Grandmother quietly asked Irén whether she had really sent the maid away like that or upset herself like this only afterward.
If only she could be trusted.
Grandmother had come to take me home with her and now here she was, confronted with this story that visibly shocked her.
You don’t think I could possibly have stayed another minute under the same roof with such a creature.
Her voice receded from me on the balcony, along with the sound of the band tuning up, as twilight slowly approached. Then it became completely dark and although I heard the drums, trumpet, saxophone, and piano as they were looking for their correct positions in the ensemble, I was on my way to somewhere where things were not so musical.
Luckily they never found out why I fainted on the balcony.
They said the little fool must have stood in the sun for hours again and they shouldn’t let me do that in the future. I was too sensitive a child, which of course was understandable. Dampened cloths were put on my forehead and chest, and for a while longer I lay there at their feet on the warm stones. He always waits for Hedda Hiller, would you believe, and for some reason they all laughed at this remark. They always laughed at my enthusiasm for the singer. Then they lugged me inside, I let them, though I felt I had nothing wrong with me, I could have made it on my own two feet. They laid me on the sofa, everyone stood around me and I could see on their faces that they felt they had to do something with me or for me. Szilvia and Viola took turns running into the bathroom; they were in charge of changing the compresses. Grandmother fanned me with a newspaper; my aunt Irén took my pulse. The only unpleasant thing was that this sunny summer afternoon was pouring in through the many floor-to-ceiling windows, together with the jazz band music.
Hedda Hiller was crooning something about love into the microphone, then said a few words that made the men and women in the Moszkva Garden laugh, and then the saxophone kept wailing.
They asked if I felt better, because now my color was coming back.
I said I felt really good, though I had no idea how I felt.
They asked if I hadn’t eaten something on the sly that might have upset my stomach.
I said I thought there was too much light in the room.
Did I understand what Irén had asked me. She asked me if I’d nibbled on something.
I said I understood, but still there was too much light in the room.
But they were asking if I had eaten anything before lunch that they didn’t know about, whether I could remember what it was.
I said I hadn’t eaten anything before lunch, I remembered very well, and I didn’t take any pastry from the serving table.
That calmed them down but I was afraid I might faint again; I was afraid of myself.
I kept insisting — not that the air was filling up with something — but that the light was becoming unusually dense. My grandmother drew me to her, as if she’d sensed what was happening to me, and said, no problem, darling, the girls will darken the room right away, and with that, she may have kept me from fainting again.
It felt good when they finally shut off the light.
Let’s leave him alone for a while, Grandmother whispered, he’ll sleep now.
And I did feel as if I had to fall asleep.
But the moment they left the room on tiptoe and stopped making the floor creak, I opened my eyes. They had closed the double door leading to the dining room; the room became dark. That reminded me again of the night, the bridge and that girl, who was me, having to sleep under the bridge.
But why did they lie to us the next morning, saying she had left of her own will.
I felt that I was born to be a girl.
There was always a truth that later turned out to be a lie.
The feeling that I was not who I imagined myself to be, and not who others thought I was, always tormented me. Actually nobody is what he or she appears to be, and I’m not the only one who doesn’t know who he is or to whom he belongs. I observed the torments of others; I wanted to understand how they decided when they had to lie and about what, or what it was they could consider the truth for a while. That was the reason why I later so obsessively followed the half-man trundling himself down Teréz Boulevard on his board with casters, since no one knew where he came from or where he was going every day, or the woman with her big hats and no face left, nothing but a walking burn.
As if by watching them I could crack their secrets.
Since these two were so obviously not what they appeared to be, it never occurred to me that they might not have any secrets. And since I could never shake the thought that my father surely couldn’t have disappeared without a trace as claimed, and our mother couldn’t have just left us — that too had to be a lie, and something entirely different must have happened — it followed that these two, the man on the rolling wooden board and the burned woman, were my father and mother. My mother had survived the war, though she’d suffered terrible burns during the siege of Budapest. And my father had heroically stuck to his truth, and when they saw they were getting nowhere with him and were unable to force false testimony from him about anyone, they simply threw him out of a speeding car.
He was like a living piece of flesh. He could just barely crawl away from where they dumped him.
A stranger took him in, with whom he’d been living ever since, somewhere around Hunyadi Square. It would be nice if Hedda Hiller were that stranger. Since I couldn’t decide what would be better for me, sometimes I imagined that the kind stranger was a man — a more convincing version of my story, since a woman couldn’t have carried the wounded man to her place.
His legs could not be saved. The truth was that in their condition neither of my parents wanted to be a burden to us.
That’s why my mother kept hiding from us, that’s why she pretended when looking out from under her large hat that she didn’t recognize me. I also tended to avoid her because I could not imagine the moment when she’d give up the playacting, take me back, and press me to herself for the first time. I was scared that I might push her away because she had become repugnant, because she had left me, and because I really hated her.
Of course I suspected that this woman, whom I sometimes imagined was my mother, was among those who were crushed when the marquee of the Duna Cinema crashed down. Probably not one of those whom the rescuers scraped out alive from under the rubble after the dust settled and everyone was sobbing, fleeing, helping, or only helplessly screaming and watching the incredible. That would mean I’d lost my mother for the second time. Later some good people carried the corpses to the corner of Antal Nagy Street in Buda, and then, at the cost of subdued altercations on top of the rubble, the line for bread re-formed itself.
They lay side by side where the tank had appeared earlier.
People in the line slowly kicked the rubble off the curb.
The chaos was too great, and I never saw her again on the boulevard or anywhere else.
Somebody said that the marquee was made of cinder blocks, which is why not more people died, since it’s much lighter than regular concrete.
I preferred to continue weaving the story for myself. In my story she was taken away with light injuries by a Russian military ambulance that showed up for the injured. She recovered in a few days but had no doubts that I’d recognized her, and that’s why she left the country in the last days of December, along with other refugees.
My imagination protected me from the pain somewhat, although the more cleverly it worked, the more doubts accumulated in my mind.
I stood there on the landing above the second floor, leaning against the wall, bent forward a little, my legs slightly apart, like someone preparing to throw up but hoping not to soil his suit with his vomit; I was waiting for my imagination to calm down, so that jealousy and senseless physical desire would not drive me mad. I held my unbuttoned coat together with my fists sunk in my pockets. As if afraid that someone on the dark staircase might see what was happening inside my pants. I was clenching one fist hard to keep my fingers from stretching out, from crawling onto my painfully rearing hot cock, to keep my warm palm from closing around it.