It seems, Lady Erna thought, fate always brings me together with these thick-mouthed ones.
The dying man also had huge lips.
Pardon me, she yelled to the cabbie because otherwise they wouldn’t hear each other as the taxi bounced along, what makes you think I’m any kind of doctor. I don’t understand why you would say that.
The man, without turning around, spoke in a loud voice.
I took the professor to the university many times, to the academy, to Party headquarters. You’ve ridden with me too, but you don’t remember because it was at night, in the dark. One evening last year, when you went to see Aida in the Erkel Theater and we had that big snowfall. And once before that, when the professor, you remember, got that award, Order of the Red Flag.
As you can see I remember everything exactly, believe me, I do.
That’s very good, very nice of you, answered Lady Erna impatiently, but I still don’t understand how this follows from my being some kind of doctor. What sort of joke is this.
Listen to me, said the cabbie, laughing, and for a second he even turned around jovially. It’s very simple. I heard what you and the professor talked about. Please permit me to say, such a conversation demands at least a diploma and a doctorate.
I never mention my doctorate.
And my job is such, you know, I mean, its basic nature is such that I don’t have to understand everything to know whom I’m driving from place to place.
She couldn’t imagine what they might have talked about back then; she did not remember. She was sure they hadn’t talked about anything confidential, they would never do that in a taxicab.
And while with her fingers she grasped and then raised a little the swollen nipple of her left breast, she saw that milk was indeed seeping from it, she would have liked to ask the cabbie to tell her anyway what they had talked about during that trip. But she did not want to be so intimate with him. With a secret policeman who might have also been an Arrow Cross man. But now she had the feeling that neither assumption was correct; this man was somehow deceiving her in some way.
Geerte at the same time lowered her eyes but not completely, and from then on the two memories ran side by side.
Sometimes it’s best to separate tactile sensations from visual ones.
Nevertheless, Geerte does peek out from under her eyelids to see the nipple’s nodular, purple areola at a time when Erna entrusts her senses to its power of attraction. It never even occurred to her that she might deny herself this pleasure or that there might be any moral reason why she should. She’ll find me; let her lead. And Erna was admiring Geerte’s heavy, lazy eyelids, her auburn lashes whose roots were a transparent blond. It seems that her face, like seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, has hidden features. This is a secret they have in common.
Perhaps no one has paid attention to this or analyzed it until now.
The Thirty Years’ War with all its horrors is concealed in her special sense of family and home, in her inimitable tenderness and all-embracing attention, and in her gentility. It is like a benevolent curtain, hiding those aspects of human nature that the uninitiated should never see again. Or like a wrinkle, she thought, a soot-covered groove, sign of a blazing, continuous pain.
Should look up those years, to see if this is really so.
She had been regarding Geerte’s face, her bony and prosaic figure, as if in this small, strange town she had found the living model not of a single painter but of an entire tradition of painting. Just as it sufficed to step up to the square-grid windows to see what magnificent scales of depth and height the substance of air had taught Dutch painters. Now the situation was completely the other way around. In the face of a living person she had found what had been hidden in the paintings of a magnificent era. And if the dates of the years corroborated her assumptions, all the emphases would shift.
But this came as a hovering, uneasy feeling, something that seems to be on the tip of one’s tongue, not fully formulated, then vanishing and reappearing out of reach.
Of course I understood a lot of it, she thought bitterly, laughing at her old naïve self, at the entire brutal prewar world that had pretended to be so innocent, clinging to strict traditions and rules of etiquette. And all the while she pondered what the subject of their conversation might have been on that snowy evening, what indeed, and whether she should ask the leather-capped cabbie, who probably had not been an ÁVH but an Arrow Cross man but in either case was very chatty.
The help shouldn’t be chatty.
He was an Arrow Cross man, yes, now she was certain of it, an Arrow Cross man who later became an ÁVH man.
Geerte’s strong arms were again around her waist. It’d be better not to get into a conversation.
She was looking at this male head and she was looking at this memory of hers, observing the fleshy lips closing in on her nipple, tugging it away from her fingers. She released it, let her take it.
As if it were not pleasure but a noble deed to quench the thirst of these deformed lips. The gesture of nourishment acquired new meaning in this carnal pleasure. She sank the thrust-out fingers of one hand into Geerte’s woolly red hair; she thrust the other hand, a little clumsily, as much as the stiff, striped cotton dress allowed, and a little bashfully, between Geerte’s thighs. Still, for a little while she wanted to feel as if she felt nothing. She deflected her senses with thoughts, or rather, she seemed busy with something other than what she was experiencing directly.
What she was thinking about was the question of how the painting of a given era could deflect itself from the horrors of that era.
And that is why several minutes may have passed before she let out a loud moan.
She was thinking so hard about all this that she did not see the nape of Gyöngyvér’s neck, did not notice when she had gathered the pills from the ribbed rubber mat and when she took her place again on the taxi seat. It was very painful to immerse herself in this old pleasure. She even berated herself for having torn herself away from Geerte. Though the years had passed the memory had not faded. She should have stayed there.
If not in Groningen then in Venlo, where they traveled together with the children. Then, maybe her little girl would still be alive. Why can’t one stay in the moment.
Why must one leave?
Or why doesn’t one know which moment to stay in and never move until one dies.
Besides, the cabbie shouted cheerfully toward the backseat, I don’t mind telling you I hear a lot of things from my son. He was one of the professor’s favorite students, and he’s been to your apartment many times.