Their steps grew stiffer and stiffer. If one may say such a thing, the man’s hands were positively ugly, his fingers short and thick, his wrists too powerful. Still, she would have liked to feel them, to walk with their fingers intertwined and to keep on walking. To get away from here and go to America with him. They should have stopped to shake the pebbles out of their shoes. And neither of them could bear thinking about the long stroll stretching out before them. The farther they walked from the entrance to the island promenade, the more certain it seemed that once well inside the island, in spite of everything they would irresponsibly fall on each other.
A saving idea occurred to the architect.
They shouldn’t continue in this direction because there was too much wind on this side; they should cut across at the casino and take a look at the new covered hall for the high-board diving tower at the Sports Baths and how it had been marked out; he’d heard it would happen this week, according to the plans.
Maybe he would find the renowned architect Alfréd Hajós* there.
The woman understood the implication of this suggestion, and at the same time the enormous ache surprised her.
She felt in her throat and in her chest that although she would accept the man’s arbitrary decision, she wouldn’t get away scot-free with a surrender.
Because it hurt very much, she would not be free of this pain for a long time. She was suffering and she would continue to suffer.
Luckily, they found nothing and no one.
They found only traces of uprooted trees, a few abandoned ditches from which the designer must have taken soil samples, and a few stakes at various points on the neglected lawn. The construction had been halted for some reason. This gave them an excuse to talk about neutral topics, look around, roam about, linger and be silent, and then quickly turn back.
At the island’s entrance, which is one of the city’s most exposed spots, the wind stormed across their bodies, pushing them relentlessly.
They tried to resist, laughing loudly, they held on to their hats, kept on shouting, accidentally bumped each other, and then deliberately leaned against each other back to back and, holding on to each other, kept guffawing about how they were so enjoying themselves and how each successive gust took their breath away.
Or who knows what took away their breath.
There was nothing to be done about the wind; in the end, they took the streetcar.
In the empty car, they panted loudly, right in front of the conductor, flushed and wide-eyed. They behaved as if they had just saved their lives.
And if they already had, then they could quickly part company at the very first stop in Pest.
Which is the second-stormiest place in Budapest; here, tin gutters often become loose, rain pipes detach themselves from the walls, plaster and roof tiles take flight and crash to the sidewalks.
They parted on Lipót Boulevard as if they never wanted to see each other again.
Otherwise It Couldn’t Have Raged
I don’t know where I got the courage finally, valiantly, to spit it out. The sentence was bad, but I said it anyway. I’d like to have a date with her. It sounded like another person’s voice calling over into my own life.
Maybe today’s young people no longer say things like that, they say something entirely different, but back then that was the proper expression. Propriety, of course, did not make the declaration less shameless.
It wouldn’t have been possible to wipe out or remedy one of my shameful deeds with another.
Only nine months had gone by, I figured out quickly while standing by the rain-lashed living-room window, yet those events seemed to have receded into a calmer distance.
During the fall, there was one foggy evening when I ventured back to those places, but luckily I found not a single soul among the trees and bushes. Yet it seemed so useless to go on with everything as before when I could not help looking continuously into another life. Into a life running parallel to the one I was leading. I should have kept the secret even from myself. I needed more time, maybe the same length of time that has passed until now, this was my ascetic hope, and then I’d forget it completely. Though the best thing to do would have been to kill, that’s what I kept imagining, to kill everyone, leaving no one on earth who might remember those things.
Sometimes I even recalled the black dog, the way it stood over me, panting into my face, longing to lick my eyes.
With legs spread, hips thrust forward, there above me stood the men who knew everything better than I, did everything better than I, and wouldn’t miss a single opportunity.
The strange shadows of huge birds.
That is why I hesitated, helplessly mulling over every prepared sentence, that is why I waited for weeks for the right moment, and that is why I became so harshly determined with my dumb sentence when the right moment finally arrived that blustery March morning.
It was as if for the first time in my life I’d blurted out my wildest wish to a total stranger. Until then everything had been the other way around: I either rejected or expected crude invitations from others, which was much simpler. And I still did not have enough insight into the secrets of men, I still didn’t know exactly how they carried on the dangerous game of making overtures, even though I observed things very carefully, wanting so much to learn the ropes.
I probably should have appeared before a woman in the guise of an innocent, instead of presenting my wish as gloomily as I did when it finally burst out of me. My awkward sullenness made it awkward for both of us to begin like that. Her immediate response to my gloominess was a sadness of her own. As if she were saying to me, this is not what I’d expected from you. I should have been lighter, kinder, sweeter, and hidden my secret wish between two more innocent sentences. Shouldn’t have barged in like that, asking for a date. However, I was anything but innocent. Should have given her every opportunity to refuse without offending me, or to pretend she hadn’t heard right.
She wore a wedding ring, and seemed older than I was.
She shouldn’t have been able to humiliate me even if she rejected me.
Yet to my great surprise, she did not reject my proposition. But not because I played the role of seductive lover well. She must have had some other reason.
Maybe she enjoyed my ridiculousness.
She closed her eyes for a moment, I could observe her dejection, and then she opened them again and nodded. And by that time her sadness was gone. Maybe it had been neither dejection nor sadness but something quite different. I understood nothing; nothing made sense to me, least of all my own existence. Facing each other we were just as much strangers as we had been before, and she’d said not a word. We ran out of time as someone with a receipt headed toward her from the cash register. The key moment was over and we hadn’t even set a time or place for our date.
And we couldn’t, not only because of the approaching stranger but also because it was no longer clear why we should meet at all, never mind where or when.
I was unprepared for her sadness and unprepared for her acceptance, which like my proposition was unrefined and undisguised. If I’d had a way of knowing what she wanted from me, perhaps I’d also have known what I wanted from her. I had just enough experience to decide on having a little affair and I did take the first step, but then had no idea why I should take a second one if she wasn’t glad about the first. I figured that if others did this because they found joy in their amorous romping, then I too should learn how to do it. Something told me that without this knowledge I’d perish. If I get up every morning, I should know what other people do in the successive hours of their day. The thirst for learning urged me on, but the object of my study looked back sadly at me.