Quiver (23 page)

“The cold pool, it is busy,” said Maria. “We can wait here for a while—you do not mind?” She ran her hand lightly down my upper arm. “You are disappointed still, about the archives?”

“I thought things would be more straightforward,” I dipped my shoulders under the warm water. “What now? Is there anyplace else to search?”

“I will look in the boxes, when they come. It is possible something is there. We must be patient.” She paused and scooped water into her hands, gently splashed her face.

“But what do you think our chances are? Can you imagine if we did find them? Her words! A record of a perfect psychopath.”

“Dani, you and your perfect monsters. I wonder what you would do if you ever met one, outside of your little clinics, your institutions.”

She stood up, splashed me again and started to swim to the steps. “I am warm enough,” she said over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”

I followed her across the pool, up the steps. Turned to follow that lightly freckled back into the dark room.

We passed through the tiled arch. On the other side, the ceiling was low and beige. Narrow metal pipes wound around the room like skinny snakes. The cold pool was to the right. It was smaller than the others, oval and deep. There were a couple of lights under the water, halfway to the bottom. The pool glowed, pond green. A rickety metal ladder hung over the side; its small silver steps looked distorted below the surface, smudged grey planks descending into the green.

“It’s good for the skin, Dani,” said Maria. “Tightens the pores.” She turned around to descend the ladder and took a quick breath after her first step. “And good to get the blood going,” she said, looking up at me as she sank into the emerald pool. “You must come in.” She slowly walked backwards towards the far wall, away from the ladder. The water was up to her chin.

“I’ll try,” I said. I put one foot under the water; my flesh screamed, then went numb. Another foot. Then legs, thighs. I let myself fall off the ladder and plunge in. My skin prickled, almost burned, and then nothing. The cold anesthetized me. I watched my hands moving, paddling my body over to Maria, but I couldn’t feel anything. “How long do we stay in here?”

“What, too much already?” Maria laughed. “Just a few minutes, Dani. It will be good for you, you will see.”

“I can’t feel my skin.”

“That means it’s working. Here, I’ll keep you distracted.” She swam around to face me. “I have made plans for us, for tonight.”

I forgot about the cold for half a second. “What kind of plans?”

“We will go out. First, we will meet with my friends for some drinks. But later, there is an event, a tableau vivant. It is designed by a Dutch artist who loves Báthory—you have heard of her?”

“The one who legally changed her name to Báthory? Are you serious—she’s in Budapest tonight?”

“It is serendipity. We must dress up,” she said as she moved closer to me.

“What painting are they presenting?” I asked.

“So many questions. You should wear something white.” She leaned her head close to my ear. “It will be so striking against your hair.”

I nodded. Even through the chlorine of the water, she smelled like flowers. She pulled away and moved towards the ladder.

“Enough of the cold now.” She looked back over her shoulder. I paddled over and climbed up the metal rungs after her.

Maria lived on the Pest side of the river, near the Erszébet Hid (or Elizabeth Bridge, but not
our
Elizabeth, she told me). The evening was warm, and I felt happily disoriented as I looked at the curling eddies of the river during the walk from Maria’s flat across the long bridge towards Buda. Zöld Pardon, where we were meeting Maria’s friends before the party, was just a couple of blocks beyond the bridge.

Maria led me up the dozen or so concrete steps to Zöld’s front gates. A bald bouncer with large biceps stood in front of the entrance; Maria said something briefly in Hungarian and he stepped aside, sweeping his arm towards the open gate with a flourish. Maria dropped my hand, and I followed her through.

Zöld Pardon was largely what the name described: a green, open, outdoor space. There were three different dance areas, and each featured a different style of music. Tall scaffolds held up pink and blue spotlights that speckled the dancers below. In the middle of the field was a shallow wading pool and a bar in a wooden cabana. Wooden boardwalks ran from each of the dance floors to the bar.

From our spot just inside the entrance, Zöld looked enormous. The sounds from the dance areas mashed into a frenetic beat, and I stood still for a moment, trying to sort out a melody in my head, surveying tanned women walking the boardwalks in heels, young men with shirts unbuttoned to the navel hovering nearby in case the ladies needed assistance. Maria kept walking, merged with the crowd, her magenta-red hair blending into and out of the dark, spotlit night.

