And it could not evolve in small increments, secretly, in unguarded moments. Because they did not know what was supposed to happen since what was happening now was very different from many of their rational experiences.
And if the waitress had not very politely taken away their empty glasses, opaque with lemon and sugar, laughing rather too intimately and maternally, they would have continued for at least another forty minutes, sitting stiffly in front of other people, frozen at each other’s melting point, constrained and expectant.
That is when they realized that they each had another hand, and had had it all along, holding a long-empty glass.
This was not vacant time but time full of event, each moment filled to the brim.
Finally they grasped each other’s free hand. Only then did they notice how attentive the waitress had been, not only addressing Klára in the familiar form but also calling her by her rarely used nickname.
They could stay no longer; suddenly they had to leave as quickly as possible; out on the street they ran straight into the winds coming from two different directions, then found each other again, this time not only in great haste but also clinging to each other along the entire length of their bodies, shyly and sweetly.
And then, with their coats open, they ran again in different directions into the big, darkly blinding void.
By the time they drove into the deserted downtown area, their excited breathing had subsided.
They got out in front of a small mansion on Újvilág Street and stood under trees swaying in the wind, but even there they said nothing to each other. At moments their mutual silence seemed hostile and at other moments just the opposite, soaring and moving with the power of their mutual discoveries. In any case they seemed to be coddling each other in temporal terms, both of them wanting to prolong their time together.
Klára lifted out the wine and vodka bottles from behind the backseat, four in all, and handed them to Kristóf, but then she took back two of them for herself. By sharing the work in this way they seemed to go on fondling each other. That is how they went up to the second floor, carrying real bottles, immersed in the loveliness of their first mutual undertaking.
She walked ahead of Kristóf as if she knew her way around, but Kristóf watched only her calves and ankles and how she stepped up the worn-out stairs, one by one.
It wouldn’t have occurred to them to talk about anything in the dimly lit staircase.
Already on the first landing they could hear bits of music, thumping, the din and humming of people crammed into the apartment.
By the clock on the nearby Town Hall it was almost eleven. The clock would strike on the hour, and the old mechanism was preparing with loud clatters for the four strikes that would fill the narrow street, but here there was no day or night because the party had been in full swing for two days running and no one could tell how long it would go on.
People did not know where they were going, to whose party, they had only heard about their hosts. But that was the interesting and wonderful part of it — the anarchy. There were no rules anymore, and no rules meant no rules. When there are no units of measurement, there is no time either, and we can’t tell when the reckoning of time stopped. All they knew was that the ancient tailor whose trade sign had adorned the facade of the handsome little mansion since the late nineteenth century, who made splendid evening jackets, tailcoats, smoking jackets, and formal suits, and whose shop was now run, theoretically, by his grandson while he, darkly tanned and wrinkled, was shooting the breeze on the terraces and in the corridors of the Lukács Baths with old people who were in every way younger than he, that this tailor had a few days ago emptied his second-floor apartment and third-floor workshop, which — in return for his long and faithful service — his family had been allowed to retain as leased property, though they could not own them, since the Land Registry records showed that they’d been taken away from him. No one any longer needed the magnificent garments whose specialist he was, not even in the highest circles. He had made tailcoats and jackets for Mátyás Rákosi that required all his professional experience, but János Kádár, with his quite good build and carriage, bought his suits from the Red October Clothing Factory’s tailoring workshop, and other high-ranking functionaries followed the leader’s austere, plain example.* The old tailor could not imagine a world in which nobody was interested in shirtfronts, dickeys, cufflinks, silk vests, and the cut of lapels. And regarding the modern lines and fashionable new patterns, his family slowly lost their courage. The new tailors and assistants simply didn’t have a feeling for true tailoring. With the family’s exceptional connections, they managed to obtain emigrant visas to go at least as far as Vienna. Once there, they would see, perhaps there they could still make it, maybe their skills were still needed. Most of their objets d’art had been declared national property and been turned over to the state. They were allowed to take hardly anything with them; fortunately their money, kept in foreign currencies, along with the best of their jewelry, had been smuggled out of the country before the war.
Both Klára and Kristóf were used to going to completely unfamiliar places where people were celebrating a fiasco or solemnizing a devastation. Yet a few years earlier no one would have shown up uninvited anywhere. But these decorum issues had ended in Budapest. One could virtually name the hour when this had happened. It was not that no one now hewed to the old obligatory codes of behavior — some people did — but that it was impossible to know who would comply, when, or why somebody would not, or even what should be complied with.
A lean figure in a white shirt was lying on the steps, his torso reclining against the grating that surrounded the elevator shaft.
Hesitantly they stopped above him.
At the very same instant, amid noise and music, the tall wide door of the apartment upstairs opened, and along with thick clouds of smoke a loud group of people emerged, shouting back and forth.
Stop, how many times do I have to tell you.
Above their shoulders one could see that the apartment hallway was also full of people; the wonderful chaos was complete.
I’m afraid you’re dreaming.
Different kinds of music reached them simultaneously: somebody, in a whiny voice, was demanding love, a man’s voice on a tape recorder or record; and somebody deep in the apartment was pounding away on the piano with great conviction and screaming at the same time as if beside himself, or anyway it sounded as if the pianist and the screamer were the same person. People in the group streaming out the door were all talking at once, each taking great pleasure in speaking over the other voices. The group included young women and somewhat older men, all quite gentle, almost shy figures and all of them completely drunk. As they started down the stairs, they too stopped above the figure lying on the steps, held on to one another, swayed back and forth — which was not without danger because their hands and arms were filled with empty bottles — groping for support on the walls, banisters, and one another. They sobered up a bit in the drafty staircase and began to giggle at this other drunk stretched out on the steps, but what the fuck.