THE HUNGARIAN’S KISS
“You’re certain?” Beryx Gulyas demanded, as he rubbed the turquoise and pyrite between his fingers. The minerals, according to his fortuneteller, aided digestion—and Beryx was suffering from terrible heartburn after eating smoked lard, washed down with a glass of palinca brandy for lunch.
“Yes, of course,” Etor insisted.
Beryx hated to delegate his work. He’d spent too long and worked too hard to allow blunders to sully his reputation. He’d only delegated one other time and it had kept him up for two nights in a row, drinking a near overdose of morphine as he awaited word that the job had gone off fine. It wasn’t without a hitch: the idiot Spaniard had left the woman alive, bludgeoning her with a silver-bound new edition of The Conquistadors, of all things, rather than using a pistol or a knife. An amateur should never get creative, Beryx Gulyas believed, and to him everyone was an amateur. Everyone but himself.
The woman was still in a sanitarium somewhere, cleverer than the leeches the doctors used on her bedsores, but not quite as sharp as the pigeons that perched on her windowsill. Gulyas would’ve done the job perfectly, but in fairness, the Spaniard’s work had been adequate enough. The injured woman’s husband never did openly challenge Gulyas’s boss, Nicolai Ceausescu, ever again, and the ambitious Romanian was elected to the Politburo less than a year later.
It was lucky for Beryx Gulyas—and it was luck, and not the Spaniard’s skill—that the black hole of a vegetative state had an even more menacing effect on Ceausescu’s nemesis than a clean kill. It dampened the man’s ambition as surely as his wife’s intellectual disfigurement snaffled his sexual attraction for her. It was, after all, their love of books that had brought them together, the man had explained to her doctor as Beryx lurked in the waiting room.
“You’d better be right,” he told Etor.
Beryx slammed the phone down, chipping the cradle in the process. Etor was a lousy assassin, but the only assassin available in Greece—let alone Monemvasia—on such short notice. His effete tastes irked the Transylvanian native, especially since he knew Etor had spent most of his adolescence and early manhood as a rough for a Cretan gangster known as Baru. Now he sashayed around like he was better than everyone else and took assignments from Baru only when he was broke. Beryx would’ve made an example out of him if he were the big Greek, but there went Etor, eating his fancy food with his fancy girlfriends. Beryx Gulyas hated the Greeks almost as much as he hated the Romanians.
“Burn that little turd…” he said aloud before catching himself. He looked back into the living room and was relieved to see his Aunt Zuzanna was still asleep on the couch and hadn’t heard his crass slip of the tongue.
Whenever Gulyas came to Brasov, he stayed with his Aunt Zuzanna, his uncle’s second wife. She lived on the edge of the valley, where the gondola left hourly for the tops of the Southern Carpathian Mountains.
Zuzanna thought he was some big shot party official, and he proved her right by sending her twenty American dollars every month. It was a fortune for her and he was sure that she’d saved every dollar he’d sent and kept it buried in her yard somewhere. This simple pay-off allowed him the freedom to come and go as he pleased and discouraged his aunt from gossiping for fear of losing her meal ticket. These were the very practical reasons he sent her money. The personal reasons were more complicated.
His aunt had taught him how to make love some two and a half decades earlier. She was slender then and a youthful thirty. She had shapely calves, and full hips, and almost no bosom. At the time, she was perfection to him, and he would favor her physical type all of his life.
They had eight encounters total, but it was the first that was most exciting and played over and over again in his mind when he needed to summon the proper enthusiasm with his wife. He’d seen Zuzanna sunbathing in her yard, lying face down, with her bathing suit pulled slightly down over her hips so that just a wee bit of her cleavage showed at the top of her buttocks. He lost himself staring at her, and was startled when she called out his name and summoned him to her side. “There’s some oil in the kitchen, would you bring it out here for me?”
He nodded yes and ran back into the house, retrieving the oil.
“Now, rub it on my back, will you?”
Gulyas bent over to cover his lap as he massaged the oil into her skin. Without any warning, she turned over and poured the oil over her tiny breasts and stomach. Zuzanna took young Beryx’s hands and dipped them into the oil, guiding them over her body until he took over the motion himself.
“Such fine-looking eyes,” she purred at him. “I could pluck one out and wear it on my finger like an emerald.”
The tension in his loins became unbearable, and to Beryx’s horror, suddenly released. Zuzanna giggled and he wanted to slap her. Instead, Beryx ran into the house and closed himself off in the cellar. It was quiet for several minutes there—he could hear no small, bare feet making their way into the house, and no voice giving gentle words of apology. Only the squeak of a fruit bat that had entered the house in a basket of freshly picked crab apples.
After little less than an hour, Beryx grew tired of the dark, damp cellar and made his way back to his room again. The house was quiet and still, and Zuzanna was nowhere in sight—neither inside in the kitchen, her usual place, nor outside on the lawn, where she’d been sunning.
It was to Beryx’s great surprise when he opened his bedroom door and found Zuzanna, naked and asleep, on his bed. She pointed her toes and stretched a bit at the sound of the door, and slowly opened her eyes. He’d sworn she said ‘come here’ and he walked over to her shaking and fiddling with his trousers. Zuzanna helped him get undressed and then took over for the rest.
How different it was seeing her now. She’d become pear-shaped and had grown weary, having been shunned by her neighbors. Marrying a Hungarian was almost as bad as being one in those hapless years.
Zuzanna had tried to rekindle their affair once, but Beryx could no longer look on her with desire the way he had when he was seventeen and she was beautiful. He used his wife as an excuse, but Zuzanna knew the real reason behind his faithfulness. It was then that he started sending her money, and she started treating him like a nephew.
She dithered over whether he’d eaten enough and spent entire days washing his laundry, trying to erase age-old stains from fine shirts that were too good to throw away. This was all done without affection, and Beryx now felt like a young boy with a distant mother when he was in her company. The hungry woman in his fantasies bore no resemblance to the busy, ashen woman who kept his underwear clean and smelling like freshly cut grass.
“Have you eaten?” she asked, without looking at him. She got up from the couch and pushed her feet into her slippers.
“I’m not hungry,” he told her.
Regardless of their past, Zuzanna had never fully liked him, as she had never fully liked her late husband, Beryx’s uncle by blood. They were, after all, ethnic Hungarians, and she was no Hungarian, as she’d liked to remind them—even during their most intimate moments.
“Az apád faszát,” he snarled to himself in Hungarian—do it to your father’s cock. Beryx Gulyas fingered his ring—a bequest from his grandfather’s time in the Royal Hungarian Army.
Though Beryx was born and raised in Transylvania, and carried a Romanian passport, he’d never felt like one of them, and the Romanians would never let him forget that he was by origin a Hungarian. Despite the overt snubs he’d endured throughout the years, his birth-country had not left him uninfected by its history and culture either. He loved the brittle air of the Southern Carpathian Mountains and the wide, sensual faces of the women who called them home. Their broad shoulders, made strong by carrying milk jugs, piles of pelts, and heavy buckets to and from the water pumps, were rippled from behind and particularly alluring when covered with perspiration. Romanian women sweat like their men and smelled like animals.