from me, steal towels, bang up the pots. The main issue is that none of their stuff is damaged!”
The apartment was filled with loud music. Piercingly loud. The furniture and Elza shook. Someone ran out onto the balcony: “That’s it! Do you hear me? The two of us are done! I loved you very much, but you’ve really offended me this time. But this time you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I love you, but I don’t need your involvement anymore. And it shouldn’t matter to you at all how many dicksinmycunt!”
Elza ran out of the apartment and thought she would never come back. Home!
She walked around town for eternity, making loops around the posh neighborhood. Looking into lit-up windows. The streets echoed with the sound of her own muted steps. The silence radiated. Her breathing was deep and regular.
As soon as she crossed the threshold of her own apartment, it involuntarily quickened. Her belly was bloated with a mountain of muddy, slippery stones. It was quiet in the room. She waited. Like a deer in headlights. Like a rabbit ready to bolt.
The muezzins reminded her of bats. Blind mice with wings always making noises. They find their way, set their azimuth, their position, know where they are by how their voices ricochet off things around them. They orient themselves in the world by how their voices bounce off things, beings and landscapes around them. They give off sounds, looking for their place. They are amplified beings following the echo. Like people forever babbling into telephones glued to their cheeks. Quickly and continually blabbing, listening to the echo of their own yacking. They’re looking for where they’ve gotten to. Where they’ve settled in the net.
Like blind people afraid of the dark who sing quietly to themselves. Like people who live alone in dark apartments and turn on the television first thing in the morning just to give the place some life.
Like a rapsodist who constantly tells the same stories over and over again. Stories that force themselves to be constantly told. Improved. So that they don’t lose their place. So they have something to bounce off of. So the thread isn’t broken.
Elza. Voices are so bewitching. They bore into the body. Gradually uncover all the paths. Some of them shut the gates forever, burn bridges. Close openings.
“What kind of fucked-up country is this?” yells the neighbor and laughs like a lunatic. I sit on the toilet and try to pee. The neighbor is laughing and yelling. His voice encircles me like a strap that’s too tight. Like a harness. It digs into my flesh. As long as I have to listen to him, I can’t pee.
The neighbor is an emphasized character.
You can’t hear the Petržalka muezzins in the city. The river stands in their path. It doesn’t carry their shouts. It swallows their calling with its own silence. Silence without competition.
The muezzins are powerless under the surface. The water swallows their words, stories, shouts. The earthly noise, meaning, and intensity. They back up from her. A few steps back— home—to Petržalka. Retreat like rats.
A city with a river running through it has an advantage over one without a river. It doesn’t have to be exterminated all at once. A city without a river has to be exterminated all in one day. So that the rats don’t get out of the poison zone into places that haven’t been treated yet. A city with a river running through it can be poisoned in two steps.
When Elza left the apartment in the morning, Ian was sitting naked in a chair, writing. In the evening when she returned, she opened the door to the living room and was surprised to see him still sitting there naked, writing, in the same position. When she points it out to him, he slaps his belly and thighs with joy as if he were seeing them for the first time. He likes the lively sound of it.
That spring Elza and Ian started living in their city as if on vacation. Like being abroad. Reading for hours at Café Hyena. They listened to and watched the people around them. Maintained a state of wakeful hunger. Spent lots of money. As always, on the edge of being broke. Pissing it away. Always writing something.
They met at the café twice a day and shared the table with another couple—Rebeka and Lukas Elfman. It was obvious that this was a Quartet of artists. Rebeka was Elza’s friend from childhood, and Elfman had married her just before it ended.
At the Hyena they were on a stipend. That’s when life slows down to the pace of a ship cruise.
II
Café Hyena
“Oh little fairy, if you only knew what I’ve been through…”
—Pinocchio
Elza. Rebeka and I always met just before lunch. We would go shopping together and then we took our time drinking a bottle of red wine. Meanwhile, Rebeka would cook because, unlike me, she didn’t like sandwiches, but preferred meat and sauces. All the honest, completely homemade meals, like Szegedin goulash or chicken and rice with compote moved her and reminded her of her family and eating with her mama, who had died.
Rebeka also liked to cook because wine went down well during cooking. “This is the way we live, Elza, cooking, cleaning, and drinking. Jeez, but sometimes I say to myself—we do it instead of working—but imagine those women who are at work till four and then they manage to do everything that’s taken us all day.” Rebeka lit another cigarette, took a deep drag, and for a moment quietly admired women who work. Rebeka was my best friend. We even looked like each other. There were days when people thought we were sisters. Rebeka didn’t mind it. She also had one real sister—a twin. Their relationship got sticky when the sister went around in public yelling that, in their mother’s womb, Rebeka had taken all the nourishment for herself.
Rebeka reproached her for not remembering anymore who saved her from being beaten up. “She was always baiting somebody, but didn’t know how to defend herself afterwards. We were strange twins: we won all the competitions. I was always faster at running, swimming, and climbing. My sister always won the other battles, like who could eat the most pancakes or swallow a whole muffin.”
Lately something had been bothering Rebeka. She was the only member of our Quartet who’d never worked. The ones with stipends met daily in the café so they could set the strategy. They had a system where one of them would always work and earn money while the others created. They sat around in the café, strolled around the city, studied, observed, fought for their lives.
The fourth, meanwhile, provided the stipend. Just as other artists get them from: the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the Instituto Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Fulbright Foundation in the USA, or the Countess Thurn-Taxis in Duino.
The Trinity Foundation had its headquarters at the Café Hyena, which the patrons renamed Café Vienna. It was a spacious café patronized mostly by foreigners and rich people. Here they considered the Trinity to be students. They were always shivering with cold, not dressed heavily enough, warming their hands on the hot mugs, mixing all kinds of alcohol, and continually writing something or making notes in books or magazines. Sometimes they would close a book loudly, put their hand on its spine, and look off into the distance with a sigh. So the other guests knew that they had just gotten to an idea in the text that had suddenly completely changed their life. Sometimes they stood up and nervously walked around the café. Tapping their fingers impatiently on their lips. Creativity broadcast live.
Today at the Hyena, Elza is reading aloud from Seeing People Off. The first ten pages. The air grows tense from the vulgar words and a pair
