The fawn, p.18
The Fawn, page 18
Sometime after that Pipi took me to a concert so that I could hear his current mistress perform. We sat in the director’s box. He was so excited he nearly fell out as he leaned over the balcony to get a better view; reading programmes bores me, I’m only interested in what the performers actually do, but she played several different pieces, all of them rather well, with her strong white arms flashing in the blaze of the chandeliers; I suddenly realised she was playing Chopin’s Scherzo in B Flat Minor and I closed my eyes to hide the tears; when the interval came Pipi kissed me on both cheeks – he was always so grateful when anyone praised his mistresses. We went down to talk to her, she simpered prettily, looked very pleased with herself and flirted with him, and when he told her that she had made me cry she blushed with pleasure, I smiled and shook hands with her, and he grinned with delight; I looked at him as if he were an idiot: he had never seen my mother at the piano, with her mane of black hair flowing down over her shoulders, playing by the light of two tiny candles – they were cheaper than electricity – while the room smelled of cooking fat. The supper often burned as I stood entranced because she was playing Chopin.
I never wanted to see you or speak to you again, but as I went into the room I was aware of the imprint of your hands – the book you had sent me, the little souvenir pot you put the raspberries in that you bought when we were on holiday by the lake, and the little patchwork dog on the shelf above my bed, the one you were forced to buy to stop him looking so sad in the shop because he was so ugly – and so that I wouldn’t be all alone in my house; I stood there looking at the dog and thinking about the coat on the horse’s rump, and the scherzo, and you. I have never thrown or given away any of your presents. You duped me and I hated you, but I know I can never forget you.
16
The bird is drinking now.
Water has collected in a crack in the concrete next to the cistern. First he drank, then he bathed, and now he is shaking out his wings and his legs are gleaming. I have never hated birds; they used to arrive in a flock and descend on the crumbs when I shook the tablecloth out – they knew when we had lunch and they always know when you are doing the washing-up. In winter the twilight came early and they arrived with it, filling the garden with noise and pecking up the crumbs and chirping away around my feet; the cold raised goosebumps on my skin and it turned red where my rolled-up sleeves exposed my arms; if I left the door open in the spring I could see them hopping about in the lilac tree, and we had swallows under our eaves – people call that a blessing from Heaven, because a house where there are swallows will never catch fire. I thought of the swallows when I was coming into town from the Barrage, the day after the bombing.
The only bird I ever hated was Péter, the one you and Angéla had. You were very fond of him and were very amused by him, as you were with every living creature; he adored you, he would land on your hair and shout at you, and take food from your plate, and when you and Angéla had nothing to say to each other he would fly up onto the table between you, clean up the rest of the meal, tweet at you for a while, cock his head from one side to the other, hop onto her head and then back onto yours; he was so light and fragile and clumsy that you had to be careful not to tread on him; you had to make sure he always had something to eat and drink, and not to leave the windows open; your love for him was obligatory under the law that makes you care for anything weaker than yourself.
Every Sunday Ambrus would make pigeon soup; he would go out to the pigeon house, pull out a couple of birds and wring their necks. “Péter looks like a jewel on you,” you said. I was standing on your balcony, it was the last time I went to your house, after the fair at Máriapócs; I opened my hand and he flew up onto my fingers; I immediately thought of Ambrus and those pigeons and my fingers started to tremble.
The bird here has finished his ablutions and flitted up into the willow tree.
I wasn’t jealous of you. You probably never understood that. It would have been easier if I had been . . . “Let my coronet be dressed with willow flowers . . .”
Two years ago Hella was a far better Emilia than she is now. We should swap roles, you said, at the end of the first act: I should do the Moor and Pipi Desdemona. I was gluing an eyelash back on that was getting in the way and I glanced at you in the mirror, you were lounging in the doorway, with a cigarette in your mouth; my hand was clumsy, Angéla had come to see me before the play started and I had shaken hands with her and scrubbed it so hard afterwards I had almost taken the skin off.
I was never jealous of her. I knew that you loved me and not her. I just found her repulsive; I shuddered whenever she touched me, and on those rare occasions when she visited me and I had given her something to drink I would smash the cup she had used when she left. Her touch, her breath, the way she walked, the scarf round her neck, instantly brought it all back to me – everything that had happened to me in the past, and everything in yours: she had had a striped ball, you fell in love with her and married her, and I thought of the fawn and the fact that you slept with her, and the thought would make me put down my knife and fork on the dinner table. I thought it would be enough just to get away from you and hide myself in a suburb somewhere where I wouldn’t have to see you, and all the time I was aching for you so much I was actually trembling.
