He started missing performances when Lili appeared, filling his evenings with walks, talks, travel plans, flattering remarks about his mind and body, and in the end with the transformation of their mutual desire into physical union in the Dositej Street apartment. True, the new situation was less than perfect — there was the burden of responsibility, and there was even disappointment in some respects — but compared with the scene in Erzsébet Csokonay’s kitchen it had the attraction of being tangible and fulfilling. When he stood again at the bathroom window on a free evening, he no longer felt the earlier surge of excitement. Now that he knew the secrets of a woman’s body, he required more of it than the power to arouse; he required ecstasy. Then Lili left, pleading tearfully with him to follow, but war came, and the Occupation, tearing Blam away from his nebulous broodings and hurling him into the raw world of violence, mortal fear, and sudden twists of fate.
One of those twists, minor as it may have been, was that Kocsis moved in with the widow Csokonay. By then the Blams were second-class citizens and, not daring to protest, could only look on helplessly when late every morning the graying dandy, freshly combed and shaven, left the back house as if it were his own, bowing with new dignity in the direction of the veranda, where his greetings were returned with reluctant, nervous smiles. Before long he started carrying a new leather briefcase under his arm, a sign of gainful employment, which — to make matters even more humiliating — bore a certain resemblance to Vilim Blam’s means of gainful employment: in tune with the upsurge in Hungarian nationalism Kocsis had been hired as a door-to-door salesman for a luxuriously appointed volume celebrating the return of Novi Sad and the entire Bačka region to the land of Saint Stephen. Only Erzsébet Csokonay was untouched by the events: she went on running from house to house to clean and waiting for her crippled child and ne’er-do-well lover to return home. Kocsis’s commissions must have come in slowly, or else he used them as pocket money — in this way too coming offensively close to Vilim Blam — because Erzsébet Csokonay continued to wear the shabby dresses that concealed the splendor of her flesh.
One evening, driven almost mad by the news of executions throughout the city, Blam came home earlier than usual and, suddenly recalling her body, climbed to the bathroom window and peered into the lighted kitchen. He found it changed: there was a white bed behind the sideboard, and the widow’s crippled daughter was sitting at the table, now closer to the stove, dipping her long, red pen into a square inkpot and doing her homework. Blam waited patiently but saw the widow only once, when she came into the room to turn down the sheets and help her daughter undress. Clearly she and Kocsis had the large room to themselves. Where and when did she bathe now? Blam had no idea; nor did he try to find out. The spell of those nocturnal scenes had been broken, and the new reality deprived him of the will to bring them back.
Chapter Seven
“ARE YOU UP?” the woman asks in a low voice. She must have heard Blam stirring. “It’s six thirty.”
It is more admonishment than statement of fact. Stocking in hand, she takes a step to the table and pushes the metal cap of the alarm clock with a pudgy index finger: no need for it to ring. Every morning after the clock does its silent job of measuring time on her side of the bed, she moves it to the table and sets the alarm that she doesn’t use, not wishing to disturb the Little One’s sleep.
Her effort on his behalf affords him a slight, malicious satisfaction. “Coming,” he says, though he merely props himself up on his elbows. Janja has suggested they buy another clock for his bed, but he says no, claiming that the ticking bothers him. What he really wants is for her to wake him, because it makes her think of him the moment she opens her eyes.
Think of him. He knows what she thinks of him. He knows she wrinkles her prominent forehead and pictures him with his eyes on the ground, mute and motionless, an object. An object you’ve got to set in motion if you’re going to get anything out of it. That’s what he is to her.
But it doesn’t matter. He’s just one object among the many hemming her in. The others force her to brush against him now and then. If she had more of them, if the kitchen were smaller and crammed with things and if her bed were here too, they’d have to touch all the time. Maybe then — body to body, breath to breath — they’d feel the need to put their arms around each other on a morning like this, when the imagination is more footloose, even after insane dreams that make your heart pound — or because of them.
What he wouldn’t give to pull her into bed now, to bury himself in her soft, freshly washed skin, to sink into her supple body and find freedom from his sweaty, insecure self. He feels his arms ready to reach, feels his hands and groin quivering with desire, but the request that must precede the embrace — no, he cannot bring himself to utter it; he cannot even imagine putting it into words. Words — real words, words that demand or explain — have long since died between the two of them. He rooted them out himself after catching sight of her from the tram. He made himself dumb rather than try to keep her or accept what she did. The words they exchange now are superficial, almost mocking in their matter-of-factness.
“I’m dripping with sweat,” he grumbles.
Janja pauses in the minute motions that make up her dressing ritual and stands up straight, her bare arms and shoulders rosy in the light of the sun.
“Want a towel?”
He is unnerved by her naked beauty, glowing, willing to accommodate but not to love.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll get it myself.”
He drops his feet to the rug covering the cold tiles, steps into his slippers, and squeezes through the narrow passageway between the bed and the table to the sink-and-shower combination. The kitchen-bedroom was originally a bathroom that Janja cleverly remodeled, leaving the main room for the Little One. And for herself, of course, because she is utterly devoted to the Little One.
Now each is busy in opposite corners — he washing under the tap, she finishing her dressing — their bends and arm movements all but synchronized. But it is pure habit: her thoughts are far removed from him, he knows — at the restaurant, perhaps, where a boisterous group of friends await her daily, or here with the Little One, who is still asleep.
They finish at the same time and walk over to the window together, she to raise the venetian blind and open it, he to toss his pajamas on the bed and take his shirt from the chair.
Janja picks up the pajamas from the bed, holding them as far away from her body as she can, and lays them out on the windowsill, where the sun is beating.
“So they’ll dry. But shut the window when the Little One wakes up. Because of drafts.”
She goes to the refrigerator, opens it, and, bending over, sticks her head into its cool light.
“Don’t forget to give the Little One butter and honey. And take the chill off the milk.” She issues her orders in the harsh voice of her early years. The only reason she wakes him — the only reason she acknowledges his existence — is to give orders.
“You’re not going to eat anything?” he asks in turn, though he knows the answer.
“I’ll have something at the restaurant.”
“One of these days they’ll catch you, and you’ll be sorry.”
“We all have breakfast there,” she says, waving goodbye and flashing the usual false, bored smile.
Blam is alone. He listens to her footsteps echo through the entrance hall until they are cut off irrevocably by the click of the lock. Then he looks around. She expects him to clean up and make breakfast; he has no desire to do so. Once she is gone, he has no desire to do anything here. Everything around him looks suddenly wrong; nothing feels familiar, his own. The bed, with which they have replaced the bathtub in the alcove under the window, reminds him of a couchette in a train, and the stove, the sink, the wall cupboard, the refrigerator are so many utilitarian items, stopgaps. The distances between them were calculated to the last centimeter, as was everything else, to accommodate as many objects as possible and leave space in the Little One’s room. Not that he was against it. In fact, he was the one who proposed that he move out of the main room — the child needed her peace and quiet, after all — and he had helped Janja rearrange things. It was as if he wanted to be pushed out of the family, out of their life together, to be isolated by the faceless necessities of cooking and keeping house. As if he were punishing himself for ever having tried to form a bond with, become one with, another person. Or was it that he hoped to provoke Janja into opposing him and joining him in his self-imposed exile? But she accepted his suggestions readily and without hesitation.