I weaved through the crowd to catch her, but was swept along in a crush of drunk young dancers making their way to the pop music floor. Someone grabbed my hand and I moved with them to the edge of the grassy space. I found myself standing among a group of strangers who were motioning me to dance with them. I smiled, laughed and shook my head at their entreaties, which I couldn’t understand, and they left me near the cabana bar. I looked towards the floodlit structure and saw Maria, laughing with a bartender, picking up two bottles. I headed towards her.

“Dani, but you almost lost me! Here, for you.” She handed me one of the cold green bottles, the glass sweating beads of condensation. She clinked her bottle against mine.
“Egészségedre,”
she said, looking me in the eye.

I laughed. “Yes, Eggy-shaggy-rats,” I said and drank the cold beer.

“Ah, there are my friends, Sándor and Tünde.” She pointed to a tall man in a black dress shirt and a petite woman with long, dark blonde hair. We shall go with them to dance, yes?”

We danced for about an hour, but I wasn’t disappointed when it started to rain and we left for the performance. Maria started walking away from the front gates of Zöld.

“Maria, I think you’re going towards the back.”

“It is shorter. This is the way.”

Sándor flipped open his mobile, said a few words in Hungarian, flipped it shut again. “You see,” said Maria, “Sándor will have a car waiting.”

We picked our way through groups of partiers dancing in the rain and made it to the back fence. Sándor and Tünde led us to a corner gate guarded by another bouncer; Sándor said a few words and slipped the man a couple thousand forints. The bouncer opened the gate, and there was a driver waiting for us in a silver car. Sándor got in the front, and the three of us crawled in the back. I was in the middle, wedged between Maria and Tünde.

“Now, to the show,” said Maria. “Your first tableau vivant. It will be exciting for you. It is really how the French called it, a living painting.”

Tünde grabbed my hand. “I have a part, you will see.” She grinned, her professionally whitened teeth gleaming in the dark.

“Yes, we must get these two,” Maria motioned to Tünde and Sándor, “to the location on time. They are both performers tonight.” Maria draped one arm behind me along the back of the seat. “You and I,” she said, looking at me, “we will first go to the reception, for the spectators.”

I followed Maria up the steps of a grey four-storey building. We went through the double door, and a young woman greeted us with “
Jó estét
” and handed Maria a handbill. She made a gesture towards the twisting staircase behind her. Maria was going to pull me past the girl, but I stopped and attempted a “
Jó estét
” of my own. She smiled, lips cotton candy pink, and handed me a pamphlet as well.

“Very good, Dani,” said Maria as we climbed the stairs.

I looked at my handbill. It was in Hungarian; I could make out some names on what looked like a list of performers. At the top, in larger type, was a name that seemed familiar: István Csók.

The stairs led to a large, open room with hardwood floors and a rectangular burgundy rug in the middle. A crystal chandelier hung above, and the only other illumination in the room came from groups of taper candles arranged on the window ledges. There were several vases of pale pink roses, and the air was saturated with their sweet scent. Waiters circulated with trays of glasses filled with an amber liquid. My heels sank into the deep plush of the rug. A tray drifted near to us; Maria took two glasses and handed one to me. “It is Tokaji,” she said. “Only from Hungary. The wine of kings and the king of wines. You will like it.”

I stayed close to Maria all night. She seemed to know most of the fifty or so people there, and most of their conversations were in Hungarian. I attempted to introduce myself in Hungarian, stumbling through “
Dani, vagyok. Ès te
?” but then I’d fall silent and watch Maria as she talked. She laughed loudly, stroked people’s forearms, looked seductively at the more handsome men. A few times we drifted off by ourselves, sipped our Tokaji by one of the candlelit windowsills.

After about an hour, a man stepped into the centre of the room. The crowd hushed and he spoke three or four sentences. Then everyone started moving towards the back corner of the room, where there was another staircase.

Maria leaned close and whispered. “It is time for the show, Dani.” She stepped ahead of me and I followed. We funnelled into the line of people and headed up the stairs. To the side of each stair, a tealight burned. The tiny flames were the only source of light. I kept hold of Maria’s hand.

