He’d be busy for a long time working on those bones.
I closed the steel door behind me as best I could.
So he couldn’t follow me. Early in the morning, somebody would surely discover him and let him out, or call the dogcatchers on duty.
The filth was so thick in the hinges that I couldn’t close the door completely, no matter how hard I tried. Only a good cleaning, preferably with a strong jet of water followed by generous oiling, would do the job. I did not want the dog to follow me.
Or anybody; I wanted no living being who might cause me pain because I’d fallen in love with him or her.
Fallen in love, yes, I was able to love, no matter how hard I protested; I could fall in love in a minute, with any body or thing. I couldn’t get out of my head the marvelous giant who was probably illiterate. Or the odor of Szidónia Oltó’s armpits, Gyöngyvér Mózes’s fingernail polish, a little cloud in the sky, Ilona Bondor’s red freckles. And for this permanent weakness I despised myself.
Why am I so weak and foolish.
The rotten door closed tight enough for me to be sure the dog wouldn’t break out and follow me.
In the old days, two awful hags used to clean the basement. They came from Pest on the streetcar; they weren’t from the country. Heavy, large-bodied women, they wore rubber aprons and rubber boots and dragged their red water hoses after them everywhere. Wherever they appeared, they’d attach the hoses to a faucet and the ice-cold water went streaming over everything.
They hardly talked, but instead continually moaned and sighed, oh, Lord Jesus, oh, Virgin Mary, help me, save me now. If their bleach bucket tipped over or their thick, willow-twig brooms fell and splashed in spilled water, they would swear in long loops of curses.
The things they told each other were certainly not meant for children’s ears.
I was scared of these huge women. They did not return my greetings, and if I politely asked them something they looked through me as if I were made of air and neither of them replied. The hotel’s strict regulations that exhorted the staff from the ground floor up to politeness and familial courtesy did not reach to the basement. One could not count on them in the lower regions, and looking at things from down there, it seemed to me that what went on above ground level was not so much natural as, rather, exceptional. I had the impression that the world was one big basement with which I was not yet sufficiently familiar. Even in the kitchen one could count only on the personal favor of the cooks or scullery maids, or on the merciless indifference of the directress. The servants would not continue for very much longer to serve the masters on the floors above. And while the women in rubber aprons didn’t even look up from their work when I came near, as if they didn’t see or hear anything, they talked to each other loud and clear, and made sure I heard and understood what they were saying. The least of it was their calling me shitty little kid, snot-nose, little dwarf, and grumbling that I was always underfoot, always loitering. For a long time I did not understand this word loitering, just as I hadn’t understood bigamy, of which the drunken old woman in the rabbit-fur coat was supposed to have been guilty, or phrases like dirty Jew and filthy bourgeois, which referred directly to me and along with me to my entire tribe.
Shove the little bourgeois dwarf into the barrel, what the fuck is he loitering around here for; let the garbage man take him away.
The stokers weren’t exactly friendly either, but at least they didn’t mind if I stood at the top of the steel stairway and watched them work. Maybe they liked having at least one little boy in the world who truly admired their shiny bodies and the work they did.
With the two cleaning women, I tried to pretend I was admiring them, but I failed to convince or deceive them with the seriousness of my interest.
At the water fountain I first washed the wound and then drank a lot of water, I could hardly get enough of it. I had to balance on a brick because the fountain leaked, water trickling down even when no one pushed the release lever, and the drain in front was stopped up.
Shapeless puddles of standing water marked the swamplike vicinity of the fountain.
Bricks had been set down in some of the puddles so one could manage to approach the fountain, but from the wobbly bricks my feet slipped into the water several times. If I really wanted to walk home on the Árpád Bridge instead of taking the night tram, I had a hopelessly long and unpleasant trip ahead of me in wet shoes.
Maybe it would be better to put an end to my life.
The hard lump that had developed on my bruised shin was throbbing and turning blue, a tight pantleg was rubbing against the oozing wound, and I was limping badly.
Once on the other shore, to reach Váci Road, I’d have to make my way across Vizafogó, a jungle of worthless little proletarian housing projects that keep sinking into the sand. From there, the only routes lay along tall fences and cheerless planks of factories all the way to Lehel Square, where, amid a constant noise of shunting and switching, I’d cross the Ferdinánd Bridge over the railway tracks and continue on the endless, sooty Szív Street until I reached Andrássy Road. There, I could choose to go under the plane trees on the promenade lined with salvia, forget-me-nots, pansies, and daisies, where I might be somewhat exposed, or, remaining in the maze of houses, to approach Grand Boulevard from the cover of little side streets.
I hoped to find the main gate open and slip in without Balter’s noticing me.
But in the end I set out on the long trek with two parallel sets of calculations at work in me. It was also possible that I would be unable to hobble home at all.
Jumping off the Árpád Bridge, one could be much more certain of killing oneself than by jumping off the Margit Bridge.
The span between the piers is much greater, the bridge is simple and unadorned, and there’s no chance that one would knock against the steel framework or that the piers would be a hindrance. I wanted to reach the water unharmed. I needed only a single glance to get an idea of the width and depth of the whirlpools and of the current’s strength.
It would be nice this way; at any rate, this bridge was preferable.
But even if I were to go through with it, first I had to urinate. I could barely hold it anymore; I was hurrying, limping, anxious to reach the mysterious darkness of the chestnut grove below the boulders of the Japanese Garden, where I could finally relieve myself.
The promenade along the shore and the thicket around the Dominican cloister had kept me captive for four whole nights, so I hadn’t wandered this far afield, and I had no idea to what sort of place my urge to urinate would bring me.
But I knew the area from my childhood, and a few days earlier I had taken a stroll there with a slightly limping, very elegant young lady from Buda, who in her utter passivity mercifully wanted nothing from me. Whenever I joined her family for an opera or ballet performance at the open-air theater, or in the casino for five o’clock tea and a dance, before and after the event the two of us would go for a walk on the island to about this point. There was nothing interesting past the chestnut grove, except perhaps for the war-damaged ruins of the neoclassic Music Well, soiled and stinking of urine, and the barrenness of the paved ramp leading to the bridge.
An artificial waterfall poured over romantic rocks into a calm little pond.
This is how far we came.
The bodies of plump goldfish glimmered among the water lilies, and one could gaze at the fish even if one had nothing worth saying to one’s companion. The point always arrived when I had nothing to say to girls, or when they didn’t want to talk about Edith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, or Camus. I was not enthusiastic about their favorite topics. What they wanted to talk about was the cooing voice of sweet little Ákos Németh, along with all the gossip about him, which was of very limited interest to me. If they’d wanted me to grasp their breasts and stroke them while gazing into their eyes, or if they’d let my fingers wander under their skirts, there’d have been no problem at all.