I had visited him every two weeks but, as I grew up, it became less and less. After I divorced Gábor, I had taken up talking to my father, first on the phone, bouncing accusations back and forth, then more gently and in person, but once that faraway mist appeared in his gaze, I shied away for months. I didn’t want to let him chip at my life.
You can never really get used to having an oracle for a father. You may forget it for a while, but then something happens to bring forth the strangeness. Often, he didn’t even realise it. I remember once, when I was still in primary school, he stepped onto the crosswalk while the lights were still red. The horns blared crazily but when I held him back, he pulled me with him and said, “Not yet.” He hurried like those who, unlike him, didn’t know the exact time of their death. But his steps were surer. He knew that, until his appointed time, he was invincible. I looked up at him as I would upon a wonder. That passed, too. No big deal in being brave if you know you are invulnerable.
Now I know exactly what Mum must have felt when she took me and left him, finding that my father had ironed and folded her clothes beforehand. She knew she had to break away, but she also wanted to be held back. We all want that deep down inside.
So Mum entered the flat with the prepared words of goodbye on her tongue. The clothes were folded in neat piles on the sofa.
“I saw that he wanted to call me back,” said Mum after my divorce, when we talked about the end of relationships. That time she was more like a friend. Not so much since. “I saw that his heart was breaking; he wanted to hold me back so much, but he knew what would happen and he didn’t even try to change it. I couldn’t forgive him for that for a long time. That he didn’t even try.”
At first, I didn’t understand why my father never attempted to change fate. I tried to pry into it but he always dodged the answer by saying that he didn’t see the future in order to change it, the same as I didn’t control the lives of people I saw on television. After many years, I realised this was the only answer I would get. He cannot change the future just tell it. He wanted me to know that. That was why his girlfriends had left him. That was why I said goodbye to him when, as we were talking, I saw the planets relay to him a sliver of the future. When you cannot fight fate, it is better not to know.
No, this is not entirely true. I asked him many times what he saw. I just stopped asking about Gábor.
As a teenager, I nagged him to tell me if I would pass my exam; would I be a doctor, a pharmacist, a nurse? No, no, yes. It had been a kind of vocational guidance. What could he tell me about Márton? Béla? Attila? When he told me whether the love affair ended in a nice or ugly manner, I realised I didn’t need to know. I shouldn’t know beforehand, never, because it is poison, a permanent ache, a constant search for faults and defects. Why wouldn’t it work? Because of him? Or because of me? Which of us wasn’t enough for the other?
I told my father to keep the messages of the planets to himself. For a while he complied, but I knew from the shadows crossing his face that he saw my future. I pressed my lips together and didn’t ask. Perhaps it was defiance rather than the good sense not to let myself be controlled by my father’s prophecies. I managed to refrain from asking. For a while.
When I married Gábor, I asked my father what I should expect. It was stupid but I wanted to be sure I’d done the right thing. I wanted affirmation. When he said, “Three years,” I felt betrayed. I didn’t invite him to the wedding. He still came; he stood in the back row and didn’t come to congratulate us.
It really was three years. Whether there couldn’t have been more time, or whether it was because I’d known from the beginning that I would have only three years with that man and had therefore allowed my marriage to slip through my fingers, I don’t know. Perhaps my marriage had been dead even at the moment I said my vows.
After that I didn’t ask him anymore. Not even now. He had decided to tell me because he had no other leverage to hold me back. To protect me?
Will Iván really die in one year?
Iván was a doctor, two years younger than me. We both worked in Rókus Hospital, saw each other every day, and even if there was no time for intimate talking, we were never short of a quick touch, a hurried kiss on a flight of stairs where our colleagues couldn’t see us. The day after I’d visited my father, I saw Iván briefly several times. Once he stopped for a moment to stroke me between my shoulder blades, then he continued walking. Words burnt my tongue: “I went to see my father and…” How could I end the sentence?
How could I tell him? I should. He should know in order to be prepared, even if he didn’t believe me, even if he laughed at me. Maybe, if he took the warning as a joke, I would be able to see it more light-heartedly. “Ha-ha, what a strange bird my father is,” I could say, and pretend.
As if I didn’t know the future. Just like my father does.
At the end of my shift, I was close to snapping like a cord. I craved a cigarette so badly that when I finally got down to the garden and lit one, I realised only during my third that I couldn’t remember smoking the first two. Anna from Surgery came after me, and asked me between two puffs:
“Why are you so nervous? You two had a fight?”
I don’t think she was really interested. She had her own quiet lake-world; she never let anything from the outside disturb its water. Therefore it was easy to answer.
“Just my father… Now that I am over thirty, he’s started to discipline me and he began with prohibition.”
She nodded, finished her cigarette and pressed out the stub.
“And you are really going to India?”
“Of course.”
“Well, good luck! It must be more difficult for a nurse. To talk those weird languages. It’s easy for Iván. Patients rarely chit-chat on the operating table.
She went in.
Sometimes I think Anna’s calmness comes from taking it from others. Her remark hit me. Iván and I had planned everything perfectly. There was a hospital in New Delhi where we would work. It would be good experience for him, but for me…? Patients were patients everywhere, but Anna was right: I would have to talk to them; simply turning the sheets was not enough. Every doctor spoke English well, but my patients…? And the native nurses, my colleagues…?
Will I feel unwanted? Still, Iván will be there.
For how long?
The thought knotted my stomach. When Iván sneaked behind me and touched the nape of my neck, I jumped as if licked by fire.
“Let’s go home!” I beseeched him, looking into his surprised eyes. “The sooner the better.”
“Let’s go then,” he said. I liked his way of knowing the difference between the important and the unimportant, when fuss was annoying. He didn’t expect an immediate explanation. He knew I would come around to that.
“Well?” he asked later, at home after ten minutes of silence and my nostrils had filled with his cinnamon scent. “What’s the matter?”
“I am afraid of losing you.”
He laughed—not with irony but with relief, as if my fear were a mere silliness not worth even a little consideration.
“What makes you think you will?”
“I went to see my father and…” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the whole truth. “He forbade me to go with you.”
“Aren’t you adult enough not to let him dictate your life?”