wants to,” Margit said.
Erzsébet studied her face with a weary contempt. “He thinks you’re a tinsely bright carnival, a cheap little fair after what came before,” Erzsi said.
Margit’s ankles felt brittle and weak as she tottered on them. “Things have happened to me, that’s my dead father’s coat you’ve got on.”
Erzsébet leaned on scraped brick with a careless precariousness. “If we’re toting up corpses, you lose.”
They lit cigarettes. Wind stirred greasy puddles and trash. Leftover snow seemed illuminated from within, glazed pink from the bloody runoff gouged by trucks from the meatpacking plant. At the tail end of winter, Budapest was the same everywhere, Margit thought. The nickel-plate sky over clattering boughs of bare trees. Men on the street, hats pulled low, nearly slipping on tracks before trams. Soldiers cradling the stocks of their guns, cobalt-blue barrels recklessly aimed anywhere.
“If we’re counting the living, I win,” Margit said.
After her mother died, Margit remembered this: The year before war, when the war was still mostly vague fear. Down by the boats, she pressed the heel of her hand to the small of her back, squinted against the white glare. She tugged at her hem, brushed cinders and leaves from her hair.
Alma stood beside her among ankle-high weeds. Paddleboats drifted by on the pond, knocking green-yellow ribs. Saw grass poked through lily pads. Buoys seemed to anchor the water, dotted with black and white birds. Margit wanted to touch Alma’s arm, her pale exposed wrists made her ache. It had been cold and no heat, wind covered their coughs into soiled handkerchiefs. Margit twisted a tube of gold lipstick, leaned over a puddle, refreshened her lips. She knew how to do this, already almost thirteen.
“There, pretty and happy,” she said.
Her mother had seen them, these practiced, perfunctory strokes.
“You could teach me,” she said.
“The pretty or happy part?” Margit asked.
She watched her mother bend to her small black purse, smelled her hair as she picked out a jar, smeared red on the undersides of her eyes, pastry-thin.
“That’s rouge, for your cheeks,” Margit said. Impatient, she rubbed quick smooth strokes across her mother’s startled white face. The light was beginning to fade. They collected leaves, there were plenty of them. Margit pressed leaves down the front of her mother’s familiar sweater with holes in the sleeves. Alma blushed, she said stop, but Margit wouldn’t quit, she wouldn’t have minded if they could have stayed there forever, just kept doing this.
• • •
The day Alma’s body was found, the light behind Sandor was spare. In the Angel Street house Margit wiped rain from her shoes with her hem. There were birds on the sill though it was too icy for pigeons to land. Outside, a lorry went by from the tungsten refinery plant.
Oh, she already knew, she could tell by the way Sandor stood, as if shamed, ashen-faced. If he’d worn a hat, it would have been clutched in his fists. Margit thought about Alma’s fingertips splayed on the pane and their dewey rosettes. About how when the war was still young, there was lace on the arms of the chairs, decorative plates on the wall just like in any decent Magyar house. Then, Alma had a small job, earning tips from the lift. When rent became due, she stacked coins on the scarred tabletop by the light from the window that never properly shut.
Always, it seemed, it was winter outside, or just passed, almost winter again.
“What happened?” she asked.
Sandor’s hair fell over his brow, his shoes, too, had gotten wet. “Alma went out in the snow, they found her frozen,” he said.
He enfolded her arms. Though she didn’t want to be touched, she desperately needed it. She smelled ink from the press, she wasn’t crying yet. Margit looked over his shoulder, bewildered that people could simply walk by on the street while her mother was dead. “But it’s not even snowing,” she said.
The rails curve away from old rain. Beneath me, the river draws earth from the banks, gorges itself on mud, stones, rain-swept leaves. Every place the train passes I think, we could have lived here. Milked goats, sap from trees. We could have cured sausages in these curing shacks, watched the progress of fat dripped in pans, the honeycomb ooze of nectar we robbed from our fat yellow bees. We could have forsaken our gunmetal press, the tindery papers we printed that burned up your hand.
But I don’t know farms from carpets, bees from nicotined nails, yellow teeth. I know Budapest. In the city I was always crossing some dead hero square, some stranger’s mended clothes in a sack by my legs.
When we buried Alma the sky was like this.
I smelled you on me as they lowered her in. We’d made love while her body thawed on a slab in the morgue only two blocks away. I’d never been so reckless. Her death papers crumpled beside us in bed, you hadn’t had time to remove both your shoes, your hands were still blue from the press.
You touched my shoulder at the grave but I fled. At the top of the rise, they were burying somebody else.
Should I say why she murdered herself?
Seven winters she waited for him, watching the top of the tree, down on the sidewalk, the useless affairs of the weeds. Yellowtooths lay disarrayed, dug up by the usual dogs. She didn’t waltz the broom, sweep. She paced across fingernail parings, dry crusts, wrote my father’s name in the dust, breathed the lack of his hands. The expectation of his steps in the hall, the icebox’s drip, the faucet’s wet tick were her clock.
Her sweaters had holes in the elbows where she leaned and leaned. Her feet hurt, she had to lie down in the cold lardy night, unsure where her bones pressed parquet and the hard floor began. Her palms filled with dark then with light until she forgot what all the waiting was about. Sometimes she got so small in herself she hardly dared to cough.
Was she sad?
Listen, she chopped off her hair from regret. It used to fall in her eyes, just like mine. When she ventured outside, she must have tried little slips on the ice but felt my father’s absent hand grab her arm. Maybe she made that small speech I had heard: “If I’d twisted a shin, broken a wrist, we could have gone to the clinic instead of the altar,” she’d said.
Sometimes I rode by on the tram, sometimes I got off. She said, “Everyone’s getting married again, everyone has come back.” She opened her window, looked down. “Don’t joke with me, Margit, not coming home, who gave you permission for that?”
“But I’m here right now,” I replied. “See? Do you need anything? Are you doing all right?”
One day there was nothing out there except what had always been there, the bakery, the milliner’s shop. Nothing disgraced our Saint Matyas Street except what had always shamed it. In the war before last, she knew where the bodies were stacked for the carts. Your father used to load them. Right on the corner, Germans rinsed helmets, boiled soup you could sell yourself for. Blond hairs floated on top, Alma said, blood-rust flakes in a blue helmet bowl.
She must have thought it might as well be 1917, 1918 again. She must have believed the dead were twice blessed, finally blameless and they got to visit the rest of the dead. She grew tired of her nails and her hands, expecting me or her husband my father or bells, the toothachy
