She took a step back, ankles weak, on the verge of a slip.
I looked up at our window opened out so the war might fly in. I said, “Are we going to die?”
Sandor, we did die.
What happened once? It had the look of nothing. A storm, a light rain, the war came. My father left for the front, he said when I come back, he meant if.
In the city the woman who I had become wiped marzipan glaze from her mouth. She picked her teeth with her nails while you practiced your forgeries, already inventing your fate.
My hands that touch the train’s glass: I’m just like my mother now, tired of my feet and my hands, my own cheap sentiment.
So here is my hand where my wedding band also leaves its white mark. I never did feel safe wearing it. My thin shift with its cigarette burn in its lap from when we both fell asleep after love, then you woke me up, said, “You were on fire but I put you out.”
I’ve been moving toward you or away since back then, my hands held in front of my face as if trying to hold back the wind, scraps of newspapers blowing by fast.
There was a place in Kispest where old soldiers were kept. Men with one leg lived there, men who wore hats low over their faces to cover whatever was left.
Three a.m., soft autumn rain shirred oildrum fires that hadn’t gone out since war’s end. Margit stepped like her heels were too brittle for puddles or leaves. Figures limped across stagey flame light past gutted tank carcasses, clothing shredded and wet in their treads. A late-night bird wheeped. A cobbler bent over a crate, resoling the shoes of the dead. She could imagine them trapped in rain’s runny embrace in repose everywhere.
Hard to follow Erzsébet’s clues, to find Sandor’s place on a night without moonlight by shattered streetlamps. Margit didn’t stop for “hey girlie,” an offer of free cigarettes. Behind her, the river was useless, too distant to be any help. Over her head, the sky held no hint it would ever be daylight again.
She had to kneel on the shell-shocked sidewalk to see in. Sandor’s mattress was flush by the tipped-open window’s low grate. A candle burned on a chair, obscuring her dark rained-on shape, her wet dress that clung to her thighs and her chest. The rain, queasy warm, etched tears down her cheeks.
She shouldn’t have come, should have kept her willful ignorance: though she hadn’t slept with him yet, she already knew her heart was about to be wrecked.
Erzsébet lay on her back, her hair fanned across the mattress a violent, articulate red. Her teeth clenched the cup Sandor tipped to her lips. He held a washcloth, wiped her face. He reached inside her shirt, wiped her breasts. Under her skirt, he cleaned what was dirty down there. Margit could tell by his flame-honeyed shadow he used his tenderest hand. If she wished, she could have extended her palm and touched Sandor’s brow, the ragged collar of his shirt.
“Hey, Sandor,” she called.
Then she held her breath as she passed through his door with no number on it. Sandor looked up like he’d known all along she’d be there. “I thought you were mending our clothes,” Sandor said.
Margit felt struck so she lowered her head, picked leaves from her dress she’d worn just for him, washed so often its poppies were merely the idea of blooms on a sheer yellow field. “I kept thinking about you and stabbing my fingers,” she said.
A porcelain bowl on the floor, a plank on stacked bricks for a desk. The candle, the chair. A wedge of cracked mirror by Saint Stephen’s picture torn from a book. Sandor’s shoes on the floor as if they were ready to walk down the hall.
“She wants you to kiss them and make them all better,” Erzsébet told him.
Margit smoothed her dress, wiped the slight from herself. “I’m not hurt. You’re the one all laid out for a cure.”
Erzsébet patted the bed. “Caught a cold in the camp.” She lifted her chin to Sandor who fussed with the sheet. “Don’t you pity me, too, like he does? Or maybe you’re jealous I suffered more than you did.”
Margit studied Erzsébet’s face for the proof. “Suffering’s not relative,” Margit said. It was what her mother once claimed.
She wanted Sandor to see she was brave enough to do this: she lay down on the bed. Margit swore she felt Erzsi’s fever in waves as she lifted her hand.
“Look, my nails all fell out over there,” Erzsi said.
Margit looked. “They’ve grown back.” She had a desire to strip Erszi bare, to see for herself if there were stigmata on her everywhere.
“Nails and hair don’t stop growing on a corpse,” Erzsi said.
Margit thought about running her hand along Erzsébet’s long skinny arm to see if its texture was really so parchment thin. She wanted to cup Erzsi’s wrist to see if her fist would unclench. She touched Erzsébet’s collarbone, canted like it had been broken and carelessly set. The wet Sandor spilled in her clavicle’s hollow was cool over Sandor’s blue thumb bruises there.
“We carried rocks and bodies,” Erzsi said. “Stiff or soft, puffed with juices and gas.”
“The bodies or rocks?” Margit asked.
Erzsi laughed, more a cough. Sandor stood. He looked toward Erzsi, Margit, then his coat on the peg.
“He means to save me, raise the dead,” Erzsi said.
Margit lit a damp cigarette and passed it. “Kindness hurts, doesn’t it?”
Erzsébet blew out smoke. “Especially from you.” She raised her legs, kneaded cigarette ash into her knees’ dented caps, rubbed it in like a powdery salve. Margit could not help but see where her underpants’ cloth came apart from its elastic band.
“I bet you think pity is stronger than love,” Margit said.
Erzsébet turned to the wall. Where her shirt came undone, her backbone seemed too loosely fused. It reminded Margit of pig’s knuckles in aspic turned pale as it jelled. If she were to lick Erzsi’s spine, she thought it would taste just like that, sour and vinegarish.
“Love’s just hugging bones,” Erzsi said.
Sandor stalled at the foot of the bed. Margit smelled Erzsi’s Emke perfume, her own nerves and his sweat. “You can’t prove that to me,” Margit said.
Erzsébet made a noise in her throat. She climbed from the bed. Her stride was an incautious lunge like her hips were attached to yanked strings. Jerky as if she would fall, but she didn’t fall as she stepped away from them both. “He carried me five hundred kilometers on his back.” Erzsébet hugged herself. “Crows waited to pick out my eyes from Katowice to right here.”
“She’s exaggerating,” Sandor said, but Margit thought she was not.
Erzsébet stood before the bit of mirror, skew-hipped. She touched her hair and her mouth. Even after what happened to her she’s still vain, Margit thought.
“You look like some soft creamy thing, your figure’s a pitcher of cream,” Erzsi said. She pressed her concave belly, watching Margit in the glass. Margit leaned
