Tranquility (3 page)

Then, in a few days, somebody was going to Cologne, and I was unable to write Esteemed Mother, I will be playing in the great Cologne Cathedral. In short, I wanted to put an end to these miserable lies already back then, but one night, with matted hair and lips bitten bloody, Mother tore into
my room and bellowed that I had better not steal her mail. She demanded I hand over immediately her daughter's letters; I said, calm yourself Mother, Judit is probably in Sydney or New Caledonia, giving concerts, and the mail from those places is very slow. And in about ten days my sister wrote from Istanbul, because lately the Pintérs from the first floor had begun making trips to Istanbul, instead of Warsaw, to buy leather coats.

.   .   .

Yes, it probably would have been better to stop the whole thing instead of ordering a lousy leather coat from the Pintérs just so I could ask them, casually, to mail a letter from Istanbul, but I couldn't do it. Actually, I was grateful to my mother for insisting on receiving Judit's letters. I caught myself anticipating the mail as much as she was; we got so used to dividing the little tasks: I'd open the envelope and then together we would read the few lines in the kitchen.

Esteemed Mother, this week I am giving three concerts in Tel-Aviv, from there I'll be going to Damascus, best to my kid brother, wrote Judit, because I had no idea that those idiots signed only a ceasefire, which in its own way is still war and that tourists still had to choose: either Israel or Syria. The Brenners found this out, but only at the Syrian embassy, from which the Consul kicked them out when he saw the Israeli visas tucked into their passports. But they already had the two letters with them, and thinking that at least I'd have two Jewish stamps, they mailed Judit's letter from Haifa; luckily, my mother didn't notice because she hadn't a clue about the difference between Hebrew and Arabic letters. In short, she didn't notice anything; she took out the world atlas that I had given her and I helped her find Damascus. Using a black felt-tip pen, she marked the city with an X; the map was so full of black Xs and dates, it could have been a board
game where one advanced from luxury hotels to concert halls not by train but by Lufthansa or KLM, and not by rolling dice but by waiting for the mail. That is how my sister traveled the world on a map spread out on the kitchen table, like a plastic doll moved along her route by my mother, but I was the one who determined the route. And for years I planned that one day she would have to put an X on Budapest, which would be the logical end of the game, but as it turned out I miscalculated that too.

.   .   .

In Karcag, I went into the waiting room. I actually like artificial flowers clinging to radiators and flypaper dangling from fluorescent bulbs, oversized clocks showing the exact time, and the smell of liverwurst sandwiches, homemade brandy and sweat that the cleaning women can't banish from these giant spaces even with their green-apple spray fresheners. For a while, I was watching a young countrywoman sitting at the far end of the waiting room. In a neon-yellow vinyl bag placed between her feet, baby chicks were squawking while she was trying in vain to calm her baby in her lap. Finally, the baby got what it wanted: the mother freed one of her breasts from her blouse and the infant's lips stuck to it like a leech. There was nothing in the greedy sucking and gulping one could call childlike innocence, but the moment the baby began to swallow its mother's milk, the chicks in the vinyl bag also piped down.

Then a tarp-covered truck stopped in front of the entrance. The driver did not turn off the engine; he simply waited until all fifteen men jumped off the truck's bed and then sped off without looking back. No waving, no bon voyage, nothing like that; as if the truck had been piloted by a robot. The men came into the waiting room and sat down next to one another. They all wore the same kind of pants and sweatshirts, the kind that soldiers
in forced labor units would wear. And they certainly weren't Hungarian soldiers; I could see it on their faces that they wouldn't understand a simple Hungarian “good day.” As for me, I find nothing scandalous about racial characteristics sitting there on our mugs the way old ladies sit in front of their houses to gab, or about being able to tell, sometimes at a single glance, whether another person had spaghetti or goulash for lunch. In addition to the chaos of Babel, this race-and-characteristics game is one of the Lord's few ideas I actually like. In short, the racial characteristics sat quite clearly on the faces of these fifteen men: they were non-Hungarians. They said not a word, only stared sourly, with watery eyes, through the flyblown curtains at the railroad tracks outside. In their hands, they all had a plastic bag from the Skála Metró Department Store with the same sandwich and the same passport in it, and when the baby began screaming again, all fifteen of them started the same way, though you could tell that even the puniest of them could easily pick up and carry a couple of sacks of cement.

Then some stationmaster-type figure appeared and said he'd like to see the gentlemen's tickets, for the waiting room could be utilized only by people with valid tickets; but the men did not understand what he wanted.

“Ticket, travel pass. If you have no ticket, you've got to leave. Nice sunshine out there,” said the officious official, and kept pointing outside.

“Oradea,” replied one of them, and all fifteen men reached into their Skála Metró plastic bags and produced their tickets.

“That's Nagyvárad to you, for the sake of your hairy-soled mother's cunt,” said the official, smiling and nodding to indicate that so long as one had a ticket everything was all right.

“Why did you have to say that?” I asked, though what I really would have liked to do was use his head to knock the plaster off the ceiling, all
the way to the bricks; but through the years, we learn to see our cowardice as forbearance.

“They don't understand anyway,” he said, still grinning.

“But I do,” I said.

“Nobody asked for your ticket,” he said and left the waiting room; and I consoled myself that I would write about this incident, because in moments we don't dare strike out with our fist, we think of writing as some kind of whip or blackjack.

A few minutes later, the international express from Budapest arrived and the men got on. Not all in the same car: two in the first one, five in the last, and the rest in the cars in between; fifteen illegal workers in one bunch would be an impertinence to make the most indulgent border guard lose his temper and then it would be impossible to return on the evening Korona Express from Nagyvárad to the Great Hungarian Plain, in possession of the properly stamped tourist permit, renewed for another month. In that case, these men would be banished from Europe's breadbasket for two whole months and instead of the early-fall seasonal work they'd be left only with the sunstroke of the Bărăgan plain, and there would be no fifty forints and two hot meals a day, but only yesterday's cold hominy grits – as a kind of racial peculiarity.

