The prostitute sits next to him on the bench. The square-cut, sweaty, swarthy village lad has roused her dulled senses. After all that she’s gone through in life, only a powerful stimulus could excite her. A disturbing aroma wafts from Rácz’s half-unbuttoned flannel shirt, which reveals his broad hairy chest. She’d love to touch it and run her hand under his shirt, touch his muscular belly and his narrow loins. She runs a finger over her lips. She feels how hot they are. Something stirs inside her. “How well-built you are!” she says and puts a hand on his shoulder.
Rácz flushes bright red again. “That’s because of work.” He’s strong, all right.
The dancer says ambiguously: “Strength isn’t everything…”
Rácz nods absent-mindedly, thinking now about something else. “I used to do weight-lifting,” he confesses after hesitating for a moment whether to say so. I was the strongest kid in our school. I once hanged Feri Bartaloš — that’s a lad from our village, he’s a bit stuck up — on a hook. You know what I mean? Like this, look!”
He gets up and approaches the valves. His confidence has returned. Full of pulsating excitement at Silvia’s presence, he grabs a steel rod with two bolts welded to it, used to tighten the valves. He bends it like a piece of plastic. He lets out a proud yell. Then he grabs a shovel and breaks it on his knee. He punches a dent in the metal door to the hall. He bends a piece of railing and winds a poker around his forearm. He roars from a surfeit of strength seething in his mighty body.
Silvia watches him, amused, but more and more aroused. She gets up and approaches him. They stand facing each other. Breathing heavily and sweating from the performance, he keeps rubbing his scraped fist, while she is excited by his animal strength. She has got so close to him that she can see his muscles pulsating on his sharply outlined jaw. “Could you grab me like that too?” she asks him. “Why not?” Rácz laughs and burrows his fingers into her shoulders and arms.
Silvia gasps in pain. “More, more,” she whispers. She pushes him to the bench and sits astride his knees, facing him. Rácz does as she asks and leaves big bruises on her shoulders. The dancer begins to moan. She rips the stoker’s chequered flannel shirt open. Buttons fly everywhere. Her hungry hands encircle his chest. The tips of her fingers can feel his thick black chest hair, dewy with sweat. Rácz presses her thighs. She sucks his mouth like a leech. Soon it is full of her hot, slippery and flexible tongue.
“It’s hot in here,” the prostitute says after a while. “Don’t you have somewhere we could crash?”
Shivers run down Rácz’s spine. His stomach contracts with nervousness. “Here we go,” he tells himself. The more often he imagines something, the more hurdles he has to overcome when he wants to make it come true. But now there’s no going back. He gets up and takes her to his cubbyhole behind the boiler-room.
Unembarrassed, the slut takes her clothes off, settles back on the rumpled bed and looks up at Rácz. “Well, what are we waiting for?” she asks. It takes Rácz a while to get going. Still upright, he hastily undresses, and stands there in his socks and boots. Then he hurls himself hungrily at Silvia. He runs his mouth all over her. He’s never had such a sophisticated woman before. He rams himself between her legs. They wriggle about a while to find a comfortable position.
* * *
Not long after, Rácz is lying on the bed and the dancer is wiping herself with a crumpled towel hanging on the bedstead. “Have you got a cigarette?” she asks.
“I’ve some Mars cigarettes in the boiler-room,” says Rácz, a bit upset that the dancer has recovered before he has.
“Oh no, you smoke Mars?” Silvia reacts, disgusted and astonished. “Where can I take a shower?” she asks him.
“Open that door,” says Rácz, and go to the end of the hall, last door on the right. You want some soap?”
“I could use some,” Silvia says. Rácz tears open a carton of the mandarin soap and gives her a bar. When she notices the brand name, the slut nods in approval. “You surprise me!” she says and disappears down the hall.
“So that’s that,” Silvia says offhandedly when she returns and starts to get dressed. “Try to do something about the heating.”
“When are you coming back?” Rácz asks her, now that he is overcome by sadness.
“I’ll come when the heating in the bar breaks down again,” Silvia jokes.
“It’ll break down again tomorrow!” Rácz declares.
“Just so we understand each other,” says the prostitute holding a shoe in one hand, looking up at Rácz. “I was serious. Now you try to be serious and YOU show me what you can do. Don’t think I’ll put out every day. Do you have any idea how much other men think I’m worth?”
Rácz sits down on the bed. He doesn’t like the idea of Silvia going with anyone but him. What’s she after? Money? Big deal! Rácz has money.
Silvia can’t help bursting out with contempt. A few crumpled hundred-crown bills? Silvia’s not interested in those.
“What?” Rácz reacts, jumping up. A few crumpled hundred-crown notes? He opens the cupboard and puts his suitcase on the bed. He takes out a stack of deutschmarks. He holds them in his fist so that the stack looks bigger. “How much do you want?” he shouts. “A hundred? Two hundred? Here you go!” He peels off two hundred-mark bills and throws them in her lap. “When are you coming?” he asks.
Silvia takes the money, checks them against the light. She rubs them against each other, and listens to the sound of the paper. They’re real. “Today was for free,” she says. “But I’ll take these.” She’d come the day after tomorrow. “Deal?”
“You’re a bit pricy,” Rácz’s peasant mind hesitates. “For two hundred you come tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I can’t,” Silvia shakes her head.
“Then give me back a hundred!” Rácz orders her. He takes the banknotes and carefully wraps them. Then he hides them in the suitcase and puts it in the cupboard. “They’ll all be yours one day,” he says, “if you’re nice to me, really nice.”
“Same time the day after tomorrow,” the slut promises. She combs her hair in front of a fragment of mirror and touches up the lipstick on her sensuous lips.
When her steps die down on the stairs and the outer metal door bangs shut, Rácz gets up and looks for his trousers. He’s satisfied.
* * *
“Mind if I phone the bar?” Zdravko G., speaking more in Serbian than Slovak, asks the waiter in the coffee shop. The waiter silently points to the phone. Silvia is back. The radiators in the bar are working. Her colleagues praise her, but gossip behind her back. “She’s screwed the stoker! How vulgar!” But Silvia couldn’t care less. The heat is back on and she’ll gradually get those deutschmarks out of him. She’s glad to hear Zdravko G.’s voice on the phone. Everything is working out for her today. The darkly handsome doctor practising in Vienna is sure to have brought her some sort of present. He’s not stingy. There’s no rehearsal today, anyway. While she was working on the stoker, some of the girls were killing time drinking rum and coke. Now they are wobbly on their chairs and keep giggling stupidly. That’s unprofessional, Silvia realises. The drunken Edita puts her hand up Silvia’s legs, trying to get her into the dressing room. Silvia picks up her bag and coat and goes up to see Zdravko G.