A clock’s far-off chiming entered quietly during a caesura in their conversation. ‘It’s eight o’clock and you haven’t pounced,’ she commented. ‘You men are such frail creatures.’
They closed in to fit their urges together. The main thing, he pondered, hugging her thankfully was that she felt it too; if he had made no inroads on her heart, that would have been unbearable.They clung to each other as if they were tumbling through outer space. Two supplementary conclusions made themselves comfortable in his thoughts: that by holding her he had captured everything he wanted in life and that he had got to the end of pleasure. ‘Switch off the light,’ she breathed. Just before he alighted on her in the darkness, she halted him, and from the bed she reached up to draw back the curtain; her naked body was instantly coated with moonlight. How did she learn that?
They sweated out the loneliness and after the gasps of surprise and exertion, prostrated themselves on each other. That’s something that can’t be wrenched from your possession, Gyuri reflected. Money in the unrobbable bank. Whatever happens now, I’ve won.
Jadwiga’s husband, it turned out, was a bastard.
On the orders of his ball-gripping lust, Gyuri kept looking out of the window, and just when he thought he was going to swoon with expectation, Jadwiga appeared. She was walking at a furious pace, he noted, a woman with a purpose, the weekly week-long separation eliciting the same concupiscent smouldering from her. One of her most endearing features was the way she would take her clothes off as if they were on fire, leaving them where they dropped, without a thought for any sartorial suffering that might occur, and plunging into bed as if it were a cool pond of water. The other women had, no matter how high the flame was under them, been fearful of creases and had taken time out to utilise a hanger or a chair to drape their attire.
Gyuri saw her shape through the smoked opaque glass of the front-door and he thought how lucky he was to have such a visitor. Virtually ignoring him, she made for the bedroom, casting off her dress and stumbling on her knickers, fell flat on her face on the bed. ‘Come inside,’ she commanded at the end of the crumpled clothes-trail.
A part-time god, Gyuri ruminated in a bout of lyricism, 1 loosed off liquid lightning in my private thunderstorm. Jadwiga rose to go to the bathroom, and Gyuri perceived a fructiferous droplet dash along her thigh towards her ankle. He wanted to make her pregnant. He wanted to make her pregnant. What was going on? He couldn’t believe he felt like that but you can’t beat biology, he concluded.
Furthermore, it was very, very unlikely that he would achieve anything more important or significant than this, making one person feel full happiness, manufacturing a roomful of ecstasy, even if it were only a bubble in a gloomy ocean. It seemed a mundane pinnacle for a life, a trite climax for a biography, a flippant line for a gravestone – ‘did some worthwhile willying’. But was there anything else that had given him the same reward of joy and plenitude? The oldest trap had opened and snapped shut and he didn’t mind at all.
‘There goes the best moment of my life,’ he said to the absent Jadwiga. Which story had it been where the devil offers a man the chance to stop time, to slam on the brakes at a point of his own choosing, but the man can’t decide when to say when? Gyuri had had intimations of love before, but looking at Jadwiga, he realised that was a prospect that could last him for eternity, whatever went on outside the walls. He didn’t care who the general-secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was or whether or not socialism was being built outside or whether people were swinging around in the trees. He had his portable universe, his mobile self-sufficiency. This sort of satisfaction could bog down a man with great aims, but since he had never got around to preparing any, Gyuri felt ready to sink back and enjoy it.
As Jadwiga started recovering her clothing, Elek returned and for some obscure reason (he only ever visited Gyuri’s bedroom on average twice a year) wandered in to catch the whole story of her skin. Mumbling apologies from the other side of the door, Elek retreated to his armchair, like a parrot to its perch, as if that would render him inconspicuous and inoffensive.
Unhindered by Elek’s entrance, Jadwiga carried on with her dressing. Her poise made a contrast with Tünde’s hysterics when Elek had found her torso exhibited in the shower. She had yelled as if her life was in danger and threw her arms tightly over the regions acknowledged to be of most interest to men, to staunch the flow of libidinous material. Tünde’s behaviour had been excessive; despite living in an age when the public baring of bodies was frowned on, her physique was as well-viewed as the Statue of Liberty and in particular the parts she was shielding with her hands, making fleshy fig leaves, had been as relentlessly fingered as the timetable at the Keleti railway station. But for some reason Tünde believed that all-lung hysterics was the pertinent reaction of a well-brought-up girl to an unannounced guest. Jadwiga’s nakedness hadn’t blinked.
Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac. He loved her sagacious buttocks that had settled the entire subject of good buttocking. He loved her lips, the well-marked borders of her mouth; he loved her felicitating soles and all on them. He couldn’t see anything that let the view down. Perhaps that was the symptom of fully-defined love: like a great work of art, nothing could be docked, interjected or tampered with. If the Creator had come to him with a special offer of restyling, ‘For you, Gyuri, I can change anything you’d like: a little more leg? another helping of breast? blonder hair? darker hair? more ear lobe? younger? older? wittier? graver? repainted eyes? American passported?’ Gyuri realised that he would just reply: ‘We’ll stop here.’ He wouldn’t change a hair, not a pore, not one particle more, not one particle less, because then she wouldn’t be she. And it was no use trying to make up his mind about which sector bested the others; he couldn’t judge Jadwiga’s beauties’ contest, because her components kept leapfrogging over each other, grabbing his favour. Then he knew that he had jettisoned the world. That he was marooned on the planet Jadwiga.
Although not Jadwiga’s first foray into the flat, it was the first time she had met Elek who had taken up employment as a night-watchman at the Laszlo hospital (an occupation that suited him since it involved a lot of sitting and doing nothing and gave him complete freedom to speculate on what he would do with the money he was counting on winning in the lottery). So, after the full-frontal introduction, time was set aside for a formal hand-kissing which Elek did with a snap of the heels.
In the kitchen, as Gyuri lined up the ingredients for an omelette, Elek sidled up to whisper his warm admiration: ‘My congratulations.’ Gyuri didn’t want to register pleasure at Elek’s approval but it was pleasing nevertheless. Elek watched Gyuri’s egg-cracking with the admiration of the culinary illiterate. ‘You haven’t heard any more from young Pataki, have you?’ he asked.
Gyuri shook his head.
The fastest motorcycle in Hungary had been the root of Pataki’s departure. Or maybe one of the roots of it. Or maybe, Gyuri continued to reflect, really in the mood to push a metaphor around, just part of the foliage. Who knew?
The motorcycle had been a Motoguzzi, a mountain of a bike. Sándor Bokros had owned it originally. Bokros had, by a series of dazzling commercial speculations, starting in 1945, when there had been a widespread vogue for a really good wash, juggled a dozen bars of soap through ever-augmenting metamorphoses until he had half a dozen fur coats. Then Bokros left the country and went to Italy, where, according to reliable accounts, he had almost willied off his willy and bought the motorcycle. Suddenly, through some incomprehensible mental aberration, Bokros had returned to Hungary on his bike, just as the country’s borders were being sealed so tightly they lost fifty kilometres. Even in Italy there had only been a handful of bikes like that one and for the citizens of Budapest it was like something from Mars. Bokros had two problems: having to cope with an epidemic of adulation and street-enquiry and finding a stretch of road on which he could get out of first gear.