Breathless (10 page)

I
met him on the streetcar between Buda and Pest that spring when the catalpa trees flowered too early and the month of April was so warm that by summer it would be unbearable to stay in town. He was the last one to squeeze on when it had already started to move. My eye caught the paisley pattern on his shirt. Only madmen go barefoot on a tram, I was thinking when I saw him hanging on, his hip against the chrome post, drinking from a bottle and smiling. What was he smiling at? Nothing in particular . . . just a smile? He lit an imaginary cigarette and suddenly I had a sneaking suspicion that I had provoked the smile. Discreetly I wiped my lips; perhaps a little of the paprika filling had ended up outside my mouth as I ran across the street from the market hall to the streetcar stop with my warm Hungarian bread.

Nothing is quite like the light in April, not in this town. Budapest at this time is like a mirror, the kind that lies and tells you that you look better than you do. We were traveling right into the shining brilliance over the water of the Danube. The last thing I saw before my vision was flooded with white was a drop of soda trickling down his smooth suntanned chin. I wanted to catch it with my tongue while he was dazzled, but we were already through to the other side.

The first thing I could distinguish when the brightness dimmed was his hand. An animal, presumably a dog, had disfigured it. Small stumps remained in the place where his fingers should be, but the hand was so deformed it could scarcely be called one. He dragged it nonchalantly through his hair, and I couldn't help watching, wondering how it would feel to be caressed by a hand like that, if it had any sensation left in it, feeling. Perhaps his hand had not forgotten—life before the accident—what it was like to experience the tiniest details in your fingertips.

I searched for something else I could let my gaze rest on. Around his neck he wore a loosely knotted tie with the Taj Mahal embossed in the fabric. I'd never seen such a handsome man with such awful taste in clothes. Perhaps I was wrong, but it seemed as though something burned within him, from his hand right up to the intense look in his eye.

We rode in a wide arc through the town. Lukas's town. I tried to imagine him standing on a street corner, but I couldn't picture him. He didn't fit in here. Then we traveled back over the river, and by the time we stepped off at the last stop it had turned to autumn, or it felt like it, cool, with a hint of rain in the air. The two of us and a whole crowd of youngsters of different sizes on their way to school in newly pressed uniforms. The children went in one direction; he went in the other. I went the same way.

The smell of lilac at the wrong time of year disturbed and confused me, until I saw the soap factory. He walked slowly, as if wanting me to keep up, past the factory toward the apartment blocks in its shadow. We cut across the empty gardens of the subdivision, and when we emerged at the other side the buildings came to an abrupt end. Flat fields covered in weeds quite unlike the ones at home stretched out toward the highway in the distance.

Where was he going? The gauge was registering in the red zone. Never go with any man who obviously wants you to go with him. But I hadn't yet developed a fear of strangers. The rain was so light it was hardly noticeable, just a film of moisture on the forehead and cheeks. He raised his shoulders in the thin shirt, increased his pace, and by a field that appeared to be lying fallow, overgrown with thistles, he stopped without warning and turned around.

“What do you want?”

I didn't want to look at his disfigured hand, but it was impossible not to, as if it were whispering, “
Hey, you . . . yes, you . . . Look at me. Don't be afraid
.”

It should be possible to spend a day or preferably a whole week in a new town without going to bed with someone. On a purely theoretical level I know it's feasible, but single men in the transit hall, freshly showered men in the breakfast room, the backs of beautiful heads at the check-in desk, someone's profile in the elevator mirror, a smell along the sidewalk or on the tram, that's all it takes.

Men with grandiose dreams. Men with dogs. Young men who drink too quickly, older men with eyes like desert islands. The ones who shoot from the hip. Softhearted killers. Men in exceptional circumstances. Men with style. Men without. Men who don't know what they want or why. Or men who know exactly. It's not that they are all walking around waiting to be seduced, but if the opportunity presents itself, I don't see what would stand in their way.

“You're peaceful when you make love and violent when you sleep,” someone said.

“Your laugh's like a wave machine—it makes me seasick,” said another.

“Come,” said the black marauder. And I did.

