She continued tasting for herself his humiliating words and his insane cadences.
I let somebody take advantage of me again, she thought. She was ashamed of going along with the game, especially since she did not believe the man had wanted it, though he was a beast and in retrospect she thought he wouldn’t be ashamed of anything. He had deeply hurt her self-esteem, with his self-confidence or maybe his shamelessness. He spoke as if he had free access to and was at home in many strange apartments.
Unlike Gyöngyvér, who could not get her bearings even in places she thought she knew.
I must not let anyone take advantage of me ever again, she kept saying to herself, her anger turning against herself.
She did not put the light on; she hopped around naked and barefoot on the parquet and the stone tiles.
First, with a single quick movement she spread the soiled bedcover out on the kitchen balcony and locked the door on it.
I’m a pig, she said to herself, not very convincingly since she enjoyed her body, its suppleness and its easy flow.
She felt as if during the night she had grown by at least five centimeters.
Quickly she took water to him and then quickly left him alone again, though it was nice to watch him slurping the water eagerly, the spoiled beast, whom she continued to spoil, stupid as she was.
She stopped in the hallway crammed with furniture and tried to imagine where this man would find the damn blankets he was talking about.
When they were sneaking into the maid’s room, the man couldn’t have had more than a quick glance at this hallway.
She had to be careful not to overwhelm this man with senseless rebukes and thereby further betray herself, making it easier for him to take advantage of her. She hastened across the hallway, on whose rustically sanded, pale gray bare walls only one sconce gave a cold, unfriendly, dim light. Mrs. Szemző obsessively believed that with this light she could scare off burglars or sneaky thieves.
In fact she could not shake the fear that in her own apartment she might find herself face-to-face with strangers or bump into living bodies in the darkness.
That is why this weak light had to be on all night.
For a while, the living bodies inside the sweltering cattle car supported the living dead.
According to regulations, the gendarmes* were to count off 90 Jews and jam them into each cattle car, but they crowded 116 into this one so as not to have to attach another car to the train at the Veszprém station.
This was duly recorded in the notebook of Chief Counselor Elemér Vay, whom His Excellency the regent of Hungary had personally appointed to observe the process of deportations throughout the country. Beginning in April 1944 and following the itinerary prepared for him by the Interior Ministry, the chief counselor traveled from city to city along the proposed deportation lines.
His verbal reports could not of course include such insignificant details as one overcrowded cattle car.
He did not want to talk and could not have talked about it to anyone.
During his three-month inspection tour he returned only twice to Budapest, where His Excellency received him in a more than friendly atmosphere, for tea with the family. At the conclusion of the tea and accompanied by His Excellency’s daughter-in-law, the always composed and cheerful Countess Imola Auenberg, he strolled over to His Excellency’s study, where he could briefly summarize the impressions he had gained on the inspection tour. The countess had been friends with Elemér Vay’s young wife in her youth, and it was at her recommendation that the retired counselor had been recalled for this special mission.
His Excellency was very pleased with the reports from this high-ranking civil servant, who on more than one occasion had proved more than competent in the execution of confidential missions and whose loyalty was unquestionable.
At the conclusion of their last meeting, he made the chief counselor promise that if there were incidents of atrocities or arbitrary actions taken by gendarmes during the evacuation of ghettoes around the country, the counselor would telegraph a report immediately, using the usual codes and addressing himself to the countess. His Excellency’s personal opinion was that within a few months a burning and weighty problem would be settled once and for all; arbitrariness and injustice were not commensurate with the chivalrous Hungarian character.
Ever since, Mrs. Szemző has wanted to see what the unavoidable moment might bring, the inevitable moment.
She told herself that the details would surely be of interest to a pathological anatomist or an expert in forensic medicine, and then she had to think about the person, identical to herself, who had the chance, for a few months in the Buchenwald camp, to work as an assistant to Professor Nussbaum, the prosector. Who had examined how, in a given situation, living bodies deal with the bodies of people who have fainted or died, in which case, according to popular belief, they are no longer aware of anything. It always seemed to her as if she had only read about these cases, rather than that she was remembering them as a real occurrence in her life. She also remembered Dr. Dénes Schranz, who could not have known in advance about this abomination when he wrote his book about the various and extraordinary phenomena of death.
Mrs. Szemző snickered at this notion.
Interesting in all this was that she couldn’t believe how many superfluous bits of knowledge she had.
Once the living and the dead were jammed in there together, the dead were stuck, inescapably and constantly, under the feet of the living, who went on thumping and jockeying; the living trampled and ground down all the soft or liquid tissue, which oozed through the gaps in the cattle car’s floor: blood, urine, eyeballs, excrement, even bone marrow.
A few had tried to do something about this but ultimately could change nothing, their shouts being insufficient; after a while she too lost her voice, no longer saying that things shouldn’t be like this.
She had to conceal from herself what her feet and others’ had done in the infernal heat and maddening cacophony, for days on end.
Her mind invented a fear with which to occupy her memory.
That she could no longer wear her medium-heeled shoes with their arch supports, or that she would have constant guilt feelings about the ankle boots of her two dead sons.
The sounds now echoing from her other life, the creaking of mucous, muscle fibers, tendons, and cartilage, were sounds that even that stranger, identical with her, could not have heard, theoretically, given the other constant noise and clatter, the crying, the clanking of the cattle cars’ buffers, and the frenetic, crazed altercations.
The light did not become much friendlier even when they turned on both sconces and the ceiling light for music practice.
The custom-made furniture that had originally given meaning to this sort of spare lighting were missing from the apartment.
Once, Mrs. Szemző stopped her accompaniment, laughing, and said that Gyöngyvér should not be an alto because she had the voice of a man who’s trying to sing contralto.
They giggled about this for quite some time, saying that Gyöngyvér must have been a eunuch in one of her previous lives and was now the reincarnation of Farinelli; they laughed, but the idea made them shudder, and neither of them could shake it off. Gyöngyvér thought of this later when she and her famous coach were grappling with problems of her voice sliding and gliding, and the need to clarify her timbre; it was at the tip of her tongue, but she never dared to mention the nightmare to Médi Huber.
Originally, simple lack of brilliance and sobriety free of illusionism characterized the light from those lamps, but for years the appropriate opal bulbs had been unavailable, so the original idea had become plain shabbiness.