The fire was burning, practically roaring, in the tile stove, and from her bed she looked straight into the blazing flames.
As if she were looking at fire for the first time. On this shore, everything was stranger, more distant, than what she had to leave behind on the other, more familiar shore. She was amazed; she did not know where in the world this dream had come from; she could never have seen such a huge river in her life. I couldn’t have seen such a river, never have, this is as big as the Ganges or the Mississippi. Her head was reverberating with her own voice. She should have gotten up a long time ago. She felt her pillow emitting the apartment’s strange smell, which she had never been able to get used to and which urged her out of bed. It wasn’t the bed that held her captive; she saw the day ahead of her as hopeless. All her days were hopeless. And the ferry shuttling between the two shores must mean that she does not, never has had, and never will have a home of her own.
Her mother, of whom only her name has remained, Borbála Mózes, left her in the maternity center of Nagykőrös when she was but a few days old; on her birth certificate the newborn was registered with her mother’s last name and given the first name of Gyöngyvér. She did not know who her father was, whether she looked like him or her mother, or if she resembled them at all. Her mother must have requested the hateful first name. She persistently and darkly hated her unknown unmarried mother because of this name, because of the gyöngy, meaning pearl, and because of the vér, meaning blood. She was raised first in parochial and then in state institutions; she lived with foster parents, in boarding schools and finally in college dormitories. And the words with ambiguous meaning must have rattled in her head, because her forehead was throbbing with pain. But between the two friendly shores of the mighty river all the unpleasant feelings dissolved, the obstinate pain melted into the landscape. The early morning sunshine glowed as if through a fine mist, it was summertime, a summer that she did not recall while awake; a short, soft, early little happiness that still managed, after all these years, to compensate her for the painful headaches. In secret, she sometimes drank a great deal. The only thing that clouded the erstwhile happiness was that she had to wait for other passengers while she wanted to get across quickly. Her hunger and thirst were insatiable, as befits one who always longs for another shore.
But now she could tarry no longer; she had to get up. Her bladder was tight as a drum; she had sharp little stabs in her stomach urging her to make a move.
The room was wrapped in a pleasant dimness that begged her to stay; she pressed her thighs close together. Despite the late morning hour, no one had opened the shutters that kept the room dark. I’ve got the chills again, she declared with evident annoyance. Light came in only through the open door, and on the walls were the long shadows of reddish flames.
She stared at the flames but did not see what she was looking at because she kept reaching out with the feelers of her imagination, casting about in vain; she could not decide of what her dream was reminding her. A memory, this is one of my memories, she repeated to herself, and she almost caught it but then missed it. Before fleeing the rattling words in her head and angrily turning over to make the pain dissolve, to disappear finally in the landscape, she instinctively clutched at wakefulness; she longed not for an empty dream but, perhaps, for the empathy of the other person.
Ilona dearest, she shouted to the other room in a weepy singsong, couldn’t you open the fucking window already. If you keep the stove smoking like that, I’m going to suffocate.
Her plaintive tone did not lighten the brutality of the sentences, of course. She really wasn’t asking for much; still, she always overshot her target, and because of that she was often dissatisfied with herself. Sometimes she thought she was too lenient with others, sometimes too aggressive, pushy, or hostile; she couldn’t find the right proportions. It’s not that she had no standards of proportion; she had too many different standards, which could not be easily reconciled and often clashed, making her emphases and her behavior offensive.
The other woman did not respond for a good long time. Not because she might have been offended; she kept leaning back and then forward, first to escape the flames lashing out of the stove and then to blow on them, with her bare breath, to keep them from dying. To build a fire every day in six different tile stoves and keep them going evenly was no easy task, even without a crazy storm raging outside.
I’ve had this terrible migraine since the crack of dawn, came the words from the other room, my head’s about to split open. I don’t know why it’s happening again. Maybe because of the wind.
The complaint that could possibly pass for an apology hovered helplessly in the air between the two rooms for a few long seconds.
The domestic help, whose full name was Ilona Bondor, understood and to some extent even felt the young woman’s difficult situation; she needed no explanation as to how one winds up with a migraine at the crack of dawn.
Either she’d drunk a lot in secret again, or Ágost had failed to satisfy her again.
And, perhaps not as the other woman would have liked, but she decidedly felt empathetic toward Gyöngyvér. There was something touchingly awkward and vulnerable in Ilona’s asymmetrical round face, in her dense, pale freckles that nearly met under her eyes and on her nose, in her thin, carefully frizzled red hair and narrow shoulders. She gave the impression of being an undeveloped slip of a girl, perhaps suffering from a mild case of rickets, but she was neither an immature nor an irresolute person. Judging by her exterior, she was more resolute than others expected or were willing to accept her as being. She knew exactly what to expect from everyone. Now, too, she looked up only when the kindling finally caught fire.
I think the healthiest thing would be if Gyöngyike got herself out of bed now, she shouted back over her shoulder. And she could even pick up the phone. Gyöngyike told me yesterday that she’d have to get up early this morning. She meant to go swimming before her singing lesson because she said she’d like to make full use of her days off. And that would be a very nice thing, but how can she do that if she stays in bed. That is not very nice of Gyöngyike. Gyöngyike thinks that her migraine will pass by itself. Well, it won’t. She should get up right away and go out into the fresh air.
She had a strong, penetrating voice and, curiously, she spoke to the other woman as if talking of a third person.
But the other woman did not find this insulting. Like Ilona, who came from a Slovak village near Buda, she had been living in the city for only a few years. When on occasion they fell to talking either in the kitchen or leaning against a door post in one of the rooms, neither of them paid much attention to how the other was speaking or what she was saying, but it would have been entertaining for an outside observer to witness the encounter of the two distant dialects. While Gyöngyvér produced her ő sounds with an open throat, Ilona pronounced her á sounds with puckered lips; to boot, they each used expressions that neither the other woman nor natives of Budapest could possibly understand. Their being from the countryside had a secret undercurrent that alternately brought them together or made them jealous of and even turned them against each other; they listened differently and judged things differently from others, and therefore if anything happened to them they understood each other better than others would understand them, or than they understood other people. For them, there was nothing odd in Ilona Bondor’s talking to Gyöngyvér Mózes as if speaking of a third person. It was Ilona’s artful way to avoid addressing the younger woman formally, which otherwise would have been demanded by the differences between their respective upbringings.