She walks over to a chest of drawers, her steps Karády style. She lights up a cigarette. In a silver frame on the chest of drawers is a portrait of her mother and father and a young boy with a teddy bear. Herself and a man, possibly her husband. I don’t stoop to take a closer look, I’m not interested in her husband, and Vera, for her part, did not ask me about anything. The two of us were the original couple, siblings in the depths of the cellar.
That was the time she ran an index finger over the portrait of her mother, from the lips to the eyes, in the way Ágnes Hirschi did in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. Slowly as if she were tracing its contours.
She sits down on the sofa, unbuttons the top button of her blouse, then the next. Lies back.
Undress me, she says.
I am not wearing a vest under my polo shirt. Wait, she says, sit next to me. Take my blouse off. Lie down next to me. Her breasts are plum-shaped; the two darkening nipples stand erect. Take off your underpants, my knickers.
She is clamping her legs together so I cannot get at them. She giggles. I was more adroit then.
On Francia Road, on the big table in the workshop where Jolán Bors glued bags. I reached the palm of one hand under Vera’s bottom. I try. She shifts a little to assist. She reaches back and takes a tablet from the back of the sofa. Slip it in, she whispers. Is this the way the two of you do it? I lean over. There is no tenderness in her gaze. This is how we do it. I can see that she is already on the way; there will be a route ready for me to follow. I carefully push the tablet into her. More, she whispers as if it were not me but my fingers she was talking to. Leave them in a good long time, she says to my fingers, that’s right, like that, for a long time, everywhere, more, more, now come.
Her eyes are again steely blue slits. We are negotiating separate paths while her body moves with mine. I am on the border, my face not yet pressed into her neck. Her cheeks blush, the features grow taut, the panting ever shriller, already squealing. Why does she open her eyes so wide? What is she searching for in my face? The screech is the same as of old and yet not the same, a quite different scream. My face cannot press into her neck. I am compelled to watch the fixed pupils, like those of a corpse, as if what they were looking at was beyond me, but she was only able to look into my face.
I later asked her what it was she was looking at. Or rather, I asked, What did you see?
Nothing, she says. When it comes down to it, nothing, thank you. She kissed me in sisterly fashion on the cheek, although in our lovemaking there had been nothing that could be considered sibling-like.
Some time was spent like this, with us lying next to each other without bedclothes. She placed one of my hands on a breast, she placed the palm of one hand lightly on my crotch. I should not be shocked by what she is about to say, but what had finally happened just now had never before happened to her; she had supposed many times before that she would be unable to find release without me, although she did not say from what. She had become resigned to the fact that it was futile, that moment could not arrive. She had tried with others, and not just her husband, but never before, you know … What was it like? Like never before … Now it had happened at last, she chuckled. Thank you, brother.
When the captain had yelled out at the head of our column, as it stood ready to move off in the yard of the Óbuda Brickworks, that those aged sixty and over and those who were under sixteen could quit the ranks, and when Father adjusted my cap and Mother wound my scarf once more round my neck and told me what food was to be found in my haversack, and Father enumerated what documents and banknotes he had slipped into the pockets of my windcheater, and when the Róberts similarly said their farewells to Mádi and the gendarme NCO was lining us up, and Father shouted out names and addresses, Mother was looking at me as though she wanted her smile to live on as my lasting memory of those moments. I see them grasping each other’s hands and waving with their free hands as they reached the wooden gate and made a turn to the left. In all likelihood in the very last moment before the column disappeared Vera had spotted her mother’s face in the last row — or at least so she says.
Mrs Seidel is thirty-nine years old. She is wearing a black winter coat with an imitation astrakhan collar, high-heeled shoes and a dark-grey beret. When Vera joins the line of the elderly and children, she tells her to beware of you know what. Vera would like more than anything not to hear the same old warning, and Mrs Seidel concerns herself with the buckle on the strap of her haversack. Perhaps after that she looked for Vera, perhaps wishing to say something different and even waved, but I was no longer able to see her, and she almost certainly did not see me because I had ended up in the middle of the column. Yes, you were standing next to me; you must have been in the middle of the column, I say with my hand still resting on her nipple. The column had already reached the gate, and you shouted out to her, shouted out her name twice. You didn’t shout out Mummy, Mummy or Mother, Mother. Maybe that’s why I remember what you shouted out was Klári, Seidel Klári. The reason I shouted out Klári, Seidel Klári, she says, was because I reckoned that there were so many who were shouting out Mummy or Mother. Like I say, that’s what everyone was shouting. I saw her. She was walking in the last line, and she heard me calling out her name, says Vera. She turned round, I could see her face. I’m sure she saw me because she started waving, maybe even walked on tiptoe so that I should be able to see her. She had the look of someone who understood that they had to go whereas I would be staying. Her look was as if she had sensed that she would never see me again, and that was how I felt myself.
At the time even she could have no certainty about that, any more than you.
But that was what her expression was like, says Vera meekly. There was a postcoital satisfaction in her voice.
Maybe you felt like that only afterwards, I say. Maybe you only feel that way now that you have told me.
She draws her hand away from my crotch, and I draw mine away from her nipple. She embraces me.
I’m not saying while we embrace one another that I don’t recall Auntie Seidel’s look.
I let go of your hand and wanted to run to her.
Wanting to run to her mother but being unable to is a frequent subject of her dreams. She says that was what she dreamed about on the big table at Francia Road, and while in her dream she was helping me to pull down her knickers, she saw her mother as she was warning her to beware of you know what when she was thrilling from the touch of my hand. She had never felt it before, but she had heard about it from women friends; she had wanted the thrill to intensify. I was awake, she says, by the time I reached for your hand so you would keep it there, so it would be even better. But even then I still saw her, and that made everything which was good hurt so much.
I don’t tell Vera that her cry of pain on the table at Francia Road, as I withdrew my hand in terror and pulled out my handkerchief to mop myself, that her cry of pain I do remember.
You never talked about that kind of thing, I say.
That kind of thing cannot be spoken about. Your parents were so good with me, and it was also so good to be a sister, I never dared tell anyone before. Ever since then it always pops into my head just short of reaching a climax. I went to a sex psychiatrist, and he said it was understandable, far from unique, even used some technical term for it.
And you never even said anything about it to your husband?
He does everything as it is. I don’t want him to know why it is painful for me; he does not deserve that. It’s not his concern, it’s yours.