She chose to let happen what could not but happen, and in her stabbing, throbbing climaxes she considered herself deaf, blind, and dead.
Quickly she turned on the hot water, which instantly filled the bathroom with a sulfurous odor. She didn’t want to stay by herself for long, and she washed the washcloth so angrily it was as if she had to remove sperm from it. She was not comfortable about the physical characteristics of sperm. Given its consistency, she thought of it as snot. She was always surprised anew when it didn’t have little knots in it and its thick body easily dispersed in water; it was not snot after all, but an embodiment of her dread, anxiety, and fear that she’d ruin her life with her dissoluteness.
Fulfilling the prophecy of her parents.
Not to get pregnant.
Sometimes she left a strongly outlined, yellowish stain on the sheet, though she wasn’t sure that it was not copious vaginal discharge flowing out during orgasm. Because it was so dark, she took it to be the first sign of syphilis. There’s blood in it. Or it left a stain on the handkerchief she used to wipe it off; in worse cases stains were left on her clothes, or it dried and turned white in her black hair, which to her shame she noticed only in the rehearsal hall’s mirror.
She kept rinsing and squeezing the washcloth, as if worrying that she couldn’t get rid of the stains. After she hung it up and quickly, with a bad conscience, returned to the others, she still did not know what to do with her agitation; in Mária’s living room, everything appeared to be the way she remembered the hotel room to which Vladas Korsakas took her after her release from the hospital.
As if there had been no operation and no anesthesia, he was standing there before her, alive, warm, and real in his white corkscrew-patterned wool sweater. And it didn’t matter that so many things were happening in her head. The three women were still in the same positions around the table; their every little move made the layers of smoke around them flutter slightly. In his thick, white, high-necked sweater, Korsakas looked more athletic than he was, and he wore no shirt under the sweater. The bed, the heavy curtains on the window, and the Japanese sitz bath in the corner behind the screen were just as she had left them; the accident had caused no change in her hotel room. She saw no signs of joy, pain, or empathy on any of the objects.
Nobody had taken the glass from Elisa even though she’d been whimpering and begging for who knows how long, stretching out her arms to get attention, to demand something.
But the object of her wish was not easy to determine.
Beyond the open glass doors, above the petunias’ fluttering funnels, the urban night was dazzling, motionless. Wet tree branches were swinging icily in the wind; the maid had to be called in to put more wood on the fire, the room was too cold, and then to bring more hot water.
Elisa did not relinquish her glass; on the contrary she was signaling that she wanted something, and she kept pointing at another glass. Her eyes flashed wildly, she definitely wanted something, and her eyes, as Bella followed them with hers, were on Irma’s almost untouched drink.
She wanted — no, seemed to demand — that she be given it; give me what Irma hasn’t drunk. Obviously it wasn’t the drink she wanted so much; jealousy was raging within her.
In response Szapáry puckered her lips slightly and angrily shrugged her shoulders. What do I care, she answered Bella’s mute question. Let her get drunk if she wants to so much.
The empty glass clacked on the tea trolley.
They could still have talked, but at this phase of the evening they wouldn’t.
Dobrovan in her dark silk dress, amply gathered over her breasts and at her waist, stopped behind the empty chair, making the smoke flutter again in the air; the excitement froze.
This is what they had been waiting for.
The card game relieved them of the burdensome, highly responsible obligation of conversing, but it took a long time before their concentration on the run of cards made them forget what was constantly on their minds, what had been overstraining their nerves. Once again they reached the point where, despite their intentions, each woman found herself face-to-face with each of the others. Mrs. Szemző smartly tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth with her tongue and kept blinking because the smoke irritated her eyes. She picked up a deck, shuffled it, and then spread the cards on the table in a large fanlike arc.
Each of the four women picked a card, twanging it under her fingers as she flipped it. The value of the cards they picked determined the order of their turns, which also assigned their seating arrangement. To which they responded with little hisses, clicking tongues, giggles, sounds they could produce with almost-closed lips.
The sounds had different qualities, all of them filled with satisfaction.
Bella liked especially to make sounds with her lips because she could steal the kiss for herself across the years, the penetrating taste of the cock, its smooth slopes and strong rims, as it smacked her lips.
It was almost the other way around for Mrs. Szemző; for her it was an enormous effort to keep up appearances. As she giggled, she and her mates were being driven across the old bridge of Regensburg, in the spring snowstorm, stumbling and sliding on the slippery cobblestones.
Erna Demén’s daughter was no longer with her.
According to the value of the picked cards, Dobrovan is to be Szapáry’s partner, and Mrs. Szemző will team up with Médi Huber. With their sounds of approval they in fact reveal disappointment. Mrs. Szemző, however close she was to Szapáry, liked best to be partners with the soft-spoken Dobrovan, while Médi Huber and Szapáry, despite the loud conflicts punctuating their relationship, preferred each other as partners in the game.
Once again the cards had not complied with everyone’s wishes.
Quickly they changed places as was necessary and sat down again.
And those two in the maid’s room of the seventh-floor apartment realized that it had been quiet for a long time, that their bodies had been cooling off in the silence and that no more streetcar noises were coming from below.
Above their heads a draft was slowly swinging the window giving on the dark sky.
Tonight, luck arranged it so that Mária Szapáry again sat facing the terrace.
That was the place they all liked most.
Looking up from the cards from this position, one could see the pale dim lights of the gas lamps, like a flawed string of pearls along the promenade on the other shore of the softly rolling dark river, and the deep shadows of the Buda mountains, sliding in and out of each other above the flat block of the rowers’ clubhouse illuminated by reflected lights.
From here, of course, they could not have seen what was happening on the island, around the clubhouse, or under the gaslights, but in the city, people knew in general what kind of place it was.
It wasn’t proper to talk about things like that.
As if the promenade were empty.
Occasionally, however, one could see, even with the naked eye, solitary little figures stepping out from among the bushes and trees, waiting for someone or hurrying to escape someone else, all but fleeing on the promenade, and then, a few meters farther on, casting furtive looks about, disappearing into the sparse grove of yellow acacias and then returning to the trails cut in the meager undergrowth to the ruined medieval cloister, stinking with human excrement, where the gently swaying light of gas lamps could barely reach.
Over Izabella Dobrovan’s silk-clad shoulders Mária Szapáry glanced at the other shore.
It was like a victory that fell into her lap; she was waiting for her cards.
She was deliberately avoiding Elisa’s eyes. Neurasthenia was visible on the features of the other three women. Try as she might to appear as a person of democratic persuasion, she considered everyone below her rank neurotic. She always saw their exasperation showing through their disciplined behavior.