Everything to do with you and Angéla – Péter, a packet of cigarettes, Elza – seemed to me unclean, and when I thought about your having any dealings with her I would run madly down the street, as if running could drive a thought out of a person’s head. One day Pipi came to the house, he arrived just after you had left; I was down on the carpet attacking a book, the book of fairy tales you had just brought me to read; I had been looking for something by Hans Christian Andersen and you brought me one from your own shelves; on the first page, in large round letters, were the words “Angéla Graff”; there was a large swan on the cover pulling a shell, with a fair-haired boy sitting on it wearing a huge hat. I had knelt down to tear the book to pieces. Pipi went and got the brandy, then sat down beside me on the floor with the bottle between his knees; he didn’t speak, he just watched as I swept the pages under the wardrobe, then lay on the carpet with my head on his thigh and he stroked my hair and my brow, the way you do to someone who is ill. By the time Juli came in he had finished the whole bottle, I was still lying on the floor and the tears were running down my face; she switched the lights on, gathered up the glasses and the bottle and started to lay the table for supper. She glanced at me only once, then turned her head away; she had looked at me as if I were the scarlet woman in the Bible.
The gardener is planting now. It’s rather late in the year to be moving such a large plant, but it might take all the same, if only because so much rain has fallen, and perhaps it will survive; I can’t make out what sort it is, only the colour, a sort of coppery red. When I first brought you back to the house I was afraid of Juli and what she might say when she saw you, and I wasn’t sure she would even give you any supper; I didn’t dare let you come inside at first, so I wandered about the garden with you, you were looking at my trees and measuring the distance between them – you had said you would bring me a swing. It was already quite dark by the time I got up the courage to go into the kitchen; she wasn’t there but one thing stood out, it was the weighing scales that Kárász néni had given me when I went to say goodbye. I don’t know why she chose a pair of scales, she took me in her arms and kissed me, and she smelled of sugar. In one of the pans was a note: she would be away for two days, tonight’s supper was in the fridge, tomorrow I would have to eat in town; she was going on the farewell pilgrimage to the shrine at Máriapócsi; she had taken care to close all the windows; the kitchen smelled of the wet mop, and gas. I handed you the note, I didn’t look at you, I just straightened the tea towels on the rack. You took the key from my hand, went back to the door and shut it. I don’t know what you told Angéla when you phoned her, I “accidentally” released a loud blast of water into the bath so that I wouldn’t hear a word of it. Sometime before that, about two weeks earlier, before I was hiding away from you, it amused me when I heard you lying to her; I knew that she believed every word you said and it tickled me to know that there I was sitting with you in some restaurant while she thought you were at a meeting or rehearsal at the theatre; now it just irritated me. The truth is, I would have liked to hear you tell her you weren’t going home, you were going to spend the night with me. That was the day I started to shudder whenever I heard her name. Lying there on Pipi’s bed under the head of Agrippa was very difficult, but it wasn’t easy here at my place either, that night when you said you knew that I loved Angéla.
•
Now the gardener is mumbling something. He’s right, it’s good to talk to flowers; when my father was planting he always stroked the little leaves and said, “Now do be good.” He’s started to hum, and he’s stooping down to create little mounds of wet earth around the bottom of each bush, they look like nests of mashed potato, with new shoots sprouting out of the top. You left at dawn the next morning; I watched you all the way down the path to the main road, and I felt nothing but bitterness. You whistled as you walked and kept turning to wave to me – you knew I was sitting on the windowsill watching you; it was the same tune: “Blow, spring wind, my flower, my flower . . .” Your figure slowly grew smaller, then disappeared from sight at the corner. The clouds drifted away, my face and hands were bright red in the morning light and the dew had settled on the flower boxes in the window. I just stared at them, I had no idea what to say to them, I don’t know how to talk to flowers. The gardener isn’t stooping now, he’s kneeling.
“Stooping” was the word you used that night. Last night, at Gizi’s, I realised what you had meant. I had never thought about it. I realised I hadn’t been listening to you properly and you had already talked so much; my brain must have been paying attention but my ears and body were just lying in wait, listening for the tremor in your voice that wasn’t intended for me. But for some reason the word stayed with me, and last night I realised that you were bristling with accusation and a sense of grievance because I had abandoned you and you were begging me never to do that ever again. You had been stooping all your life, you went on to say – I watched the smoke curling up from your cigarette and wondered if you smoked at home at night when you were with Angéla; you had stooped before your mother, so as not to make her worry about you, and you stooped before Angéla, because you loved her, and before everyone else so that they wouldn’t think badly of you and chop your head off because you were taller than they were. You said that no-one had ever liked you for what you really were, you were always playing a role to make people accept you, but with me you stood up straight and didn’t feel you had to sing if you wanted to show me your teeth, like the wolf in the story.
I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t interested in what you were saying. I was wondering if when you left me and went home you would give her a hug, and if it was true that there really hadn’t been anything between the two of you for so long. As you were going down the hill and I was sitting on the windowsill, a cold hatred ran through me: it had occurred to me that if she trusted you so much that she believed every word you said, then the two of you must be in complete harmony. The morning light was cold and hard; I could no longer see you but I could still hear your voice. “Blow, spring wind, my flower, my flower . . .” I closed the window; I was tired and miserable, and bitterly disappointed.
That morning the phone rang – you were calling from home. We exchanged some neutral words about the rehearsal, I threw in the occasional yes and no. I knew that Angéla would be sitting somewhere close by, with the coffee steaming on the breakfast table. I put the phone down and took out a book. I had no idea what I was reading. “So you did manage to deceive her,” I thought, and was not pleased.
