for a long time, Mária called over the noise, a little humorously, a little instructively. In other people’s company, she would quickly translate Elisa’s gestures into words. She did it out of consideration, so that the guest or unsuspecting stranger who had strayed into their lives did not have to struggle. In another sense, she seemed to be not so much obliging the stranger with a translation as sharing something with Elisa in their most secret language. Elisa was begging, entreating, with the single more or less coherent sentence, I don’t know, that she cried, she sang, to Irma. They weren’t even sure whether she was repeating the English phrase for its meaning in that language, or whether her paralyzed speech organs could only form sounds reminiscent of the English phrase, in which case the syllables were arbitrary and void of meaning.
If they asked her about it, she irresistibly broke out laughing.
I don’t know, she’d answer playfully, her head tilted to the side, as if she understood the humor. Now, however, she used the phrase to beseech and extort, as an indignant beggar woman would, and when Irma resignedly hugged her, she clung to her neck and kept kissing her.
My sweet, my darling, Irma whispered, very feelingly despite her own intentions, and momentarily lost her balance; when her knees buckled a bit under Elisa’s weight, she could not but think of being hugged by her own children.
She says you’re an unfaithful pig, Mária Szapáry interpreted; on hearing this, Elisa with bubbly sounds laughed sensually into the creases crisscrossing Irma’s naked scraggy neck. With both her arms, she continued her insistent clinging, entwining, and clasping movements, partly because she was holding her half-paralyzed arm around Irma’s neck with her own good arm. As if she were wanting to climb up on Irma, to wrap her in her body, she offered up her thin body and her light, quivering, little-girl breasts.
And since you’re here, Mária continued her somewhat arbitrary translation, please help me get up.
Irma had to lift Elisa’s helpless body by holding it under the arms, to pull it up onto her, to cushion it, as it were, while Mária shoved the antique wheelchair under her.
She called me an unfaithful pig, did she, Irma was ready to burst out.
Mária keeps Elisa under lock and key, and if someone happens to ask about her condition, she considers the very question a lèse-majesté. And while she was holding the blond woman’s light body, she could not but suspect that they were engaged not in doing what they were talking about but, rather, playacting again, in their well-practiced way, for each other’s benefit.