The crowd filed around two sides of a rectangular space lit by floodlights and filled with shaved ice. Four naked women were sprawled on the ice; two were completely supine, while the others were posed with arms outstretched in a way that suggested they were trying to crawl away. Three people dressed in black robes with hoods were holding a fifth naked woman. They were trying to drag her forward, and she was hunched over in resistance. On the far side of the ice pit, a number of men in dark fur coats and hats regarded the scene. An old woman, with a full peasant skirt and a kerchief, lunged towards the naked women and held a bucket of icy water that threatened to spill onto them. Her face was contorted into a. joyful sneer.

A long, red, embroidered carpet unfurled from the head of the ice pit and led beyond the glow of the floodlights into darkness. On the carpet, a few feet from the edge of the pit, a woman sat in a throne. She was dressed in a long white dress and a purple velvet, fur-lined cape jacket. White gossamer sleeves emerged from the coat and were gathered at the wrist by ruby-studded cuffs. A square, lace-trimmed collar topped her dress and overlapped the collar of her jacket. She wore a headdress of garnets and pearls that held in place a tall, stiff-looking cap. Her posture was relaxed, her head tilted back and her arm draped over the side of the throne.

“You remember Csók’s painting from Čachtice?” Maria had manoeuvred us into a spot right at the front of the crowd, parallel with the supine naked woman nearest the throne.

“Yes.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. The women lying on the ice stayed completely still. I was surprised at the realism of the recreation. “Do you know all of the performers?”

Maria put her arm around my bare shoulders. I held my breath for an instant, wondered if she would keep it there.

“Always a question. For now, watch. Later, we can talk.”

Then I heard a deep, nasal hum, like a low note on a bassoon. The sound grew louder, and more notes layered on top of it. Soon, the low tones merged with other pitches, higher-toned instruments, and a slow, sombre music began. A loop of synthesized bass notes kicked in, along with a slow drumbeat. The figures in front of us began, very slowly, to move.

The women lying on the ice began to writhe; their motions were fluid, yet they performed at one-tenth the pace of regular movement. Then the women became still, and the black-robed men on the side of the ice began to mime clapping and laughter. Only one or two figures or groups moved at a time, so I could take in every movement of each of the figures in the scene. The three men holding the naked woman started to push against her stance of resistance. Her bare feet dug into the crushed ice, and her calves and thighs tensed against the men’s pressure to drag her forward. All the figures were silent, and the music continued to play, getting faster and louder.

After a minute or two of this, I asked Maria, “How long does this last?”

“It depends on how they have designed the performance.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Traditional tableau vivant, the actors do not move. But this is not strictly traditional.”

“Does anything else happen? Or do they just do these little motions for the whole time?” Now the Báthory figure had begun to raise her arm from the side of the throne. Her mouth pulled back slowly into a wide grin.

“Danica.” Maria dropped her arm from around me and looked annoyed. “Just watch.” She turned away from me and focused her attention on the scene. Suddenly, I might as well have been a lump of rock next to her. I looked at the rest of the crowd. They were all transfixed by the performance.

The old woman with the bucket started to move. She rocked back and forth, swinging her bucket to and fro painfully slowly. It was difficult to mime the inertia of swinging a washbucket full of water; on her creeping upswing, I saw her upper arms wobble under the weight. She made one more sweep back, then made a rapid upswing. Water flew from the wooden bucket and doused the women lying on the ice. The old woman became still, and the women again began to writhe. The ice they rested in had begun to melt in the warm summer night, but still their skin, illuminated by the floodlights, was bright pink gooseflesh.

The women ceased to move and the group of men who held the lone standing woman inched her closer to the edge of the pit. Her feet scraped and slipped in the icy slush as they dragged her towards the throne. The Báthory figure began to lower her hand back over the armrest, but her face stayed frozen in a wide, smug grin. One man broke from the group, grabbed the woman’s hair with one hand, pushed at the small of her back with the other and caused her to fall forward, still slowly, onto the slush. His hood fell back, and I could see it was Sándor, from Zöld. The woman arched her head back from the cold surface, and her hair fell away from her face and settled over her back. It was Tünde.