The rest of the weekend we spent in his summer cottage just outside Pest. Roasted last year's remaining chestnuts in sooty cans on the woodstove and ate them piping hot out of their skins with salt, drank moonshine strong enough to put a wild boar to sleep. It wasn't a dog that was responsible for Miklós's ragged hand, but a machine at the soap factory. When he touched me I felt calm. His hand didn't feel repellent, just different, softer than a child's.

There was something soft about his mouth too, like biting into a plum overflowing with pungent dark red juice from his generous lips as they grew more and more red. His mouth breathed, “Bite!” And I bit. Fleeting shadows moved across the cottage wallpaper and the clouds rolled by.

“You know Eskimos,” he said suddenly, when we were back in bed after eating all the chestnuts, even the charred ones, to quell our evening hunger. We didn't lack food, but a feeling of being full. “To increase the strength and endurance of the sleigh dogs, they used to leave a bitch tied up for the wolves to mate with,” he said. On top of him, I was quiet. Outside the French window darkness had fallen over the garden, so all that could be seen were the outlines of handprints on the inside of the dirty windowpane. Lots of handprints, as if someone had tried to get out. “And they let the cold take the girls,” he continued. “They laid them in the entrance to the igloo where they soon froze to death. Two out of three newly born. But only in times of necessity. In the summer they built a little stone grave by the tent and put the girl in there to die. If it was spring or autumn they suffocated her with a sealskin. Some lives had to be sacrificed so that the others could survive—always the girls, because they could never be hunters.”

His eyes were still as soft, his eyes and voice as well, but something else had been altered. Something within me.

Fear is like an animal. In fear we are changed into a creature with four legs, feeling the chill beneath our paws.
Come,
he whispered.
Go,
I said to myself.
Trust your fear. Go now. Go.

—

The smell in the room had changed from pleasure to discomfort. I recalled it from somewhere—childhood, frogs rotting in the rain, sweet like urine.

“Be quick,” he said, when I spluttered that I had to go out. Fucking unnecessary right in the middle of it, seemed to be his opinion. The lie was fairly transparent, but there was no time to consider. He had said that the old water closet inside the house was broken, that you had to go out between the gable end of the house and the empty dovecote. “Hurry up,” he said, in spite of the fact that hurrying was the only thing I could think about, anxious that he would sense how cold my body had become, how white, how bloodless, how rigid with fear.

And then, as if he had suddenly changed his mind, he held on to me. Not with the soft, damaged hand that I liked, but with the other, less sensitive one.

“Your bladder must be as small as a bird's . . . What did you say your name was?” His fingers were tight around my wrist, so he must have felt that it was frozen to the bone. I tried cautiously to wriggle free and said my name again. It wasn't difficult. Two letters. I didn't understand why he couldn't grasp it. He had already asked me several times, as if dissatisfied with my answer.

We had laughed and toasted each other and I had lost count of how many glasses I had consumed of his aromatic home distillation as it went down to the quarter-cup line on a plastic jerry can without a label. Now for the first time I could taste it, sharp like a cut in the throat. What had he given me—liquid insecticide, weed killer, diluted rat poison? Any of those toxic substances was readily available in a house in the country.

“You're cold,” he said, “freezing cold. What is it?”

“I need to . . .” I searched for the word in German, but it was gone “Let go!” As soon as my hands were free I pulled away and dragged on what I thought was my dress. It turned out to be his shirt, but there was no time to change. I just stumbled away through the darkness without looking to see if he was following. I tried to find my bearings by the light, but it was black everywhere. As I groped my way along the walls I found only locked doors.

I had swallowed his trash, laughed my most childish laugh, seduced and allowed myself to be seduced as if life had taught me nothing. His tongue in my mouth, my hand in his shorts, more spirits in the glass, falling on my back with him on top of me, just as drunk . . . or only pretending to be. Maybe he was stone cold sober the whole time? Alert and focused, right behind me now, just wanting to give me a head start to increase the thrill?

