Alma’s eyes became shiny and hot. Her shoulders described a practiced weariness I felt down my back, in my arms.
“That wasn’t me, love did that,” Alma said.
I’m half my mother’s age when she died. In the cool future I see myself in a city with awnings and atomic clocks. It is a different country. Women don’t wear these cheap polka-dot scarves, men don’t wear hats; if they do, they don’t wear them so low on their heads.
When I arrive, I’ll recognize her in the wan armature of my stance in patisserie windows I pass. I’ll be admiring some fluffy confection and I’ll have a sudden nostalgia for lilies that I never had. If it’s a place far enough, sunlight will flail my white bed, its thin sober warmth, my hand hanging over the edge. I’ll call this good, and no one shouting infamous names in the square, the newspaper carrying no five-year plans or decrees. Obituaries will reveal only natural deaths. But this will mean nothing to to me, I won’t understand the language.
They stood by the swing, wary, afraid to go in. Low clouds unanchored the sky, leftover rain blew chill darts on her neck. Beyond the Angel Street park sallow lights blinked in the haze from the tungsten refinery plant.
“You forgot your sewing,” he said.
She breathed Erzsébet’s Emke perfume, she’d smoked several cigarettes.
“You neglected to wash off her smell,” Margit said. Rain had pasted black mouths to her velveteen coat she clutched tight to herself. Cold wind on her legs, she was thinking of Erzsébet’s fingernails thin as eggshells. “It makes me sad we could lose everything in a moment like this,” Margit said.
“But you like being sad,” Sandor said.
She looked toward a wet yellow tram. Passengers clung to the straps, their poverty tarted up for cafes and what nightlife there was. Down at the end of the block, black marketeers sold East German perfume, laudanum, girlfriends.
She watched Sandor turn up his collar, straighten his glasses, aslant. This random collection of gestures was all he could offer, she thought. “That must be why I picked you and not somebody else,” Margit said.
Sandor bent, gathered leaves, a rust bouquet he let fall at her feet. “It’s because you love me,” he said.
Wind ruffled his shirt, Margit’s hem, she would not look at him. She stood in the odor of dogwood decay, arms weather-vaned north and south. Loves me, loves me not. The shadows of her arms and legs were the hands of a long moonlit clock across rocks.
“That word, you can’t toss it around,” Margit said. She could have left him right then but her name in his mouth was the scrape of their feet over gravel and mud. Sandor’s coat stank of ink and perfume, something else. Pigeons flung themselves like soot stones through the sky overhead. Then they were inside, she was ripping her buttons apart, his coat’s epaulet in her teeth. “You’re not even sorry,” she said.
Not so long ago, at this hour, she’d call her own name from the street because no one else did, so she moved to his side in the bed. To have a purpose satisfied for the moment, she thought. She leaned into his shoulder, arms crossed on her chest, both yielding to him and defending herself.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you left,” Sandor said.
Hurt, she held him at arm’s length. Her hands on his shirt were all knuckle and knot. “You wouldn’t speak this way to Erzsébet,” Margit said. All through the years she’d kept on sewing and colored her hair nonetheless, so she had earned this: her come to my arms, her thinking but married, a wife, her immodest woman’s desire in the way their bones fit as she opened her body to him.
After, she sat up, ran her splayed fingertips through her hair, lit her last cigarette. In the wedge of their mirror she watched coarse iron clouds skid over the sky’s faded ink. Behind her head, rain bled the window’s iron bars, light from the lamp in the street creased dark stripes on his arms and her legs. She felt milky and lazy and all stubborness.
“My mother says one person always loves the other one more,” Margit said. She was glad for the dark so she wouldn’t see if he knew who she meant.
Sandor smoked her cigarette, coughed, he had never done this. He peeled tobacco flakes from his lips, picked a leaf stuck to her thighs near the V where they met.
“Maybe when we’re husband and wife we’ll find out who that is,” Sandor said.
Margit touched her face. It felt hysterical, if you could feel such a thing. She said, “You could ask Erzsébet.”
“She has nothing to do with you and me,” Sandor said.
Margit made a sound through her teeth. He’d carried that woman with fire and ash in their mouths and stars burning over their heads. “I’d have to suffer and die to become what she is,” Margit said.
Sandor laughed, he swept crumbs from the bed. “Stay with me, you might get to do that,” Sandor said.
For once, she couldn’t tell if Sandor was joking or not. Outside, it grew into an evening Margit might have drawn as a child, the horizon’s wound a rough seam she might stitch to the hem of her dress. Even this night might outlast them, she thought, and everyone’s unremarkable shoes, the procession of crows in the park. The glass on the chair, lipstick stains on its rim.
“Will you promise to stop it with her if we’re wed?” Margit asked.
On the frozen sidewalk, pedestrians slipped on moonlight. Beneath it mud glared like a lamp. Sandor pressed his chin to her brow, already a husbandly gesture, she thought. As casual as leaves pasted onto their shoes by the bed, he held her life like the small of her back in his hand.
“I could do that,” he said.
They lay quiet, apart, their hands side by side in the light from the lamppost outside.
“How easily you say it,” Margit said.
Later the temperature dropped, soon it would snow everywhere. Only then, when the bed had grown cold, as she buttoned her coat against it, did she wonder why she’d asked him her question the way that she had. Only when the only sound left was a dog, the last tram, this man’s breath, did Margit suddenly realize there was hardly a promise at all in what Sandor had said.
Where were you born?
I was born in the Szentes Infirmary on April 31, 1921. That was the year King Charles tried to retake his throne. There must have been a drought. Hardly a leaf on the trees, hardly trees.
Where’s that, Sandor?
There were the plains then the plains then a field, then you came to our town. It was famous for black pottery. The lane where we lived soaked with after-shower mud. Vines crept up the wrought-iron gate. They used to burn witches there for selling the rain to the Turks.
You always lived there?
Cats ran up and down the mud streets, a buckboard brought me home. Carts brought mail, rags, and milk. We had a loosely built house by the side of the road. I wore short pants until I was ten, no shoes or shoes covered with dust. An iron gate, there were four chickens next door.
Your mother and father?
He
