New Year’s, her birthday remembered, her name day forgot. I bore insignificant gifts, hard candies, chicken wings, spent nylons robbed from clotheslines.
“It’s worse when you come,” Alma said, “then you’re gone and I have to remember I’m getting accustomed to it.” She might have waved at my retreating back, but I wouldn’t know, never turned, didn’t stop.
Then nothing was out in the street but a soldier, a fountain, a blue-smoked Trabant. The air had the smell of horse droppings, wet dogs. Her hair had the odor of cigarette smoke, my hasty visit in it. Her room had her lying-down scent. She thought, years of this, my gray hair growing out.
She’d miss it, she thought, but not much. Perhaps she’d be missed for a while, but that wasn’t for her to decide. Downstairs, the door yawned. The wind blew the door open wide, it always did that. She buttoned her nightgown, she put on her shoes, her good dress so it might be appreciated at last. She did not turn around. Her heels on the stairs made her Tilt-A-Whirl queasy, a little knee-sick, thinking, here’s how I leave, a shallow-pressed shape on a bed, a name written in dust on the sill.
How long is too long for sadness? Margit grew tender from it. Six days without washing, she wore a man’s pajama top she’d neglected to mend. In the low basement room Margit sewed, then she pulled out the threads. She picked at cabbage stew Sandor made, slipped the dish through the bars on the sill.
She knelt by the window, leaned out so the rain soaked the plate and her sleeves and her face. The slant V of birds overhead tugged her arms and her legs. The distance between her Angel Street house and the blinking stoplight made an ache in her limbs.
She let Sandor trace S loves M in her palm, unsure how much comforting she could allow. She studied his eyes to see in his features if she was all right, but she wasn’t all right. Margit pulled back her hand.
“It’s not helping,” she said.
In his jacket, she stood on the corner and blinked into sudden daylight, amazed anyone was alive, simply walking around. The light, cold and white, touched her breasts. She took the next tram as if it could carry her out of the country, away from herself. Out of habit, she traced their initials in steam from her breath. It took only forty-five minutes to ride to the end of the line from Kispest.
Margit studied herself in store windows she passed. Just last week she had painted her toes the same shade as her chewed fingernails, she had colored her hair. Suicide blonde, Sandor said, dyed by your very own hand. How tired she was of her vanity, gestures, her smell.
In the Corvin Cinema, she cried herself dry through the newsreel about the last harvest, the next five-year plan. She stood in the back where the seats were torn out among bottles and cigarette butts. Couples moaned into each others’ necks, used the wall as a bed.
Outside her Saint Matyas Street house she watched a van carry off Alma’s table and cot. The government repossessed suicides’ homes, like it was the survivors’ fault, and maybe it was, Margit thought. She got down on her knees, dirt and ice burned her wrists as she searched for her mother’s footprints.
She returned to Sandor because rain had soaked through her clothes, because he was all she had left.
He passed her a lit cigarette. “Invented by Magyars,” he said.
She tried hard not to smile. “You say that about everything.”
“Electricity, algebra, applesauce.”
They sat on the edge of the bed, her hair dripping into her lap. In his jacket she shivered, she thought she would never get warm. “Keep talking so I can stop thinking,” she said.
He pressed against her in her father’s rough coat until they were both shivering. “When I was a boy we went to see Saint Stephen’s mummified hand. After he died, sixteen kings fought for succession, then Mongols invaded and killed all the peasants,” he said. The light in the room like his hair was the color of iron and ink. He plucked her damp sleeve. “My father was wearing this jacket that day,” Sandor said.
Margit threw herself onto her back. “Now I’ve managed to make you sad, too.”
He lay beside her in his shoes and his pants. “It’s just the Hungarian disease. When it comes, I forge a new document.”
Margit tented the blanket and sighed. “It feels as if history climbs into bed with us every time we lie down.”
Sandor waved smoke from her face. “Sure, even love’s a political act.”
Margit shook her head. “I can’t believe that.”
He smoothed her collar against its wet grain. “Look at us, Margit, both wearing our dead parents’ coats,” Sandor said.
Margit hugged herself tight, she didn’t want irony now. “It’s cold here, Sandor, it’s the practical thing.” She laughed because what had he ever cared about that? She looked at the ceiling’s flaked paint, the candle a pale unlit stub on the chair in near dark. She raised herself up on her elbows and studied the dumb gravel road where weeds pushed through the cracks. The small park’s swing mute in half light. A finch pecked at the plate on the ledge. “Why do you want to get married to me?” Margit asked.
Sandor shrugged. “Because politics isn’t enough.” A lorry, a tram, pant cuffs passed.
“Then neither is love, if it’s a political act.”
Sandor lifted his hands toward the watermarked stains overhead. “It’s the best thing we have.”
She almost believed him, though there was a gap in the logic of it. And he had his forgeries, Erzsébet. She said, “Sandor, you’re not making sense.”
He touched the hair that had strayed to her brow. “That’s what love does to us,” he replied.
She took off his glasses, hooked them on the window’s iron bars. Rainwater had pooled in the plate pocked by pin-prick raindrops. Outside, the street was the same as before Alma died. Rain fell across soldiers’ shoes splashing puddles reflecting dull clouds. A couple shuffled across the wet tracks, their hands on their single umbrella seemed fragile as crepe in the dusk. Margit needed to bury her face in his shoulder, his one epaulet. She breathed Sandor’s counterfeit scent, how he smelled like the whole day she’d had, the rain that fell on everyone and it couldn’t be helped. “All right, then, Sandor,” she said.
He held her in his grasp, rocked her in the bed. “That’s your answer for me, isn’t it?”
Rain swelled the wall by their heads, its cracks like the wallpaper maps in her Saint Matyas house. On the opposite side, someone swore, someone coughed. Margit let Sandor touch her cheek by her wide-open eyes where her skin was too tender from crying. Though it wasn’t enough, she traced an M, then that careless nonsensical word binding it to the S in his palm. “Come on, Sandor, let’s take off these coats,” Margit said.
To Sandor from me, Kiskunfélegyháza, November 6, 1956.
They’re burning leaves in the apple orchard outside, the smoke bitter yet sweet. The newspaper says the Russians reclaimed Budapest. We won’t be going through there, the trains shuttled past that new death. I half expected this. Escape is the wind through the panes of this roadside cafe, stirring red and white checked tablecloths, my hair, soiled napkins. What remains: Winter scars on the buildings’ facades, this light at