.   .   .

Since I still had about twenty minutes until my connection, I thought I'd work a bit more on my manuscript, but, save for a comma here and a word order there, I didn't have much to correct. It was a very simple story about a village priest named Albert Mohos who, after many years of faithful service, annihilated his entire congregation during a Good Friday Mass, with the rat poison he had mixed into the wafers.

What I usually do while being introduced by the host – inevitably a literature teacher, a librarian, or some cultural functionary – is scan the audience to pick out a person for whom I would do the reading. Someone I would occasionally look in the eye, who would ask no questions, in short, a person who would not applaud because that was not his or her job. This time, the minute we took our places on the platform, I chose a woman in her forties, sitting near the end of the third row. After the first few sentences, however, I felt she didn't like my addressing the reading to her; halfway through the story she got up and left the hall. She didn't even bother to prevent the floppy seat of her chair from making a racket. From that moment on, I sat on the stage as if in a courtroom, but I did finish the reading, and then tried my best to answer questions about why I write, what my plans were, and whether I was content with my accomplishments thus far or had I expected to achieve more. Because I didn't remember my prepared answers, I had to drink a whole pitcher of water just to gain time to think. Luckily, at such places, there is always a pitcher of water on the table. Then an elderly man asked why I picked a priest as the hero of my story, whether I was angry with the Church, and if so, why, because in his view the Church had an important role in today's alienated world. And I had to drink some more water because I hadn't prepared for this question at all. It didn't occur to me that the Reverend Albert Mohos had anything to do with the Church.

I am not angry with the Church, I said. I don't really know why I chose a priest as the hero of my story, I said. Maybe because if the hero were a party secretary this story wouldn't make any sense. We cannot expect a party secretary not to poison the attending members at a party meeting, I said, and then luckily the librarian came to my rescue:

This story is really a symbol, Uncle Anti, only it is written in a very true-to-life form, he said, and then quickly thanked me for having accepted their invitation and wished me continued good work and success.

.   .   .

After the reading, the local priest came over to me. He was about fifty, a military-chaplain-type who, if the need arose, would stroll between the trenches under fire as if only the sky were thundering, and who, because of the Lord's infinite benevolence, would be hit only after he had completed his mission.

“I've got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you've got the courage to taste it,” he said and took me by the arm, giving me a good excuse to turn down the invitation of the school principal who must have been designated as my official host by the cultural committee. He was visibly relieved now because he wouldn't have to render an account to a total stranger about the difficulties cropping up in education and about the excellence of his school, despite those difficulties, or about the annual poetry recitals and field trips, and of the countywide successes of the folk dancing group that celebrates its jubilee this very season. And he wouldn't have to show interest in the difficulties of book publishing, he has enough problems of his own; only two days earlier his cow dropped its calf prematurely and every six months, as part of the cultural program, they stick him with a writer who, in the best of cases, pukes all over his bathroom and then molests his sixteen-year-old daughter, and in the worst case he's as silent as the grave, eats his chicken with fork and knife, which means that the whole family has to follow suit and he, the host, must keep talking, juggling all the words – the whole cultural program be damned – if only it wouldn't be always so obvious that all these readers, the pukers as well as the silent ones, are
hopeless losers, babies blown up into adult size who'd have preferred to remain stuck to their mothers' dugs, like this one with his rat-poisoned holy wafers. But what would you do, Mr. Writer, if at pig-slaughtering time they handed you the blood bowl to hold, eh? You'd drop it like a hot potato, wouldn't you? About that, Mr. Principal, you are mistaken; I'd just get a better grip on it.

.   .   .

“I thank you very much, Mr. Principal, but the parish has just invited me for a bit of sacred ceremonial wine.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Writer, what a wonderful conversation we could have had.”

“I'm terribly sorry, too, Mr. Principal, but I'm sure you understand that in light of my story, Father Lázár's opinion is most interesting to me.”

“Naturally, Mr. Writer; anyway, I am very glad to have made your acquaintance. Please allow me, in the name of the entire town, to thank you for this unforgettable experience,” he said, and then the priest took my arm and dragged me off like a prisoner, and I let him, though I have an aversion to being touched by another man. A handshake is the most I put up with, but even that I try to do with a well-extended arm. Nevertheless, I felt that in that whole rotten village this flashlight-wielding priest was the only one not filled with profound indignation about my story of the Reverend Albert Mohos. The only one in whose company, and without shamming, I might make it through tomorrow. Then I'll be out of here, I thought. Take the first train back to Eszter, I thought, and that calmed me down a bit and I let the priest lead me by the arm across the dark village, through an abandoned garden, along chicken coops and cowsheds, because that was a shortcut. Sometimes he pulled me, sometimes he pushed me,
depending on whether the beam of his flashlight disappeared in some hole or lit up the surface of a puddle.

“We'll find you a sweater in one of the relief packages,” he said, because my jacket had soaked through in the rain, and I said thank you but there was no need, the ceremonial wine would do the trick.

We must have made a huge and superfluous detour because, past a brook, we got back to the main road again; and then we stopped in front of a mansion, its walls crusted with saltpeter. The yellowish beam of the flashlight scanned the façade, the remnants of glass flaring up like shark teeth in the smashed windows of the upper floor. At last, the beam came to rest on the crumbling, stone coat of arms above the gate: a pelican feeding its young with its own blood.

“Will this be all right?” the priest asked while looking for the key to the gate.