Each sat facing the other as if facing a mirror.
As if they both had drawn in their bellies, thrust out their chests, and with tightly closed thighs pressed themselves to the seat. It was pleasurable to be here together, at each other’s disposal. They were entrusted to each other, and that is very different from the usual, everyday routine, deeper and more carelessly familiar. If this was true, then it was possible to get to Erna through Ágost, and Gyöngyvér hardly even noticed how it happened. Whatever the moment contained had no opposite pole, no charge of attraction or repulsion, and therefore the moment’s space and duration became infinite. And Erna did not even notice that the dying man, who might no longer be alive, had vanished from her life. A burst bubble would leave more of a trace. Their gazes opened wide onto each other, mutually revealed that each was not unacquainted with these lesser-known territories where no males ever enter. Of the two, Gyöngyvér was more experienced but also the more cautious and reticent. Lady Erna had always relied more on her imagination and memory, which made her demanding and greedy. But now the cabbie, much as he would have liked to, could not look in the rearview mirror. The wind was pushing the taxi this way and that; the entrance road to the island — still paved with the same smooth yellow ceramic tiles produced in Demén’s brick factory in Budakalász back in 1898 when they began building the ramp off the middle pier of the bridge, resting on the tip of the island — was slippery.
A careless thought or a wrong move while taking the curve would have been enough to send the cab into a spinning waltz.
The two women did not notice.
Their sensation was much more brutal than what is felt by little girls crazy about their female teachers, or by female teachers dazed by their own feelings for their frenzied pupils.
Every emotion has a primal state, the seat of instinct. Laughter had thrown them back into this primal state, whence they could continue, arm in arm and led by instinct, down another path. Instincts work the same way in everyone. But primal states, to which everyone always returns, are not the same and may not even resemble one another. In some people, the primal state lives on as a single experience that the person remembers only vaguely or would prefer to forget. Others forget so successfully that a vacuum is created where the experience had been; and the only reason to be aware of deliberate forgetting is that one cannot fill the vacuum with any old thing, for then it becomes a burning lack that can no longer be named. In yet others, the primal state means a chain of rippling interwoven experiences that cannot be untangled, and whether or not a person remembers which sensation produced which subsequent sensation, the primal state reveals itself according to the person’s instinctual needs.
Showing one of its pulsating and throbbing countenances — now this one, now that one.
Lady Erna, from a distance of several decades, looked back to the sole experience she cherished above all others as a sacrament. Gyöngyvér might have looked in several directions but did not want to see her experiences, neither yesterday’s nor yesteryear’s.
Yesterday’s experience filled the place of everything.
Instinct cannot be steered.
Once it stirs in its reeking den, there is nothing can keep it from flashing into view a few unavoidable images from a primal experience, even if it does not show the entire storehouse. One of Gyöngyvér’s primal experiences was that she had no one in the world and therefore felt as though she herself did not exist either. Or the very opposite: she did have somebody somewhere in the world, and the moment she could find this somebody would mark the beginning of her existence. Until then, pitying, cruel, caring, or indifferent girls and women would keep passing her on from hand to hand because they didn’t know what to do with her. She does not even have to look at them; one is just like the other. They are different in every way but similar in that none of them is the woman she belongs to.
Who does not exist.
The stream of others never dried out, however; they kept coming, replacing one another as though there was a magic source somewhere from which women sprang. She had had enough of women.
She’d preferred to look for a man who would supplant the only woman she’d been looking for, would fill the empty space.
Although she had spent her life in unceasing search, she never found what she was looking for, or rather, she always almost found it: a man, after all.
Lady Erna paid attention to only one young woman, one very special creature, in whom once, and only once, she had had a clear glimpse of herself. In her mind, she always returned to the same one and only young woman, whom she had failed to see for many decades though she knew she was still alive, and whom she truly did not want to see in the flesh since she could always see her in other women.
In the stormy half-light, in the taxi saturated with their perfumes and the acrid smell of tobacco, each stared coldly at the other’s strange face. As if the head of the young woman had been cast of bronze. Lady Erna had no use for a living person. But Gyöngyvér could see a double face in place of the single one. One of them wore face powder hastily applied, unevenly painted lipstick, and fatty beads of mascara as superfluous and clumsy armor.
No traces of their little laugh together remained on these faces.
Mother and son looked at her simultaneously, and if the son belonged to her, then she belonged to the mother.
This was terrible. This was no laughing matter. Once again, both women’s lips trembled with emotion. Which could not be taxed further. What is this, fumed Lady Erna to herself, in place of her own infuriated mother. And she fumed for Gyöngyvér too, because she had to be a mother to the younger woman. If the taxi hadn’t swerved a second time, in their embarrassment they probably would have leaned back on the seat and continued their chatter in an entirely different direction; it had strayed into dangerous territories and times.
The cabbie swore quietly to himself; the women heard only his muffled grumbling, not the innocent curse.
The swerve made them fall on each other and they couldn’t have said whether it was by accident or whether their instincts, quickly and almost shamelessly, took advantage of the moment. And once in this situation, they would have liked to touch each other’s face with their lips, lightly and fleetingly, to put an end, as it were, to the painful comedy that could not have been avoided. But this too turned out differently because of the taxi’s slipping and swerving. Lady Erna’s soft, lipstick-covered lips did encounter Gyöngyvér’s firm, perhaps too firm, dry lips — not directly, but as if the edge of one mouth enclosed the corner of the other. And each of them felt the other was the initiator, and deliberately so. That was horrible. Before one mouth could slip over the other completely, they both recoiled and restrained themselves. The swerve, the inevitable pleasure, the jostling, their fitful protestations, the entire turmoil was enough for Gyöngyvér’s hard little forehead to push Lady Erna’s wide-brimmed hat off her head.
Gyöngyvér reached for it carelessly. She did not catch it but managed to knock the silver box out of Lady Erna’s hand. Both women squealed, one after the other; and the large black hat adorned with a shiny cluster of ribbons landed gracefully on the front seat next to the cabbie, while the silver box snapped open and the blindingly white pills scattered on the ribbed rubber floor mat.
Relieved and squealing, they laughed simultaneously. The cabbie, busy steadying his vehicle, could not help them. They fell silent in almost the same instant.