At last she has the chance to feel what her husband feels, this man, these men, and to experience her own desires in their stead.
In her fear, she called him by his name, István, as if summoning him, the only one, asking for his help. She exchanged herself for the only man whom she had come to know through her body and to whose two children she had given birth. Which immediately reassured her that she loved him.
I love him, I love him, he is the one I love, no matter what happens. In reality, it wasn’t the woman she loved, the one she was now clasping more forcibly than the woman was hugging her back. This will turn into a mere episode in her life, she need not take it seriously. However, she hadn’t noticed when she had embraced the woman, so while her consciousness must be functioning well, she might not be aware of her intentions.
And that meant there was another self inside her.
Geerte was the stronger, or her feelings guided her more profoundly and confidently. Almost coarse and very common. The pubic bones thrusting against each other did not come to satisfactory terms. Erna was not certain whether she could want anything this other woman would not want from her. Her search for excuses and her doubts completely occupied her mind, though this did not decrease her pleasure.
At most, she enjoyed the other woman more slyly, enjoyed the way the other woman took pleasure in her.
Geerte had a definite goal.
A fantastic image hovered before her and she was determined to follow it. As if she were trying to force living matter into an ephemeral vision.
Erna pressed her body against Geerte’s, but Geerte thrust back as if to oppose her.
Erna felt clearly that Geerte wanted something. And this aroused a clear image that quickly washed away all other images. Even though the baby was still cooing evenly and by way of warning.
There was only this plump protuberance with its pubic hair when they rolled under each other. Only a kiss was missing to make it all possible; the contact of lips, the full taste and sensation of hollows opening into each other; and it was this lack, all that was missing, which now appeared to her as an image. Precisely what a moment earlier she had denied herself.
No, she shouldn’t deny anything. To open up, like two slow-turning, rippling, muscular snails sticking to each other.
She had long imagined Geerte’s pubic hair as fiery red. If she rolled down, their labia would open and nestle against one another. Her imagination mixed, mingled, and blurred the horizontal with the vertical, lips, kisses, and labia. She saw how Geerte’s opened up at her touch, and how her own opened into the welcoming hollow.
But she could neither move nor roll anywhere, because Geerte’s lips took aim at her tense, resistant neck — a snail, clinging, leaving a shiny film on tree trunks in the dim park; and simultaneously she shoved her back on the chair where she had just finished suckling her baby. The chair wobbled under the double weight, swinging a little on its back legs.
Geerte had a kind of grip on her, and she, for lack of anything to grasp and because of her fear, held on to Geerte, trying to keep them from falling.
She would have liked to laugh.
Then, in a flash, she saw Geerte’s frighteningly agitated face above her; her rounded lips, the darkening countenance, strands of her mad, reddish, scattered curly hair, and many other things ran across her mind. This is war, then, touched by the whirlwinds of horrible plague and conflagration. And now she will say something, now. And just as Erna wondered whether at moments like this every woman is repugnant, as repugnant as men are, the chair tipped over.
She fell, but not only on her back. The back of the chair hit the floor before her head did, which prevented a hard impact, and the two of them, arms around each other, were hurled from the chair. This happened more or less because of Geerte’s clever maneuvering. With their legs intertwined, they rolled onto the rug. The tipped-over chair remained where it fell.
As if they had been running alongside each other for a long time, they panted together.
Did you hurt yourself, my dear, asked Geerte, fearing her clumsiness might have caused Erna pain; her face returned to its former state, her features cleared.
How laughable the whole thing was.
Last time she had been involved in such horseplay was when she was a little girl, and always with boys. Arms around each other, they were lying lazily on the cool floor. And how pretty she is. As though this were happening to strangers whose warmth she could feel.
No, I’m not hurt, she replied, as if breathing words into the other woman’s breath. But you were about to tell me something, Geerte.
I’ll die, she shouted, keeping her voice down, I’ll die if you don’t tell me.
Geerte, in surprise, held her breath.
How could she possibly know I wanted to tell her something.
And then, along with the next sentence, hoarse with pain and shame she spat the words out.
I wanted to say that I’m hungry, I wanted to say I’m starved, Erna.
I’m thirsty, and I absolutely don’t feel like bringing you your stupid pump from the next room.
That’s what I wanted to tell you.
Silently and perhaps involuntarily they both laughed, which had the effect of a sobering wink, indicating how well they understood each other.
Erna freed herself from the embrace and slowly sat up, but neither of them let go of the other’s eyes.
Geerte, not to be alone, not to be left desperately to herself, reached after her.
She has finally understood; and this filled Erna with great serenity.
She felt enormous, powerful; with her blue-veined, swollen breasts, she ruled over and could have fed all humanity, but she no longer had any weight. They made barely perceptible movements. Even if in their own minds they were addressing themselves to each other, from this moment on they spoke each to herself, and about strange things that had no connection to and very little to do with the situation. Erna said to herself, I must check the dates, the years. She had a great urge to grab her coat, go to the library and look up the years, and she felt it so naturally that Geerte sat up, startled, sensing something of Erna’s strangeness.
However, she was wrong in assuming she was being rudely rejected.
Simultaneously they let go of each other’s gaze and hands.
And as they came off the bridge onto muddy Margit Boulevard, the convex basalt cobblestones began to rattle and toss the heavy taxi, whose springs were too stiff to absorb the shocks. I’ll get it for you in a minute, madam doctor, patience, please, said the cabbie, raising his voice against the noise, almost shouting. Just let me get through this damn section here. Anyway, I’d like to ask you something, madam doctor, if I may.
She didn’t understand where the driver had come up with this stupid madam doctor phrase, and what did he want from her anyway. She did not like, she could not get used to the idea of the help becoming independent. How could he possibly know that she had earned a doctorate when she never used the title.
The road ahead was clear all the way to Török Street. Gas pipes were being replaced, but now no one was working in the long wet ditch.
Above Geerte’s huge, meaty, heavily ribbed lips, a sharp-edged vertical scar disappeared into the cavity of her wide-winged flat nose. She had come into the world with a cleft lip; labium leporinum is the Latin name of the deformity. At the time she was born, during the last years of the nineteenth century, this condition was far from harmless. A cleft-lipped baby cannot suckle, because the various tissue lobes of its face have failed to join. The upper lip normally gains its shape from the union of a middle and two side apophyses, the lower lip from the union of two side ones; a cleft lip is an abnormal or irregular union of apophyses. It appears mainly on the upper lip, when the union is imperfect; the flesh of the lip is completely rent breadthwise. Moreover, a baby with a cleft lip cannot be operated on immediately but must first gain strength. Feeding it artificially, not suckling it, was not a simple matter in those days; babies easily got infections from the utensils used to feed them. A vicious circle developed. Because of infection, the artificial feeding would be discontinued, which posed the danger of dehydration. Geerte was three weeks old when she was finally operated on, and nobody dared vouch for her surviving the critical phases of the healing. They carefully sliced away the edges of the severely inflamed and suppurating cleft and sewed it together with three stitches. Her mouth was indeed a surgical masterpiece, but her flesh lacked the usual tripartite division on the rim of the upper lip, the natural mark of a proper union of the facial-tissue lobes. Even now, her lips did not close completely, making them especially round-looking — at once fascinating and repulsive, as are all injuries that affect the body’s wholeness or hint of at any threat to it.