Wherehaveyoubeenson?
IhadthingstodoMother.
This is the time when everybody's at home with their family. That's the custom.
I know. That's why I hurried home, Mother, and then, using the three glass orbs and the desiccated fudge, I decorated the pine branch stuck in a vase, as if they had been here since '44 when little Friciberek had brought them.
You've got a letter from Judit, Mother. She sent it with an acquaintance of mine.
She's never done that before.
Well, she's done it this time. In Nice, she ran into Frici Berek.
Who is that, Son?
You don't know him, Mother, I said, and then she took out the world atlas and the felt pen and while she looked for Nice to mark it with an X, I lit the candles and brought over the Weér family tree I had drawn up based on notes Eszter had taken in the State Archives, because we thought that Mother's deranged soul would like that best. But my mother's face slowly turned grey, and by then I knew that mad people's hell was reality. That she would never forgive me that we were merely a collateral branch of the family, which meant that half of Greater Hungary would go to some cousin six times removed.
Not even Christmas is holy for you, is it?! I will not let anybody rob me; do you hear? I know you and your whore are planning to clean me out! You screw her and then you show up here with this filth! she screamed and threw the framed family tree at me like a handful of shit. I didn't feel anything, though the glass broke on my forehead. I got a hand broom and dustpan to clean up the splinters so I could go to sleep.
Over my dead body, she said.
Nobody wants to clean you out, Mother.
Hyenas! But don't think I'd let myself!
I don't think that, Mother.
I'll denounce you!
Go ahead, put it in writing, Mother, I'll mail it for you.
I'm not writing anything. I'll report you to Kádár. He'll take care of you.
Kádár is dead, Mother.
Really?! We'll see about that, she said and piece by piece began to throw out of the closet all her clothes, most of them moth-eaten, until she found her black silk suit. Then she began to get dressed. Although the web of nothingness had entangled her body as the spider would the rose chafer, passengers of the number seven bus would still demand not to pass Cleopatra; mothers coming out of the Pioneer department store would still cover their children's eyes, and wives of actors, sedated wrecks all of them, would still press their husbands' heads against the small window of the oven so that even in their dreams these men would continue to see their silk-suited whore becoming charred.
What are you doing, Mother?
Scared the shit out of you, didn't I? I'll have you locked up. I'll have both you and your slut locked up for forgery, she said and tore the drawing out of the frame and stuffed it into her pocket to prevent me from destroying the evidence. When she put on her fur coat, the dustpan was shaking in my hand and I thought that in a second I'd choke her; that I'd shove down her throat all those thirteen years along with the Weér family tree and the broken glass.
Never! Never, you trollop! I screamed, and grabbing her arm I threw her on the bed.
Never, you understand?! I panted, and while I kept yanking the fur coat off her, she laughed into my face.
Shreds of the moon-globe were scattered on the mattress like a smashed egg from which a wild animal had sucked out the yolk. As I stood in the empty apartment, I realized why she had asked for a baby instead of a full moon, and I was hoping I'd still find both of them.
I began calling the hospitals, found out she was in the Kútvölgyi, but by the time I got there, the nurse said she had been transferred from gynaecology to neurology-psychiatry, and there would be no visiting hours until tomorrow. "She's my wife!" I screamed at the nurse in the corridor. "I'll have you fired if you don't let me in! I am a writer, I can have you thrown out, you shitbrain!" And there she was, lying in Ward number 14, next to the barred window, her limbs strapped down, and she looked through me as through opaque glass.
I had learned from my mother that with booze and cigarettes one could accomplish a lot; I managed to get her into an empty room. I could even take the straps off her, but she didn't move for three days. I could read the word "two" on her lips, but even that she said to somebody else. And then she recovered, more or less, from the drug-induced daze, and on New Year's Day she was disconnected from the infusion tubes and we were walking around in the room.
"Let's sit down," I said, because her legs were shaking.
"Not yet. It feels good," she said, even though she stayed upright only because I was holding her. We did another round, five steps to the door, five to the window, and then I picked her up and lowered her into the bed.
"Don't let them give me shocks," she said.
"Of course I won't," I said.
She kept scraping the peeling paint on the wall. She broke off a tiny piece, put it in her mouth and then spat it out.
"I forgot," she said. "You know that I only forgot it, don't you?"
"What did you forget?" I asked.
"The medicine. To take the medicine," she said, and finally broke down.
In coarse woollen clothes, we were standing on the shore of the Danube, in some boggy area. A small boat was floating downstream with a seven- or eight-year-old child in it, also in a coarse woollen shirt and with a blindfold on his eyes. When he reached us, he took off the black kerchief and looked us over. There was neither calling to account nor reproach in his look. He simply sized us up and then replaced the black kerchief; the flatboat continued floating downstream and it already vanished in the rising vapours when I realized that nobody operated the oars; that a minute earlier the river had come to a halt in front of us.
Continues in the print edition. Order now.
Translated by Imre Goldstein.
