Gyöngyvér was sitting on the piano stool made for young ladies which Mrs. Szemző had bought as a replacement, remembering the ones she knew in her youth. There were countless chains of causation in the world and they were not perceivable in sequence yet were not imperceptible either. At this moment, Gyöngyvér may not have known what her senses were registering, but, like other people, she felt something definite and therefore formed certain suppositions.
She instantly looked for a possible intonation in place of crying, a vocal passage in her own range reminiscent of shouting, beseeching, or praying; she accompanied her search by tapping two consecutive keys at a time on the piano. She was chasing after a single note or semitone but did not know what she was looking for, while the old piano stool creaked meekly on the well-worn parquet floor.
With her buttocks, she enjoyed the cool leather of the stool, though after a while the contact with the cool cowhide again revived in her bladder the urge to urinate. She had nothing more to let dribble out of her. Her bladder would have liked to inundate the leather on the piano stool.
She wouldn’t have budged but would have just let it all out.
The urine would first collect on the stool and then drip down from it.
She would listen to the trickling.
She saw it; she saw immeasurable amounts of fluid flowing out.
She became alarmed at the mere desire for a flooding.
She had to repress, squeeze back into herself the heat of her burning slit, which made her posture rigid.
She stared out into the night as if watching a movie about her frightened and irritated self.
A sliding glass-paned door opened from the hallway into the living room, whose own wide window, encompassing and framing the entire room, looked up at the empty sky.
Gyöngyvér could not imagine her own home, but wherever she lived, she always had to imagine it anew.
Except when she was singing.
A future home, the home of a famous opera singer, refused to take shape in her mind. Whenever she thought about this, what she remembered was an old, large, worn iron key and bluish-purple lilies on the silk wall tapestry ripping loudly under her hands. In the castle at Tiszadob* they had to tear all the silk tapestry off the walls, and in their enjoyment they screamed and yelled happily together with their instructors, along with the sound of ripping silk.
She could not shake the thought that their enjoyment had meant pain for the silk.
Together, they were busy girls and their instructors freeing this castle, where they lived and worked, from the dark tyranny of the sinister Countess Katinka Andrássy. The windows were closed because Mrs. Szemző was afraid of sudden storms. The pervasive fragrance of valerian in the stifling air may have been the same fragrance that had eaten into Mrs. Szemző’ s every belonging.
Here, in the heat trapped between the buildings, the night had no cool edge, yet she shuddered a little.
One of the tin-helmeted towers of Palatinus Mews planted itself in the empty sky and, as if pinged by the moonlight, glittered in the darkness.
Madzar used the soles of his feet to try to overcome or at least understand the strange floating of the apartment; he stamped, treaded, and trampled on the floor.
He was walking systematically back and forth across the well-laid parquet because he wanted to feel clearly what caused the sense of floating. He listened to the entire building, to how it rustled and made other small noises; without a stethoscope he auscultated the building’s heartbeat, as it were, listened to its echoes, the trembling of water pipes and the gurgling of drainpipes. He let out shouts of various lengths and strength. He did not find this pleasant. The otherwise attractive glass cylinder of the stairwell behaved like an ear trumpet, brutally amplifying the tiniest sounds, elongating them, repeating them individually. Given the interior proportions, the poor quality of the materials, and the lack of insulation, noises within the apartment were received by the cold reinforced concrete and reradiated back into the apartment in the form of imperceptible vibrations. The interior spaces therefore did not project a sense of proper enclosure, had no warmth, and did not provide a feeling of security.
A future tenant would be exposed to irritations for which there would be no remedy. A building might possess several characteristics that a person, though experiencing them, refused to acknowledge, and then it might seem as if the person was creating his frequent and serious bothers on his own, not realizing that the architecture was at fault.
If the ceiling had been higher by just twenty centimeters, the partitions by, say, thirty centimeters, the sound box would not have been so unpleasant. But neither the owners nor the builders had clarified the relationship of the interior to the exterior, which led to fatal disproportions. They had used the idea of functionality to hide their own wretchedness and their profit motive, and this infuriated Madzar.
As if they considered disproportion the incontestable reality of things.
He could think of no architectural statement more irresponsible.
Light was the only thing of any worth here. Strong saturated light whose sources were, of course, decipherable, and one would have to make a thorough examination of the surroundings. Direct light mingled with two indirect lights that had a completely improbable, unreal general effect. He could begin there. But no, he could not, because he would have felt he was merely doing something clever in an emergency situation of unknown proportions.
The problem remained: could he do the job with impunity. The light was indeed very good; he’d hate to give up on it.
I really can’t find it in my heart to do this job, he told the woman flatly.
And, to be honest, I am not very interested in this whole spiritual-poverty business, this whole emergency situation that has become permanent in this country and even put down roots.
Not my cup of tea, he said in English.
It presents conditions I don’t care to deal with, conditions I don’t know what to do with.
You’d rather not touch it at all, said Mrs. Szemző quietly but pointedly.
Unguarded contacts, of course, always have their peculiar hazards.
Maybe you’re right, said the architect, as a person with long experience in avoiding potential friction by being agreeable. I don’t like walking into an unknown. But even that doesn’t signify much, since I sense no danger.
Oh, go on, belittle it, continued the woman insistently. But don’t misunderstand me: you may walk away from the task as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to force you to do anything. I probably wouldn’t have the talent to do so in any case.
Which made the man blush.
Still, he could not completely disregard the woman’s brazen manner.
Perhaps you’ll understand, he said more coolly, that this is not my egoism. I just can’t clarify other people’s extremely unclear situations.