I banged my hip on something hard without feeling any pain, fumbled farther along. Thought I heard him say my name, but it might have been the wind rising. The gaps in the walls of the wooden house made it sound like a broken instrument the wind blew through. Finally, at the end of the kitchen, I found a back door with a key in the lock. The night air hit me and I breathed it in with the vigor of having just surfaced, then kept on out into the overgrown garden, where briars ripped thin material off the shirt. I wandered around in circles until I knocked against the metal railing at the boundary of the plot, climbed over, and hastened farther into the unknown darkness.

—

I have no stamina when it comes to fear—it drained away from me as I was running. Like a quarry who stops in the midst of the hunt and wonders why she is fleeing—empty, disoriented, slightly stupid—I came to a standstill in the middle of the desolate field. The wind was cold and my mouth tasted of sooty chestnuts and smoke from his mouth, a trace of blood. I crouched down to catch my breath. No longer sufficiently agitated for fear to outweigh tiredness, I longed for a bed, any bed, my warm hotel bed or his lumpy mattress—just to give in to exhaustion, shut my eyes, and fall asleep. In my imagination as I ran, the highway in the distance with its sporadic night traffic had been my salvation. Now that I was standing close I didn't feel so sure. I might get into the wrong car—anyone at all could pick me up. There was nothing to suggest I was safer out here than in the house with him.

Of all evil things he's not the worst, I thought. From a distance the summer cottage looked like a sleeping hare alone under the night sky. Blue smoke indicated that the stove in which we had roasted the chestnuts was still burning, a rustic idyll shrouded in the peaceful darkness of spring. Somewhere far away the sound of a nightjar. From a distance everything beautiful, simple.

I turned back.

When I reached the fence I saw him standing by the French window in the bedroom, waiting, naked with a towel around his hips, and even when he pushed open the door and stepped out into the garden, he did not appear to see me. For a long time he stood listening, instead of calling for me. Was it in these parts that there were bears who went right up to the houses and ate out of the trash cans at night? I had heard about it, thought that must be what stopped him shouting for me. Or perhaps the knowledge that there were those giant bloodsucking bats that . . . no, surely it was not here, but farther east in Transylvania? Probably he had just forgotten my name again. That was why he was standing in the dark, waiting. I could make him out clearly in the faint glimmer of light from the bedroom, and despite the distance I could see how the wind took hold of the towel he had twisted around his hips, lifted it up and exposed him before he had time to cover himself. As if he sensed that someone in the surrounding darkness could see him.

Upright between the tall trees, half naked, calm, he seemed so much less than the man in my head as I ran away. The alarming disquiet in bed, the sudden uneasiness under my skin: what had triggered the reflex of fear? I was there of my own free will and enjoyed being with him. It wasn't the place, not the situation, not him. He was a careless lover, but I liked him. And his spider hand had enticed me, caused me to notice him and want to know who he was. How it would feel to be caressed by it. But he had two faces, as different as his hands.

—

In every culture throughout every age the same ritual: a feared animal is worshipped in order for it to be appeased. The more one fears man, wolf, bat, spider, the more one idolizes them. I once had a phobia for spiders, especially the large, hairy variety. Made up my mind that their bite was deadly, but that was just as superstitious as the belief that the bite could be cured by an exhausting dance, the trancelike tarantella. The venom was quite harmless and most spiders' jaws were too weak to penetrate human skin. But what good did knowing that do? Not even when I read that spiders have a heart did my fear of them diminish. Fear is fear, irrational and persistent. Intense, manipulative. Fast-working. From one second to the next you lose your balance. You have control for as long as you can keep it, then it's gone, sliding through your hands like a slippery piece of soap, and when you've lost control, the only thing that remains is fear.

My fear of spiders may have caused the problem in bed. Desire and fear—sometimes they run into each other, mixed, confused, impossible to separate. The Eskimo girls were certainly responsible, stories I'd heard when I was a child, pestered to be allowed to hear them . . . until I found out how many sleepless nights they would give me. That in the past in times of necessity they suffocated their newborn daughters—that your own family could do this—turned my whole world as a girl upside down. I couldn't stop thinking about those little girls, how their tiny round legs jerked until they fell to the sides, loose, under the sealskin closed so tightly over their mouths.