She moaned that I was torturing her.
It was as though there existed one gigantic emotion and a tiny piece of it had chipped or broken off and I shouted that I wasn’t torturing her, with what would I be torturing her.
At the same time, my conscience was gnawing at me. I wanted to understand her, see her clearly; I was shouting and throwing accusations around because I didn’t have the strength to fight my way out of my miserable lie. What’s more, it felt good that I couldn’t, and instead I kept on with my insistent, domineering huffing and puffing, even though I was deeply ashamed of it all.
Why is it a crime, I shouted, that I want to see things clearly.
Oh, come on, those are nothing but big words, she responded morosely. Who’s talking about crimes here, and what do you mean clearly. She doesn’t know words like that. Anyway, how dare I use such words. She can see very well that what I want to do is get away with something. I want to avoid her. I had taken a deep breath and run after her, but what I really thought was that it would be better if she didn’t exist, that’s what I thought. And why would I think she can’t see through all my little tricks.
Why would she think I don’t see them myself.
That’s why she’d said before that I’d like to take life easy. That’s all she had in mind. I think that one can solve everything with words. And for my information she did not mean to hurt me. She really didn’t know much about my life, though she had heard a thing or two.
Then you could at least tell me how you know my name.
From Terike.
What Terike, I asked, surprised, I don’t know any Terike. And I noticed that we were staring at each other again.
And that again I saw she was phenomenal.
And that I had never seen anything so beautiful.
Terike, her boss.
And her eyes were roaming over my face, she was letting her gaze glide all over it without stopping anywhere.
And how could her boss know my life’s story when I don’t know her.
How could she know, well, from your own dear aunt, that’s how.
This I hadn’t expected, though I could have, because Nínó, always looking for her little girl, asked every woman she met who had a number on her arm.
Her face became a strange object in the dim light. A single patch of yellowish light fell on her nose and lips. Her innocent statement opened up a secret world in which people discussed one another’s lives behind one another’s backs. For her, this world was probably neither secret nor strange nor repulsive but familiar and natural. She appeared little-girlish or awkward in this world, and this must have been one of her transformations, which I had not understood until then. She could change her age even between two sentences. Now she was older than I, now she was like a child. I couldn’t easily imagine a world in which my aunt would talk about me to a stranger while another stranger eavesdropped. Although I knew that such a world existed, just as I knew that in the real world every sentence was an assassination and betrayal; but in the world that existed only for me, in no circumstance could a thing like that possibly occur. And with the help of these feelings, or thoughts, within a fraction of a second I had finally understood something about this woman, yet somehow I still didn’t know what it was I had understood.
I asked when and in what way my aunt had talked about me, how had I gotten into the conversation, and from where could her boss have known my aunt. But I didn’t wait for an answer; as though I dreaded her answer I turned away and stared out at the street.
The street was more familiar than her face was.
No, she did not think the two women knew each other from someplace. They like to talk to each other because they are about the same age. Her boss had a child very late in life. Sometimes they talk about this, sometimes about other things, about this and that, anything.
And I didn’t even know, I said, that my aunt frequented your shop.
Not only my aunt, she said in her lively, enthusiastic, little-girlish voice, but my older cousin too.
Meanwhile I was looking at the street, because for some reason I had to.
No, I said, it can’t be, she must be mixing him up with somebody else, because my older cousin has never in his life set foot in a store. Unless he was with my aunt.
She laughed and said I was wrong about that too, because he does come to the shop on Wednesdays and Fridays, always between four and five, and he always buys the most expensive dessert.
Dessert, I said. You mean to tell me my cousin buys dessert, I said. He had never bought a box of matches, let alone dessert.
But there must be something to this story.
And I kept staring steadfastly through the swaying, yellowish sphere of the lights from the streetlamps as if I had not the slightest wish to see this unknown woman’s face and was willing to hear her voice only from a distance. This lively, little-girlish, distant voice I didn’t know what to do with. She was talking to me from another world, and the image that Ágost bought desserts at that shop so he could court her was simply unbearable.
There was no woman who would want to avoid his gaze.
And the street was now commanding my gaze. As if I were slightly forgetting what we had been talking about, I too was becoming a bit lost. Or I longed to be lost, I don’t know. I began to long to be out of the car, to lean into the wind and to go home to Stefánia. To return to the country that no longer existed for me. To see at the far end of the garden the six high arched windows all lit up and, until Róza came to open the gate, to lean my forehead against the cool, lance-shaped pickets of the fence.
She asked what I was thinking about, or looking at so hard, or why did I become so quiet.
I said I was remembering something from my childhood.
I should tell it to her.
That’s it, I said, laughing, and went on staring out into nothing in the tunnel of the lights on Dembinszky Street. That’s exactly the problem, I don’t know what I should tell her about, because suddenly so many things were on my mind at once.
I had to look back at her; I asked whether she came from the country.
Wherever did I get that idea.
I didn’t get it from anywhere. I’m just asking.
But she is asking why does that interest me.
Because if she was from the country, then maybe I couldn’t explain anything to her. This is an idée fixe of mine that I had even as a child: that there was a border on Aréna Road and life on the far side of it was completely different from our life on Stefánia Boulevard. I asked her if she wanted me to show it to her. But suddenly I remembered that we hadn’t brought down those drink bottles from the third floor.
The Spice of Happiness
It was clear he was at the right place, and it was equally clear that he was in the grip of a peculiar feeling.
Perhaps happiness in love is what makes such a wonderful promise in the air made fragrant by vegetation.
It would have been foolish to be taken in by such a spiritual promise, but it would have been no less foolish to deny himself the exceptional and groundless feeling of lightness.
Dr. Kienast saw a solitary, one-story house in the forest, standing in the middle of a long, rather narrow clearing, all its windows lit up, and he had to goad himself to look so he could see, instead of being preoccupied with what he was thinking and feeling. It was as if he had strayed back into the same winter twilight. But where in the devil else could he be walking if not at the place where he happened to be.
Everything might have occurred once before.
In light moments or frightening ones when, who knows why, one is gripped by irresponsibility and suffused with happiness, one can easily have the impression that one knows the world by heart. And it wasn’t the first time he had experienced this particular hallucination. A little farther on in the clearing, he saw a smartly built wood-framed shed and, facing it, a handsome little structure whose use he could not guess. This was the fruit-drying shed in which, in Döhring’s dream, Isolde had found the hidden gold, and perhaps the oldest of the three buildings.