Why are you ruining it, don’t, I begged him.
Me, ruining it; this shithead has the nerve to say I’m ruining it. He says I, I.
His wounded pride and his wrath set his words on fire; they lit up everything in the darkness and made him look like one of the furies.
He was right; I could not say he wasn’t.
I was afraid he’d hit me; he hypnotized me with his wrath. And this made me realize, unexpectedly again, that in fact we were not in my imagination but at a very dangerous place where I had done something to another human being.
Only a few paces from us an unbelievable figure was standing in the bushes, his pants half lowered.
In full preparedness, he was spying on us, waiting for us to continue, which would increase his excitement, a parasite, a voyeur. I could not ignore him. His arms were like huge hams, his short-sleeved shirt very tight on them and open to the waist, letting me see massive, hairy, rippling layers of fat hanging low and luminous in the darkness. With one hand he was holding up his pants on his enormous sausagelike thighs, with the other he was yanking something under his shiny belly protruding tautly from the layers of fat that luckily could not be seen for all the hair, skin, and darkness.
At the same time at the opening of the footpath a strange couple appeared among the bushes, partly penetrated by the light of the gas lamps.
They were exchanging excited words as they approached, yet something restrained them, so I could not make out what they were saying.
One was obviously a burden to his partner; he was one of the tribal warriors and I happened to know that his name was Robi Königer. He lived on Eötvös Street, in the house we reached after we had managed to break through the firewall, when the boulevard was on fire.
In our neighborhood most everybody treated him as a fool.
Robika is like this, Robika is like that; maybe he’s a little weak in the brain. Come on, sweet Robika, carry my basket for a spell, you won’t regret it.
He did not strip like the others; on the contrary, he was all buttoned up because he could not possibly put his shapelessness on public display.
He wore white surgeon’s trousers and a white shirt; he worked for the ambulance service of a clinic on Üllői Road. When he had no money, and everyone in our neighborhoood seemed to know what he spent his money on, he would go to the open market on Hunyadi Square and help housewives carry home their live chickens tied by the legs, their tomatoes to be preserved, or heavy sacks of potatoes.
His skin must have been bluish white to begin with, every little blood vessel close to the skin’s surface, yet he covered his face, I cannot imagine why, maybe because of some injury, with a thick, blinding white layer of powder. Dread sat on this strange, motionless face. That is how he roamed the streets, white and frightened; in the winter, he wore a black cape. Even in my childhood I had been frightened of him because of the way he carried the struggling chickens, tied together in pairs, Szófia Street reverberating with their squawking, and I could not help thinking that I’d wind up just like that for my secret sins. He was very tall, and because of the constant bending over, his back subserviently developed a hump; he gave the impression that he was forever being forced to go through doors too low for him. He was going through doors we could not see with our naked eyes. Whoever touches himself too much will develop a back like that because too much sinful pleasure eventually attacks the spinal marrow. He had to bend down to everyone he talked to. All his clothes were too small for him, his ankles showed under the cuffs of his pants, one could see he wore red or blue socks most of the time, white only rarely, and his shirtsleeves left not only his bony wrists but a good section of his lower arms uncovered.
The entire man was so thin it was as if he had no flesh on his bones, or as if his bones were made of glass.
The other man was coming faster toward me on the path.
Königer was following him, upset and mesmerized, and one could hear they couldn’t end the tune of their irritation. This other man wore short pants and very spare sandals on indecently naked and strong feet.
As they came along the darkening path, one could not tell which of them was telling the other the more important things, or rather, which of them disdained the other more, and which of them should have controlled his temper.
But this was enough for me.
Seeing their fast approach, I lost my self-control and was left with nothing but the will to get away.
I burst into the thicket without looking at what I was stepping into, at what I would come up against.
Branches slapped my face with their metallic-tasting flowers, I bumped against tree trunks, I scraped my skin, under my feet everything crackled, I also heard the sailor’s shouts.
Idiot garbage pail, he shouted into the softly fragrant mute night, and then in an even more mournful tone he yelled that I was a stupid little prick.
You are a big stupid garbage pail.
I did not have to run far to clear the trees, but I couldn’t stop running, I was pounding on the naked earth, clattering on paved and pebbled paths, and making grating noises with my fine, pointed, filthy black shoes.
The sailor was not talking utter nonsense.
The kid from Újpest who thought himself queen of the whole place — he wasn’t just anybody, he wasn’t some unknown person from Újpest whose name just happened to be Pisti.
I felt as if my soul had been stabbed.
I didn’t know by whom.
But I could see with my own eyes that it was indeed Pisti. The sharp pain and disturbing light of this unexpected discovery at least in retrospect illuminated many things I had not understood before.
Running was making my sides hurt because I paid attention to everything except proper breathing, but I kept running, which at least was familiar and felt good.
And then I collapsed and tripped over something, or maybe the other way around. I didn’t know where I was. The grass was dewy; I buried my face in it.
But I felt that something too warm was running down my leg.
Those Two
On the bed of the maid’s room in the apartment on Pozsonyi Road, neither of them remembered how and when they might finally have fallen asleep, or what had happened between them and when before they fell asleep.
And why they awakened at all in the unfamiliar night, when first they had to find their own limbs in the cooled-off tangle of flesh so that then they could feel the other’s limbs, distinguishing them from their own.
With their senses filled to the brim with each other, this is how they perceived their mutuality, though they did not realize how exceptional this moment was. They couldn’t have named the other person, whose body had soaked up and absorbed every iota of their self-image, and for a good while they remained ignorant of their own names as well. The other person’s intrusive self streamed into the place of their own self-image, just as the other body’s sensation and substance dissolved the shape and sense of their own body. They saw nothing but darkness and only darkness, nothing but darkness, while, submerged in the persona of the other, they sensed they should find their way back to certain characteristics of their own.
They each failed to conjure up their own individual memories.
The window, swinging slowly in a current of air, made squeaky little sounds.
Gyöngyvér spoke first. Quietly yet very excitedly, as if being informed of her own existence by her own strange voice. This surprises her. She still cannot understand herself, because someone else within her is thinking faster or, rather, is thinking ahead of what she will say.