all the benefits of an affair with none of the risks.
Except of course an ever-increasing loneliness whenever I placed another call, ushered another girl into my room, handed over another wad of cash I’d covertly put aside. Every night I spent with Judit I’d awaken at three in the morning, the worst possible hour, and gaze at the twinkling city, the Danube, thinking of how to get out of my situation, of what could still be rescued or restored and what it would take.
Then Judit would wake up, her hand would travel up my spine, and she’d tell me another crazy story about a sailor in the Museum of Failed Escapes, consoling me not so much with alternatives as with putting off the decision, not thinking about it, so that when she finished I was still in exactly the same place. She knew exactly what to do, what I wanted.
We met just after I arrived in Budapest, one night when I’d gone out hoping to lose myself in the city as I’d done on nights in countless other cities, wandering in and out of bars, looking for someone to hook up with, a businessman out for a drink, a banker from the U.K., some Hungarian guy, men who’d also taken off their wedding rings. I think on this occasion his name was Gergő, and he took me to the Tip-Top Klub, one of the city’s strip bars. I was too drunk, about to get more drunk, and already listening with regret to the rising sound of morning traffic.
Judit was one of three girls we ended up sitting with, Gergő strolling over to their table and asking if they’d mind. They didn’t mind, they didn’t care, they were sitting in identical shorts, tight, low-cut T-shirts, drinking straight cherry pálinka over ice. I ended up sitting next to Judit, who turned to me with a sour smile and asked what I was doing in Budapest.
Two hours later, on the Margit Bridge, I stood in the first light of morning holding up Judit, caressed by one of those cool summer breezes that almost makes you happy to be drunk, sleepless, and still up that early. I shuffled her around to face Margit Island, then around again to gaze past the parliament with its neo-Gothic spires, at the Lánc Bridge beyond, then the Erzsébet Bridge, the green river winding itself away. All of the girls Judit had been sitting with danced at the Tip-Top Klub. I knew what “dancing” meant, and Judit knew I did, and that more often than not they danced for people like me, “men from the west,” as she said, who’d get drunk, have their Visa cards overcharged, and if they didn’t mind spending that much money the girls were told to offer them other things at similar rates. I knew enough about it not to ask why she did it, why she didn’t quit, why we were standing on the bridge at five in the morning.
Earlier that night I’d told Judit everything—Trianon, Erdély, Anna and Miklós, the orphaned girl. It was a lame attempt to prove to her that I sympathized, that things were not good for me either, though remembering the clichés about women like Judit—those without options, unable to make the switch when communism fell, forced to cash in on their beauty, five years of work, ten at the most, before the steady slide down the rungs of the sex trade left them wasted, addicted, dead—I realized how ridiculous it was, how narcissistic.
“It’s good that you’re married,” Judit said. One of the last casino boats of the night—those golden barges that sail up and down the Danube—pulled into dock, blaring music, lit up, filled with men and women at the roulette wheel, playing blackjack, dancing. “A child should have a father and a mother,” she continued, slurring her words in that way she’d perfected, pulling up her slumping head, letting it slump again. A fleet of Mercedes passed on the bridge behind us, smaller sedans grouped around a limousine, racing along the körút into Pest.
“Where do you live?” I asked, hinting that it was time for her to go home.
“With my mother and daughter,” she said, then went quiet.
It would be a long time before she said anything else, but by then I knew I’d be going there too, stumbling along the streets of the Nyócker, following the direction of Judit’s wavering finger, up the stairs to Janka in the hall.
There was a man, Judit said, a Swede, who liked to watch her cry while she danced. He always brought a towel to soak up the tears. It was a relief, she said, to know he was coming back to Budapest, to the club, that he’d be asking for her, and she wouldn’t have to pretend. He would sit there, his smile brightening, as she danced until her breasts were wet, until the makeup ran down her cheeks, until she lifted the towel to her eyes and kept it there, dancing on, her body remembering that three feet of stage with a memory all its own, until it was over and he paid her and gently wrapped up his towel in a plastic bag and left.
She laughed after she finished telling me the story. “There was a landlocked sailor who tried to cry himself to sea.” Once Judit was asleep, I sat there imagining this sailor, sitting on a sidewalk in some city dreaming up the saddest stories, hoping his tears would turn into a waterway and carry him off. Were those eyes, I wondered, plucked out by the communist authority, by some guard in some horrific camp, on display in the Museum of Failed Escapes?
There were so many sailors. Judit had an endless supply. I’d lie beside her watching as she wiped the drink or me off her mouth with the back of a hand. The Nyócker was in the southeast part of Budapest, narrow neighbourhoods where the ornaments on the secessionist architecture were inches thick with grime; bullet holes still in the walls from the siege or the revolution; crammed corner stores where you dug through rotten peaches and plums, brown lettuce, yellow peppers covered in black spots; Romani children in the street staring at you with crazed smiles, bags filled with glue held in their hands like the necks of chickens; their parents wandering by, back and forth from the eastern train station, where they sent younger children to beg; men with blue tattoos, strange lettering across their backs and chests, less decoration than a series of messages only a select few, those who knew the code, could decipher; and their wives just like Judit’s mother, with handkerchiefs or shawls on their heads, holding bags filled with poppy, pumpkin, hemp seeds they sold for next to nothing outside sports stadiums, metro stations, public parks; and of course the whores, not only in Rákóczi Tér, but deeper in the district, like nothing I’d ever seen, lined along the tiny streets as if someone had measured out and marked exactly the spots where they should stand, less like the girls strolling and chatting at the intersections in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, than some regimental line called to attention, at most lifting a cigarette to their lips, sometimes extending a leg.
Janka would come and go from the apartment where her mother and I lay in bed, never telling anyone where she was going, never asking permission, somehow always back in time for dinner, or for the bedtime story she brought up to me one time, a battered book that looked as if it had been paged through every night for years, holes punched in the spine with a knife, held together by bits of string. It was about the wind—on each page either a boat blown along a lake, a kite through the sky, pigeons up to belfries, autumn leaves—and when I read it her eyes widened, as if she’d always imagined a different story, different words, to go with the pictures.
I described it all to Anna over the phone, telling her I was in Bucharest, superimposing one set of streets over another, lying about Janka’s origins. When Anna said, “Well, I don’t know,” when she became vague, I told her about reading to the girl, about what her mother had done for a living, how quiet Janka was when not talking in perfect Hungarian about what her village in Erdély had been like before her father’s death (for a minute I thought of telling her he was killed by Romanians, but decided not to push it), which forced her mother to move to the city and sell herself. Her mother was arrested, put in jail, and Janka ended up in an orphanage. I hoped the pauses and slight reversals in my story made me sound breathless, excited, and I guess in a way I was, and not just because I was worried that Anna would catch me in the lie, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the story, or even with Janka, reasons that had come to me only after I’d picked up the phone and dialed our number hoping to catch Anna in a moment when she was surprised, receptive, wide open to the sound of my voice.
“Hm,”
