When Ágost or other men before him called her at the kindergarten when she happened to be playing with the children or singing to them, when someone came in to tell her she was wanted on the telephone, she had to pay very close attention to understand the person at the other end of the line. When she left the house in the morning she became distant from him; it was as if she did not have another life besides the kindergarten.
And the same was true the other way around.
If they went out in the evening, to the Fészek Club or anywhere else, and people she did not know asked her what she did, she would say, I’m a kindergarten teacher, but then suddenly she’d be unable to explain what that meant. Hours would go by and still she could not recall what she did there. In a matter of seconds the divider in her soul would rise between things, and it was wider than the Great Wall of China. Because if something had not happened, then something entirely different must have, and the former was no longer visible. She was in constant fear of not understanding what had happened or was happening in a given moment. She got the idea that others could not grasp her incomprehension. She kept it a secret how difficult it was for her to get into the present from her various pasts. She did not comprehend how others could connect different things and times in themselves. This is why she did not feel at home except among children. She would stand by the telephone, listening to the familiar voice to which no face or expression belonged, only a possible name and a pure sensation.
Although they had been living under the same roof for half a year, she had not been this close, even in the simple, physical sense, to Ágost’s mother. Their shoulders touched, their thighs a little too, and neither of them found it necessary to move away. Sometimes Gyöngyvér keenly perceived how different mother and son were in many areas; at other times she was surprised, it nearly overwhelmed her, by how alike they were in other ways. Now, from the moment they walked out of the apartment, she had sensed nothing but their similarity. Neither physical nor mental difference existed any longer between aging woman and young son. Her entire attention was taken up with the sensation that she was in the presence not of that barrier thicker than the Great Wall of China but of a familiar attraction, an intimacy she could not avoid yet could not make her own.
This led to an insane thought — perhaps she should reach Ágost through the person of this elderly woman.
During the past weeks Ágost had quietly, politely, and brutally rejected her and not only in his sleep and not by chance. The night before, the struggle had turned brutal; it wasn’t, Gyöngyvér felt, the usual transition between two bitter fights and reconciliation, which sometimes she provoked for its gratifying excitement. Now, with the older woman suddenly opening up, Gyöngyvér felt that these two mature humans were made of much the same stuff. If only she could cross over into Erna, she might be saved. In the meantime, her splitting headache was getting worse. The realization struck her like lightning: if she could manage this, she would truly be saved. It was no longer about mother and son having identical tones of voice, skin color, deep and close-set eyes, piercing and constantly inquiring looks, of being almost perfect reflections of each other. No. Which would explain everything.
Gyöngyvér, contrary to all appearances, was not stupid. True, what she could formulate for herself, based on the reports of her senses, was usually flatter, more banal, more boring, and much simpler, almost primitive, because so much less than what she had sensed. Now, for example, she kept telling herself that if she succeeded in winning over the mother, she would not have to move out of the apartment. Which she dreaded.
Like a child, she was euphoric that Lady Erna would save her.
The survival instinct compels no less greed from her than it did from other people. Still, she often became entangled in situations in which she appeared to have committed some unforgivable impropriety or done something immoral.
As was happening now, when Lady Erna failed to see why Gyöngyvér responded to her overture with silence. She could have gone on looking at the younger woman’s pained little smile, but she was increasingly impatient. She preferred to turn away and look, through the rainwater dripping down the taxi window, at the buildings on the boulevard rushing by. A good thing she did, because the pain and the dissembling made Gyöngyvér’s lips tremble violently. Pain assailed her in merciless waves. She nearly fainted. It was clear to her that she was not going to lose the man, but this was sheer self-deception, because she had already lost him. She sought an explanation for this loss, but there was none, and she should have accepted it like that, as something that made no sense.
They had to stop at the intersection with Podmaniczky Street; the windshield wipers creaked and clattered. Lady Erna grumbled to herself, I have only myself to blame. I had to bring her along. If I only knew why I’m so stupid, even in my old age, why am I going out of my way for this silly goose. How can I be so stupid. And how could this little foundling understand how insanely generous I have been.
Gyöngyvér sensed the rebuke, but from afar, for now she was preoccupied with what might be the great discovery of her life. Not only was the dread gone, but it was replaced by the kind of happiness that until now only this one man had given her. As if a footpath across one person’s body led to the soul of another. As if in proximity to Lady Erna, she knew Ágost’s body better. Not only did she think these general thoughts, but she saw the path before her or, more correctly, the circuitous but ineluctable paths that lead from one person to another. She must choose one, must set foot on one of them. In the exhortation lurked an unpleasant urging or reproach. But I am already on the path. As if she were failing in some way.
I’m going to fuck it up; I’ll make a mess of things again.
She sensed, of course, that she should have returned the touch, she should have squeezed Lady Erna’s gloved hand in return.
Now she could no longer reach for it.
That meant something irreparable.
She was barely nineteen when on a winter morning she stepped out from the gate of the kindergarten teachers’ college in Szeged. A small suitcase in one hand, in the other a cardboard box tied with string. She started out on the wet street in the hazy December cold. In her coat pocket she had a slip of paper with an address where she could stay for a few nights. Ever since then, she had had to find a roof for every single night. This was not a figure of speech; it happened many times that she returned to her lodging only to find, in front of an office door or in a filthy stairwell, her hastily packed and discarded belongings, and she was out on the street again. Then there was only the streetcar, train, or train station, until the police chased her away. She had lived in workers’ hostels, abandoned farms; for months she slept on a folding cot in the locker room of a gym, and sometimes, for a single night or a few weeks, she would find shelter in the beds of pitiful, questionable, or revolting characters, about whom no one would ever know. In those places, her head held high, she had to let her hosts ejaculate into her body. She had been a night lodger, sleeping in beds rented by others for a day; when she had it a little better she became a real subtenant, first in Kecskemét and later in Budapest. From there, however, she had no place to go. Singing lessons were expensive. And her decision to marry a rich fellow made no difference. Either no sugar daddy presented himself or the men she managed to snare did not want to marry her.
One man would have been ready to marry her anytime but she did not want to; she was disgusted by him even though he worshipped her.
Slowly she outgrew the marriageable age.
As soon as she got to know someone new, the familiar dread returned, and no matter whom she went to bed with, in what fashion, she felt she had an intestinal obstruction and should spend the trysts farting rather than making love. And whenever she broke up with someone, the destructive excitement went away.