Lajos went on to distribute presents: a wristwatch for Laci, two rare French editions of poetry, bound in leather, for Nunu (he had garnished the gift with a presentation verse of his own, indifferent to the fact that Nunu couldn’t read French), Tibor and Endre received expensive foreign cigars, and I got a lilac silk shawl. The excitement was general, constantly at boiling point. There were strangers gawping over the fence, so we retreated into the house. The house was filling up with the aroma of hot seasoned food that always carries an immemorial sense of the simple delights of life along with something of its haste, conjuring the tinkle of cutlery, the slamming of doors, the clatter of plates, the distant chatter of arriving guests, faint childish screams, all amounting to some physical or musical fanfare to declare that life was a miracle to be celebrated! Which was exactly what I saw whatever way I turned. The unknown woman sat down in a corner and talked in a flat voice.
She told me how she had first met Lajos eight years before when she left her husband. Her son worked in an office; she did not say precisely where or what kind. I had never in my life seen people like the woman and her son at close quarters. I had leafed through magazines where there were photographs of what the young were up to, or a species of youth, the kind of people who danced in jackets with padded shoulders in the lobbies of hotels or flew airplanes or dashed off somewhere on a motorcycle with young women whose skirts fluttered above the knee on the pillion seat. I am of course aware that there is another species of the young who are perfectly real people. The former is just my caricature of unnerving aliens of whom I know next to nothing but who live on in my memory and imagination. All I know is that they are no longer anything to do with me. Beyond the confusion, beyond my ignorance, when I am in their presence I know that I have no means of communicating with them; they are the species of motoring and dancing humanity I see on movie screens, who are not included in the contract my parents and I had established with society.
There was something unusual about the boy; he might have been the hero of a novel, most likely a detective story. He said little, and when he spoke he stared at the ceiling and pronounced each syllable distinctly, almost singing the words. He was as melancholy as his mother; both exuded a dreary sadness. I had never before been with people who were so insultingly, so brazenly alien. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink. He wore a thin gold bracelet on his left wrist. Sometimes he raised his hand so suddenly it looked as though he wanted to hit someone; then, with a stiff mechanical movement, he would push the bracelet farther up his arm. I discovered he had not long passed thirty and was a secretary of some sort at the headquarters of one of the political parties, but when he took off his dark blue glasses and surveyed the people and objects in the room his watery eyes made him look even older than Lajos.
Why do you bother with them! I thought. But I couldn’t help noticing that he kept an eye on the company. I didn’t even like his name, the rather common Béla. It meant nothing to me. I always have a strong reaction to names, liking or hating them. It is an unjustified, crude feeling. But it is just such feelings that determine our relationship to the world, our loves and hates. I couldn’t give him very much attention, since his mother completely occupied mine. Without any invitation whatsoever she gave me her life. The story was one long catalog of complaint, a shrill cry of accusation directed at authorities both earthly and heavenly, at men and women, at relatives and lovers, at children and husbands. The accusations were rendered in a flat, even voice, in smooth, round sentences, as if she were reciting a text she knew by heart. Everyone had deceived her, everyone was against her, and, in the end, they had all left her; that, at least, was what I gathered from her philippics. I occasionally shuddered: it was like being addressed by a lunatic. Then, without pausing, she got on to the subject of Lajos. She spoke cynically and confidentially. I couldn’t bear her manner. It humiliated me to think that Lajos required accomplices of this kind to call on me, that this person had some kind of rank. I stood up with Lajos’s gift, the lilac silk shawl, in my hand.
“We don’t know each other,” I said. “Perhaps we should not be speaking like this.”
“Oh,” she said calmly, quite indifferent to my concern. “We will have plenty of time to talk about it. We will get to know each other, dear Esther.”
She lit a cigarette and blew a long line of smoke, gazing so assuredly through the cloud at me it seemed she must have already arranged everything. It was all decided: she knew something I didn’t, and there was nothing I could do except give in.
13
There are three conversations I should note here.
That was precisely how many took place that afternoon. Éva was first at my door, followed by Lajos, and lastly by the “officially invited” Endre. After lunch the guests dispersed. Lajos lay down to have a nap, as naturally as if he were at home and would not be diverted from his domestic habits. Gábor and the strangers set off in the car to see the church, the neighborhood, and the local ruins, returning only at dusk. Éva, however, came to my room straight after the meal. I stood with her by the window, cupped her face in my hands, and gazed at her a long time. She gazed back steadily with her clear blue eyes.
“You have to help us, Esther,” she said eventually. “Only you can help us.”
She had a sweet singsong voice, like a schoolgirl. She only reached up to my shoulder. I hugged her but then felt the whole scene was a little too sentimental, and was glad when she gently disengaged herself, moved to the sideboard, lit a cigarette, gave a light cough, and, as if freed from an embarrassing, slightly disingenuous situation, examined the objects and framed photographs arranged on the flat surface. This shelf, the upper half of the sideboard, was a sacred place for me, the kind of thing the Chinese think of as a household shrine, before which they bow and honor their ancestors. Everyone I loved or was close to me stood there in a long row, each of them looking at me. I went over to her and watched her eyes moving along them.
“That’s Mama,” she said quietly but with evident delight. “How beautiful she is. She must have been younger there than I am now.”
An eighteen-year-old Vilma gazed back at us, a little chubby, dressed in the garments of the time, in white lace with high black boots, her hair undone, curled, and combed over her brow, carrying flowers and a fan. The picture must have been for an occasion, since it was a touch self-conscious and unnatural. Only the dark, questioning eyes betrayed something of the later angry, passionate Vilma.
“Do you remember her?” I asked, and knew my voice was not quite steady.
“Vaguely,” she replied. “Someone comes into my room in the dark and leans over me with a warm familiar scent. That’s all I remember. I was three years old when she died.”
“Three and a half,” I say, flustered.
“Yes. But really I only remember you. You are always adjusting something on me, my dress or my hair, and you are always in my room, you always have something to do there. Then you too disappear. Why did you leave, Esther?”