Cannot tell how long she might continue to feel it, hear it, even though she hates it.
When this happens, she moves blindly, with numb fingers she rifles in bags, drawers, jewelry boxes, phials, so at least at the very last moment, with the very edge of her nails, she can grasp her medicine. Sometimes she succeeds in getting at the lifesaving medicine with her long manicured bright red nails; her fingers do not have the confidence to extract a single pill from the many, but a pill can stick to the underside of a nail; that’s how she brings it to her mouth, tucks it under her tongue, where it has to dissolve. A vessel called the vena lingualis runs across the base of the tongue, and nitroglycerin, the agent that widens blood vessels, is easily dissolved in this intimate location and then seeps through the wall of the vein. After a few long, impatiently awaited seconds, it reaches the heart; in the coronary artery, it widens the passage narrowed by sclerosis and fatty deposits.
And then the blood begins to circulate. Blood pressure drops, the pulse slows, oxygen reaches the heart’s muscles; the body, tensed with anxiety, relaxes.
There were times when the medicine took effect immediately. At other times it had no effect at all.
Sometimes it had a little, or she deceived herself that it did — yes, I’m feeling better — even though she felt worse. Or the medicine began to work but only a few minutes later, when the stranger had stopped panting disgustingly into her ear and the icy mask on her face began to melt, and suddenly she felt the next and stronger attack approaching. And if this were not enough, the medicine caused a collateral hyperemia in the abdominal cavity, loosened the abdominal wall and the sphincter muscles, resulting in an attack of diarrhea; gasping for air, entrusting the weight of her body to empty walls and sliding furniture, invoking God, she fought her way across the entire apartment.
If in such a state someone tried to help her she would silently refuse to accept it.
Until now, she always made it to the toilet, if only just in time. Where the shit literally burst out of her rectum. While, of course, the pain, pressure, and tightness below the sternum did not let up. While her mind was racing, writhing with humiliation. While the rotten medicine was back in the room or she couldn’t find it in her dressing-gown pocket. She kept repeating to herself a single sentence, but of course, I’ll keel over right here, I’ll drop dead like this, and her hand was groping after the toilet chain on the wall.
If she could at least reach the chain, she wouldn’t have to die in this awful stink.
And a wicked little girl was sitting inside her who has been giggling at everything. Maybe this was her soul, something that people call the very depth of the soul.
And that reminded her of her little dead daughter.
This wicked little girl could not be frightened; she feared nothing; she kept laughing at Lady Erna’s little vanities. Of course, you’ll drop dead like this, craven, the way you have lived. Good Lord, how much crap you still have in your guts. How did you think they would find your body; you think people would be interested in your shit then. But don’t worry, you’re not going yet. And if you stay, you’ll swear you’ll lose at least ten kilos. You wouldn’t have to shit so much if you didn’t gorge yourself all the time, that’s right. The urge to stuff yourself is still stronger than you are, no matter how much you protest. That is how the little girl talked to her and she, of course, swore, I swear, I swear I won’t do it again, knowing her words were worthless.
Her false swearing sounded like the sniggering of the wicked little girl, and she imagined that if she didn’t make it this time, they would find her in this awful stink.
That is what she had to go through that morning. And she thought she heard the telephone ring again, for the fourth time.
No, this cannot be.
The towel stopped in her hands, she listened, thinking that her anger and her ears were deceiving her.
And just then, simultaneously, all three of them started for the telephone. One woman jumped up from the tile stove, taking with her the poker with which she had just slammed shut the stove door; the other woman jumped nimbly out of bed and, because her searching foot could not locate either of her slippers and her dressing gown lay too far away on the back of a stuffed chair, went off as she was, barefoot, wearing only a short silk nightie, a so-called baby doll, that clung to her body and left her thighs bare all the way up to the top.
The young man tore himself away from the windowsill, though only a moment earlier he had noticed a police assault car stopping in front of Café Abbázia. With great alacrity, policemen were jumping out of both sides of the vehicle, which could have deflected his attention from the woman he had been observing for months, whom he kept following secretly, and whom he wanted to see this morning though he knew that from this vantage point he could not.
The wind howled while the telephone rang.
Lady Erna lost her patience completely; slamming her towel on the laundry hamper, she slipped, still wet, into her pink bathrobe which, despite its garishness, became her. Her movements were nervous, uncoordinated and hasty; her fury egged her on and at the same time hindered her. What a bunch, she mumbled to herself, what a rotten, inconsiderate bunch. Her reproach was directed not only at the three people in the apartment but, mainly, at her son, who at the moment was not at home.
He was shooting the breeze with his friends, two men of his age, in a heated glass-covered corridor at the Lukács Baths, but Lady Erna could not have known this.
At last, it was the maid who picked up the receiver; she’d barely said who she was when at the other end someone began to speak, very firmly and to the point.
It was like a report from the battlefield.
Which caused the maid’s jaw to drop and her features to freeze. With one hand she grasped the receiver tight, she had to listen carefully, understand every word, but concentration made her forget her other hand, from which the poker slipped free.
It hit the rug with a thud.
At the sight, the other two people stopped in their tracks; aghast, they remained motionless.
The person on the line spoke continuously and at an ample volume. Ilona Bondor would have been glad to stem the flow and hand the receiver to someone more authorized than herself, to a family member, to Kristóf, who understood the hesitant little movements of her hand and seemed ready to take over at any moment. But it was impossible to interrupt the seamless speech. Twice she responded helpfully by saying, yes, yes. After that, she could only utter yes, yes, thank you very much. Lady Erna also heard these last words and saw her employee’s telltale, in fact ridiculous, features.
But mainly she saw their motionlessness, their posture, the way all three of them leaned stiffly forward.
She stood in the doorway of the sitting room, a little wet, the fluffy pink terry-cloth bathrobe barely gathered around her ample body, in her high-heel slippers, her bleached, tousled hair still dripping.
Oddly, at such moments, everything else ceases to exist. Still, she cast half a glance at Gyöngyvér’s sinewy, slender brown body, which had always impressed her, as if she were hearing a sudden snap, a sound that for a thoughtless moment brought everything to a halt in her mind. It was rare that she saw her so scantily dressed. She had to take advantage of the opportunity.
She loathed this woman, did not believe anything she said, though she understood her own son: after all, the woman’s body had an effect on her too.