It was all about my own soul, and I could not resist it.
Her steps kept pattering on. I heard these wishes uttered within me in my own voice, and not only was I not ashamed of them but an unknown quantity of unreasonable cheerfulness was bursting in my chest. Which made me exactly as irresponsible and haughty as I saw other men being in similar situations. Only a little while earlier, I had been eagerly sneaking after her; only a little while ago I had felt the heavy, anxious, nervous, and unstoppable hammering of my heart, and now this — this puffed-up, conceited, and unimpeded gaiety. I kept following her and my own voice made me feel free.
This is how we reached Ferenc Liszt Square.
She is leading, this woman is leading me, I thought, she was leading me somewhere. That was my definite impression. To tell the truth, though, I couldn’t really have believed this, because I had no intention of arriving anywhere, could not have said where I might arrive with her and what was making me so puffed up, but by then at least the doubt and dread had disappeared. As if I were saying, if it won’t be like this, well, then it will be some other way, shrugging my shoulders. Even if I’d known what was waiting for me, what kind of months or years, I still would have surrendered to this moment, because I had nothing to ward it off with. I haven’t regretted anything, I’d do the same today, I would surrender.
While we were crossing the square in front of the Academy of Music, she had to lean forward and force herself into the squalls.
She was holding on to her bag slung over her shoulder. She turned her head to the side to keep the wind from slamming ice-cold drizzle into her face.
I let the wind do what it wanted to, let it hit me in the face, let the water drip down my neck, so long as I could see her, not lose sight of her, not for a second. And then I turned my head away too, and for a while I followed her like that, though I was as good as blind and with drizzle spitting into my face. Inside the academy, a concert must have started; in the pale light of the lobby, behind the art nouveau swing doors, strolled two usherettes deep in conversation. I don’t know if she slowed down or I speeded up, but by the time we reached the corner of Király Street there were no more than ten paces between us. I did not dare go closer; I deliberately kept this distance.
Let her lead; let me follow.
Perhaps it was only for a few seconds, but I was gripped by an attractive irresponsibility, or perhaps I was completely filled with joy, or one feeling totally masked the other. Above Király Street the sky was completely dark, with only the streetlights swaying in the wind. A police car was approaching, its wheels whispering a soft slow melody on the wet asphalt. As if with its quiet purring it had banished all the other noises in the empty street, the unexpected clapping of the wind, the mysterious knocks, the low gurgling in the gutters on the unadorned neoclassical corner building. Even if it hadn’t been a car like that in which they took my father away and made him disappear, I’d still be afraid of them forever. My own fate no longer interested me, and my father’s fate had shrunk to being a mere episode in the overall story. She was moving along, walking close to the corner building while navigating between puddles and water dripping from holes in the gutters. The squalls could not easily penetrate this area, yet the roofs were clamoring. The police paid no attention to us, in their eyes we were only pedestrians; still, they watched and acknowledged us. Quarreling lovers. The car carried four somber outward-looking faces, busy ascertaining whether there was still an adequate level of fear in the dead city. I could have been a rapist-murderer; all they were interested in was the degree of fear. I could have been a mugger planning to rob the woman and waiting for the police to disappear. It was happening right before their eyes, yet they had no words or even eyes for it. No matter how much they checked things, the street was still there and they could not keep people from walking on it. It was the minimum they could permit, but it showed on their faces that this was too much for them, more than necessary; it overtaxed them.
There went the prey, who deliberately revealed her steps to me. And the city’s darkness was also not working for the police. I wouldn’t have minded walking all night in its labyrinths. If they had followed us, they’d have had nothing to uncover. It was like a blood clot momentarily stuck in the heart for an unexpected, fleeting instant; still, I felt light and it made me happy that I could follow a woman on the street right in front of the police. I could have easily said that I was enjoying my secret little liberty. As if it were the randomly appearing and disappearing police car that made me understand what I had taken earlier as regret and sadness on her face. I saw my own hesitancy, anxiety, and dread squirting up from under the police car’s wheels. My entire life until then had been nothing but withdrawal and hiding; I wouldn’t have thought there was free will — as indeed there was not. But now, with her steps, she simply suspended my fear. I didn’t care about her ugly coat either, because my hated cousin’s hand-me-downs no longer bothered me. Only a few more steps were left, which is to say no more than a few more seconds. And that was the end of this last little reverie, because then she turned into Nagymező Street and disappeared. As if she had been meaning to trick me. And life would indeed be nothing but bitterness and disappointment. I speeded up and took the last steps to the corner on a run. I could not let her do this to me after she had brought me so far. I wanted to see at least where she was going.
She was standing in front of the church as if she had meant to flee there in the first place. One wing of the heavy door was wide open.
She could see that I was virtually running after her. And I, at last, could see that she was waiting for me, nobody else, because in the middle of the broad sidewalk she turned around to face me. I couldn’t slow down, and I couldn’t have said how far I’d go in my daring now that she had gone this far. As a feeling, it was as if, unable to brake my momentum, I’d plow into her — but my courage abandoned me at just that point. I had a chance to live through one of my life’s most lucid and delicate moments. There was no room for deception or falsehood in it. It was a brief flash preceded and followed by thick fog. She stood there, stiff within her own obstinate decision. She would wait for and, with a single blow, bring the insane attacker low; that’s how I saw her, determined, wild, and aggressive. But the closer I came, the more nicely she smiled, as if welcoming the attack with the joy of brutality come true. Which meant that she was no less insane than I. Her smile was so refined, so soft, so unalterable, yet expanding and spreading so that her face almost swam away with it, but the obstinate decision with which she planted herself on the glistening sidewalk was not nice.
It was crude and uncouth, and my overhasty running wasn’t nice either, as if my limbs were flying away from me, leaving me unable to control or aim my movements in the right direction. The eagerness, this greedy fear that I might lose or miss out on something, was not aesthetically pleasing. And neither was my alarm that I might smash what I wanted to seize and hold on to. But it was nice that I wasn’t ashamed of all this, of my desire to possess. In what way would it be possible to possess an entire human being — in no way. There was nothing I could ruin. For at least a single moment to grab her ass with both hands. And that’s what she responded to with her smile because she wasn’t ashamed either. She said, I’m not playing hide and seek with you. She said, what do you want. She said, here I am. She did not say, possess me, but now I shall crush you, tear you apart, devour you, possess you. And that, after all, was a different kind of beauty, though a little funnier too, or cruder. Until then, she had always seemed rather fragile, transparent, anemic, and sad. I could not yet see clearly that she had physical characteristics in which the cruelty of her soul was engraved. In her there was room also for the ugly; on her the lovely also had its place; madness took up space in her, as did shameful cunning. Ultimately we both knew what we wanted from each other, and we even knew that we were unstoppable.