I can’t learn three foreign languages simultaneously. She can’t shove every stupidity down my throat.
It did not seem reasonable to put up with so much shame and humiliation and to pay so much for it.
But she did not give up, she kept hitting that fucking F sharp on Mrs. Szemző’s piano, following its sound with her voice.
In the meantime, she was locked up in the chicken coop.
When did anyone lock up Médike in a chicken coop, or Irmuska and the famous Mária Szapáry and the rest of the grand ladies, when. Never. They gave her nothing to eat, she drank out of the trough, she had to drink out of the cattle trough.
Out of what else.
When had these women ever suffered as much as she had, and she couldn’t have known that this was mental suffering because she hadn’t learned the appropriate words from them. In the morning they gave her a turnip to chew on. She’d never tell anyone that she had picked a live worm out of one and eaten it. How could she have known there would be punishment for that too.
She did not understand what sins a little girl like that could have committed, or what sin was. And she did not know what a little girl or little boy was because they kept her as if she’d been a dumb animal, and also punished her for being one.
She drank the chickens’ water.
She was capable of doing it, that useless thing.
She looked for her uselessness everywhere, tried secretly to feel it on herself, where it might have entered her, and to figure out what made other children so useful.
And they always shoved her back here, hungry and thirsty, and she felt that anybody could put her to shame, degrade and humiliate her.
She could never be free of this. The only reason she could endure the long hours, the whole nights, in the chicken coop was that she didn’t know she might die or that she had been born; how could she have known. How could she have known any of the things other children knew. The bolt clicked again, they locked the chicken-coop door from the outside, and this was her punishment for drinking from the trough again.
Ain’t yah a disgustin’ li’l animal drinkin’ the water o’ them cows. What am I wastin’ time teachin’ yah what to do, an’ aks fur water when yah thirst. Didn’ I gi’ yah turnip. I’ll leave yah here all night, but if yah budge, the ugly fox come take yah away an’ bite clear across yer throat.
From the depth of that night, there glimmered in Gyöngyvér’s brain a realization about her first foster mother. She could not remember her face, only her meaty arms tanned dark by the sun, her approaching heavy steps, and that strange large man and what he had done, in the midst of intimate and ominous sounds, to this larger-than-life woman who now seemed to have been the Médike of her old life.
That is why she is so terrified of her, or of Médike, and of men in general.
These figures metamorphosed into one another; she could not be rid of them.
That is why she can’t learn from Médike what she should, not because of the cognac.
Paying her in vain.
She will kill her.
She’d like to take my entire salary.
These two very different things, her unconsciously committed sins and her sheer existence, were inauspiciously coming together. This was not something she thought; she actually witnessed it. She saw the fox from very close up; in her life, not in a fairy tale, the fox and the rat came in the night and kept chewing and pushing at the coop’s boards until they got to a hen or rooster and they took away the little girl too. That was actually good, taking her away, because then there’d be quiet at last; or maybe it was inside her that something was forever rent asunder, something that could not be mended in her lifetime and it is only her that God punishes like this so cruelly.
The fox did come.
To pick at the bolt from inside wasn’t easy, but she kept at it for a long time and finally got it to move and managed to escape. She threw the bolt into the nettles. So they couldn’t lock the coop door on her again. But they did, they also beat her around the head and locked her up using something other than the bolt, seeing how incorrigible and useless she was.
Not only did she escape, she also drank the chickens’ water, the mean thing.
She’d better talk or answer me before I knock her dead.
With what remained of her senses she understood that the world order was different for other people; they wash up and go to church. She didn’t understand why they stuffed soap in her mouth when she did not know how she should have answered, or what her sin meant to her and why she was so filthy and smelly, and why she had scratched her fleabites again until they were bloody.
Mrs. Bizsók did not do things like this to her but she slapped her face and spanked her bottom mercilessly.
Though she won’t forgive her for beating her with a vine pole.
Don’t yah fret, nobody’s gonna look for yah if I beat yah to death.
She did not lash out at the others whom she wanted to understand, to win over, love or bribe to compensate for the heat of the chicken coop, the constantly fidgeting hens, and the scratched fleabites. She wanted them to accept her, take her in; she’d show them that she too could be useful or that at least she wasn’t useless. This was the reason she paid so much money to Médike. Fifty-seven forints for an hour that was only fifty minutes.
They should not do this to her.
She threw up; in her alarm, she vomited on her little dress when they were taking her to church, but how could they take her wearing something she’d thrown up on.
In the coop, it was also hard for her to learn how to avoid the rooster.
She had the runs because of her fear; they tethered her to a tree because she soiled everything in the summer kitchen.
Or to stick a knife in them, that long-bladed knife her foster mother pulled out from behind the saltbox to slit the throats of the geese and let them thrash between her legs until they bled to death, down to the last drop.
She was quick to flare against those she could not strangle with her hands.
She desperately envied them for their always different lives, none of which would ever be hers.
Not to turn around or look back.
At first he only quickened his steps, trying not to limp so much, but the dog’s tapping feet followed him even faster.
He did not want to take the starving cur under his wing now that he was so defenseless himself.
Only not to turn around.
Then, as if hit by lightning, her brain was shot through with an electric discharge.
Whereupon her hearing seemed to open onto her voice, and the voice, small and miserable because of all the secret crying and infinite joy of having possessed that beautiful man, now breaks free, is liberated, and this time she is the one chaining someone to herself. Who is not right for her. Although she had been with a man like that before, this is not the first time she has done it with them, Jews. If he is a Jew — he says he isn’t. And she felt the joy because of this incredible exhaustion too, and her elemental fear of him, being so exhausted because of her. All right, let him be half a Jew, what do I care, it’s all the same to me. Anyone can wear you out in three days, that’s for sure. Why should I be scared of things that are good for me. Because of him, she won’t be able to go to work today, yes, because of him. And she trembled because of her constant anxiety about having the money to pay Médike. I should be ashamed of what he did to me, ashamed that with me anybody can do anything; he can make my knees shake and my soul tremble at the same time. My head will explode, because I’m such a miserable creature, God put me down at the wrong place, Providence slipped me into the wrong body and there isn’t a person in the world who can help me.