Ever since they were girls, they had been enthusiastically touching on these delicate points, and now all four were laughing hard.
Elisa looked at them sheepishly, quiet, listening like an animal.
When there was a sudden, finely self-conscious silence, they could hear the soft puffing of the receding tugboats on the river, from farther and farther away, softer and softer with every puff. One of them, to the north, must have been passing the public baths in Dagály Street, the other, to the south, near the Lánc Bridge.
This is how a hog wallows in a sunlit puddle when peace returns to its soul.
They refused to acknowledge that these jesting little remarks no longer had any effect.
Seven flights below, in the dark Szent István Park, crickets were chirring peacefully in the grass among the trees. Occasionally they could also hear the sound of strolling lovers’ footsteps creaking on the pebble paths and echoing on the walls of nearby buildings. They looked at one another, slightly moved by their own embarrassment. Their broadminded liberalism, with all its historical instability, had become like a grandmother’s well-proven recipe for which, in truth, they could not find the ingredients.
They simply pretended that everything could be still set aright; with this pretence, at least, they kept their attitudes.
It was a little empty, but not mendacious.
They raised their glasses, silently, took sips of the sweet-and-sour drink with the fragrance of juniper.
Before we sit down, said Mária Szapáry, inspired by a sudden idea but speaking rather lazily, we should take the time to tell Irmus that, with Médi’s help, the famous Mrs. Lehr, this Erna Demén, is looking to make contact with her.
While she spoke, she looked in front of her rather than at anyone.
Hearing the name, Mrs. Szemző’s heart skipped a beat and then throbbed much faster than before. The quiet creaks of pebbles made her glance down seven floors, and she desired no continuation, she did not want to hear it.
So this will not be a party, then, but a storytelling evening, she said in the frozen silence, and the stubborn decision made a wry smile tremble on her lips.
Because I also have something to tell you, she continued. She absentmindedly picked up one of the two packs of cards and then put it down.
I think it would be best, said Mária Szapáry, virtually ignoring what Irma had said, if Médi told you about this. After all, she’s the one who spoke to Mrs. Lehr.
Imagine, said Irma quickly, as if interrupting not only Mária’s but her own words, before I left to come here, I was already near the door, and in the foyer—
She could not finish the sentence because at that moment Margit Huber, at the opposite end of the table, angrily shook her loosely pinned crown of hair and, ignoring Izabella Dobrovan, who tried to stop her with a belated movement and a commanding whisper, stepped closer to them, glass in hand, and in a raw penetrating tone cut in. Médi, Médi.
No, oh no, this, this cannot be. You can’t seriously mean this.
The flesh under the tanned skin on her open chest quivered. With her large hand she slammed her glass on the table so hard that the drink spilled out and lemon pulp stuck to the green felt tablecloth in a small flat opalescent puddle.
You’ve lost your marbles, Mária.
What’s that supposed to mean, snapped Mária Szapáry. Your style is atrocious.
Atrocious style. You think it’s atrocious. You dare mention style. Oh, this will kill me. You, of all people, for whom everything is rotten and always has been.
She would have sent her voice into the safety of hysterical laughter, her helpless limbs in a spasm of rage, but then she decided to end this tactlessness and suppressed her laugh.
You’re telling me this. You have the nerve to tell me a thing like that, she cried frantically. You know what you are, you are a born traitor, and you dare lecture me on style. You. Lecture me. You should be ashamed of yourself. Lecture me. Me. Me.
In her inconceivable excitement, she was casting about helplessly for words.
And then something peculiar happened. She suddenly felt unspeakably sorry for herself, for all the things Mária had done to her over their lifetimes, and they weren’t minor. Not only could she not stop saying me, me, me, me, but simultaneously she turned against herself the fire-red nails of three pressed-together fingers; and while, ever more loudly and in ever higher tones, as if gliding upward on an infinite scale, she shouted the one-syllable word reproachfully, unappeasably, and unstoppably, soaring so high that her lungs failed to support the sound with the proper volume of air, she mercilessly lunged those fingernails, to the rhythm of her screaming, into her firmly resisting breastbone.
She seemed to be transforming herself into a giant colorful bird that, in the moment of metamorphosis, was destroying itself with its own beak.
With the tall glasses in their hands, they all stood frozen in place.
Perhaps, in the first moment, with the vain hope or thought that they might somehow stop her.
But they had neither the strength nor the ability to do anything but stare at her with parted lips and eyes wide.
Yet in the next moment they couldn’t have said what they were staring at, or whether there was a next moment, or what might have been the subject of the conflict provoking such a mythically proportioned fury.
Anger died out in Mária too, even though it was she whom Margit Huber’s outburst touched most personally.
They saw her living flesh as she was tearing it off herself, or as if she were ripping her soul off the bones to which it had clung. There was no human experience on the basis of which they could have predicted with certainty that this, and no other, was the nature of their friend.
But when these many self-lacerating utterances of me, me, me reached the top of the scale and her injured self could no longer hope for more self-pity, her voice unexpectedly slumped back to its original register and stopped bleating, cooled off to its normal temperature, jounced back to its usual dimension, which, to the ears of the others, was no more credible than all her former sounds; vision and hallucination.
Didn’t we agree, you miserable creature, said Margit Huber in a sober everyday tone, speaking directly to Mária over the green felt tablecloth, that we wouldn’t say anything about this.
At virtually the same moment Mrs. Szemző dryly asked what wouldn’t you say anything about, for god’s sake, about what.
Something happened that overwhelmed and then completely swept away this reasonable question. Elisa broke into an ugly laugh — harsh, irritating, and vulgar, and not without justification.
For a moment they all looked at her. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t be so gloating, so harsh, so unfeeling, they protested to themselves about this interference.
Elisa was laughing at how the women had given Mária what was coming to her; her laugh could not be misunderstood.
Mária must have been ashamed that the other woman’s commonness always managed to show its face through some hole, aperture. And Médi, in whom the struggle between anger and self-pity continued, made sounds as if something had gotten stuck in her throat and then she burst into tears, choking on the unspoken accusations. As if with the last remnant of her strength, she staggered to the bulky leather couch, torn at several places, and fell on it as if on a warm living being, a mother or a friend, hugging the stuffed armrest, which responded with a whiff of the strange, strong odor of cowhide.
You look down at everybody, with no exception, everybody, she bellowed and howled into the brown leather, which was quickly warming under her mouth. Tu me méprises, tu nous méprises, with no mercy, you wipe your feet on everybody.