•
It’s a chicory.
A drop of water is clinging to one of its petals . . . and now it has run down under its own weight and been swallowed up by the soil. Cichorium endivia. Gizi must have told you that I like salad. Juszti always made it, Gizike served it to the guests with a large multi-pronged glass spoon, and the two of us finished off what was left in the bowl, trying to outdo each other at eating it like rabbits. I even loved the way it looked – the curl of the green leaves, the crispness of the younger ones. I have never been able to eat it since I found that poem in your briefcase, the one you wrote about Angéla’s salads when you were younger.
I always see writers in their settings: Ovid sitting on the seashore with foaming black waves at his feet, a black cloud flying overhead and a bird circling. On one occasion Gizi came into the study and suddenly let out a scream: I was lying sprawled out on the floor with my brow bathed in sweat; she wasn’t to know that I was having a terrified fit because I was reliving the Battle of Segesvár and horses were running over my body, stamping on me as they went, and I could feel the weight and sharpness of their hooves cutting into my flesh; I was so happy to see her standing there, now I could get up and no longer have to relive the battle of Segesvár, and no longer see those waving fields of corn – I could see my father’s law books again, and the blackened mirror, in its mother-of-pearl frame, hanging from a gold thread in the corner of the room; it always made me reimagine the heroes of the poets and other writers, Piroska Rozgonyi and Cordelia and Klärchen, and man’s long journey through the dark wood of life.
When Pipi dug out that old poem of yours you simply said, “Oh, that was so long ago, it wasn’t the real me.” We were sitting in the Swan and Gizi had just brought me a salad she had prepared herself, done the way I remembered them. I instantly recognised the smoothness of the oil and the smell of the vinegar and I couldn’t take a second mouthful, I just pushed the plate away. After that you always ate all the salad yourself; you had duly taken note, as you had with the fact that I don’t like alcohol and eat bread with everything, like a peasant. You were always delighted when you came across any oddity or peculiar fussiness in me, but they held no interest for me. “It’s an allergy,” you declared, as I pushed the plate away. The leaves had left a tight knot in my throat, you dipped them in the paprika sauce and spooned up the layer of vinegar and oil dressing beneath them. I just watched. I was thinking of Angéla, and that first meal she cooked for you when you were newly married and you wrote that ode to it, and the first spring you spent together, and I thought of the journal that had published your poems, and that they were always there on her dining table and would still exist when we are both long dead. Their hideous immortality made me choke.
•
Now the gardener is silently mouthing some sort of formula, like a magical incantation, the way old women in the villages do when they are planting, or he is praying and muttering non-stop.
You too talked non-stop; it was as if after the long years of silence you had at last found someone who really took an interest in you. You talked about your godfather and how prickly his beard was and how his huge fur cloak – the one that was so black and shaggy – shed hoarfrost everywhere when he came into the room in winter. I just listened in silence. You talked about your time at university, and the first trips you made abroad, and about Angéla, how you first met her and how her radiance gradually faded during the war and put a distance between you – and how she had distanced herself from real life to devote herself to her dead family and you had grown apart. I watched you and said nothing. I was silent and helpless beside you, like a stray animal who follows you down the street then looks up into your face and whimpers, and you have no idea what he is trying to tell you. My bottomless silence should have told you that there was something truly terrible in my past and that I was begging you not to let me look back – if I did that even for a moment it would drown me again. You didn’t understand. “You’re jealous,” you told me irritably, after you had gone on and on about how you went with her to the children’s home because the night was frosty and you didn’t want her to be out alone on the slippery streets – and all I could do was shut my mouth and push the plate away. That was always your answer: I was jealous. You would spend half an hour trying to persuade me that I had no reason to be, there had been nothing between you for years now . . . and I listened in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you that anything you shared with her – the bird Péter or a letter about the rent or the electricity bill – was more than I could bear.
“Think,” my eyes were saying to you, “about the ugly fits of rage, the uncontrollable moods that come over me; try, because you love me, to understand that there is something inside me that I cannot talk about; I need you to reconstruct in your mind the house in the Barrage that you never saw and that has vanished for ever, and Kárász néni’s kitchen, and Béla’s kisses and Ambrus and everything; try to acknowledge the fact that I really hate Angéla, and why I hate her.” If I could restrain myself sufficiently I would sit there and hum a little tune while you told me all about your day and I would be telling myself that you are weak and corrupt and I despise myself for loving you and I hate the pair of you – Angéla because she exists and you because you take her by the hand and hold out her coat and say goodnight to her.
•
The gardener is looking this way now – he doesn’t know whether to greet me or not – he’s fiddling with the loose button on his coat, and now he’s turned away and started to hum again. “You are a genuinely great actress,” you once told me; you weren’t just being nice, you said it in a calmly matter-of-fact way; I was sewing the top button on your jacket at the time. It had just fallen off; while I was stitching away I noticed that someone had reinforced the middle one with a weak, light-coloured thread – clumsily and very badly. Angéla never learned to sew, she always pricked her fingers in the needlework lessons and started crying.
